Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “I admit,” he said, “that I had certain misconceptions about Bordeaux.” He beckoned to the view, in itself so blameless and unassuming, so carefully kept that it provided its own answers to Thomas’s “misconceptions.”

  “That has been clear in your letters,” said Hardy with good cheer. “Eileen herself had a quite negative view.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, trying to evade. “I think she said something like that.”

  Hardy laughed guilelessly. There were few subtexts with this man; most of him was on the table. “She said she told you to have nothing to do with Bordeaux.”

  “Well,” said Thomas, “it’s true. She was the reason I ended up in Languedoc. But she was right. It’s a life I’m used to.”

  “Perhaps that’s my point,” concluded Hardy. “Really, we are all just farmers. Even at Château Latour they are all just farmers at heart.”

  Genevieve stood up. “Any time Alan mentions farming, I know we are in for it. I’ll leave you farmers to talk about grapes.” She left, and they talked, the beginning of a conversation that would last many years, but at dinner it was Genevieve who asked Thomas to tell them about Eileen and that winter in Paris.

  Thomas told them everything he could remember. It seemed that each detail, each tiny gesture brought joy to her father. There was no need to prevaricate; whatever misdeeds he had committed, either to Beal or to Eileen, were well understood and long since forgiven in this house, a house that had its own history. He told them about standing in terror in front of the bookshelves that morning, when everything seemed pretty impossible, and then, over his shoulder, the gentle Irish whisper, Are you all right, Monsieur? He described their teas hunched at the tiny tables of the tearoom; he didn’t have to tell them that their knees touched. He described the meeting they’d had after he came back from Languedoc, how strong she had been, how honest in the face of his untruths. “Oh, now,” said Genevieve. He told them that he had misunderstood her boss, M. Vaucluse, who seemed unpleasant and dyspeptic but was really being fiercely protective. As the conversation progressed, Thomas found that he could not tell the story without talking a little about Beal too, and about her winter in Paris and the move to Languedoc and the difficulties in all that. “She’s in Paris now,” he said.

  “From what you have said, it sounded as if she were away,” said Alan.

  “An elderly friend of ours was very ill, but it seems she has recovered.”

  “Well then,” said Genevieve, “it’s right that she is there,” but Thomas heard in that affirmation an acknowledgment of all the uncertainties he might have been expressing. They sat in silence for a minute or two, but it was a sort of familial silence: plenty to say, to talk about, but taking a rest. This must be what it’s like to have parents, thought Thomas; they’re concerned, but they won’t probe. This must be what it’s like to visit a place you call home.

  But in all the pleasure of recalling Eileen, deep into the evening around this friendly table, they could not avoid the fact that after she left Paris, she came to Bordeaux without gladness. She had lived with her father and Genevieve for almost two years after this, and it had not been a happy time for her. They tried to divert her, introduced her to the few women they knew who were roughly her age, tried to interest her in a trip to America. There were men, in Paris before she left and here in Bordeaux, who tried to woo her, but she turned them away. If she had been looking for a husband, she would have gone back to Dublin. Instead, she chose to close herself off here, in a place she did not like all that much. She often took the train into the city to go to the library, to read and also to write, but she was secretive about it.

  “We think she was writing about a young woman in Paris,” said Genevieve. “It’s a novel, we think.”

  “We would be happy for you to look at the pages she left, if you would like,” said Alan.

  “I can’t imagine I would be the best reader,” said Thomas.

  “Perhaps not,” said Hardy. “But any character based on you would be given a sympathetic treatment.”

  “I think I’d be more afraid to see what she made of herself, if that’s what fiction writers do.”

  “Yes,” said Alan. “She was secretive.” He said that even as a small child, she’d have nightmares, and her mother or he would go to her, but she would refuse to tell them what she had seen. It seemed that these fears were private for her, that what scared her, even at six years old, was not something she could share. Her fears turned inward. “We Irish are good at that,” said Alan. He paused and then took a turn. “The home her mother and I made would not have helped.”

  Genevieve put her hand on his arm to quiet him. “You did your best,” she said. “So did Maeve.” She turned to Thomas, for the first time took him into her gaze. “What I think you need to understand is that Eileen was a girl of some sorrow.”

  Thomas could not react, a stranger in the middle of this excruciatingly private conversation. But he did not feel out of place, for almost everything they said made him realize that he had understood her better than he realized at the time. He said that he had seen a little of this, the underlying shadow on her smiles, but at other times she could be so gay, so quick with wit; she sparkled the way a real girl of sorrows could not.

  “She was that way around you,” said Genevieve. “You gave her moments of happiness. That is why Alan wrote to you.”

  “I assume Alan wrote to many of her friends,” said Thomas. He glanced at Alan for affirmation, but Mme de Bose had the floor now.

  “No,” she answered. “He did not. We recognize that you were married during the time you knew Eileen. We have heard of your quite remarkable wife. People in Bordeaux know your story more, I think, than you realize. But you should understand that for us, for Alan, you will forever be a son-in-law he never had.”

  The room they had put Thomas in was on the third floor, under the eaves. It was not a room for a guest, more like a room for the youngest boy in the family, but it was the right place for him. On the way up, Genevieve had shown him Eileen’s room, the room where she died, all her books still in piles, sprigs of dried flowers and lavender woven into the mirror frame, and when they backed out, Genevieve closed the door behind them gently.

  Thomas bid her good night with a handshake and crawled quickly into bed. He lay awake with the echo of what Genevieve had said, and he realized that he could do that, be a son of some sort to Alan Hardy. He lay on his back, the covers to his chin, in a remarkable, maybe even narcotic comfort. The minutes, the hours ticked by on the grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs; he felt as if he were ten years old again, but a different boy in a different house, with different parents down the hall. He said it plainly to himself: This is something I have been looking for all my life, this is a missing piece, this is air that fills a void.

  He would tell Beal all about this trip, every detail. He would start with the first letter from Alan, and he would tell her not in the form of confession of a further wrong he had committed, but as an acknowledgment of a blessing he had received. Of a great light he had been shown, and this light, Thomas believed, would illuminate the path ahead for both of them. He would tell her that he had loved Eileen, and that this love only magnified the love he felt for Beal, for the lives they were living. He would bring her to Bordeaux to introduce her to Alan and Genevieve, and for them she would come to stand a tiny bit for their dear departed daughter. As they grew older, as their children became adults, they would bring them for visits, and these young men and women could show Alan what might have been if Eileen had survived.

  Thomas awoke early, came down to the kitchen for coffee, and asked the cook for directions to the town, a mile or so away. He set off before Alan or Genevieve appeared—it seemed that they were staying out of the way for him—and his first stop was the post office, where he sent a telegram to Arthur, who had gotten to Paris a week or so earlier. His next stop was the churchyard, the cemetery next to the ancient presbytère, and there he found the simple s
tone among the more elaborate monuments, crypts, pieces of statuary. It was a lonely sight, this single grave amid the plots teeming with departed families, but it was peaceful and private, and there was room beside it. Secretive was perhaps the word, yet Thomas did not feel that she had ever withheld from him. There was no one else in the cemetery, so Thomas sat down at her feet and told her, half out loud, that he had loved her in a very pure way and would remain a member of her family, would be loyal to her father and to Genevieve. He could not imagine a more comforting thing to say to a person who had died young. And then he told her all about Beal, about the obstacles they had faced, which he realized now were not so exceptional, which had nothing to do with race or with cities and farms, but were what one would expect of two people so young and so inexperienced trying to set out in life together. He felt that Eileen would agree, that she would further argue that recognizing this was the first step toward a mature marriage, and that she would tell him it was time he was on his way.

  When he got back to the Hardys’, he found Alan sitting alone on the terrace. Thomas told him about visiting the grave. “I had thought,” he said, “that I would do it with you, but I guess I needed to be alone with her.”

  “Yes,” said Alan. “That is what we reckoned you’d want to do.”

  Thomas described his visit, sitting on the pebbles of the path, talking to her.

  “She loved that church. She asked to be buried there.”

  “There seems some room for you by her side.”

  Alan nodded with a cheerful smile.

  “I have been waiting for my wife this summer,” said Thomas. “She has decisions to make, I think.”

  “Then I would think you have done the right thing. To stand back a bit.”

  “We did so much in the wrong order, in the wrong sequence. I believed this time would right things. My friend Arthur Kravitz says I’m nuts.”

  “Ah, les vignerons,” said Alan. Thomas nodded, and Alan reflected for a moment. “If that’s the way you think of it, this waiting would have required considerable fortitude, but everything you have said makes it sound as if it will work out in the end.”

  “I’ve sent a telegram to Paris. It is time I went. It is time I brought my family home.”

  “I would think so,” said Alan. “We’ll put you on the train back to Bordeaux tonight and you can catch the early mail express tomorrow. You’ll be in the Quai d’Orsay by midafternoon.”

  “That’s what made sense to me,” said Thomas, and they sat in this restful silence.

  Alan, for all his cheer, was a man who did not fill the air with unnecessary talk—a man like Thomas himself, a man, perhaps it might be said, of sunshine and shadow, like his daughter. Above them, a single white stork, perhaps getting a jump on the flock for the trip to Africa, or perhaps lost, glided majestically in the thermals. “I can’t tell you how much this visit has meant to me,” said Thomas. “I wish I could stay longer.”

  “You were very kind to come.” Alan patted Thomas on the knee. “We’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future to see more of you. But now your only responsibility is to your family.”

  * * *

  Beal woke up late the next morning to the sound of Gabriella packing their trunks. Beal had hardly slept. The night before, she had made soup, their last pistou on the rue Cler, and they played with the children until they were ready for bed. They were all happy; even little Céleste seemed to understand that they were going home. After the children were asleep, they sat together at the kitchen table; the light in the apartment was yellow with a very full moon. Beal apologized to Gabriella for what she had been doing these weeks, a sort of folie, but now it was over.

  “You do not have to say that to me,” said Gabriella.

  “I need to say it until I am sure you believe me,” Beal said, but it was unnecessary. She asked Gabriella if this had been fun for her, being in this great city, and she answered that she was grateful for everything, she would never forget a moment of it, but she missed her home and was glad they were going back.

  At about nine a boy arrived with a telegram from Thomas. He was on a train and would be arriving at the rue Cler around three. Arthur had told her that Thomas was in Bordeaux and that he was taking the express, and she supposed she could figure which train it was and go meet him at the station, but standing in a crowd, waving when he appeared—she had done that before, and this time it seemed too public. The words one said on a railway platform were meaningless anyway: Did you have a nice trip? I have a cab waiting. Whatever the right words were, they weren’t that. Beal decided that she would wait for him here, in this little home; she’d send Gabriella and the children out for one last ice on the Champ de Mars, which they would like. And besides, from the vague way Thomas had written about his plans, it seemed that this is what he wanted too.

  It was a strange experience, she thought, to feel that a whole part of one’s life could end as if it were a chapter in a novel, that one could turn the page and move on to the next adventure. Arthur had concluded it in just a few lines—Lawrence says goodbye, gave him money for the train. It wouldn’t take more than a paragraph in her journals to be done with Lawrence. Maybe even done with her youth, which now, as wife, mother of two, she was ready to shed. Packing her clothes, she lingered with each item: Where did this come from? Who was I then? In the next room Gabriella was singing a tune quietly to Randall, a children’s song he loved. “I met my beloved on Monday … I met my beloved on Tuesday—Ai rescontrat ma mia diluns / Que se n’anava vendre de fum. / Luns fum, tòu! / Entòrna-te ma mia, entòrna-te que plòu.” The sound of those words was like an aromatic puff of smoke from home for Gabriella, but also for Beal; she remembered that the person she always heard singing in Occitan was Mme Esquivel, in the washhouse at night, and that memory brought the rest of St. Adelelmus into her eyes, the little winding road past all the dwellings of the families, a place that suddenly seemed irreplaceable to her. She had always thought of the domaine as Thomas’s new Retreat, but she had never realized that this tiny familial village was her new Tuckertown; the memories could be as sweet if she allowed them. Leaving it meant that she had twice forsaken her real home.

  Beal did not know what to expect from Thomas. That he had telegraphed Arthur before he contacted her meant something, though exactly what she didn’t know: Was it a symbol of the distance between them, or was it a kindness? She didn’t know why he was in Bordeaux, and though there could be many business reasons, she suspected that there was more to it. If it were just business, he would have told her he was going. She couldn’t imagine him in this Paris apartment, where, in three months, an entire life had been lived that did not include him; he’d be too big for this space. Without a doubt he would hit his head on the door frame of her room. She knew he would be hungry, wouldn’t have eaten a bite all day because he didn’t like to eat on trains, and she would need to drop down to the markets for some cheese and sausage. Perhaps even, of all things, some wine to wash it down.

  She didn’t know what Thomas would do, what he had in mind, but she knew her own mind perfectly. She would tell him everything she could imagine about Lawrence Goodrum, and she knew that the more she said, the less important it would seem. Because there had been nothing to it. She would tell him that she was ready to go back to St. Adelelmus, this unlikely refuge, and that now, more than ever before, more than the moment when she agreed to marry him, more than when she stepped on the gangplank to La Touraine, when she stepped on the train to Languedoc—she would be admitting much here, much doubt—her heart and mind felt joined, that she was whole. She could not fight the rising tide of joy she felt. So many mercies, and all the more magical because they were undeserved. Undeserved, but she would not dwell on that. She was astonished by what had happened to her. By her life.

  At lunchtime she went down to the street to buy the snacks for Thomas. Paris was now in its August lull, resting for another year. September, that greatest of months, would soon be upon them, and i
f July fairy tales were now being replaced by the realities of fall, that was good. How astonishing! Life itself is a hymn to life! She walked up to the river, and it felt good. She and Thomas had walked here so many times, along the Quai d’Orsay from the Pont de l’Alma to the Pont des Invalides. The first time was in November; they’d been in France for a week, married for three weeks. That was not a lifetime ago, it was a point in her past that was simply irretrievable. She had dozens and dozens of memories from times before—growing up at the Retreat, working in Hampton—that were so fresh in her mind that she could hear the voices, as if these people were standing next to her; those times would always be with her. But those first weeks and months with Thomas? No. She could recall a few outings with the little girls, maybe. Diallo Touré, alas. But nothing distinct and sharp about herself and Thomas, just the sensation of having passed time together, having endured. This made every bit of sense to her. She had been only slightly in the world during those months, too terrified about the next hour to spend any effort recording the last hour. Even now, thinking of this peculiar state of mind, she involuntarily turned to look behind herself, as if something would be sneaking up on her. She had been nothing then; she had wafted through the events like smoke. But now she felt she could grasp her life by the shoulders, give it a vigorous shake, and it would fall into line.

  When she got back to the apartment, Gabriella had already left with the children. Beal tried to read a little, but instead she sat by her window and watched the traffic. Perhaps she dozed off a bit, and then she heard Thomas talking to the concierge, heard his heavy-booted footsteps on the stairs and a slight knock before he opened the door. They looked at each other down the short corridor, and for a moment that’s all they could do.