A Lady of Good Family (5 page)

T
hat evening, after Beatrix’s encounter in the Borghese gardens with Amerigo, the meeting that almost did not happen, Beatrix and Minnie, accompanied by Edith and Teddy, attended Mrs. Haskett’s musical evening. They felt they must, but what they didn’t know was that the damage had already been done. Mrs. Haskett took slight easily and was slow, very slow, to forgive. Mix passion and jealousy with insult and there is guaranteed trouble ahead. It was going to be a difficult evening.

There are two ways to acquire an ancient and noble Roman house. The first is to marry the son of the house. This was beyond Mrs. Haskett’s abilities. She had a sharp-faced attractiveness, an animal quality of health, but she lacked youth. First sons, heirs, tended to marry young women, and she was middle-aged. The second way to acquire an ancient palazzo, of course, is to simply purchase it. This was not beyond Mrs. Haskett’s talents, since the late Mr. Haskett had left her a tidy fortune. My
Mr. Winters had been a friend of that family and we had spent long evenings gossiping about—and, true, also being jealous of—that fortune.

The old house, as the merrily widowed Mrs. Haskett called her Roman palazzo, was close to the fashionable Spanish Steps, not far from where the poet John Keats had died seventy-five years before. He was one of Minnie’s favorites, and she often recited from memory his “Ode to a Nightingale.” “Singest of summer in full-throated ease,” she whispered to Beatrix that night as they climbed the steps to the palazzo. There were forty or so rooms, two separate courtyards, and enough American modifications to make the old Roman families sneer with distaste. They did, however, accept her invitations: her personal chef, we had been told, had been lured away from the Ritz, and she hired the best musicians available.

Beatrix’s party arrived promptly, followed by their two maids and one manservant, only to discover that most of the other guests had decided to follow the European custom and arrive half an hour late. The huge halls and reception rooms were almost empty, except for the predictable down-at-heel bachelors and poorly paid
professori
, who arrived as soon as possible so that they could dine for free at the buffet. Rows of servants in red satin and white stockings and white wigs lined the rooms, waiting, and a trio of violinists tuned their instruments with a series of squeaks and twangs.

Mrs. Haskett herself was still upstairs in her dressing room, so Edith and Beatrix, Minnie and Teddy, sent the maids and footservant to the back of the house, found a door into a pleasant
courtyard garden, and sat there, feeling strange and a little miserable.

At ten, the music began and their hostess came to find them, apologizing profusely and insincerely for having kept them waiting.

“What a day it has been!” she exclaimed, pretending to have forgotten she had met them in the Borghese gardens. Insult for insult. By then the other guests had arrived and the palazzo buzzed with activity.

An unfamiliar soprano of great beauty but questionable vocal range sang Mozart and Goldoni in the yellow parlor. Beatrix tried to close her ears to the faltering notes, but ears are not like eyes: they will not abandon the world as easily as eyes do. The music seeped into her consciousness, reminding her of things better forgotten.

A late supper with ices and greenhouse strawberries was provided in the conservatory, amid a great quantity of orchids and ferns. It was, Minnie kept complaining in Beatrix’s ear, a great crush of people.

“But look at the orchids!” Beatrix whispered back. “Do you think I will be permitted to tour the new greenhouse?” The violin trio in the conservatory was playing a waltz, and Beatrix couldn’t help swaying a little to the music.

“They will be certain to ask you to sing,” Minnie warned her. “Will you?”

Before being accepted as an apprentice at Arnold’s Arboretum in Boston, Beatrix had studied to be a concert singer. As
Amerigo had already discovered, she had one of those voices that made people hold their breath when they listened, not wanting to break the magic even with the noise of their own breathing. When she sang, her voice made people remember first love and cradling their first newborn in their arms, or a certain moonlit evening with an irresistible lover.

“No,” Beatrix said to Minnie that night in Rome. “I will not sing for Mrs. Haskett. Not even as payment for a visit to the private greenhouse, not even if she is once again offended.”

She and Minnie moved deeper into the throng.

•   •   •   •

O
n this particular evening, the five salons of the house were opened to the party. Guests in formal and very expensive evening attire wandered back and forth, admiring the crystal chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries, and large collection of recently acquired pictures, mostly old masters, all hung from walls and ceilings newly reinforced with American dollars and ingenuity. It was rumored Mrs. Haskett had a staff of no fewer than three curators, hired away from the Louvre, scouring Europe for her purchases.

Beatrix found it compellingly repulsive, this combination of new wealth, greed, and impersonal tastes. She found her repulsion to be just as repulsive, as if somehow her disapproval was part of this scheme, accommodating Mrs. Haskett’s rampage. The mix of so many brilliantly colored satin gowns, randomly placed Fra Lippis and Berninis, huge urns of ferns, roses, and
orchids, made her fingers ache for soil, her neck for the feel of sun browning the nape . . . for the honesty of labor. The salons of the palazzo made her miss the simple single drawing room of her mother’s New York brownstone, the cozy comfort of the Bar Harbor cottage.

“How soon can we leave?” she asked Minnie, extending her hand to a count who had clicked his heels and bowed over it.

“An hour more. Anything less would be rude. Do smile, Beatrix. You look as if you are about to have a tooth pulled.”

Minnie had known in advance that the evening would be distasteful. Mrs. Haskett, like other nouveau riche, had a reputation for overdoing things. But Minnie was determined that her daughter should have a taste of Roman society whether she wished it or not. It was dangerous to turn one’s back on the untried and untested. Life was, after all, an experiment. What is the planting of a single desiccated seed if not an experiment in hope?

It was inevitable that some of the experiments would be failures, but some would not be. Marriages, for example. Hers had failed, but without the marriage there would have been no Beatrix, and that single child was worth all the possible failures of the world. There was the single seed blossomed into a lovely woman, a future, a life to outlast her own.

“I think I would rather be at the surgeon’s,” Beatrix whispered back.

The rooms were too crowded for her. Tall as she was, she still felt herded like a wayward sheep, pushed this way and that. She had become ensnared in a group of young girls in silken pastels who were carrying her away from her mother, toward the table of ices.

The violinists were beginning another waltz, and couples swirled into the middle of the room. Across the way, a young man waved enthusiastically and began pushing through the crowd toward her. She knew Timothy Whipple from the Newport tennis club and understood that he wished an association with her. She found him boring, one of the indiscriminate mass of young men who study lethargically at Harvard and then settle into society and family life with equal lethargy, rousing only for games of tennis or bridge—young men who do their duty with little enthusiasm, who seem permanently asleep by the age of thirty. She had no desire to waltz with him in this overcrowded room.

“Miss Jones!” Another hand reached out to her.

“Signor Massimo.” She could think of nothing to say, once the name had been said. But she grasped his hand and let herself be pulled out of the current of humanity.

“It seems my fate to rescue you from swarms. Come, this way.” He guided her to an alcove festooned with red and gold velvet curtains. They sat on cold white marble. “Are you enjoying your stay in Rome, Miss Jones? How strange to have—how do you Americans say?—bumped into you, twice in one day.”

“Yes.” She winced at her lack of inventiveness. In New York ballrooms she was not this naive, tongue-tied maiden. Rome seemed to be rendering her speechless. They did not look at each other. They did not look at each other so hard that the other’s face was all they could see in their mind’s eye.

“Shall I bring you some punch?”

“No, thank you. Don’t leave. I mean, if you leave . . .” She stopped.

“I see. That young man still waving at you from across the room will claim my place. Then, I will guard it with all my strength.”

That seemed to be the end of their conversation. They sat there, side by side, neither looking at nor touching each other, yet conscious only of the other, as if the soiree was a mere stage setting for what was to occur between them, except they had forgotten their lines.

Had she really met him only that afternoon? Why the sense that he had always been there, at her side? When he brushed at a bit of lint on his coat sleeve, she felt it was a gesture she already knew. She had already known his evening cologne would be vetiver, and that the handkerchief in his pocket would be simple linen with neither lace nor monogram.

The waltz ended. From the next room she could hear subdued applause, a woman’s voice announcing a set of songs she would perform accompanied by the violinists. The musicians played the opening notes of Zerlina’s aria from
Don Giovanni
, the song that promises a remedy for pain and ends with Zerlina placing Don Giovanni’s hand over her heart. There was a problem, a false start. The soprano cleared her throat and the violinists began again. This time she joined them, her coloratura voice sending the sensation of honey through Beatrix’s veins.

“A fine love song,” Signor Massimo said when she had finished.

“Her final notes seemed to quaver.”

“It is true her voice no longer has the clarity for which she was so famous in her youth. But still, it is a fine love song.”

From across the room, she could see Timothy Whipple staring at her and whispering to another young man at his side. Their faces were stormy with disapproval until two young women stopped before them, laughing, saying something that made the two boys bend closer to their whispers, forgetting Beatrix and the Roman who seemed to have claimed her for the entire evening.

“How long are you staying in Rome?” Amerigo asked, still not looking at her.

“Just days. I am here to see the gardens and monuments, and then there are other cities I must visit.”

“Ah! You wish to return home and style your gardens in the European manner.”

“Not just my gardens. Others as well. I am to work in the profession. And no, not exclusively in the European style. We need a new style for our New World.”

“But that is the work of laborers, of men,” he protested.

“There are some who believe it can also be women’s work,” she answered quietly.

“Americans.” He smiled and shook his head. “So industrious, so new in their thinking in that New World.”

“Not all of them.” Her father, the man she hadn’t seen for years, had sent a letter of complaint when he heard his daughter was pruning trees and turning compost at the Boston arboretum. “She will ruin her hands. Who will marry her?” Beatrix had read the letter after her mother had crumpled it into a ball and left it for the maid to take away.

“Your father doesn’t approve,” Amerigo guessed. “They are a difficult breed to please, fathers. Mine as well.”

They sat in silence as the music changed from Mozart arias to Brahms’
Liebeslieder
. Beatrix understood enough German to appreciate the lyrics: “The underbrush is trembling, struck by a bird in flight. My soul trembles in the same way.” Gardens for joy; dark woods for danger. Brahms knew how to place love, she thought.

No, she told herself. This is not love. She sat up straighter, lifted her chin higher, and purposely looked in the opposite direction, where Amerigo’s face could not fill her peripheral vision. She carried a fan Minnie had given her, and she opened it now, revealing the antique garden painted on the silk mount. It caught his eye and he reached over to touch it with admiration.

“It is beautifully painted,” he said. “May I see it?”

“Certainly.” She gave him the fan, still avoiding his gaze, pretending to be entranced by the dancers. They were so careful to avoid touching each other’s hands in this exchange that the effect was stronger on them than actually holding hands would have been. That moment was, I believe, the closest Beatrix ever came to coy flirtation.

“I do not recognize the flowers they have painted,” he admitted, handing back the fan after a moment.

“That is because they don’t exist. They are, as far as I can tell, a strange hybrid of peony and calendula. They were the painter’s fantasy.”

“I see. Poetic license.” The music changed yet again, to a quick-paced polka, and the room filled with the laughter and shrieks of the dancers, the rustle of silk and clink of glasses, young
girls dressed in garden colors, their partners in black and white, whirling and changing formation like shards in a kaleidoscope.

This is wrong, Beatrix thought, feeling overwhelmed. We should be in a quiet garden; we should hear birds, people speaking in the distance. She shifted restlessly, and he misunderstood, thinking she was tired of his company.

“Sadly, I see someone I must speak with,” he said after a few more moments. “You will excuse me?”

Beatrix should have spoken that line; the woman should be the person to end the encounter and the conversation. But there had been little conversation, only that magnetism of their two bodies leaning slightly toward each other.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I must find Mother. I have left her too long.”

“Perhaps we will meet again.” He took her hand and kissed it, formally. “I hope so.”

Had her silence offended him? Beatrix worried. She was, then, too inexperienced to know that his confusion was even greater than her own, that he could no longer sit close to her without putting his arm about her waist, and that, of course, was impossible.