A Lady of Good Family (22 page)

“Aren’t you glad to see me, Gilbert?” I asked. “I am very pleased that you are here tonight. You’ve been away so much lately.”

We were in his study, that room that always smelled richly of leather and cigars and newsprint. Gilbert, in our travels, had
collected Oriental pieces, and his study was outfitted with inlaid tables, a wall-sized carved dragon screen, and displays of two-sided embroideries. It was, I thought, too busy for Edith’s taste, but I enjoyed the effect and had always envied him that study.

We sat in the early-evening darkness, and when a maid came to light the lamps, Gilbert sent her away. Through the heavy closed door I could hear Robert speaking with the new footman, Arturo. Robert was home from school for a few days, taking time from his law studies to recover from a cough, except the cough wasn’t going away. My son was ill, and there were Mr. Winters and I, frozen anew in silent combat over . . . over what? A new servant in the house?

“You should be thankful,” Mrs. Manstey had said to me the month before, at her dinner party. “It is only the horses, a card game now and then. So many husbands keep mistresses. Oh, this new age. Where will it all lead?”

“I’m tired,” I said to Gilbert. “I will go to bed now.”

“Not yet. I have to tell you something.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Please.” I feared what he had to say, and I wanted one more night of my old life, just one more. But it wasn’t to be.

“Daisy, I’ve lost it all.” He ran his hands through his hair.

I sat down in the chair opposite him. He reached for my hands, but I folded them into my lap.

“Surely not all,” I said quietly. “We can sell the house in Newport.”

He laughed unpleasantly. “I mortgaged that years ago.”

I felt cold and wished we could light the fire in the hearth,
but no wood had been left there. There was dust on the mantelpiece; the carpet was unswept; the twin vases on the mahogany bookcase were empty. They were antique Japanese bronze, and they had been an anniversary present from me to him; I couldn’t remember when ever before they had been without flowers.

All this in a single week, I thought. What will it be like a year from now? Ten years from now?

“I’ve let two of the maids go,” he said. “And the sous-chef. There will have to be more cuts.”

“What about India?” She was to have a coming-out ball that winter. “And Athena’s tutors?”

“Athena can continue her studies on her own,” he said, running his hands through his hair, then flattening his hands against the top of the desk, the way people do when they are trying to get ahold of something to stop a fall. He looked like he was going to weep.

Everything was lost except the brownstone on Fifth Avenue, which was in my name. We would keep our home. But we would do what others had been forced to do: sell my remaining jewelry, some of the art we had acquired, make do with less, become invisible, people who lived in large houses behind closed doors and thick drapes, rarely seen in public, certainly no longer invited to the balls and opera opening nights, because we couldn’t afford the box, return the supper invitations, purchase the necessary wardrobes.

I laughed, and Gilbert looked up in amazement. “Don’t you see?” I asked. “This is how it began. Beatrix and I in Europe, hounded by Mrs. Haskell, who was buying everything she
fancied, except the one thing that would have meant Beatrix’s happiness. Amerigo’s heirloom,
The Wolf of Gubbio
. Now we will be the sellers.”

“I’ll get you some brandy,” Gilbert said. “Sit down, Daisy. Calm yourself.”

“Have you told my brother?” I asked when he came back with the decanter and two glasses. Raymond had never liked Gilbert, even as a child, when he had found Gilbert in the garden in Vevey and Gilbert had refused to give him any candy. Oh, how Raymond must have gloated over this news.

“Yes. We will still have a small income from your trust, enough to live on.”

“In reduced circumstances, of course.”

“Of course.”

I think it devastated Gilbert and the girls more than me. They had been born to wealth, but I could remember a time when my own mother cooked Sunday dinner, a time before the full household staff was hired, before the house itself changed from a two-story farmhouse to a three-story brick town house.

“I’m sorry, Daisy,” Gilbert said that evening. When he wept, he put his head in my lap, like a little boy.

What a dreary autumn that was. The house staff shrank and shrank, one position after another gone, with tears and slammed doors, till there was a cook and a maid and not much else. Arturo stayed, having nowhere else to go, and worked for bed and board. I sent the seamstress away when she came with samples for new winter coats and gowns. I canceled our weekly order with the florist, and the French lessons and drawing tutor. India sulked
when I explained her coming-out party must be held at home instead of in a ballroom, but she recovered herself soon. Athena promised she could learn as well on her own.

The four eldest children were already living on their own and doing well, but they felt shame for what their father had done. It was months before Gil Jr. would visit us, months before Robbie would look him in the eye and speak with him.

Life went on, just as gardens do. Winds and floods and frost may destroy them, but each spring some little green shoot appears, announcing that life does indeed go on. Some days, I felt like Lily Bart, who crept down and down the ladder instead of up, but I put that feeling away and determined there would be no self-pity, no long faces. My grandmother had milked a cow. I could darn my own stockings.

I did not leave Gilbert, as more than a few friends advised. He had come back to me in his troubles, he had wept with me, and there was more to hold us together than there was to drive us apart. I had loved him once with all the passion and ambition and dreams of a young girl, and to deny him would be to deny a large part of myself.

Eventually, I did forgive him. I realized his gambling was a weakness, stronger than himself, but not stronger than the promises I had made on our wedding day. Our love changed, became less about passion, about what intimacies happen between a man and a woman, and more about two friends trying to help each other through difficult times. He was much diminished and began to stoop and stayed at home rather than going to a club, but he was still Gilbert. I still belonged at his side.

Our lives grew smaller, yet some friends stood by. Minnie invited us over for her Sunday afternoon salons, and we met some of the more interesting minds of the time there, either in person or through discussion of their works, the writers and politicians who were slowly reshaping the world, Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Theodore Dreiser; even that very strange woman who wrote in the rhythms of a stalling and starting automobile, Gertrude Stein.

One of the most argumentative salons was about
The
Ladies’ Home Journal
article by Grover Cleveland, who had written, “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.”

“I don’t know about that,” Gilbert said. “It seems to me that society is doing the assigning of positions, and perhaps not all that well. Daisy has more common sense in her little finger than many men I know, and I don’t see that women could make any more problems in the world than we men already have.”

“Hear, hear,” said Beatrix. Gilbert and I had sold most of my jewelry that week, and we would go home to bread and cheese for dinner, yet it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I
t was snowing heavily the day Beatrix went to meet with Amerigo, almost two months after our week at the Mount. The sidewalks were icy and Fifth Avenue was a contrast of new white snow and brown ruts where traffic passed over.

Beatrix was working on garden plans for several commissions that autumn, and though she didn’t speak of Amerigo, I knew she had been thinking about him. I could see it in the garden plans she showed me, the slight Italian influences that crept into her designs. We had made a point to meet once a week, and more and more it seemed those meetings with Beatrix were the lightest moments of my week. I could laugh, say anything that came into my mind, and know she would judge neither me nor Gilbert.

Minnie had found me a small job at the hospital dispensary, which was very kind and thoughtful, since I could permit people to think that, like Minnie, I was a volunteer rather than a paid laborer. Such things mattered, for the sake of my two youngest
daughters, who still had to be settled in life; it was necessary to spin a few illusions about our circumstances. There is poverty and there is genteel poverty; we aimed for the latter.

So, that day when I met Beatrix, just before she was to have her reunion with Amerigo, I was coming from the dispensary, she from her office. We were two workingwomen meeting for an hour at the museum. I still had the smell of ether in my nostrils; she had ink on her fingers. That was the day when I looked hard at the question that had been swirling through my thoughts for months, perhaps years. Why should women be mere appendages to other people’s lives?

Beatrix and I often spoke of the suffrage movement, but that day she had other things on her mind.

“What is the point of it?” she asked that afternoon at the museum. “I have agreed to meet with him. But to what purpose?”

They had just installed a new collection of Chinese porcelains, and we sat in front of them, admiring the whiteness of the glaze, the intense azure of the blue decorations, how a single brushstroke suggested a bird in flight, three strokes created a bridge over a river, eight strokes created a pair of lovers on that bridge. There was such a serenity to the ancient objects, a simplicity based on two colors, craft, a scene that the mind must register for exactly what it was: a lovers’ tryst.

“Miss Jones?” A woman’s voice interrupted our thoughts. “Beatrix!”

The wolfish Mrs. Haskett stood before us, cutting off our view of the Chinese porcelains.

After marrying off her youngest daughter to an English lord,
Mrs. Haskett had become, under Minnie’s influence, a “woman who read” and, having read, enjoyed having the authors come to visit her and provide interesting talk for her teas and dinner parties. She had purchased one of the brownstones on Fifth Avenue, not far from my own house, though hers was newer, larger, and grander in every way.

“Mrs. Haskett,” said Beatrix, standing.

Mrs. Haskett looked better as a woman of fifty than she had at forty. Her hair was white, but still very thick and full of waves, and the whiteness of her hair offset her olive complexion. The skin had shrunk back a little around her eyes, making them larger. She was well dressed, in sedate colors and soft lines—no more bustles and frills, but a sensible, if expensive, walking skirt and little jacket trimmed with fox.

“How is Minnie? I saw dear Mr. James last week,” she said. “He came to visit and was full of tales about his adventures in the wilds of Lenox. Imagine. How clever of Mrs. Wharton to avoid Newport and instead build in Massachusetts.”

“Are you here to see the new porcelains?” I asked, changing the conversation.

“No. I am here to meet with the acquisitions committee. I have offered to sell them one of my paintings. You know it, Beatrix. That sweet little painting that Amerigo Massimo was offering.
The Wolf of Gubbio
? I purchased it some years ago.”

Yes, I thought. You made up your mind, finally, after you led him that merry chase, refusing to purchase the painting till Amerigo had married and performed his family duty. After he and Beatrix had parted.

Beatrix had gone ashen. She understood the timing as well as I. She lifted her chin higher. “That is wise of you,” she said. “I’ve heard that painting does not bring good luck to its owner. Wasn’t there a story about a murdered monk who follows the painting from place to place?”

Mrs. Haskett frowned. “I have heard that story,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.” As if she herself wasn’t fully convinced, she added, “Superstitious nonsense.”

“Well, we must be on our way,” Beatrix said, beginning a somewhat hurried step in the direction of the archway leading to the central stairs and the exit to Fifth Avenue.

“Wait.” Mrs. Haskett reached out and put her hand on Beatrix’s arm. Beatrix looked at it as if a spider or mouse had landed on her coat sleeve. “Will you come to my salon, Beatrix? This Sunday?” She pointedly did not invite me as well, but I was already getting used to that. Gossip spread quickly on Fifth Avenue.

“I wish I could say yes,” said Beatrix, choosing each word with care. “But I am afraid I will be busy.”

“Amerigo Massimo will be there. At four. And you, too, of course,” she added as an afterthought to me.

She turned on her heel and left, her little maid scurrying behind her, trying to keep up with Mrs. Haskett’s long, quick stride.

“Well?” I asked, after Mrs. Haskett had disappeared.

“No,” Beatrix said. “It would be difficult enough to see him again, alone. But at her salon? No.”

We spent a few more minutes pretending to study the
porcelains, but Beatrix’s thoughts were miles away, perhaps in Rome, in the Borghese gardens.

“That was a sign,” she decided. “This must be ended.” An hour later, she went to the park. Gardeners do not like unfinished stories; they are like bare ground that has been cultivated but not seeded. So much ruined potential, when there is a beginning without an ending.

•   •   •   •

C
entral Park was humming with activity that day. Children pulled one another on wooden sleighs, mothers and fathers playfully pummeled one another with snowballs, young girls and boys walked up and down the paths, whispering and laughing as their governesses flirted with their own beaus. It was a winter wonderland, and Beatrix took her time as she walked to the skating pond where she had agreed to meet with Amerigo.

Beatrix was filled with that sense of renewal that comes when a new year is on the horizon. She’d had a very busy year, many very busy years, in fact, since she had first met Amerigo, and she wondered what it would be like to go to him as a woman, a successful woman, rather than as the young girl she had been in Rome. She wondered what he would be like as a man with a wife and children and the fully accepted burden of responsibility, someone to whom she could no longer say, “Run away with me!” and mean it. Well, some people with responsibilities could say that—certainly many have—but she knew with all her being that Amerigo was not that kind of man.

She thought of Amerigo as she walked through Olmsted’s
marvelous park, the gardens and forest, ponds and paths in the midst of what was becoming one of the grandest cities of the world, where everyone, rich and poor, tycoons and shoeshine boys, could enjoy nature.

She was glad the park was so busy that day, because gardens, she had come to believe, never feel complete until there are people in them, enjoying them.

Beatrix walked through Olmsted’s miracle of green, not rehearsing in her thoughts what she would say to Amerigo, because she knew the words would come when they were needed. Perhaps they wouldn’t even need to talk. They could just look at each other, hold hands for a moment, and know that all was well since all was as it should be. They had each done the right thing: he to marry and she not to marry.

Was she nervous? Who would not have been? She was not made of stone, and while she was pleased with how she had cultivated her life and made it bloom, she remembered, too, long nights of solitude. When you are as busy as Beatrix, it is difficult to be lonely. Loneliness requires a certain amount of free time. But solitude requires no such thing. Solitude can descend on you in a crowd, in your office, even in your favorite garden when it is filled with people.

Loneliness can be chased away as easily as a skittish alley cat. Solitude is a wolf that stalks you wherever you go.

There was an organ grinder in the park, with a little monkey all dressed up in a blue wool suit and hat. Beatrix paused and listened to the squeaky, sentimental music and put a nickel in the monkey’s cup. He tipped his hat at her and the organ grinder
began to play a different song. A
stornello
from the Spanish Steps of Rome. Had Amerigo arranged that in advance? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Such coincidences happen.

He was there, waiting by the skating pond, leaning on the railing, hugging his arms to his sides, a Roman man unaccustomed to the harsher winters of New York. A group of children, poorly dressed and too thin but laughing anyway, swarmed between her and Amerigo, reminding her again of that first meeting, when she had been swarmed by children in the Borghese gardens.

The air, she told me later, felt thick, as it had that frosty autumn night at the Mount, when we had heard conversation and music and wandered through the house, looking for their sources. As she walked toward him, another man, a stranger, stood next to Amerigo and shouted something to the skaters on the pond.

Amerigo laughed and began a conversation with the other man, who continued to nod and wave at the skaters. She was close enough now that she could hear the murmur of Amerigo’s voice, but not the words. She stopped, listening to the music of his voice, a melody in a minor key that had both sadness and joy.

The stranger laughed again, louder this time, and moved away, leaving Amerigo alone.

She did not call out to him but he turned to her anyway, sensing her arrival in the way that lovers do, even years later.

He had changed from boy to man. His lean face had widened and acquired lines; his full beard had threads of silver. His eyes were the same, and his smile.

Beatrix would not tell me what they talked about, only that
they talked and walked for a good hour and it felt exactly as she had hoped it would, as a meeting of two old friends who once meant much to each other, lost touch, but then found each other again.

There are so many kinds of love. Some grow in deep soil and cannot ever be uprooted; some grow in thinner soil and their flowers bloom for a day. Yet even that is a kind of love.

As they talked, a burden fell from her. She, who had lived with the uncertainty of her hesitation, now knew that it had happened in the only way it could have happened, and she had nothing with which to recriminate herself. If they had eloped, they would have lost their families, their blameless friendship, their positions, and their plans for the lives they intended to live. Eventually, they would have lost each other, just as Minnie and her husband, Edith and Teddy, had lost each other, down long avenues of disagreement, disparity, resentment.

They had avoided that.

When Amerigo said he had to go, back to his hotel, to his wife and children, Beatrix felt sad, but not devastated.

I loved you, he said.

I loved you, too, she said. A long time ago.

They had met in one garden, and parted in a different one, and the parting, to her, felt complete. She was tempted, for a second, to turn back and wave one more time, but she didn’t.