A Lady of Good Family (9 page)

“I think we should take a cab,” he said. “It is already late for such a long walk.” He stepped into the street, waited till one of the small, open Roman carriages approached, and stopped it. “The Colosseum,” he told the driver, a stout man dressed in a dusty frock coat and top hat. “And you will wait for us, once we are there. We will not be long.”

The driver replied softly, in words Beatrix did not understand, but she could tell from Amerigo’s face that she had been insulted. Amerigo answered him, rapidly and with anger.

“He disapproves. He thinks this is an elopement of sorts, doesn’t he?” she asked Amerigo.

As soon as she said it, Amerigo knew that was exactly what he wanted. An elopement. With her. Away from Rome, from his father, from the Via dei Serpenti and the old palazzo for which he was to be the sacrifice. She was no longer a new acquaintance, a foreigner. She was the woman who walked by his side, her skirts swaying.

“It does not matter what the driver thinks,” he said, letting the joy of being out in the spring evening with this lovely girl fill his senses the way a good wine does.

The moon was a thick silver crescent in a star-filled sky. When they arrived, half the Colosseum was illuminated by the celestial light; the other half was in darkness. They were the only visitors, they and the stealthy cats and the ghosts of centuries.

“It is beautiful. And terrifying,” Beatrix said, standing close to him, their moon-cast shadows merging together into one shape behind them. The many arches of the Colosseum were full of blackness and secrets, dark holes that seemed like doorways to a different world. They walked through the nearest one, their feet crunching gravel, rending the silent darkness.

“You can imagine the lions roaring, before they begin their feasting,” Amerigo said. “Or the gladiators, saluting Caesar.”

“We who are about to die. Oh, what an awful way to die, so violent and so public, the crowd shouting at you, indifferent to
anything but blood.” A chill crept down her spine and she shivered. They walked to the huge cross in the middle and sat on its stone steps, the moon casting a second cross before them.

“Why is it the Americans always want to come here?” Amerigo leaned back on an elbow and stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankles. If this were a picnic, he would put a blade of grass between his lips, Beatrix thought. He would reach up and shield his eyes from the sun. She wondered if he preferred chicken or ham sandwiches.

“I suppose because the guidebooks recommend it. My friend Daisy did as well.” Beatrix moved, putting space between herself and Amerigo.

He understood the gesture. He had been feeling it, too, that intense intimacy that had nothing to do with the conversation, as if words and feelings lived different lives.

“I will take you back to your hotel now,” he told her. “Come. You have seen the Colosseum by moonlight. If we stay longer, there may be unpleasantness for you.”

“You mean Mrs. Haskett will hear about it and spread gossip.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t care for the Mrs. Hasketts of the world.”

“You should. They can harm you in ways you can’t imagine.”

He was right, of course. If she was to be a professional landscape designer, she must preserve her character. No one would hire a woman of questionable reputation, especially if that woman was the daughter of a divorced mother. A bad or even questionable reputation spread as easily as contagion.

The driver was smoking a pipe when they returned to the carriage. He emptied it on the ground and stamped out the sparks as Amerigo handed Beatrix up onto the creaking leather seat.

“We leave Rome in two days,” she told Amerigo when they were again in front of the Hotel d’Italie.

He wondered what she meant by that. It was more than mere information. A request? A challenge? A dismissal?

She was frowning. A line etched itself between her brows and he felt an urge to reach up and smooth that line. “That is unfortunate,” he said softly. He didn’t have the right, or the courage, to say anything more, or to smooth that line between her brows.

They stood, neither knowing what to say or do next. He cleared his throat. She brushed imagined lint off her sleeve.

“Maybe,” he began.

“Or,” she suggested.

He thought, She’s just a girl. An American girl. He took her hand, gently, and kissed it, not on the knuckles or fingertips, but on the palm, turning her hand over and breathing gently on it before the kiss.

It was the most intimate, most sensual touch Beatrix had ever experienced, and it electrified her. She stood, mouth open in shock, as he breathed gently into her palm and his lips grazed it.

“I hope we meet again,” Amerigo said when he released her hand.

“Yes,” said Beatrix. “Me, too.”

“You could not delay your travels for a day or two more?”

Tickets had been purchased, rooms reserved, invitations
accepted. Beatrix and Minnie had made a stringent schedule. “No,” she said, hiding her own regret.

•   •   •   •

T
wo days later, Beatrix and Minnie left Rome.

Amerigo was in his father’s study, arguing with him once again, when their train, with a great lurch and hiss of steam, pulled out of the station. He knew the train schedule, knew when Beatrix was leaving to go north. It was just about the time that his father shouted, “You will do as I say!”

He had thought of going to the station to see Beatrix off with flowers and a basket of fruit. But that would have been too like a suitor’s behavior, and he was not her suitor, not her lover. He thought of her low, soft voice and the long whiteness of her hand and wondered if he would have become her lover if they had had more time together. No, he thought. Impossible.

The next day he went back to look at the Caravaggio, David holding the severed head of Goliath, and it seemed he understood better than before the surrendering despair in the giant’s face. “Old fool,” he said to the painting.

I
met Beatrix only a couple of years before these events in Rome, yet our friendship had developed quickly and deeply. We had, she said, a natural affinity, my lightheartedness complementing her more serious outlook.

Mr. Winters and I had purchased a brownstone in New York and a summer home in Newport after we married. He had decided we should settle in America. New York deemed us an appropriate match: my family, thanks to my father’s talent for speculating in mines and railroads, had wealth, and his family had lineage. It was how things were done, and if Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred sometimes gossiped about me, at least they accepted me.

They all knew, of course, that Gilbert’s aunt had refused to meet me and then refused to attend the wedding, but that only aided my cause. She was much too enamored of Swiss mountains
and had cold-shouldered too many people to be herself thought of warmly.

With the brownstone and the summer home came children, and busy years followed so quickly I could barely catch my breath. They were happy years for the most part, except for the occasional quarrels with Gilbert, who insisted I knew nothing about finances and didn’t need to worry myself about them; and for those heart-stopping frantic days when the children came down with mumps or chicken pox or some other childhood illness. My children were strong, except for Robbie, with his weak lungs.

In 1893, for our wedding anniversary, Mr. Winters decided I should have my portrait painted, and he asked the great John Singer Sargent to paint it. Mr. Sargent cabled back from Paris a firm no. He was too busy. Mr. Winters did not take no easily and persisted, enduring several curt telegrams from the artist. One day, though, I had been thumbing through a magazine and read that Mr. Henry James was a friend of the artist. Thanks to the “Talk of the Town” column, I knew that a neighbor around the corner on East Eleventh Street was a friend of Mr. James. I sent Mary Cadwalader Jones a basket of fruit and a note, asking her to intercede on our behalf with Mr. Sargent, through Mr. James.

Minnie invited me for tea and a conversation. Her daughter was not at home, so it was just the two of us, chatting in her book-lined, velvet-curtained parlor. Minnie was delighted by my story of meeting Mr. Winters in a garden in Switzerland and I was enchanted by her warmth, her kindly intelligence. She wrote
to Mr. James, and to her friend Mary Robeson Sargent, cousin by marriage to the artist, who both wrote to Mr. Sargent. It was arranged that my portrait would be painted when next he was in New York.

This was how matters were arranged, then. One had to know the right people. Letters were sent, cards exchanged. Eventually the wife of the artist’s cousin, Mrs. Charles Sprague Sargent, who had heard amusing things about me, invited me to visit when I was in Boston. There was a lung specialist there who promised he could help my son Robbie, so I accepted her invitation.

When I visited the Sargents in Holm Lea, in October of that year, they had another guest with them, Minnie’s daughter, Beatrix, who had begun studying botany with Charles Sprague Sargent. She was one of the first students to work with him at the arboretum. That the demanding Mr. Sargent had accepted a female student says much of Beatrix’s intelligence and determination.

I suspect Mr. Sargent thought it was his idea to invite the young Miss Jones to study with him. Most likely, Beatrix planted the seed of that idea, and it fell on fertile soil.

She was just twenty-one then, a tall, pretty, solemn girl from one of New York’s oldest families. She seemed older than other young girls of that age, as if she had already passed through a stage in which they lingered. She had been working in the Holm Lea greenhouse that autumn afternoon, sorting and sketching seeds and seedpods, and had napped earlier in the afternoon in her room. There was no formal academic program then; when Beatrix studied at the arboretum, she was a guest at the Sargent home.

That day, when she came to join us on the terrace, there were burrs still stuck in her skirts. She wiped at them absentmindedly and shot a questioning glance in my direction.

“Mrs. Gilbert Winters,” introduced Mrs. Sargent. “My cousin is to paint her portrait. She is, I believe, an acquaintance of your mother.”

“How do you do,” said Beatrix, extending her hand. “Yes, I remember her mentioning that she had written to Mr. James on your behalf.”

“Beatrix is studying botany and garden design with my husband,” said Mary Sargent to me.

I had never before met a lady who studied much of anything, once she was out of the nursery schoolroom, much less a science such as botany.

“You’re studying what?” I asked, so startled that the teacup in my hand shook. She might as well have announced that Miss Jones planned to study banking or medicine, things unheard of in those days. Nor had Minnie thought to mention it when I had visited her. Probably she would have thought it too boastful, and ladies did not boast.

“Botany,” Beatrix insisted, sensing my disapproval. She gave me a direct, unblinking gaze.

“Won’t all that digging ruin your hands?”

“I wear gloves,” Beatrix said.

“And a hat, I hope,” I said. “Otherwise the sun will turn your hair orange.” She had hair that in childhood gets one teased for being a carrot head, and I hoped she was sensitive about it, because by that time I had taken an initial dislike to Miss Beatrix
Jones. So industrious and more than a touch self-righteous. She sat upright in her wicker chair, alert in a way that seemed unnatural to me on a mild, sunny October day.

She seemed so certain of herself, so certain of her place in the world that she could afford to challenge it. I was envious of that confidence, of that straight back.

“I suppose you know the names of all the trees in the Arnold,” I said. “By Latin as well as common name.”

“All of them,” Miss Jones agreed. “The ferns and mosses as well. And tell me, Mrs. Winters, does your hairdresser come on a daily basis? How many pairs of dancing slippers do you possess?”

“Oh, dozens. I don’t count,” I teased back.

By that time, Mrs. Sargent had leaned slightly back in her lawn chair and was merely observing us, as one does a tennis match, her large and slightly amused face turning left and right, left and right, as we lobbed challenges at each other.

This went on for several moments because I have a stubborn streak. Beatrix, having spent too much of her young life considering goals and ambition, was the same. Each of us wished the last word. Neither was to get it.

“I suggest a truce,” said Mrs. Sargent, rising to hand the teapot to a maid, so that it might be refilled for the men, who would soon be returning to the domestic pleasures of a summer afternoon on the lawn.

The “men” of that afternoon were Mr. Olmsted, of Central Park fame, and Beatrix’s mentor, Mr. Sargent, of Arnold
Arboretum fame. Mr. Sargent had led Mr. Olmsted off an hour earlier to inspect an ill sapling, some sort of fir, I think I recall, to see if their two heads together could identify the source of complaint of the poor wee tree.

Beatrix, I learned later, was out of sorts because she had been left behind with the womenfolk when what she really wanted was to see the fungus plaguing the little fir. The adoration and sentiment that other women gave to curly-haired children, kittens, new hats, and flocked wallpaper Beatrix reserved for trees.

“Truce?” Mrs. Sargent repeated.

Beatrix looked hard at me. I pretended to study something over her left shoulder. But when she smiled, a large, open smile, I returned it. We had both completely misjudged each other, you see, and friendship could not ask for a better starting moment than one in which a misunderstanding must, for the next forty or so years of affectionate banter, be corrected.

I had only one pair of dancing shoes and they were badly in need of new soles, but I couldn’t afford another bill at the cobbler’s. I had six children and a husband who, I had discovered over the years, liked to gamble.

That was Beatrix’s misunderstanding of me: that I was a spoiled society wife with nothing to do but be fitted for her next gown for her next ball. In fact, I was sorely besieged by the duties of motherhood.

Her misjudgment delighted me. I had grown quite afraid of mirrors by then, terrified that any day I would look into one and see a fat middle-aged mother, her face lined and haggard, all
humor and girlish lightheartedness long since fled. Beatrix’s perception of me reassured me. She saw me as I had been a decade before. What woman would not have been overjoyed by that?

As for Beatrix, I saw a handsome girl who seemed alone, even when surrounded by people; a thoughtful, even somber young woman who knew her path in life. This impression was fostered by her height and her long, straight nose over a very determined chin. Beatrix knew better than to try to compensate for her serious gaze with pink bows and excessive lace; her innate taste and good sense led her to dress in a subdued manner. The plain fabrics and simple lines of her costumes suited her well, though they made her seem older than she actually was.

“For a young woman who enjoys afternoon visits, you have been strangely absent from this household,” Beatrix concluded our initial confrontation, and by that I understood that she was prepared to tolerate me, and that toleration, if successful, might blossom into friendship.

“I have been rather busy this year. All those balls,” I said.

Just then Mr. Sargent and Mr. Olmsted appeared over the rise of the little hill near his row of white birch, their yellow straw hats glowing in the sun. They were arguing back and forth in a lively manner, not yet having arrived at a shared conclusion about the illness of the petite fir, I assumed. At the same time, a swarm of children appeared from the side garden, a devastated governess trying unsuccessfully to herd them into a semblance of order.

Gil, my firstborn, was seventeen that summer. Home from school, he had agreed to come with us only because he wished to meet Mr. Sargent. His father insisted he study finance, but Gil
wished to be an artist. Robert, my second son, was fifteen, too tall for his age, slightly stooped because of his lung problems, and shy. Jenny, thirteen, with huge eyes and such an abundance of curly hair it was difficult to fit hats to her head, and Clara, eleven, were both in short skirts and pinafores. My babies, India, four, and Athena, two, wore little sailor dresses and caps.

“Whoa!” shouted Mrs. Sargent, whooping with laughter at India, who had strewn plucked grass all over her cheeks and hair.

Beatrix watched, slightly overwhelmed. Athena marched up to her, demanding a lollipop. My heart throbbed with love for them. There had been miscarriages as well, so that when India and Athena appeared years after the others, I knew those children would be the last.

“Mrs. Sargent?” Beatrix said, confused. “Do you have other visitors?”

“India, stop crying and make a curtsy to Miss Jones,” I said. “Jenny, Robert, Gil, Athena, Clara, meet Miss Beatrix Jones.”

“All of them are yours?” Beatrix asked, eyebrows raised. “Dancing slippers indeed.” She templed her fingers before her face and peered at me over them. “I shall have to reconsider my initial impression,” she said.

Beatrix and I smiled at each other.

That was our first meeting. Others quickly followed, in New York and in Bar Harbor as well, because Minnie and Beatrix invited me to their summer home the following year. In Bar Harbor I realized how serious, how determined, Beatrix was in her goal to become a female landscape gardener.

She had been creating and perfecting her gardens at Reef
Point for years already, though she was still so very young, and the gardens were not merely beautiful; they were emblematic, somehow, of what landscapes should be.

Reef Point, after all, had been purchased by her parents at the beginning of the separation that would eventually lead to the scandal of divorce. I think Beatrix, as well as Minnie, had understood that this was to be a home without a husband, without a father. An incomplete home. And so Beatrix had set about to complete it in the best way she could, to help in the best way she could to bring contentment and peace to the place.

She hadn’t forced turf lawns over the peaty soil or created imitations of what other gardeners had done. As much as possible, Beatrix had cultivated plants suited to the conditions of the island: iris and lilies, ferns, roses, asters, wild plum.

When I visited her at Reef Point, it was a paradise of bloom and scent. That, at least, was what the visitor admired. Beatrix had a more critical eye, and even when walking among the roses, she would bend and sift her fingers through the soil, checking for texture, sniff it to see if it was too acidic, then take a handful back to her workroom for testing.

“It isn’t enough to be beautiful,” she said to me, picking a beetle off a rose and squashing it with her bare hands. “A garden must meet the needs of the soul as well as the senses. You feel at home and somehow enlarged, more yourself, in a good garden. Most of all, the garden must suit the land, not vice versa. The garden should be as much at home in the landscape as the house and the people of the house.”

It was a philosophy of life as well as of gardening: pleasure
combined with work, beauty with practicality. The garden would both calm and awaken senses and memory. “Daisy,” she said, “I know I am meant for other things. Work, for one. I want a created life, not a preordained one. Dancing in ballrooms with New York’s eligible bachelors only gets one so far.”

In fact, she was so busy with her garden that she all but gave up dancing.

The next year we both went to the Chicago World’s Fair. For me, the fair’s White City meant gondolas on Venetian waterways, Bedouin tribesmen and their camels wandering the Midway Plaisance, the strange turrets and towers of the Swedish Building, drinking Darjeeling tea at the Japanese Tea House.

After Gilbert and I married, we made several transatlantic voyages to Europe and back. But Gilbert and I never pushed beyond Paris or Rome. “Why would you want to?” Gilbert asked. He had no desire to venture into lands where the hotel concierges did not speak English and where roast beef could not be had for dinner.