Around four in the afternoon she heard the heavy clang of the knocker, and soon the muffled sounds of the concierge talking to a man, and for a moment she feared that it was Lawrence, that she had gotten the time wrong. But it was not Lawrence. When she opened the door, it was Arthur Kravitz who appeared.
“Hello, Beal,” he said. He bowed, as if this were theater, as if he were waiting for the audience’s murmurs of surprise to die down. At this point there was almost no one in the world whom she needed more than Arthur, and no one in the world she wanted less to see. He stood in the doorway like death, a dark, heavy figure, a spirit here to extract some sort of retribution. If Mother Lucy was her conscience, guilty or not, Arthur Kravitz was the one who carried out the sentence. “Are you going to let me in?” he asked.
“Of course. I’m just surprised.”
“Figures,” he said. He walked in, nodded at Gabriella, who returned his look, revealing no surprise at all. Randall ran over to him and grabbed him by the knees; Céleste pounded her little feet in the air in delight. “Hello, House Rats,” he said to the children. Randall howled with pleasure. Beal shushed Randall, and Gabriella—again, this seemed rehearsed—was already preparing to take the children out for a walk. These preparations left Arthur standing just barely in the door, giving Beal time to rearrange her thoughts, to restore the dress she had planned to wear for the evening to the armoire. But once they were gone, she invited Arthur to sit at the table in the kitchen.
She got right to it. “Has Thomas sent you?”
Arthur sat heavily in Gabriella’s spindly little chair. He looked wrong there, in this refuge for women and children, a bear, un ours dans le salon.
“Not really. Should he have?”
“Not really.”
Arthur smiled. “Not really” was a world he understood very well. “You look lovely,” he said. “More beautiful than ever. And Gabriella. A young woman now. The two of you together must have driven the Parisians mad.”
“You’ve already seen her, right?”
“Of course. I dropped by yesterday, but you were”—he paused—“out. I have been here for a couple of days.”
“Your work?”
“Yes. The photographs. We’re preparing an edition.”
“I’m happy for you. I’m so proud of you. Are you moving back up here now that you have the means?”
“No. My means are in the Midi. As long as you will permit me to live in your unused goat shed, you have me. This is just my market.”
“I’m glad. And painting? Is that over for you? Will you ever finish my portrait?”
“You mean my masterpiece?” He laughed.
“In other words, you’ll let me see it.”
“Of course. The mystery is over. But you’ll have to go back to St. Adelelmus to do so.”
“I am going back, Arthur. I am going home to my husband and my life.”
For a few moments they waited each other out, which she knew reflected no particular reluctance on Arthur’s part to get to the point, but an opportunity for her to open the discussion.
Arthur shrugged. “Lawrence will not be expecting to see you this evening,” he said. “Lawrence believes you asked to see him only to be kind. He asked me to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” she repeated, as if delivering the message to herself. “He’s not going to St. Adelelmus? Visiting vineyards?”
Arthur looked at her with impatience and a small amount of disbelief. “You think that’s what was going on?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. Not here in Paris, anyway.”
“Beal, business is not booming for the Goodrums. They’ve closed their new store in whatever fancy place it was. This is what I hear from Morris Malone. The fact is, the North has caved in to what was always the true American way. Malone said that the real Boston Brahmins are reclaiming their territory, and the Irish and Italians and Jews are grabbing up what’s left over.”
“How sad,” said Beal, a rather lame answer, but maybe she’d never really trusted everything Lawrence said, much as she’d wanted to. “Morris Malone? You’ve been busy.”
“We’re two peas in the pod. The Irishman and the Jew.”
Beal ignored this line. “Still, the Goodrums must have some family money from their business. Lawrence has been playing the part since he came here.”
“What do you mean, his family money? He’s been taking you to cafés on the Right Bank, but he’s living in a boardinghouse no respectable art student would be willing to enter. Somewhere well beyond the Panthéon. Took me an hour to find it. Maison Vauquer, it’s called. The place smells like a sickbed.”
Beal tried to sound shocked, or sympathetic—or something.
“You didn’t suspect this?”
“Well, yes. I guess I did. But not so bad as all that.”
“When I told him I was here to end this, his whole body slumped in relief. I gave him money to pay for his passage home. When I was leaving, he hit me up for a few more francs to buy his train ticket to Le Havre. He spent his last cent on you.”
“You mean I took him for every cent he had?”
“No. I don’t. The guy’s completely gone. He kept saying that I would never understand how cheaply you could buy him happiness. I kind of understood what he meant. You couldn’t have stopped him if you’d tried.”
“I could have tried. Harder.”
“If you say so. I didn’t say you were blameless.”
In fact, Beal could say nothing. The sun’s evening rays were beginning to move across the table. The cafés on the rue Cler were beginning to fill, the voices of the young. Beal no longer felt that she was one of them; yet another part of her youth that had fallen into the gap.
“He made it clear to me that nothing happened between you, as hard as he tried. That you’d told him from the beginning that he had no chance with you. He made you seem unassailably honorable. Pure, really.”
“Well, we know that isn’t true.”
Arthur ignored this. “He said he thought you liked him well enough, and I said you did. After Thomas and Gabriella.”
“I have been so mean to both of them. To Gabriella, trying to talk sense to me. I can’t believe I could hurt her like that.”
“She’s strong. Don’t worry. She’s fine.”
“And Thomas?” she asked.
“I was wondering when we were going to get to him.”
“Does he think I have been unfaithful to him with Lawrence?”
“I don’t think that’s the way his brain works. I don’t think he trades in suspicions, in conjecture. He’ll think you have been unfaithful to him if and when he knows you have been.”
“I haven’t been. You’ll tell him that?”
“If he asks. Sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lawrence writes to say it himself. And if he does, Thomas will believe him. I would. But really, wouldn’t it be best if you told him yourself?”
“I will as soon as we get home.”
“No need to wait for that. You can tell him yourself. Tomorrow. Here. He’s on his way.”
16
When Thomas left St. Adelelmus on the first of August, he was not sure he would end up in Paris. He’d fixed it in his mind that he would go when Mother Lucy died, or when Beal summoned him to attend her last days, yet every letter from Beal indicated that Mother Lucy was growing stronger and stronger, a woman of perhaps seventy-five who had no intention of dying anytime soon; Beal assured him that there was no reason to rush to Paris, that she would be returning any day now, just a few things to pack up. But the “any day” had turned into weeks.
From the moment she and Gabriella and the children left, almost immediately after he helped get them settled on the train, Thomas had been running nonstop. Beginning with the Greeks, people had been making wine in Languedoc for almost three thousand years, but that summer Thomas acted as if the future, a window to do something, could be counted in weeks. There were new holdings to buy, a few hectares here, a few there, all arranged aroun
d the compass, as if to take on any cultivar, any season, any storm, any drought and still have something to harvest. There were new vines to see that sent him scurrying back to his library to research. There were growers to spend the day with, dreaming and despairing in equal measure. He didn’t have time to travel in a gentlemanly carriage, but instead clattered through the villages on horseback like a cuirassier, minus helmet and breastplate. He picked his way home even in the new moon; one night he got lost and slept in a field. What St. Adelelmus became in the years to come, the reach of its ambitions, the prominence it achieved dated not to the day Thomas bought it in 1893, certainly not to a winter of research at Galignani’s library, but to that summer of madness. The farmer’s life is about waiting and hoping; Thomas, that summer, resolved to do neither.
Waiting had worked, with Beal, in the past, but this was different. He responded to Lawrence’s letter with a flourish of resolve: Let him try, he thought, but it wasn’t as if he were sure of the outcome.
Arthur thought he was being a fool. “Don’t you have to put up a fight? Just for show anyway? Isn’t that what women want?”
“No,” said Thomas. “This is something Beal has to do alone. You know that as well as I do. I have made a choice about how I want to live. You have made a choice. It’s her turn, even if it is late in the day.”
“She made a choice when she married you. Isn’t that what ‘I do’ means?”
“No,” said Thomas again, this time a little more sharply than he intended. “The way things were on the Retreat then, there was no choice. This was never as simple as boy and girl.”
“Maybe you’re wrong. Looks pretty ‘boy and girl’ to me.”
Thomas spent his daylight hours single-mindedly, maniacally engaged, but he couldn’t do much about the loss of heart deep in the nights in the bastide. The bed never stopped feeling empty; the dawns never stopped feeling grim. St. Adelelmus, the whole domaine, was bereft without her and the children, and without Gabriella; maybe it was nothing but the master’s vanity to believe that all the families in the domaine cared a bit about what went on in the castle, but even Arthur felt it. He was getting ready to head off himself. In the beginning of July the Señora’s husband had come to Thomas with the admission that he did not feel he could keep her safe too much longer, that sooner or later she would wander so far that no one could find her, that she would fall into a chasm in the mountains, be attacked by wolves or bitten by a viper. From that moment on, even as Thomas tried to ponder the next step for the Señora, he realized that she and Beal were a sort of pair; it seemed tragically likely that the Señora would never find what she was looking for. And Beal? Time would tell. These thoughts spun out into long fibers of speculation, and none of it was fun. At his worst and weakest moments that summer, Thomas could believe that even as the vineyards and winery of St. Adelelmus were marching forward, the stone-cold bastide was cursed. That was what his father had said the morning Randall’s body was found in the mule barn at the Retreat: We are cursed, he had said into the devastation of that day. This farm is punished for what it did to the Negro.
But Thomas didn’t entirely believe that about the Retreat, and he didn’t believe it at all about St. Adelelmus, and he didn’t believe his worst fears about Beal. The subject here was love. What he believed about love was what he had figured out in his first lonely year in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, that true love is forbidden love, that there is no place in life or literature for a love that faces no barriers. Theirs had faced more than its share because it was a truer love, because it survived and prevailed over greater obstacles. But the time of testing wasn’t over, maybe would never be over, and he knew that not just because of what Beal had been through, but also because of what he learned with Eileen Hardy. Maybe the mistake people make about true love, in life and literature, is to think it must be the only love, that the heart can swell for only one. There had been no scandal with Eileen, nothing the priest would have to hear about if that was something Thomas did; but the warmth in his heart and his attentions during those confusing months in Paris, the refuge she offered, the opportunity to be invisible at her side, something in the world other than the notorious Thomas and Beal—he had surrendered to all that for those hours and weeks at the reading room, he had allowed Beal, in those minutes, to be completely supplanted, and that was the most unfaithful thing he had ever done, or would ever do, in his entire life.
He did not commit the same crime that summer in the Midi—surrender to daydreams, pretend to different lives, to different loves—but more and more during these hours he felt that Eileen was with him. For the first time in his life he felt as if he had a confidant, a confidante, and more and more he addressed his thoughts to her and occasionally had the terrible feeling that he had spoken some of it aloud. No one around him would understand what he was saying, but still, they’d know that his solitude was getting to him. Imagine what they would have thought if they knew that half of his babbling was her imagined responses, her telling him he was right to keep busy and to trust the hours. She told him that what she saw in Beal’s pale eyes in that one instant three years ago was enough for the ages, that wise but ferocious look. And so it was in the course of such reflections that he decided to do what he had wanted to do for the last year and a half, which was to stand on her grave, thank her for her care, and bid her goodbye. It was almost August and Beal was delaying her return yet again; there was no reason not to do it now.
It was a fine day, bright but cool, when he arrived in Bordeaux. He had two hours to make the short walk across the river to the Gare de l’État, where he would catch the branch line to Libourne, next to the region of Fronsac. Over the months, he had learned a good deal about Alan Hardy, and about Bordeaux, which was five or ten years behind Languedoc in the cycle of blight and replanting. Still, no one seemed to be suffering, losing all as they had done in Languedoc. Some of these tiny holdings in Médoc, Pomerol, and Margaux were among the most valuable acreage in the world, and if it had taken a hundred years for a solution to be found for phylloxera, these holdings would not have lost a bit of esteem and value. As long as there was one bottle of wine being produced in Bordeaux each year, that bottle would float miraculously above the ocean flowing out of Languedoc. None of the châteaux were falling down. Money continued to flow in from Paris, from England and Ireland; for every relatively underfunded parvenu such as Thomas Bayly buying a mountainside like St. Adelelmus, there were ten Rothschilds buying ten tiny domaines like Lafite.
Alan Hardy and Thomas had exchanged several letters since Thomas’s first quick response of condolence. In that, in his shock, he had stepped closer to the truth than he wanted, but he had spoken out of love, which had been a comfort to her father. Thomas had said that her reconciliation with her father must be counted as a real mercy, and Hardy had taken no offense that Thomas made oblique reference to the reason for their quarrel. From there the correspondence had moved more into business, and Thomas learned that the once-fine little region of Fronsac had been decimated by the blight more than almost any other in Bordeaux, that Alan Hardy was starting over from scratch. Far from being in a position to sell Thomas some cuttings, Hardy saw the much younger, much-less-wealthy Thomas as the veteran, a survivor and a mentor.
Thomas did not have difficulty picking him out in the crowd at the station in the thriving town of Libourne. There was no stunning red hair, but he was short—as Eileen had been—and florid, and otherwise cheerful, unmistakably an Irishman among the darker bordelais. He pumped Thomas’s hand. “Welcome to Bordeaux,” he said. “I am delighted to meet you at last.”
Thomas answered that he felt the same way and thanked him for agreeing to welcome him on such short notice.
“Not at all,” said Hardy. “Nothing much doing in August. As they say…” He didn’t bother to complete the sentence.
Thomas laughed; in one minute he felt an affinity for this man—a good soul, if not an entirely spotless one. Thomas had no idea
what sort of household he would be visiting, and he was not surprised to be introduced, upon arrival, to Genevieve de Bose, the cause of all the trouble those years ago. She was trim and gracious, but muted, not the type to go looking for a scandal; if they had made one, it was a quiet scandal, and now this couple seemed content to live with little connection to outsiders.
“Eileen’s friend,” said Hardy to Genevieve.
“Of course.” She turned to Thomas. “You can’t imagine what this means to Alan, to have you here. We hope you will spend a few days with us.”
Thomas thanked her and said he would look forward to seeing the domaine, learning a bit more about the region. He didn’t know exactly how to add that he looked forward to seeing Eileen’s grave, and the question was not forced on him; that was the reason for his visit, they all understood, but it did not have to be the focus of it.
“Splendid,” said Hardy.
The small, comfortable house was a mere hut compared with the châteaux of the left bank of the Gironde, the wineries of the Médoc and Margaux—modest even compared with the larger establishments next door in Saint-Émilion and Pomerol—but it sat on a nice rise, with a view over the copses of oaks and the vineyards to the Dordogne River. The entire holding, Thomas had learned from Hardy, was little more than ten hectares, about a fifth the size of St. Adelelmus, but the small size seemed to fit this gentle land. From where they sat on the terrace Thomas could discern four or five distinct properties, a neighborly way to farm compared with everything he had known, the vast stretches along the river shore at the Retreat, the battalions of vineyards marching up the side of the Black Mountain at St. Adelelmus. Everything was lush and inviting; water was not a problem here. But whatever the differences, Thomas felt the same sort of comfort he felt at home, a lack of pretension, an honest simplicity; the grapes did this, made this feel the way it did no matter where they grew.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 39
