Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “It’s too bad our friend Arthur isn’t here,” said Thomas. “The boys would like him.”

  “Oh, yes. Arthur Kravitz. Marvelous. ‘The eye of the Midi.’”

  Yes, some critic had called Arthur that, though it was presented as an irony that an American Jew had the eye of the South of France. Still, Thomas was pleased that Mason had heard this. “Arthur came to France trying to escape a life in Newark, New Jersey, and found everything he loved about Newark, its people, here in the provinces.”

  Mason was not interested in Arthur Kravitz. The conversation lagged. Maybe there was nothing more to the visit than this; maybe Thomas had been arrogant to think there might be. “Ah,” Mason said as Edith and the two boys returned. “Here they are.”

  In fact, the group had been gathering for lunch. Randall and Justine. Céleste and her husband, Etienne Milhaud, over from La Fontaine for this midsummer luncheon. Marie, thankfully without her man. Their younger son, Wyatt, was in Bordeaux. Gabriella was visiting from Béziers with her granddaughters, Thérèse and Camille, two pretty girls in matching billowy blue muslin dresses. A smattering of children, most of them Thomas and Beal’s grandchildren, but some unidentified. They had all wandered in and plopped down here and there on the semicircular wall that bounded the terrace, on the green bench, or seated at the stone table. Maybe it was all these children and grandchildren—these days Thomas’s mind sometimes skipped a generation or two, and he couldn’t tell who was whose—but the scene seemed to hark back to a painting or a snapshot he’d once seen—he couldn’t remember where—of a nineteenth-century family reunion, Beal in the center, Thomas behind her, his long legs crossed, gazing across the valley; Gabriella seated primly at the small round table in front of them; and all around them the children, the men in stiff collars and bowlers and top hats, and the women with their great skirts and high necks and full sleeves and ample shawls. Thomas wished Arthur were there to take a photograph, but it might not have been necessary, as the image continued to haunt and comfort him until his last days.

  They repaired to the dining room, with the French doors thrown open. Additional chairs and utensils were brought in, large books placed in seats to elevate the littlest ones. Thomas sat Edith and the younger boy beside him at the head of the table, putting Mason beside Beal at the foot. Bowls of pasta were brought for the children. Most of the family had been warned that as good hosts, they who had any English should probably try to speak it, but this lasted only a moment or two in the center of the table, and it interested Thomas to see that the older Mason boy, Sebastian, seated in the gaggle of young people, seemed to be doing just fine as the languages flew right and left. An interesting boy, thought Thomas, a most promising youth.

  Before he carved the ducks, Thomas stood to welcome the guests, telling all assembled that these Mason visitors were now owners of the family estate in Maryland where Thomas and Beal had grown up, and it did not surprise him that as he sat down, Mason rose to respond. He asked, not unwinningly, for silence from “the peanut gallery.” He was very gracious, congratulated one and all, took a sip of wine, and then held it up as a totem of all they had accomplished. This “splendid luncheon” in this “magnificent estate,” this family, all these friends—he said that he and Edith, though they were well established in England, missed this part of life and that perhaps one day a meal very much like this might take place in the dining room at the Retreat.

  Thomas found this a little overblown, but for the most part he appreciated the sentiments; the little hint at the end was charming. For a second he tried to imagine such an event, under the scowl of the notorious portrait of Cousin Oswald that hung over the fireplace in the dining room; it was a nice idea, a warm gathering in that chilly place. Thomas did not, had never wished the Retreat ill. He looked over at Edith with a sort of pleased, sated feeling on his mind, but he found that she was clutching her napkin, that she looked stricken. For a moment Thomas feared that she had a piece of duck lodged in her throat. “Are you all right?” he asked, leaning forward.

  She waved him off. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What your husband said? The Retreat? Is this possibly a plan?”

  She took a sip of wine and shook her head. “He hasn’t said anything about it before,” she said finally.

  “Ah,” said Thomas.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  The general chatter, din even, of the table allowed Thomas to turn to her, and he marveled that in these few minutes he had become so comfortable with her, and so concerned, that he pursued this. “I’ve been wondering why he has seemed so intent on coming here, on meeting me. Do you think that’s it? Does he want to talk to me about the Retreat?”

  “You would be surprised at how much you have been on his mind. How much he has measured himself against you, even though you’d never met. It has everything to do with that farm, as if you are siblings. You’re the older brother who has succeeded.”

  “And he is not having the successes he hopes for in England?”

  “No.” This required no more elaboration.

  “I’m sorry. We had some pretty dark days here, I will tell you that.”

  “I know. Your wife said a little about it. But that just makes my husband even more jealous.”

  Thomas reached for her hand and gave her a small squeeze. “Courage,” he said, in the French manner. “He strikes me as a man with a good heart. You have these two fine boys. I think things will work out for you. If you did go back to the Retreat, you might find that it will be a good turn for you. For the boys especially: two thousand acres to get lost in.”

  After lunch Thomas took Edward on the obligatory walk through the caves, the pressing rooms, the vatting rooms, the bottling rooms, and then up to the vineyards; he’d taken visitors on this walk a thousand times but never really tired of it. At the crest of the hill above the farm, one could look north and see the Pic de Nore. These mountains had sheltered him and his family for forty years, from the worst of the winter winds, from some of the confusions of this young century, and perhaps they would now have to shelter them from another European storm. Languedoc, this broad plain bounded by the Massif Central and the Pyrenees: it had provided a refuge for its own people and language for eons, but now? Who knew what would survive.

  “Beautiful,” said Edward Mason. “You have been very lucky.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas. He believed to the core that luck had everything to do with it: from the first day when he realized that this girl who hung around him and Randall was actually a person he could love, he and Beal had needed nothing but luck, and they had gotten it. Had they ever. The Catholic women in his life—his mother, his sister, Mother Lucy, all now long departed—would have preferred to call it grace, and he did not resist the notion of a sacred blessing on a humble enterprise.

  But what Thomas thought of as luck was not what Mason was implying. “Unfortunately, I am in a business where luck isn’t enough,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Thomas. Something to do with manufacturing, he had gathered over the years; he had no interest in learning any more than that. He heard what Mason was saying, and it mattered to him not at all. It did not matter what anyone—especially this most tangential and transitory figure in his life—thought of his own private journey. Thomas could look out at the landscape below them and see the stations on the way, from the plains to the peaks, and that is what mattered. Mason could call him lucky, if he wanted. “Perhaps we should return,” he said. “You’ll want to get to Montpellier before dark.”

  His refusal to take up the charge of undeserved success seemed to have irritated Mason even more, but he moved on to the real topic. “This Mason’s Retreat,” he said with a belittling sneer. “What’s it good for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. “People have been trying to figure that out for centuries.”

  “Seems a better go could have been made if someone had the imagination.”

  This was insupportable, to say this about Mary
after what she had done—given her life to that goddamned place! Given her life to their father as the peaches failed and he lost heart, given it to the land with her dairy, her campaign to give safe milk to the babies of Baltimore. But now her efforts to make that farm rise above itself, to outlast the stain of its slaveholding, had fallen back into the underbrush, left to rust by the side of the road like a lost farm implement. As far as he and Beal could tell from Ruthie’s letters, the farm was lazily bumbling along, feeding maybe ten families. Maybe that was its highest and best use. Thomas almost rose in defense of all that sacrifice and work—he doubted that Mason had even come close in either respect—but then he settled back. The dead bury their dead, he reminded himself. “Well,” said Thomas, “perhaps you should make the go yourself.” He wished it weren’t true, but what he said had some elements of a curse.

  “I think I just may,” Mason said, then repeated himself in order to underline it as a threat. “I just may do that.”

  “Your wife? She—”

  “Women aren’t equipped to be expatriates. They’re too attached to their families.”

  This did not answer his question, but who cared? There seemed nothing but spleen here, so Thomas ended the conversation by setting off on the path back to the bastide. When they returned, Edith and the younger boy were sitting with Beal beside the figs, and the older boy was sitting in the back seat of the car. The goodbyes were brief. Mason, clearly a person whose manners were finer than his impulses—really, manners were invented for people like him—rebounded from the ill temper of the walk and pumped Thomas’s hand with a cousinly affection: just talking man-to-man, no hard feelings. Edith got into the car, avoiding Thomas’s eyes except for the briefest glance but locking on to Beal like a lover gazing back at the platform from a departing train, and after some grinding and shuddering, the Delahaye started up and off they went.

  “Ouf,” said Thomas.

  “Je la plains,” said Beal, and with that expression of pity they parted to finish the chores of the day, not taking up the topic again until after dinner, as they were readying for bed.

  “It was about the Retreat,” said Thomas. “I think he’s busted, and he’s heading back there whether she knows it or not.”

  “We talked about that when you were showing him around. I think she’d be relieved, really.”

  “To be returning to America?”

  “Yes. Her family is in Chicago, but that would get her closer. Besides, one needs a place to call home, and she doesn’t have it.”

  Thomas climbed into bed and waited while Beal made her final preparations. This room, these things in it, the window looking out over the terrace, this bed: for a few moments he thought back to the other bedrooms they had shared, beginning with their wedding night in the Lion d’Or in Paris. Time has a way of making life seem so compressed, of collapsing thousands of miles into the dimensions of a single room, the distance between the armoire and the bedpost, and isn’t that the mercy of it?

  When Beal joined him, he said, “Mason says he thinks women are not suited to be expatriates.”

  “And?”

  “What do you think?”

  “For certain women I think he’s right.”

  “For you?”

  “Forty years, and you’re still asking me that question?”

  Thomas was nodding off, and when he came to enough to pick up the conversation and say no, he wasn’t still asking that question, it was the middle of the night, a nightingale outside was telling the darkness the story of his life, and Beal was asleep.

  Acknowledgments

  I have drawn material from many sources for this book, but several of them proved invaluable to me as I began to envision my story. For the Paris sections, David McCullough’s The Greater Journey and Adam Gopnik’s Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology were especially useful. Michael B. Miller’s The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920, and Phil Kilroy’s The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865, gave me details about these two remarkable institutions.

  I have accumulated several bookshelves on French wines and the history of viniculture in France. Most useful to me were George Ordish’s The Great Wine Blight and Leo A. Loubère’s The Red and the White: The History of Wine in France and Italy in the Nineteenth Century. For a more granular sense of the Languedoc region during this period, I was inspired by Gaston Baissette’s classic novel Ces grappes de ma vigne. I also referred constantly to La vie quotidienne des paysans du Languedoc au XIXe siècle by Daniel Fabre and Jacques Lacroix. Finally, of many books about the Canal du Midi, the best one I know of is the most recent, Chandra Mukerji’s Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi.

  By a happy coincidence I have come to know the paintings of the early impressionist Frédéric Bazille, whose father, Gaston Bazille, was, as I say in the book, one of the heroes of the fight against phylloxera. Frédéric was killed at age twenty-eight in the Franco-Prussian War, but he left behind a few wonderful paintings of his beloved landscape around Montpellier. On the occasion of a traveling show of his works in 2016–2017, Flammarion produced a gorgeous catalogue, Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) and the Birth of Impressionism, edited by Michel Hilaire, Kimberly Jones, and Paul Perrin. I have looked at those paintings countless times for inspiration about that life and that landscape.

  The story of Lawrence Goodrum and the fictional Goodrum’s grocery store is based somewhat on material from two studies of the American black elite: The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950, by Adelaide M. Cromwell and The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor.

  A years-long project of this kind doesn’t get written without the support and encouragement of family and friends. First among them is my wife, Caroline Preston, fellow novelist and best friend, and our sons and our daughter-in-law Fraley, and our first grandchild, John Preston Tilghman. I thank my colleagues at the University of Virginia and our friends in Charlottesville, and I thank my brothers and sisters-in-law and their families, and our neighbors in Centreville, Maryland. Finally, I thank my splendid agent, Henry Dunow, and my longtime editor, Jonathan Galassi, for everything they have done—and it has been a lot—to keep the story of Mason’s Retreat alive.

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER TILGHMAN

  Roads of the Heart

  The Way People Run

  Mason’s Retreat

  In a Father’s Place

  The Right-Hand Shore

  A Note About the Author

  Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, and three previous novels, The Right-Hand Shore, Mason’s Retreat, and Roads of the Heart. He is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and lives with his wife, the novelist Caroline Preston, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Centerville, Maryland. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Part I: Paris

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II: Languedoc

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Christopher Tilghman

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Tilghman

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2019

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71913-5

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