A Lady of Good Family (10 page)

I, on the other hand, had wanted to boat on the Orinoco, to taste the honey pastries of Istanbul and visit frozen Lapland. Switzerland, for me, was meant to be the beginning of my journeys, not the end. But I had met Gilbert there, and in Rome he had kissed me in the moonlight in the Colosseum, and that ended my wanderings.

So the Chicago fair was my substitute, that vast expanse of huge domes and gardens seen from the dizzying top of the Ferris wheel—all the lovely foreignness of the world brought to the scrubby shores of Lake Michigan.

For Beatrix, the world’s fair meant plants, some familiar and many exotic. There were the strange spindly cactuses dotting the Wild West Show on the Midway, the Spanish cork trees of the Agricultural Building, the rows of tulips outside the Dutch windmill, the date palms of the Sahara. The Horticultural Building contained acres of plants and flowers: Japanese gardens, a tropical garden, an entire field—indoors, under glass!—of snapdragons, and another field of begonias, along with Australian ferns as tall as two-story buildings. There were, a placard announced, sixteen thousand varieties of orchids on display.

Mostly, though, Beatrix loved the Wooded Island, sixteen acres of pansies and roses, all strung with fairy lights so that people could sit there in the evening and be dazzled by the loveliness of the place. It was there, one evening, that Beatrix made what was the largest decision of her young life. She had studied music and still considered the possibility of a career as a concert singer, but her year of work and study with Mr. Sargent was leading her onto a different path. It wasn’t a straight line that brought her to her decision; she abhorred ruler-straight lines in gardens and in thinking. Life and landscapes required flexibility and a touch of serendipity. A little rain shower made up her mind.

•   •   •   •

B
eatrix always dressed according to her internal weather. And she always dressed beautifully, like her mother and her aunt Edith. Beautiful costuming on a woman’s part is a show of bravery and optimism.

On the second-to-last day of her visit, Beatrix dressed
according to her internal weather, which was full of summer and the kind of sensuality that encourages you, as the younger set says, to show off a little. She wore a light summer dress with half sleeves and no collar. I think that glimpse of the belly-bared dancer who’d performed at the fair, Little Egypt, and the strange Eastern music with its eerie pipes and wailing notes, had awoken something exotic in Beatrix’s own nature. She was very young, and still making all those choices we take for granted, still shaping herself for an undefined future.

And she was a gardener. She had watched butterflies mating in midair, witnessed the spring courting of rabbits and the yearly litters of barn cats, seen how sprouts shoot out of desiccated husks once they are warmed and watered. There is no more sensual activity than gardening.

Half sleeves and no collar. That’s what Beatrix wore that afternoon at the fair. And of course it rained, just for an hour and not heavily, but Beatrix was caught in it and was soaked. She had just left the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where she had been admiring the Remington exhibit. Forty different typewriting machines, all equipped to typewrite in different languages. She was going to the Mines and Mining Building to see the South African diamonds when the rain began.

A gentleman offered her his umbrella, but it was too late to stop the damage. It was one of those rains that begins quickly and heavily, like a faucet being turned on, and ends just a minute later. The gentleman, seeing she was already soaked, folded his umbrella and let the rain soak him as well. He was a young university professor, a historian with a special fondness for Benjamin
Franklin. He told her this quickly and easily, as if it mattered even more than names, which they had not exchanged.

His cuffs were frayed and there was a small hole in his straw hat. Beatrix would remember that, years later. How young he was, how indifferent to his wardrobe, as were many professors.

“Why Franklin in particular?” Beatrix asked, allowing the young man to escort her to the little tram that would take her to her hotel, so she could change into dry clothing.

“I suppose for his wit. And because he loved France. He did not want to cut the New World completely off from the Old.”

“And do you love France?” she asked.

“Who wouldn’t?”

He accompanied her all the way to the door of her hotel, even though, as she guessed, the return tram fare would abbreviate his supper that evening.

“Bon voyage,” he said, tipping the hat with the little hole in it. “I hope we meet again.” They didn’t, at least not until many years later.

Beatrix, starting to shiver from the drenching, changed into a dress suitable for walking in after dark. She had agreed to meet Mr. and Mrs. Sargent for supper at the Vienna Café, to be followed by a moonlight ride on the Ferris wheel and a tour of the Wooded Island.

Most visitors to the fair preferred to spend the evening on the Court of Honor, a spectacular turreted and domed white city lining a large lagoon, where spotlights constantly swept the sky, the crowds, the fountains, and the statues. But the crowd there,
often in the thousands, was shoulder to shoulder. The Sargents preferred a quieter atmosphere.

The Wooded Island was one of the many nature areas Olmsted had included in his design for the fair. There were wooden benches, walkways, Japanese teahouses. Quiet places meant to restore the soul to a calm state after the excitement of the day. It was all illuminated by little lamps that gave the isle a fairy-tale quality.

“You look a bit like Little Red Riding Hood,” said Mr. Sargent as they found a quiet bench to share in front of a bed of roses. Beatrix was wearing a white lawn dress with a crimson-hooded linen cloak over it, in case the evening should turn chilly.

“I hope there are no wolves around,” she joked back.

“That has always been my favorite fairy tale,” said Mrs. Sargent, sighing with fatigue. “The young girl just beginning her life, the kind grandmother, the wolf always lurking about, reminding us of the constant danger of the world.”

“In the Grimm version, the wolf gobbles up the girl,” said Mr. Sargent, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it.

“I read that version as well. My aunt Edith gave it to me in a collection of German stories.” Beatrix unbuttoned her cloak and let it fall from her shoulders onto the bench.

They could hear the roar of the crowds in the distance and saw the spotlights from the court piercing the sky as they, on the Wooded Island, felt very distant from the bustle, in their own little world.

“It is so lovely here, in this very spot,” Beatrix said. “As
exciting as the fair is, I think I would prefer a quiet garden to it, any day.”

“You can hear yourself think,” agreed Mrs. Sargent. “My ears will never recover from this visit.”

“Would you sing for us, Beatrix?” Mr. Sargent asked.

They had dined at the Vienna Café, where a concert next door had serenaded them with Schubert’s
Lieder
. “Sing something that will suit the fragrance of those roses behind us, and the beams of the fairy lights,” he suggested.

On an ordinary day, this request would not have distressed Beatrix. She had a classically trained voice, a lovely voice, and the possibility of a career as a concert singer was still available to her in that undefined labyrinth we call the future.

She was greatly moved by that Wooded Island, that large garden, and by Olmsted’s vision of a place so perfect for calming the spirit and restoring peace to an overexcited mind. It was gardening at its finest, a realm both natural and artificial, arising from what already existed, the soil, the grasses and trees, the water from Lake Michigan trained into canals and shores, and enhanced by what man had brought to it, the hundreds of roses, willow trees; beds of campion and larkspur flashing color long into the summer twilight; the fragrances of mint and lavender and rose.

It was not by accident that God first put man into a garden. What place is better suited for showing us our own promise and goodness? Certainly not a deep forest, where pagan nature overcomes all, where sharp-toothed wolves and long-knifed robbers roam, and certainly not the seashore, where an almost infinite
horizon reminds us of our absolute insignificance. A forest and seashore do not need people. They have always existed and always will. But a garden. A garden does not exist without us. Nor we, without it.

Beatrix thought for a long moment. Of course she would sing for Mr. and Mrs. Sargent, if they wished it. A song was small repayment for their friendship and hospitality, but a song they would have. She decided on another Schubert
Lieder
, one the Viennese singers hadn’t performed that evening, “With the Green Lute Ribbon.” It was a love song, but a happy one between a young man and maid, and its words had always thrilled Beatrix so much they gave her goose bumps when she sang them. After the boy gives the ribbon to the maid and tells her to tie it into her locks, he says, “Because hope’s far reaches bloom green / We are both fond of green. / . . . Then I will know where hope dwells.”

It was a beautiful song, a perfect song, in a perfect setting, with the perfect audience. But at the last note of the verse, Beatrix’s voice gave way and could not reach the final note. The chill from the rain had gone into her throat. Beatrix froze on the bench, unable to move, to breathe, wishing only that that last quavering note upon which her voice had broken, now seemingly hanging in the air like something tangible—she wished that note would disappear, to never have happened.

That night, at the fair, on the Wooded Island, Beatrix’s musical career ended. How could she base her ambition—and she was ambitious—on something as imperfect as a throat that grew chilled in a summer rain shower?

Mr. and Mrs. Sargent did the polite thing and applauded her
as if each note had been true and perfect, but they knew, and Beatrix knew, that the song had changed something. One door had slammed shut, but another was opened to her.

She had been happiest in gardens: her childhood gardens in Newport and Maine, the Sargent garden in Brookline, the arboretum where she had studied.

A gardener, then, she would be. Not an amateur, a professional. She would work for her living, and she would create pleasurable landscapes for her work.

Beatrix sat on the lovely Wooded Isle of the Chicago World’s Fair and promised herself that one day she would make something even more splendid.

“I
would like to hear more about Edith Wharton,” said Mrs. Ballinger, who was president of her local public library board of directors and a great reader.

“I thought this was supposed to be a ghost story,” said Mrs. Avery, tentatively touching the Ouija board still on the table in front of us.

The rain hadn’t come, though lightning and thunder had moved steadily closer, disturbing the dark night.

“My wife kept a vegetable patch,” said Mr. Hardy. “Grew wonderful tomatoes.”

It was almost midnight, but I had no desire to go up to my room and try to sleep. That was one of the most difficult parts of the day for me, entering a bedroom where no other voice would answer mine, no breathing match my own. “You’ll get used to it,” Jenny often told me. “In time.” Perhaps. But I still wasn’t. No, I wasn’t ready yet for bed.

Mrs. Ballinger shifted in her chair, the telltale motion of a woman about to rise and leave, and I thought if she left, so might Mrs. Avery and Mr. Hardy, and I did not want to be alone. That was one reason why Jenny had recommended I spend a week in Lenox, at an inn. There would be the familiar bustle of the breakfast room, the clatter and conversation of the evening dining room, parlors where I could sit and talk or just watch and listen, and of course the shared front porch.

“Edith and Beatrix were both greatly moved by a good ghost story,” I said, and Mrs. Ballinger sat back down. “Minnie found them silly, but aunt and niece shared a predilection for tales of the supernatural, just as they shared a preference for yellow roses and climbing honeysuckle on the front porch rather than wisteria.” That, and independence. How I envied them that, sometimes, when Gilbert was cross or sad and the children demanding. “I’ll tell you a story Edith told me one night. Do you know the story of the specter bridegroom? It’s one of those cautionary tales meant to steer young girls away from questionable choices in matters of the heart.

“It is a story that the German maid told the little girl, Edith, who told it to her niece Beatrix many years later, who then told it to her mother as they rested in yet another hotel in yet another European city, stocking feet warming before the hearth and cups of tea on the table beside them.

“Long ago, Baron Von Landshort lived in a decrepit castle at the top of a mountain in the Odenwald,” I told my porch listeners. “The castle was rough and uncomfortable, an eagle’s nest surrounded by dark firs that tapped at the windows at night. But
the baron’s pride would not let him remove himself to more convenient quarters in town. He liked to look down on his neighbors from his eagle’s aerie.

“His daughter was a blooming rose, but she grew up in solitude, an only child, and with her mother and father living in separate countries. Her mother had run away from the cold castle in the Odenwald and the daughter learned early that love was not to be squandered.”

“Oh, no,” agreed Mrs. Avery. “Love should not be squandered.”

“She sang like an angel, this daughter of solitude. Even the wild mountain wind stopped blowing when she sang, the better to hear her. Mostly, though, she liked to work in her garden. She could make plants bloom just by looking at them. If weeds dared sprout, they saw the magnificence of their surroundings and wilted in self-sacrifice.

“On the day her father announced he had found her a groom, the girl was both cheered and frightened. It is natural for a young girl to yearn for a husband.”

“Absolutely. And she should be obedient to her father’s wishes,” said Mrs. Ballinger.

“But she had never met the intended. What if he was cruel? Or worse, aged and toothless?

“‘He comes from a very important old family,’ the baron said. ‘Almost as illustrious as our own. I have made the arrangements, and your groom is already on his way.’

“The daughter began embroidering her trousseau. Her mornings were still taken over with care for her garden, but this
magical piece of ground reflected her own state of mind. The garden began to fret, and the weeds, formerly so agreeable in their habit of wilting away, started to grow. Rabbits chewed the little hedges and the knot garden unraveled itself. The daughter knew that her marriage was doomed.

“Her bridegroom, meanwhile, lingered many leagues away in a city full of distraction, gambling dens, and opera dancers. He, too, had his doubts about this marriage, but his father insisted, and his father held the purse, so husband he would be if his father ordered, though he feared the chosen bride would be old or ugly.”

“My father disapproved of my marriage,” said Mr. Hardy. “That young man should have stood his ground.”

“I don’t see that gambling and taking up with opera dancers is standing your ground, morally speaking,” argued Mrs. Ballinger. I ignored them.

“The time came when the groom must leave his amusements and claim his bride. With a distinct lack of mirth, he packed a travel bag and had his best horse saddled.

“He rode quickly and with few stops to rest and water the horse. He took a forbidden shortcut through a thick, black forest filled with thieves and outlaws. At night, in this forest, you could hear the wolves calling to one another.

“‘I promised my father I would be there, and I will be there, on time, dead or alive!’ the bridegroom shouted to the wolves.

“The day for the young girl’s nuptials dawned fair. One has to wonder why it never rains on such days in such stories, but it doesn’t. She was dressed by her maid in her wedding gown of
ivory satin; the last roses from her bedraggled garden were twined into her hair. Thus attired, she was leaning on her chamber casement and looking out when the groom arrived.

“He was filthy with the mud and dust of travel, his face white and haggard, his horse sharp ribbed and lathered.

“‘I was set upon by thieves,’ the young man gasped when the baron came down to greet him.

“‘Think no more of it, and prepare yourself for the church,’ said the baron, though he was discouraged by the young man’s ragged appearance. The daughter, still leaning out her window, sighed. Even under the paleness of fatigue and the dirt of travel, his was a face to make the sun shine. All her worry for nothing!

“The wedding was held, even though the groom limped and his beautiful face was gray. There were deep shadows around his burning eyes.

“When the baron’s daughter lifted her veil for the kiss, she felt love stir even more strongly in her. His lips on hers were as damp and cold as stone. He needs a rest, she thought. Still, she was suddenly looking forward to the wedding night. He could rest afterward.

“The musicians played merrily, but the groom did not dance. She loved the feel of his hand over hers, though his fingers were icy. She loved the gleam of his eye, though it was feverish. She loved that he was hers, all hers, forever.

“But when the time came to put the bride and groom to bed, the groom rose from the feasting table with a wild look on his face.

“‘I cannot stay the night,’ he said, his voice as forlorn as the sound of a tree falling after lightning has blasted it. ‘I have an appointment elsewhere.’

“‘Elsewhere?’ thundered the baron. ‘Where else should the groom be this evening but in bed with his bride? What cheating game is this you play?’

“‘The only cheat is that I was here at all,’ said the groom, his words turning all the colors in the room to gray.

“The bride felt a fist clench around her heart.

“‘My appointment is in St. Anselm’s Church, some twenty leagues away from here,’ said her groom. ‘I must return to my bier and prepare for my burial. I was murdered in the forest.’

“Oh, the sorrow in his eyes, in his face, for groom loved bride as well as bride loved groom, and he wished more than anything in life or death to stay by her side. But he could not. ‘Come,’ he said, offering her his hand. ‘Say farewell.’

“The guests were frozen with horror and perhaps with a bit of magic as well, for no one moved or protested as the bride put her hand in the hand of her corpse groom and walked with him into the garden, to make their farewell.

“‘I came for you,’ he said, ‘And now that I have seen your face, know that I will return for you.’ He turned her hand over, placed a cold kiss on her hot palm, and disappeared into the green and black darkness of the forest.”

•   •   •   •

“O
h, I’ve got shivers!” Mrs. Avery rubbed her arms.

All the chairs on the porch had stopped rocking,
and the crickets were even louder than before. The air had become heavy and still. A clap of lightning illuminated the night and Mrs. Avery gave a little shriek of fright.

“That story was told to me by Edith Wharton herself,” I said. “One summer night at the Mount, when a storm was coming and we felt uneasy. Beatrix was most moved by it. ‘A specter bridegroom,’ she said. ‘Ghastly.’

“‘To some extent, all bridegrooms are specters,’ Edith told her. ‘We never marry the man we believe ourselves to be marrying.’ That was after Minnie’s divorce, and a few years before her own.”

“There is such a thing as a happy marriage,” protested Mr. Hardy. His wife had died ten years before, and I had noticed that the more distant our spouses are, the more saintly they become.

“I did not say there was not,” I said. “I was only telling a ghost story, upon request.”

“We will need to go in soon. I felt a drop of rain,” Mr. Hardy said, holding his hand out to test for more.

“I could talk all night,” I said, and laughed.

“I noticed,” said Mrs. Ballinger.

The piano player in the hotel’s front parlor stopped tinkling halfway through “At the Devil’s Ball,” and a moment later we heard him shut up the piano. People had been singing along, and now they fell silent, but the tune finished itself in my head.

“Never approved of that song. It’s blasphemous,” declared Mrs. Ballinger, as if Mr. Irving Berlin needed her permission.

“It’s merely whimsical, and funny, if you think about it. Good for a laugh,” Mr. Hardy said. “The soldiers enjoyed it.”

Rain started to fall then, though “fall” wasn’t quite the word. It came down like a curtain, thick and noisy, a light, eerie blue against the blackness of night. We jumped from our chairs and cowered against the porch wall trying to stay dry.

“I think we must go in,” Mr. Hardy shouted over the heavy pattering of the rain. He ushered us into the doorway as men do, as if herding sheep or ducks, his arms making a semicircle. I have always loved that particular gesture. Inside, we shook ourselves and raindrops spun from our heads.

Mrs. Avery yawned. “I’m going upstairs. It’s been a long day. And tomorrow I’m going to the afternoon concert at the pavilion with my daughter and her children. She’s coming in on the train.”

“Of course,” I said. “Sleep well, Mrs. Avery.” We were silent until long after her heels had clicked down the hall. Mrs. Avery’s daughter had, yesterday, telephoned at the last minute to say she couldn’t make it; we feared she might repeat this inconsiderateness tomorrow. The telephone had much to answer for. When people had to take the time to write notes and send them out through a footman or the post, people were more obliging.

“Poor soul,” sighed Mrs. Ballinger. “Children can be so ungrateful. If my Evie kept breaking her promises to me . . .” She left the sentence unfinished and went upstairs to her room.

“She’d tan her bottom,” Mr. Hardy said, when we were alone in the hallway. “Will you take a drink with me, Daisy? Before you go up for the night?”

We went into the hotel’s barroom, where the young people had set up a gramophone and were dancing. We sat at a little
table as far away from the dancers as possible, though once in a while a particularly vigorous couple would jump in our direction, their arms and knees going off at all different angles.

“I could barely waltz. If I had to do that dance, I would have given up on socials after my first party.” Mr. Hardy ducked his head the way shy children do.

“I waltzed divinely,” I said. “When Mr. Winters and I took to the dance floor, people stopped to watch. I’ll have a brandy,” I said.

We sat in silence, watching the dancers, listening to how the rain sometimes overpowered the thumping recorded music, and I thought of the first time I had waltzed with Gilbert, on the little dance floor of the Hotel Eden, in Rome. It was two days after he had found me with Giovanelli at the Colosseum, two days after he stole the first kiss, or thought he had stolen it, though I had been planning that kiss all along. “I believe you are a flirt, Miss Cooper,” he said, pulling my chair out for me and extending his hand. “Someone will have to watch over you and keep you out of trouble.” We whirled to Strauss’ Treasure Waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three, around and around. He waltzed well.

“Was Mrs. Nevill a flirt?” I asked. That was the name that had been associated with his.

Gilbert stopped dancing so suddenly I almost lost my balance. “You will never say that name again,” he said. “We had an association, and now it is over. You need know no more.” He took me back to the table where I had been sitting with my mother, and the three of us sat in awkward silence. He wouldn’t dance
with me again that evening. But he asked to see me the next day, and the day after.

Mrs. Nevill was never mentioned again. My mother carefully explained that single men often form attachments, and some married men as well, but brides and wives simply look the other way and hope the attachment ends soon. I was luckier than many women in that I had met Gilbert after Mrs. Nevill was no longer a part of his life. She had found richer game.

“Terrible weather,” said Mr. Hardy, interrupting my thoughts.

“It is,” I agreed.

“You were very far away, just now.”

“I was in Rome. Again.”

“I’ve never been to Rome,” he said. “But I did go to the world’s fair in Chicago. Saw Little Egypt dancing on the midway.” He chuckled. “Have to admit, went back several times to see her. The missus wasn’t too pleased with me, but that girl could really shimmy, and her costume, all spangled and sparkling, was a sight to remember.”

He smiled and even blushed a little, and there was something in his face, a kind of innocence, a reminder of other times, that made me weak with nostalgia. I thought again of that yellow barn against a blue sky, the row of hollyhocks, and had a sudden and overwhelming urge to return to the farm outside of Schenectady, to see if that barn was still there, even though my grandparents had died years before. Perhaps new owners had painted it a different color, or even torn it down.