A Lady of Good Family (11 page)

“Well,” Mr. Hardy said, when I had finished my drink. “It’s late.”

“Sleep well, Mr. Hardy.”

“Walter. Call me Walter, Daisy, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all, Walter. Good night.”

I climbed the stairs slowly to my room, exhausted yet still unwilling to be alone. Solitude did not come easily to me.

In my room, I flicked on all the lights and out of habit checked to see if the maid had left any mail or messages. No. There was, of course, no letter from Mr. Winters. Again, that terrible pang of loss and regret. I should be used to this by now, I thought. But I wasn’t. I tossed and turned for most of the night, and when I did sleep I dreamed of dark catacombs and a formal Italian garden where all the flowers were black.

The next morning dawned sunny and mild. The heavy rain had broken some of the roses in the garden, but those with the stronger stems looked freshened, pleased with themselves.

“They needed a good soak,” said the gardener, looking up at the sound of my footsteps. He was clipping off the spent flowers and I remembered something else Beatrix had once told me about her childhood. Her first garden lesson had come from her grandmother in Newport, who had taught her how to deadhead the garden, remove the spent blooms so that new ones would come. The first thing Beatrix had learned was how endings lead to new beginnings, and that was a lovely thing for a child to understand.

“There will be a fresh set of buds, after that rain,” said the gardener, turning back to his work.

It promised to be a pleasant day, so I decided to walk downtown and look into shop windows. I tried on a hat, a little white
crocheted cloche, so much more practical and comfortable than the wide-brimmed, silk-flower-bedecked cartwheel hats of my girlhood, but decided against spending the money. I had lunch in a little café and then sat in the park, reading, or trying to read. By dinnertime I was ready to retreat to my little inn and to my porch companions.

We gathered again for the evening on the hotel porch, and Mrs. Ballinger was her usual complaining self. There had been fried haddock for supper, and she did not like fried fish.

Mrs. Avery was even more timid than usual, shrinking in her rocking chair as if she needed, wished for, someone to hug her. As we had anticipated, her daughter had called at the last minute and canceled their afternoon outing. Walter, who seemed to feel keenly the pain of others, had pushed his chair closer to Mrs. Avery’s and patted her hand every so often.

I was growing fond of Walter. He was not a progressive thinker, that was true, but if you turned your back on all those who clung to older ways, you could grow very, very lonely. He was kind, and a good listener. I noticed that evening he wore a different jacket, a new and more stylish one, and kept his collar buttoned. Once in a while he caught my eye and smiled at me.

“I’d give her what for, if my daughter didn’t keep a date with me,” said Mrs. Ballinger, taking a lump of green knitting wool from her bag and beginning to wind it furiously.

“Feed her to the lions,” I said, “like the Christians in the Colosseum. I have always felt sorry for those poor beasts, chained and maltreated, that were forced to eat humans, who, I’ve heard
from a South American explorer who lived for a while with cannibals, taste like pork, when the lions would have preferred a little deer or hen.”

Mrs. Avery gasped and began to rock so quickly her chair gave off mouselike squeaks at the pace of a quick polka. Mr. Hardy frowned and gave Mrs. Avery’s hand another little pat of comfort.

Mrs. Ballinger did not miss that gesture. I think she had rather been hoping that Mr. Hardy might develop a certain tenderness for her.

“You go too far, Mrs. Winters,” she spluttered. “I don’t see why I sit here, taking this abuse.”

“It is not abuse. It is only after-dinner chatter,” Mr. Hardy protested, turning Mrs. Ballinger more enthusiastically against me, but then men rarely understand the subtle malice of female competition. “Although we could do without further references to cannibalism,” he said. “Mrs. Avery might have a delicate stomach.”

“Don’t know how the subject came up at all,” Mrs. Ballinger said.

“The lions in the Colosseum and the ghost of Nero,” I said. “Rome.”

“I’m sure my daughter had her reasons,” Mrs. Avery said with a sigh.

“Blazes,” said Walter. “Look at that sky, will you?”

Yet another thundercloud moved in sullen, inky shadows over the horizon. It was a week of storms, as if some angry god
had been awoken and would not go back to sleep. There was no breeze, and we all, Walter included, fanned ourselves vigorously against the humming attack of mosquitoes, the ladies with lace and gilt paper Japanese fans, he with the morning copy of the newspaper.

“The afternoon was so nice. But tonight it’s like a hothouse,” I complained, wishing I could take off my stiff leather shoes, but one does not sit barefoot in a public place. Oh, go ahead, a voice whispered in my head. Minnie. She was a proper lady, well-bred and well-mannered, yet once in a while she had felt an urge to break the rules. Henry James had seen it in her, that tuft of rebellion as soft as a feather, yet also as enduring. Feathers last a very, very long time. Coward, said Minnie’s voice in my head, laughing.

“Did you know that the word ‘orchid’ comes from the Greek
orchis
?” I said.

“Of course,” lied Mrs. Ballinger, springing to the bait. Stupid women are always overeager to show off how much they know, which is very little.

“And that
orchis
means ‘testicular,’” I continued. “Ground-growing orchids tend to have twin tubers that look like—”

Walter jumped in before I could finish. “Some iced tea, ladies? Should I ring for the bellhop?” He gave me a little look of reprimand. Poor Mrs. Avery had stopped rocking entirely and seemed about to spring up and run away.

“Perhaps, Daisy, you should continue the story,” he suggested.

“I’ll never be able to enjoy my Easter corsage again,” muttered Mrs. Ballinger.

I slipped off one shoe and then another and wiggled my toes, enjoying their freedom. Mrs. Ballinger pretended not to see. Walter winked at me.

A
merigo was out of sight but not out of Beatrix’s mind as she and her mother journeyed from the land of noodles and bright sunlight and
stornelli
songs on the Spanish Steps to the land of Schubert
Lieder
, schnitzel, and dark forests surrounding medieval towns.

As they traveled ever farther north and east, the sun dimmed and the vegetation grew lusher, thicker, more intimidating. On the days when they went by carriage after dark, they could hear wolves calling to one another. Shadows lost their contrast and the difference between day and dusk was not as strong as it had been in the south. Time felt different, too. Beatrix had been warned by her aunt Edith that she would feel this change, and it would mark the moment when she knew she was entering a different reality.

Rome had ghosts, of course, but for the most part they had been talked of as naughty children, wanderers who refused to
stay in the grave but had no power over the living. Even Nero’s ghost, wailing its way through the Piazza del Popolo, had a clownish rather than frightening quality.

The ghosts were different in Germany. More powerful. More omnipresent, especially if one listened to downstairs gossip and read the more lurid type of travel book. In Germany, one slept with the covers pulled tight to one’s chin, and not just because it was cold at night in the late spring.

Beatrix thought often of ghost stories as she and her mother toured the houses and gardens of Berlin, places where Edith as a child had been told those frightening tales that had haunted her ever since. Edith still refused to sleep in a room where there was a collection of ghost stories or even a suspicion of a haunting. She believed in them, you see. That’s why she wrote her own series of ghost stories: to try to tame her fear of them.

Beatrix was more pragmatic. She believed in fevered imaginations and unexplained thumps in the night, the moving shadows and moaning winds that are the beginning of the imagination’s overpowering of the mind’s logic. She did not, however, believe in ghosts, though she loved a good ghost story, that raising of the flesh on the arm, the momentary sense that some unseen presence stands behind your chair. I suppose in her heart she was a bit of a pagan. Most gardeners are, and they know that life has forms both visible and invisible. The new rosebud is there, hiding in the stem, invisible to the eye but there, nonetheless.

It was decided that I would join them in Berlin. Mr. Winters had insisted I take another week of vacation, away from family
worries. What many men don’t understand is that mothers worry more, not less, when they are away from their children.

Even so, after a quick trip back to Paris to see that all was well with the children, I went on to Germany, to rejoin Beatrix and Minnie. I had not yet learned to stand up for myself, or even to argue back.

Since leaving Rome, Beatrix and Minnie had toured the Boboli Gardens in Florence, the gardens of Villa d’Este and Hadrian’s Villa, the public gardens of Milan. In Bavaria they had visited Nymphenburg, the Grosser Garden in Dresden, and the conifer collection in Pillnitz.

Beatrix had filled several journals with sketches, measurements, and notes. When she slept, she dreamed of parterres and fountains; awake she reminded herself constantly of Mr. Olmsted’s advice to hunt for beauty in the commonplace, in the rustic.

“I think it is difficult to accomplish what Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Sargent have recommended,” she said after our first day of sightseeing in Berlin. “To make gardens a place of joy rather than an extension of court and palace. The Italians cling to the formal past as if they would drown without it, and the Germans seem inspired mostly by grandiosity,” she said.

“It does all make me rather long for Maine,” Minnie admitted. “Some of the gardens feel as formal as Mrs. Astor’s drawing room. The world needs gardens where children can play.”

“I have seen only one such garden.” Beatrix stared at the sprigged wallpaper.

She hadn’t stopped thinking about Amerigo since leaving
Rome. I could see it in her face, a combination of dreaminess, worry, and longing.

“The garden of the young Italian who came to your hotel room,” I said.

Minnie shook her head, a half smile on her mouth. “The poor man no longer has a name, it would seem. He is just the man who importuned my Beatrix. I have heard sly remarks from a dozen and more people about that evening.”

Amerigo had been right about that. There had been gossip. Minnie hadn’t minded much. She trusted her daughter. But in those more innocent days, the world took a dim view of young unmarried girls receiving men in their hotel rooms.

“A garden for children sounds a delightful thing,” I agreed, trying to turn the conversation away from Amerigo.

Beatrix rose and tapped her damp walking shoes, which she had placed on the window ledge to dry. It was much too warm for spring, and the three of us had been sitting as still as possible, fanning ourselves occasionally and sighing over various concerns. Minnie had had another letter from the Paris lawyer about the divorce settlement; Beatrix looked lost between two worlds, that of maidenhood and that of passion; and I wondered what Mr. Winters was doing that evening back in Paris, with whom he was playing cards, for playing cards he assuredly was.

The remnants of our own supper, soup and sausage and boiled potatoes, still littered the huge round table positioned in the center of our room in Pension Grindelwald. Berlin was inferior to Rome and London and Paris in that it did not yet have any grand hotels, and this one proved the point. The street floor was
a tavern with a sawdust-covered floor, and while there was a separate room where unescorted females might dine, we had decided to take our dinner upstairs, in privacy.

The owner of the little hotel must have been an avid hunter, for boar and deer heads abounded on the walls, and the candlesticks were made of antlers soldered into pewter bases. One particularly disgruntled-looking boar looked down on us from the corner of the room, and a snarling stuffed wolf crouched in the hall. It was, on the whole, too much like being stuck in a fairy tale. We had all dreamed of wolves the night before.

“Wasn’t it strange? My wandering there like that?” Beatrix asked. The sound of shouting, singing, and accordions came up to us from the street. It was the Whitsun holiday, and all day, brass bands had marched through Berlin. Crowds of young people filled the plazas, the boys wearing caps of all colors, the girls in their white blouses and dirndls. Many of the young male scholars had dueling scars crisscrossing their faces, worn proudly as badges of honor.

“You mean that young Roman’s garden?” Minnie asked. The heat had disordered our imagination, and the conversation twisted and turned on itself, coming back to Amerigo.

Minnie studied her daughter’s face, which was a blank. Perhaps too blank. Beatrix was learning to hide her feelings, and that of course meant she had feelings. For this man, this Amerigo.

“Yes. So strange, I think.”

“No stranger, really, than my running into Mr. Winters at the Colosseum,” I said, and then almost bit my tongue, for Mr. Winters had followed me; there had been no coincidence about
it at all. “I did not mean it like that, dear Beatrix,” I quickly amended.

Beatrix laughed, but Minnie looked as if she wanted to ask something but could not with Beatrix there. Minnie often talked to me in a very entre nous manner. I was ten years older than Beatrix and only fourteen years younger than Minnie, which gave me an extraordinary position in their household, an intimate of both mother and daughter, as need and situation required.

“It’s so warm tonight.” Beatrix leaned out the window to look at the revelers below.

“Finish the story. About wandering into Amerigo’s garden,” I said, at a loss to suggest another topic of conversation. She hadn’t really talked about it in detail, not until the gossip began.

“Amerigo confessed that he had seen me in his garden, speaking with his housekeeper, but he hadn’t come out to greet me. He said he was in the middle of a discussion with his father.”

“I would guess a heated discussion, if it preempted his sense of courtesy,” I said.

Minnie was no longer looking at me but staring at the stuffed boar head on the wall. She had removed her stockings, and her feet, so white and narrow, looked like calla lilies resting on the green velvet ottoman.

“I wonder what they were quarreling about,” Beatrix said, closing the window. A particularly loud brass band had begun playing.

“That is between father and son,” Minnie said, “and nothing to do with us.” I hope it has nothing to do with us, her little sigh added.

We sat fanning ourselves.

“Did you know Mrs. Haskett is also here, in Berlin?” I said.

“Oh, Lord,” sighed Beatrix.

“Is she planning on purchasing the Prince of Brandenburg’s art collection, or perhaps all the old shields from the mercantile board for her garden gazebo?” There was venom in Minnie’s normally sweet voice.

“Not that I have heard. Something about a cousin of a cousin studying here for a year, and she has come to inspect and support. He has been keeping odd company and she’s been enlisted by his parents to usher him into some better drawing rooms. He has gambling debts and Mrs. Haskett is to try to imbue some sense into him.”

“How much we learn about almost strangers.” Minnie sighed again. “How people do talk.”

Reprimanded, I shrank into the horsehair cushions of the sofa.

“Mrs. Haskett seems to be everywhere,” Beatrix said. “A most unpleasant woman.”

“Impossible to avoid her, I’m afraid,” I said. “She knows you are here and has already planned a musical evening for your enjoyment.”

“Oh, Daisy! You didn’t tell her!”

“No, dearest Beatrix, she already knew. I ran into her this morning at that little milliner’s shop.” Her comment stung me with its suggestion of blame. In fact, Beatrix had made herself somewhat notorious by receiving Amerigo in her hotel room in Rome. The American community abroad was keeping its collective eye on her, just as it had once kept its eye on me.

“We’ll have to go.” Minnie sighed. “It would look strange, otherwise.”

“For my sins, I assume.” Beatrix was laughing.

At that very moment, there was a knock on the door. Minnie’s maid came in with a card on a salver. Mrs. Haskett had extended a formal invitation for the very next evening.

•   •   •   •

I
was with Minnie and Beatrix the following day when they toured Berlin’s Tiergarten. The peonies were in bloom but the strange heat of the season made them look as blowsy as a woman of questionable reputation who has not been properly laced up. There was a sensual profligacy to them, with their big, scented pink petals, the deep green leaves, the stems not quite strong enough to support the full flower heads.

“They need backbone,” I said with a sniff.

“Cooler weather,” Beatrix corrected. “Peonies do not like the heat. Walk on, Daisy. I want to see the iris beds. I’ve heard they have some varieties we do not yet have in the States.”

Because it was a holiday, the gardens were thick with people, some of whom—the young people especially—looked as if they had celebrated to excess the evening before. Hats were worn crookedly; faces were red; some seemed to stumble rather than walk. A group of young men lurched into us by the rose garden, almost knocking Minnie over. They apologized and bowed several times, then lurched off in the opposite direction, shouting back and forth and waving invisible foils at one another in pretend dueling challenges.

Minnie walked blindly, clinging to her hat, sighing often. The heat made prickles of perspiration run inside my clothing.

Berlin, with its premature heat and festive mood, agreed with me, though. Compared to Paris and especially Rome, it was a very new city. For the past decade or so they had been busily replacing medieval streets and ancient houses with new avenues and strong, tall buildings. The Chicago of Europe they called it, and it did indeed remind me of Chicago, especially the Chicago as it had been during the world’s fair, loud and brassy and busy and so filled with newness it fairly gleamed in the sun. It smelled of new paint and fresh sawdust. Rome had been all ghostly ancient ruins and Renaissance villas, and Paris was so well satisfied with the moment it had no need of a future. Berlin seemed the city of tomorrow, being constructed even as we watched.

“I don’t think I can spend much more time here in the garden, Beatrix,” Minnie complained. “It is simply too warm.” She tipped her hat to an exaggerated, even rakish angle, to get the sun off her cheeks. Her face was florid and damp.

“Let’s sit. I’ll see if I can find a lemonade seller.” Beatrix ushered us to a free bench and then went off in search of cool drinks. Minnie and I sat fanning ourselves and watching the throngs of people go by. Some looked the worse for wear, after the long celebrations and the license that masks and free-flowing alcohol provide.

Whitsun is a holiday situated between the hard days of winter and the busy planting of spring. Much as it has been given its proper religious overtones, it still maintains its pagan undertones of resurgent fertility, to match the season. That day in the
Tiergarten the blond, rosy-cheeked German girls looked particularly blooming; their young men looked properly mettlesome. It made me think of June weddings and March christenings, of Mr. Winters alone in Paris.

Minnie’s thoughts wandered along similar lines. “I think Beatrix has changed,” she said when we were alone. “Have you noticed a change?”

I had. There was a tension in Beatrix’s movements that hadn’t been there before Rome. Sometimes she left her sentences unfinished, and Beatrix had never been one for leaving anything unfinished, certainly not a thought.

“Perhaps the tour has been too demanding,” I said.

“No. She is physically stronger than ever. It is something else, something more subtle than mere exhaustion.”

“You think it is the Roman, Amerigo.”

“Perhaps. Such a complicated age, twenty-three. Last winter one of her New York friends teased her about being a spinster, did you know? A spinster, when she is still so young! And I am almost useless on this matter. Here I am, entering into a divorce settlement just as my daughter is facing decisions about the rest of her life. I don’t want her to rush. There is no need to rush. Yet if she never takes a chance . . .”