A Lady of Good Family (19 page)

That autumn of my visit to the Mount, Clara, already married and expecting her first child, was in New York, in her own home; the younger girls had gone to visit friends in Newport. Gil Jr. and his wife were busy doing up a brownstone on Madison Avenue, Robert was working in a law office in Boston, Jenny was carrying her second child, and Mr. Winters was avoiding me in order to avoid any conversation about finances. I had been left to stew in my own bitter regrets, and it did not agree with me.

“Lenox,” Minnie had said, the day she found me weeping in my dining room, alone, into a bowl of soup. “It is time to visit Edith.”

Beatrix took a week off from work to make the trip, to help Edith with her gardens. Beatrix had been working too hard.
There were shadows around her eyes and she was thin, so she let her mother coax her into taking a small vacation.

But when you are ambitious and essentially healthy, and passionate about your work, there really is no such thing as a vacation.

Every morning Beatrix walked through the grounds of the Mount with the head gardener, Reynolds, pointing out which bushes should be trimmed, where spring bulbs would be best placed. Their meetings were often somewhat loud, since Beatrix had grown from girl to woman, and a woman with very strong views at that.

She was not shy in criticizing some of Edith’s ideas for her gardens. Edith wanted an Old World Italian feel to the grounds, with long walkways and closely trimmed hedges; Beatrix urged her to consider the more natural English style that Gertrude Jekyll was still perfecting and that Beatrix herself preferred.

“Suit the plant to the place,” she repeated often, “and the garden to its locale. Plant an American garden, Aunt Edith, not an imitation Italian garden.” Mrs. Wharton would nod, tilt her head slightly to one side, and then continue sketching straight-lined paths and formal parterres. They quarreled over the gardens, and Beatrix did not visit her aunt often at the Mount after that autumn. The disagreement over the gardens wasn’t the only reason she avoided the place.

“It reminds me of Rome,” she said. “Why should a good American garden remind one of Rome?”

I often went with Beatrix on her walks in Lenox, and one day, when we had ventured into a woodsy area with a gravel path
strewn with gold leaves and huge oaks towering overhead, she stopped to look at a seedling that had sprouted between two rocks. An acorn had wedged there and sent up a four-inch stem with two sickly pale leaves.

She peered hard at this little plant, and a look of great pity came over her face.

“Poor thing,” she sighed. “It will not thrive. There isn’t enough soil or light.” She bent over and pulled it from its cradle between the rocks.

This seemed ruthless to me. But, of course, she was right. Leave an oak to grow in that place and it would either die quickly or grow large enough to do harm when its roots pulled loose from the gravely hillside.

When she plucked that sapling I understood what had happened to her in Italy. Despite her passion for Amerigo, she had not been able to stay there, had not eloped with him that afternoon he asked her to. She had called it a “hesitation,” but it had been a resistance, a foreknowledge of disaster to come if she tried to plant her very American sensibilities into an Italian setting. Some women thrive in foreign situations. Beatrix would not have. So she had pulled herself free of it, despite the pain. Mrs. Haskett’s cruel visit and gossip about Amerigo’s engagement to another woman had been the deciding factor, not the initial one.

“Walk on, Daisy,” Beatrix said, giving the uprooted sapling a little caress before she tossed it to the ground. There is life, and there is death, and in between we try to make the best of it, her expression said.

Mr. James, who was that year visiting the land of his birth
for the first time in two decades, was enamored of Edith’s new home, and of the splendid autumn weather, and he was pleased to get to know his fellow bachelor Walter Berry.

Before Edith had married Teddy Wharton, she had been in love with Walter, and she had married Teddy when she realized Walter would not have her.

She never knew why their friendship had not progressed down the path it seemed to want to take but was perceptive enough to realize that it was not entirely her fault. Walter Berry, tall, handsome, aristocratic, and intelligent, had expensive tastes and a penchant for chorus girls. Such men do not do a favor to the women they marry, and he was honest enough to know that and to act upon the knowledge by not acting. He and Edith began as friends and remained friends, with no hint of flirtation in the relationship. Walter flirted only when and where he could make a hasty exit with no backward glance; with friends he was true and stable.

Howard Sturgis was also unwed, but unlike Walter he had a nature more feminine than masculine, and often more childlike than even feminine. When Howard came into a room, that room took on the aura of a child’s birthday party, full of merriment and pleasure.

And so our days passed at the Mount, with card parties, walks, drives through the countryside, vivid discussions about literature and plants. I was often distracted from my problems with Mr. Winters, but they nagged at me like an unremitting pain. I had, years before, taken a step in the direction of self-determination by requiring that the New York home be put in
my name. Now I was wondering what it actually meant to be a wife, if marriage was necessary, and if necessary, what a woman should be willing to endure. There were the children, of course, and any sacrifice was worth their well-being; there had been the splendid intimacy with Gilbert, the social status of being wife to a man with an old family name. But when children were grown and gone, intimacy turned to dust, and the name was not gilded enough to pay debts—what was left? I had no answer.

The evenings at the Mount had a different atmosphere from the pleasant days. Sunset brings out doubts and regrets, and autumn does as well; the days may remind us of summer and sunshine, but the evenings look ahead to cold and snow and isolation. Tensions rise; old fears come to the surface; anxieties about the future cloud conversations. Autumn challenges your expectations, makes you aware of your limits. In the evenings our laughter was briefer, with longer moments between. We would all of us, that week, feel a cage of loneliness separate each from the others, once the sun went down.

“Read to us, please, Henry,” Minnie said after dinner one night when we sat before the blazing hearth. A wind whispered around the house and there were occasional bangs and taps that made us jumpy.

Edith sat quietly, stroking the dog in her lap, thinking. Minnie was knitting tiny baby caps to donate to one of the homes for unwed mothers in New York. Beatrix was thumbing through plant catalogues, planning a new spring border for Edith. I listlessly shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards and laid out hands of patience on the side table.

“
The Turn of the Screw
. Again?” Henry asked with a little sigh, pretending to be a little irritated though we all knew he was flattered.

“A perfect choice,” handsome Walter Berry agreed, and Henry puffed up a little.

Mr. James was a great literary success, of course, but his earnings were modest. I had overheard Edith complaining to him that her anticipated royalties from
The House of Mirth
would barely cover the cost of the new automobile she had purchased. Mr. James had replied that his earnings that year would barely cover the old wheelbarrow he needed to paint.

“I’ll get the copy from the library,” Minnie said, rising.

“No. You stay there. I’ll get it,” Beatrix said. She was thirty-two that summer, and strikingly lovely, with her athletic gait, coppery hair, and direct, unblinking gaze.

I sometimes saw Mr. James watching her too closely, studying her, and I later wondered whether it was Beatrix he had in mind when he created that tall, amiable, peacemaking daughter, Rosanna, in
The Ivory Tower
.

“How is her occupation going?” he asked after Beatrix had left the room to fetch the book. There was a hint of admiration in his voice.

“Such a stern word,
occupation
,” said Howard Sturgis, grinning.

“Splendidly,” Minnie said. “She is in demand since she designed the plantings for that little development outside of Manhattan.” The “little development” was Tuxedo Park, a new community of summer cottages for Manhattan’s wealthiest, men who wore the
new tailless evening jackets from London that would soon be named “tuxedo” in honor of the community.

“Put in some roses, did she?” Mr. James inquired, shifting his bulky figure in his chair.

“Certainly, roses. As well as viburnums, spirea, and lilac,” Minnie said with pride. “After she had graded the lawns and created a screen planting for the entrance lodges. Mr. Garrison was especially pleased that she was able to create the gardens without sacrificing the oaks and birches already there.”

Mr. James shifted again. “It is rare for a girl to be so fond of trees, I think. I always picture her with a little watering jar in her hand, fussing over a bed of pansies.”

“Yesterday that girl, as you call her, lifted an eight-foot-tall maple into the hole she had dug herself. Even Reynolds, who is not impressed by much, was impressed by that.” Minnie grew thoughtful and put down the striped cap she had been knitting. “I think,” she said softly, “Beatrix was dismayed by some of those gardens we visited in Italy, where all the trees and shrubs had been laid waste to accommodate a foolish statue or unnecessary fountain.”

“They have a different aesthetic,” Mr. James agreed. “Beatrix, don’t you agree, they have a different aesthetic?”

“Very different,” she agreed, having just come back into the room. When she felt my eyes on her, she gave me a little smile.

“I should think Italy hard to forget,” said Mr. James, who wrote very clever books—certainly the sentences were a test of endurance and sophistication—and was known to be attuned to the dramas going on about him.

“One should not dwell in the past,” said Minnie, picking up her knitting and clacking the needles at a furious pace.

“But the letter you sent me when you were in Rome in ’ninety-five has become a constant reminder of your travels there. Your description of the Borghese grounds was particularly effective.”

“We had time enough to study them,” Edith said. “Beatrix had gone off and left us sitting for quite a while.”

Minnie, Beatrix, and I grew suddenly absorbed with the ceiling. Edith did not know the story of Beatrix and Amerigo because Minnie had never told her. “What if she used it in a story?” Minnie had said to me when we decided to never openly speak of it. “That would do Beatrix such harm, and much as I love Edith, one should never trust confidences to a novelist.”

The novelist, sensing the unspoken narrative swirling above, on the ceiling, studied us with curiosity.

Mr. James, seeing that we did not wish to pursue a conversation about Rome and the Borghese gardens, picked up his book and turned the pages, looking for a passage he wished to read aloud for us.

“Paris, of course, has superior gardens,” said Walter Berry, meaning, I believed, that Parisian women were more amiable.

Howard, playing cards with Teddy at a corner table, slapped his hand down and said gleefully, “You win again, old man.” Howard often made sure that Teddy won, to sweeten Mr. Wharton’s moods, which were often quarrelsome.

It was dark by then, an early, humid autumn dusk having turned into a dark night shadowed by clouds over the moon. The
wind rattled the French doors and we thought we heard a squeal from some small animal, followed by the whooing of an owl.

For a moment I grew nostalgic for autumns past, when just such a wind would have set candles and gas lamps flickering. Edith had installed electricity and plumbing and all modern conveniences at the Mount, even a little elevator between floors.

And just as I was growing nostalgic for flickering candles, the lights went out completely. A stronger wind blew shut the French doors that had been opened onto the terrace and the warm autumn evening.

“What the blazes?” Mr. Sturgis shouted. Mr. Wharton, increasingly unpredictable, laughed.

“A fuse,” Edith said. Her little dog began to yap furiously, jumped down to the floor, and pranced in anxious circles at her feet.

“Perhaps that wind has caused some sort of damage to the system,” suggested Beatrix, who knew about such things.

“Oil lamps!” I cried, excited. “Do you still have some, Edith, or were they all given to charity?”

“I think candles,” Minnie said. “Especially if they are perfumed.”

Edith’s housekeeper appeared a moment later, carrying candles and matches. The wind was picking up and we could hear leaves rustling and that strange sighing of nature that emerges on dark autumn nights. “Do you want a fire?” the housekeeper asked, all concern for her employer.

“No, it is still too warm, and the wind might cause a downdraft. We are fine, Gross. Go back to bed,” Edith said. “Thank
you,” she added. “Can you read by candlelight, Henry, or must we sit in pensive silence till the electric problem is solved?” Edith placed three of the candlesticks on the table next to him.

Edith pretended to be gay, but her nerves were showing in the slight tilt of her head. She was uncomfortable in darkness and refused to be in a dark room if it also contained a book of ghost stories. It was an old fear dating from her childhood.

I suppose because she was not alone, she allowed Mr. James to go on with his reading from
The Turn of the Screw
.

He read from the beginning in a lovely, clear voice, and we three ladies and three gentlemen sat transfixed by the story. We all knew it well. I myself had read the novel at least half a dozen times, yet it still tethered my imagination so that my thoughts could not wander as he read, not even to wondering what Gilbert was doing that evening. We passed a very pleasant hour that way, Henry pausing occasionally to refresh his throat with a sip of brandy.

When he came to one passage the atmosphere in the room changed.

“‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll,’” Henry read, his voice deep and beautifully modulated. “‘One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should
know
; and the only way
to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.’”