A Lady of Good Family (18 page)

Beatrix sat, too. As soon as she had seen Mrs. Haskett at the door, she had had a presentiment of something important,
something vital being stolen away from her. The tea tray sat on the little table in front of the settee where Beatrix sat. Beatrix stared at the teapot but did not pour.

“He is already engaged,” Mrs. Haskett said. “May I?” She didn’t wait for a yes; she reached for the pot and poured herself a cup. “To the Princess di Cosimo. A pretty young thing. Wealthy family, of course.”

Minnie, who had been standing in the doorway, hoping Mrs. Haskett would leave, sat down. She did not, could not, look at Beatrix.

What could they say? Any answer they gave would allow Mrs. Haskett the knowledge that Beatrix had been lied to, by omission if nothing else. Or they themselves could lie, say they already knew (and neither of them had doubted it as soon as the words had been spoken; they believed the woman though they couldn’t trust her motives), but if they pretended they already knew, why would Beatrix have allowed herself to be seen with him? They were well and truly trapped.

Beatrix was heartbroken. He had let her believe he was free to give his heart, but he had not been. He had involved her in a triangle, a bitter contest, and she hadn’t even known. He had deceived her. She wanted to weep, to hide her face with her hands and let the tears stream through her fingers. But she could not, not with Mrs. Haskett sitting there, watching so closely.

Minnie passed Mrs. Haskett the plate of sandwiches and petit fours. Only their visitor ate and drank.

“Everyone seems to have known of the engagement but you,” Mrs. Haskett said. “An arranged match, of course.”

“Are you enjoying your stay in Paris?” Minnie asked. “I’ve heard there is a wonderful exhibit of floral paintings at . . .” She paused, unable to remember the name of the gallery. But they could not, they must not, have this conversation. They must go back in time, weeks back, months back, to the Borghese gardens, and Beatrix does not leave her chair, does not go for a walk alone, does not meet this man. But it has happened.

“I know the one you mean. Everyone is talking of it. Courvier. He’s showing Monet’s work,” Mrs. Haskett said. “Atrocious.”

Beatrix sat, straight-backed, smiling, revealing nothing of the interior storm that had uprooted trees, flooded streams, washed away rose beds and destroyed the garden of her trust. Calmly, she discussed Monet’s paintings, the wonderful colors, so like a garden when seen through a glowing dawn light. Minnie was never prouder of her daughter than she was that afternoon.

Amerigo arrived promptly at three and was shown in by the same maid that had admitted Mrs. Haskett. Like all young men in love, he required his eyes to find the beloved first in that room, and to be blind to all else. So it was without awareness of what had already occurred that he went to Beatrix, took her hands, and kissed them.

“My darling,” he said, still blind to that awful figure seated in the chair by the window.

Minnie stood. Her voice was like ice. “We have not been introduced.” She recognized him as the young man who had waltzed her daughter away from her at Mrs. Haskett’s Berlin soiree and saw with some regret that, had he arrived before Mrs. Haskett, before that terrible announcement, she would have liked
him, would have been prepared to welcome him. Now she saw only the man who had harmed, perhaps broken, her daughter.

In turning to face Minnie, Amerigo saw the other visitor. His face became ashen; the light in his eyes dimmed.

“I see,” he said, and his voice might have been announcing a death or a bankruptcy.

“Good day,” said Mrs. Haskett, rising. “I will leave you three to your private conversation.” She was smiling.

•   •   •   •

“W
e were affianced when we were still children. Neither of us wishes the marriage to go through. She, too, loves someone else. Yet our families insist. I had hoped to pay our debts by selling art, and in that way free myself from this family burden. Mrs. Haskett made offers. Never high enough, never enough that my father would agree to them.”

Amerigo refused the chair that Minnie had offered him. Manners above all else, she had been taught. This man has just broken your daughter’s heart, but you must offer him a chair or, the alternative, ask him to leave, immediately, and never come back. That she could not do. The look on Beatrix’s face would not allow that particular finality. An explanation was needed.

So Amerigo paced, back and forth, back and forth, between the seated girl and her mother, trying to explain. He ran his shaking hand through his hair, ruffling away the fierce brushing that had tamed thick black curls. He tugged at his high collar, loosening it so that his throat and the vein that corded his neck showed. He resembled, Beatrix thought, the David who had slain
Goliath in the Caravaggio he and she had stood before just a few months before . . . beautiful, and a murderer.

What explanation could argue away the problem he had created, being engaged to one woman and offering elopement to another?

“What more is there to say?” Amerigo asked. “I have broken your heart, and mine as well. Yet if I had been more open, would you have consented to see me? I would have been a good husband. A loyal husband. And so I took the only chance I saw.”

“That you could marry Beatrix before she found out. The marriage would have been based on a lie,” Minnie accused.

“I see that now,” Amerigo said. Finally he sat, and it was an admission of defeat.

Beatrix, who had been staring out the window and looking at him in quick sideways glances—it was the only way she could control herself—reached over and took his hand.

“I do understand,” she said softly.

“Do you?” There was a note of hope in his voice.

“Yes. But you must understand, we can never meet again.”

“If you had gone away with me that day . . .”

“It still would have come to this moment, except then we would be trapped forever in the dishonesty. Don’t you see, Amerigo? My mother has divorced. Your father would never approve. And you have humiliated your fiancée and lied to me. There is no future for us, unless we wish to be alone, completely alone, moving from hotel to hotel seeking the company of other outcasts. Could you live like that? No. I thought not. Neither could I.”

When Amerigo left a few minutes later, Beatrix felt the way a garden appears after it has been destroyed by storm and flood. She went to her room without another word to her mother, closed the door, and fell to her knees.

Minnie, on the other side of that door, heard the sobbing and knew she must let it run its course.

A Garden for Second Chances

A
garden in which one can reconsider past decisions must be more than a garden in which one feels regret. If simple regret is to be the theme, then a bed of rue will do nicely. Rue is a plant of insignificant flowers, of loose form unless grown in strong sun, and with no fragrance. But a single plant does not constitute a garden, any more than a single decision constitutes a lifetime.

No. A garden of second chances must contain fragrant plants and strong colors interspersed among shrubbery. Hyacinth in the spring, of course, and roses, roses, and more roses in early summer, especially
Rosa moschata
. This climbing rose grows so vigorously it can be fiercely pruned back yet will still, in the following season, cover an entire wall with blooms.

In back of the roses, like a curtain in a theater, a thick planting of tall false indigo, and to the side of the false indigo, a bed of
Cheiranthus cheiri
, English wallflower, which if sown in summer does not bloom until its second season.

The flower beds should be edged with sweet alyssum, and the alyssum must be cut back every few weeks to keep it blooming till frost, just as hope occasionally has to be trimmed back to allow the unknown to flourish. Other flowers should include pansies for thought, heart’s ease for regret, bleeding heart for pain, and autumn-blooming crocus to represent that just when we think all is lost . . . it is not. New fresh blooms arise when and where we least expect them.

The bordering hedge, representing the cutting off of yesterday from today, should not be excessively neat; rather than trimmed, it should be plucked, leaving a lacy and uneven edge.

The lines of a garden for second chances can be straighter and more formal than the lines for a garden of first meetings. This is, after all, a garden in which one looks over the shoulder as well as straight ahead. Garden structures should include a bench nestling in a small glade of ferns, where one can sit and reconsider. The ferns should be
Osmunda claytoniana
, known more familiarly as the interrupted fern.

In the center of this more formal garden there should be a sundial to remind us of time and its passing.

“P
oor, poor girl,” said Mrs. Avery. “Oh, poor thing. To have to endure such heartbreak . . .” In the early-evening light her face was as white as the moon that hadn’t yet risen. She looked as if she would weep.

“Young men often do not speak plainly enough,” said Mr. Hardy. “Still, to not tell her of a previous attachment was very, very wrong.”

“But don’t you see? He was in love, and people in love often do wrong things. I myself . . .” I stopped in time. I had never told another soul, not even Beatrix, how far along that attachment with Giovanelli had gotten when I was still trying to convince myself I was in love with him and not Mr. Winters.

Mrs. Ballinger did not sit with us that evening after dinner. I was glad of that, since I thought that stiff-backed, righteous woman’s judgment of Beatrix and Amerigo would be less than generous. It was just Walter and Mrs. Avery and myself, and a
friendly threesome we made of it, though we were almost strangers. For two years, other than the time I spent campaigning and marching for women’s suffrage, other than a few parties for my young grandchildren, I had been alone.

One year for formal mourning. A second year if you actually loved your husband. That had been my mother’s formula when my father died. She had stayed in formal mourning for three years.

“It did not end there,” I said. “Neither the love, nor the complications. When Minnie went to the door the next morning, determined that she and Beatrix would book passage home that same day, she found that Mrs. Haskett had left a note on the little table, leaning up against the vases of roses the hotel had sent up the day before, sent by Mr. James to Minnie.

“‘When we are in residence in New York, this autumn, I would be so pleased to visit you,’ she had written. ‘Of course, when I return I will be speaking with a journalist from “Table Topics.” They are always so eager to print news of Americans traveling abroad.’

“It was a threat, you see. Blackmail. Invitations into Minnie’s inner circle would be the price for not talking of Beatrix’s affair with Amerigo.”

“Dastardly!” said Walter.

Such a sweet and old-fashioned word!

“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you, Walter. She did have those three daughters to marry off. Enough, perhaps, to make any woman desperate. And Minnie, practical and good-hearted woman that she was, knew she would help Beatrix, and Mrs. Haskett, even though she had asked for help in such a nasty way.

“When they were back in New York that winter, Minnie
invited the woman to a few salons, and soon other people were inviting her as well. ‘A friend of Minnie’s,’ they would say. Perhaps it was blackmail, but it was practiced commonly enough in those days, when a single misstep could ruin a woman forever. Do you know, one of Mrs. Haskett’s daughters eventually married an English lord? Imagine. All because Minnie invited her to her salon a few times, and then Henry James agreed to have tea with her as well.”

“Never had much regard for the so-called nobility,” said Mr. Hardy. “By the way, has anyone heard anything yet about the suffrage vote in Tennessee?” He gave me a teasing glance, letting his eyes rest on my suffrage rosette.

“No politics. Not tonight, Mr. Hardy, if you don’t mind,” declared Mrs. Avery, who seemed to be growing less timid. “I’d like to hear the completion of this story. You can’t leave it there, Daisy. Broken hearts must be attended to. It is, I suppose, something like that story you began with, about the specter bridegroom. Her Italian lover wasn’t a specter, but he did disappear, I assume?”

The piano player inside temporarily ceased his tinkling repertoire of Irving Berlin tunes. He seemed to have a very limited musical education, and two nights in a row of Berlin was making me restless.

“Disappear is the very word,” I said.

So much in life disappears. That’s why, when we pass an old farmhouse where ancient peonies and daylilies still bloom among the weedy ruins, we are so touched by their beauty. Sometimes the most fragile things are all that survive.

Beatrix’s choice to become a designer of gardeners was about
creating beauty that outlasts the seasons—and the years. Walk a garden path and you walk in a kind of eternity where love is always a possibility.

•   •   •   •

N
ine years later, in the autumn of 1904, Henry James came to visit Edith Wharton at her new home, the Mount. Edith, as my interpretation of her stay in Rome years before had indicated, had previously been impatient and unhappy with domestic duty. Acquiring land right there, in the Berkshire hills, and designing and building her own home on that lovely land, elevated her attitude. She was mistress of all she surveyed, from lake view to china cabinet.

It wasn’t domesticity that had caused Edith’s health problems years earlier, but that kind of social Newport domesticity that requires a woman to spend her waking hours visiting people one does not particularly like and, in turn, being visited by them.

“All that driving up and down Bellevue Avenue, just to show off new frocks,” I had heard her comment once to Minnie. “Can you think of a worse waste of an afternoon?”

Edith and Teddy were still married in 1904, but Teddy had less presence in her life. It was as if he were becoming a ghost, something seen on occasion, a presence one knew was there but didn’t particularly bother with. Edith’s “scribblings” had, by then, turned into a successful literary career, earning both acclaim and royalties. Teddy had some of his own money, but he had begun to creep around his wife’s house in a disconcerting way, sometimes mumbling to himself.

“Teddy is in charge of the wines,” Edith announced at each dinner, and because the wines were excellent, Teddy would smile and puff up a little, and then just as quickly deflate once actual conversation started, since the talk was literary and Teddy was not.

He was still a handsome man, still admired by his friends at least for his charm, dwindling though it was. All I will say of Edith is that as soon as she acquired her own bedroom down the hall from Teddy’s, her nervous depression lifted considerably.

Beatrix, who had not married, had carefully, diligently built her career as a landscape gardener. When she returned from the European tour, she set up an office in her mother’s New York brownstone and let it be known that she was open for commissions. Many people were skeptical: a female landscaper? Thanks to friends and connections, and then word of her skill and creativity, commissions trickled in: she drained swamp for cultivation, tamed forty acres of wild forest into a pleasant grove, and laid out a small cemetery. (“Full of light and attractive views,” she wrote to me. “Remember those terrible catacombs in Rome?”)

Three years after opening her design office, Beatrix was so well known and well thought of that she was chosen as a member of the new American Society of Landscape Architects—the only woman so honored. “Earth-shaker!” Mr. James called her in his letters.

Beatrix was totally absorbed by her chosen work. I rarely saw her without a reference book or a trowel or a sketching pad in her hands. She forged ahead, determined, and only once did she falter, and that just for a day. She and Mr. Sargent quarreled.

She had come back from her European tour full of ideas
about garden design. When she had returned to visit the Sargents at Holm Lea, she had talked enthusiastically about how American gardens, while acknowledging the debt to the past, to those formal European gardens, should also look forward to the future and pay due respect for place. New York is not Rome, she said. Boston is not Versailles, so our gardens should not mimic those.

Mr. Sargent had nodded and absentmindedly poked at the fire in the hearth. Who would not agree with such an argument? He had done worse than disagree, though. He had grown bored. “My dear,” he had said, a little too softly, putting his feet up on the fender. “Are you ignoring your research and your studies in botany? There is more to gardens than prettiness.”

The rebuke stunned her, and she saw that she and her mentor had come to an intellectual parting of the ways, saw that men and women often approach the same problem from different angles.

“Of course I will continue my studies and research,” she said quietly, watching embers like fireflies dance over the flames. “And I will design gardens that others may find pretty.”

Mr. Sargent and Beatrix remained the best of friends and colleagues, and he did all he could to aid her career, but after that bored comment from her teacher, Beatrix realized she was breaking ground in many ways: she had entered a career dominated by men, and she had chosen a path different from her mentor’s.

“Daisy,” she wrote to me after the tour, “I sometimes feel like I am the only one of my species, something rare and isolated. A specimen plant, unclassified and stared at in curiosity. Oh, dear one, tear up this letter when you have finished. Throw it into the
hearth and turn it to ashes. I am close to complaint, close to loneliness. And you know that I will not give in or give way. Onward.”

She gave an interview to the New York
Sun
, defying the convention that a lady have her name in the newspaper for only three occasions: birth, marriage, and death. In the interview she was described as “comely” and “majestic,” and I think that helped her career, but it also made her even more of a curiosity to some.

Completely disappeared from her life was Amerigo Massimo. He had written twice to Beatrix after she sailed back to New York. The first was an apology, signed with “all my heart, all my regret, to my darling Beatrix.” I don’t know if Beatrix wrote back. She received a second letter, a year after her arrival home, saying that he had married his princess and both families rejoiced at the match. He left it at that. No complaints, no hints of bitterness or anger at the forced arrangement. He was, after all was said and done, a gentleman, and I imagine he did all he could to make his little princess happy, once the inevitable had arrived.

There were no more letters after that, and if Beatrix thought of him, longed for him, she gave no sign of it. She made almost yearly trips to Europe with Minnie, to continue her studies and explorations, but when in Rome she avoided certain places and explored only gardens and villas she hadn’t visited before.

What was her state of mind? Cheerful, usually. She had her work, and a good job she was making of it. She had independence and had found her way in the world, had swum against the current and landed on a pleasant shore. If she was lonely, she gave no sign of it.

Not till that autumn of 1904.

It was a wonderful season of mild days, chilly nights, and nature’s finest colors as far as the eye could see, and at the Mount one could see very far. Edith had had a busy summer, writing every morning, working with various village committees, and motoring through the New England countryside in a little auto. When that beautiful autumn arrived, she had even more cause to rejoice, because it brought friends: Henry James, Howard Sturgis, Walter Berry, Minnie, Beatrix, and myself. Few things made Edith happier than a house full of friends who knew to leave her alone to write in the morning, but in the afternoon accompanied her on motor trips through the countryside.

Henry, who had a secretary (he had permanent cramping of his right hand by then and dictated his work), housekeeper, maid, and little else, pretended not to be slightly awed by the staff Edith had hired for the Mount: her beloved housekeeper, Gross, shared the running of the house with Arthur White. There were maids, footmen, a cook, and kitchen boys. The gardener, Reynolds, had a small army of male assistants, and there was a chauffeur with the incongruous name of Cook. There was Anna Balmain, who had once worked in Minnie’s household, who now worked for Edith, as her secretary.

I caught Henry sometimes running a fingertip over the always dustless furniture, sighing over the exquisite meals, stroking the collar of a freshly pressed shirt, and there on his face, plain to see, was the sixth deadly sin, envy.

Edith was assisted by one other whom Henry envied above all else: her sister-in-law, Minnie, was acting as her agent, and
doing that with as much efficiency as she completed all her other work. Minnie had, by then, published a book of her own,
European Travel for Women
, a travel guide of useful information that Murray and Baedeker hadn’t thought to include: how to tip in London, the correct teatime in Paris, how much it costs to rent a steamer chair during the crossing. Because of her many literary contacts, she was well positioned to help Edith in her own career. Because of her divorce, she appreciated the extra income Edith paid her.

Divorce hadn’t damaged Minnie: her character was too strong, her virtuous reputation too stainless. It helped that she had powerful friends, Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt among them. The divorce had, though, brought changes. Poverty was far, far away, but the velvet drawing room curtains in the brownstone were not replaced even though they were faded; there were fewer expensive dinner parties and more informal lunches; she dressed as beautifully as she ever had but wore her gowns more seasons than others might have agreed to do.

Those small changes did not worry her. Minnie walked through life with the confidence of one who makes all her own decisions. Others might say, “I’ll have to speak with Tom or Lawrence to see if we can come,” or, “No, I can’t come; my husband doesn’t enjoy music,” but Minnie could give a simple yes or no, depending on her own preferences. She answered to no one and if she occasionally remembered that demeaning afternoon in the lawyer’s office in Paris, that castigating letter of accusation from her mother-in-law, she did not mention it.

I was studying Minnie, to see how it was done. Mr. Winters
and I had separated. Not officially, of course; there were no announcements. India and Athena were still at home and a few years short of marriage age, so we had to keep up appearances for their sake. But Mr. Winters spent more and more nights at his club, and sometimes entire weeks went by when I didn’t see him at all.

My life and house felt empty without him. I had hoped that a formal ultimatum from my lips would produce the desired result: me or the gambling. Oh, how I had posed in front of the hearth, hand to heart, other hand to forehead, just like an illustration in
Harper’s
called
The Gambler’s Wife
. He had smiled and put his arms around me and assured me, again, it was just a run of bad luck and his luck was bound to change. But neither luck nor attitude changed. Thank God Mr. Cadwalader had encouraged me to put the New York house in my name.