A Lady of Good Family (14 page)

B
eatrix disappeared during our last evening in Berlin. She shared a supper of sauerbraten with us at our hotel, went out for her evening walk, and did not come back till sometime after Minnie and I had gone to our beds. In the morning, we did not ask her where she had been, or with whom, and she did not speak of it. Her face glowed and she seemed to walk on the very air.

She even patted that terrifying stuffed wolf in the hall, as if making a fond farewell to it.

I returned to Paris, to my husband, who greeted me at the train station with roses, two dozen of them, and a smile much too similar to the children’s when something had been broken.

“Where are the children?” I asked, feeling a moment of panic as mothers do when their children are not where they are expected to be.

“Clara and India are in the Bois de Boulogne, riding, and
Athena is napping. I thought we might have a quiet afternoon together.”

“Athena hates to nap,” I said, disappointed that he hadn’t brought our offspring. “How much have you lost?” I turned my face so that he kissed me on the cheek, not the mouth.

“Not so much that I can’t win it back next week,” he said.

There would be far fewer gamblers in the world if we could learn to control optimism. But then, it was optimism that kept me going back to Mr. Winters.

“I have had a letter from a Mrs. Haskett,” he said, helping me up the steps of the carriage. He badly tipped the porter who promised to have my trunk delivered to the hotel. “Who is the blighted woman? Have we ever met?”

“We were introduced in New York, but she was not one of our set. Unfortunately, the Joneses and Whartons and I met up with her in Rome and she forced her acquaintance on us. She is making trouble for Beatrix. What does she say in the letter?”

“She will be in Paris and would like to call on us. She has a matter upon which she would like my advice. Something about an old painting.” He preened a bit. People rarely asked Mr. Winters’ advice on any serious matter.

“We will pretend we never received the letter,” I said. “Throw it away immediately.”

“As you say, dear.” He twirled his mustache for a moment, thinking. “Mrs. Haskett. Widow of Reginald? Tall woman, wide shouldered. Great head of streaky hair that looks like fur. Greedy eyes.” His faults were many, but Mr. Winters had a fine memory,
at least for remembering what was not necessary to remember. “Beatrix can handle her, I suspect. What kind of trouble?”

The driver folded up the steps and closed the carriage door. My husband sat opposite me, giving me the full benefit of his smile, his face, his impeccable suit and tie. He looked just what he was: an American raised abroad by adoring aunts; a man who never really had to do that much thinking for himself, who certainly had never worried overly much about money, unlike my father or brother. Even his marriage proposal had come after much prompting by me, much to Mr. James’ delight.

“He will disappoint you,” Henry had warned me. “Forced to dance attendance on his aunts, and much tired of it I should think, he will, henceforth, refuse to listen to any feminine advice, especially his wife’s.” Henry all but chortled with glee when he gave this assessment. Then he had pushed aside the tea tray, taken my hands in his, and grown solemn. “I warned Minnie,” he had said. “And look how that has turned out. And now, dear girl, I warn you.”

“Is that why you murdered my persona in that strange little novel?” I had asked him. “Roman fever. Malaria. Indeed.” The year after my marriage, Henry had published
Daisy Miller
, the novel in which poor Daisy takes fatally ill after an assignation in Rome.

“Death or marriage. Often there may not be that much difference to a woman, if the marriage is unsuitable,” Henry had grumbled. “Women are better off married, if married well. Otherwise, spinsterhood is a wiser choice.”

Tell that to a young woman, just released from the schoolroom, who is seeing Europe for the first time and encounters her first love in the process. There is no choice in this matter. Wisdom comes later in life.

“Mrs. Haskett is determined to ruin Beatrix’s reputation,” I said, sorry already that I had refused his kiss. I took his hand. “For some reason, she has taken against her and is making her the subject of the summer’s worst gossip.”

“Jealousy,” said Mr. Winters, taking back his hand.

“What?”

“The woman is jealous. Beatrix is young, pretty, and of a much better family. Of course there’s no comparison at all, on the matter of breeding.”

There was a hint of malice in his voice. He came from an old family. I did not, as Mr. James had made quite clear in his little novel. Mr. Astor’s great-grandfather may have been a fur trader who blew his nose on the tablecloth, but with me the family origins were closer and therefore more shameful, since my own grandfather had raised livestock and kept a general store till he and his son, my father, grew lucky at speculation. At certain times Mr. Winters enjoyed reminding me of this, and that was when I knew he had lost greatly at the races. He was going on the offensive.

“There is a man involved,” he deduced.

“Yes. An Italian. Beatrix has been walking with him. They visited the Colosseum in the evening.”

“And was she kissed?”

“She was.”

“She’ll have to marry the fellow. Is he presentable?”

“Good-looking, but poor as a church mouse, I suspect, and in the process of selling off the family heirlooms, or trying to.”

“Uh-oh,” said my husband. He grew thoughtful and looked out the window.

“Remember that evening?” he asked as the carriage bounced us down the Champs-Élysées. There was romance in his eye. I knew the hotel suite would be filled with roses, and in our bedroom, on my pillow, there would be a little red jeweler’s box. The size of the pearls would suggest how much he had lost. And soon he would have to pawn that bracelet or collar to pay off a debt. I had tried to explain to him that he lost considerable sums on these transactions—the pawnshops never paid the full value—but he had lifted his well-bred chin and refused to discuss the matter with me. A husband had given his wife a gift. What right had she to complain?

“Do I remember the evening in the Colosseum?” I said. “Of course I remember.” He had arrived unexpectedly, he had thought, though I had planted several clues in his path, should he choose to follow. Hansel and Gretel could not have asked for a better bread-crumb trail leading to the Colosseum, to me, walking in the moonlight with the beautiful Giovanelli.

“How much?” I asked again. He would not answer, but sat up straighter in protest, all manly indignation that I had been unwomanly enough to question him about our finances. “A dangerous place, the Colosseum after dark,” I said.

We were home by then, and I jumped out of the carriage without waiting for his assistance, a habit that always made him
glower and clear his throat with disapproval, but my little Athena was waiting for me in the nursery—lamplight shimmered through the curtains—and I couldn’t wait to see her.

I stopped in the hall long enough to unpin my hat and toss it onto the table with my wrap. The French nurse we had hired (less expensive than traveling with a set of New York servants) greeted me with a warning. “She has sneezed. She has a small fever,” she said, her voice making it somehow clear it was my fault. I dashed up the stairs, Mr. Winter clearing his throat even more loudly. A lady moved slowly, he often told me. Even in a crisis.

Athena was curled up under her favorite blanket, hugging her teddy bear. Her forehead was warm, not hot, and she did not shiver. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.

“Can I have a bonbon?” she asked. “Daddy won’t let me have any candy.”

“Later,” I promised. “When I come for the good-night tuck, I’ll sneak some in.”

“Naughty Momma,” she lisped with approval.

When Athena was asleep again, safely watched over by the nurse, I made the required inspection of our apartment, housekeeper at my side, running my finger over mantelpieces, checking the sweetness of the milk in the larder, and in general making it clear that I was the general, the housekeeper and her staff the troops. This inspection was a complete waste of time since the household ran perfectly well without me. Sometimes I missed working in granddad’s general store in Schenectady, the merry ring of the register, the friendly gossip with the customers. A
so-called lady of leisure was a creature who had little purpose except to produce children and be decorative at dinner parties. I missed feeling useful.

By the time I had finished the completely unnecessary inspection, Mr. Winters was already in his study, buried behind the evening paper. I knocked before entering.

“There are letters for you,” he said, pushing a tray in my direction.

The letters from Gil and Robert had already been opened, though they had been addressed to me. Gil was hard at work at the bank, but he had spent two weeks in Newport, sailing. Robert was in New York, working with a private tutor so that he could begin his law studies at Harvard in the autumn.

“They are men, no longer children,” Mr. Winters had said when I had first complained about leaving them behind. “Would you raise them as farm children are raised?” I had boasted once that my father had not left the farm, for even a single overnight, till he was nineteen and moved to town.

It was true: both boys encouraged me to shake their hands rather than kiss them, and they towered over me. But that did not ease the echoes in the empty places of my heart.

The new, unopened correspondence on the tray was topped by the invitation from Mrs. Haskett. I tore it into quarters without even reading it. Underneath was a letter just arrived that day from Beatrix. This letter I opened gently and settled into an armchair to read.

“On our way,” she had written. “Tomorrow we cross the channel and begin a tour of England. Fingers crossed that Miss
Jekyll will receive me.” She was referring to the famous landscape gardener, with whom she had arranged to meet.

“Does she write of her Italian?” Mr. Winters asked.

“She does not,” I said, not liking his tone of voice. I put the letter back down on his desk and, doing so, clumsily knocked over a pile of his correspondence, opened and flattened so that when I picked them up they were easy to read.

“I’ll get them,” he said, jumping to his feet, but they were already in my hands.

Bills. Tailor bills, florist bills, the quarterly check for the governess, made out but not signed, not delivered. Copies of IOUs.

I sat back down, feeling as if an invisible hand had knocked the air out of me.

“I will not discuss it,” he said, grabbing them and ushering me out of his study. I stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, for a long time, thinking.

Dearest Daisy,

I hope the children are well. Please give my warmest regards to Mr. Winters. (Has he wagered and lost much this season? Don’t tell him I asked.) The channel crossing to England was rough but well worth it, now that I have seen London, and the young London ladies, their skirts tucked up to their knees, bicycling through Battersea Park. Remind me, Daisy, should I forget, to install bicycle paths in my
future gardens. They are not allowed here in the royal parks and gardens but are springing up all over the place in the public gardens.

As soon as we had recovered from the travel and settled into Symonds’ Hotel, Mother insisted we take the train to Surrey to visit Mr. Strachey, for a literary afternoon on the terrace and a good catch-up with her old friends. They talked of poor Mr. Wilde, who had been sent to Wandsworth Prison and hard labor for “the love that dares not speak its name.” Mr. Strachey blushed when he said this, and looked shyly at me, but Mother tsk-tsked at him to indicate she had not raised me as a foolish innocent, and I already knew as well as any the sad and strange history of Oscar Wilde.

One younger man, I have already forgotten his name, jested that during the trial there had been a large migration of young London men to Paris to avoid similar prosecution. This was a little beyond what Mother was willing to gossip, so she asked how Mr. James’ new story, “The Middle Years,” was being received and the conversation was guided into calmer waters.

I spent much of the afternoon gazing out the window across the beautiful Surrey hills.

It seems to me that air and its quality of
light, and the soil itself, are the essence of any garden or landscape. The plants and trees, that part we call the garden, are the intermediary between the two essences of soil and light. The garden is the earthy part, the temporary part, and therefore the human part. Remember, God first placed us in a garden, so that we might delight, and so that we might gently work.

The light and air in England are as gauzy as a veil, soft and temperate without the hard edges of challenge of the Roman sun. I find them very agreeable.

I have met Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who is not quite so agreeable as her garden. I had written, introduced myself as a novice in her own field, and asked to make her acquaintance so that we could discuss gardens. She sent a trap and driver to the station to pick me up and bring me to her home, Munstead, in Surrey. Mother stayed behind in London, visiting old friends.

Meeting Miss Jekyll, Daisy, was too much like looking into a mirror that foresees the future. There was I, twenty-three, a former musician now turned gardener making her first tour of Europe to study gardens. There was she, fifty-two years of age, a former musician and artist, showing off her garden after her many tours of Europe, her many turns and twists in
her own path. When she shook my hand in greeting, she spent a careful moment assessing me, and I, her.

I think we both agreed, instantly, that we would be colleagues but not good friends. She perhaps had moments in her youth that she regretted, moments of which I reminded her. And she threatened me with a solitary future, a woman struggling to be herself, to make her name, without a man at her side.

The decision is not always ours, is it? I wonder if Signor Massimo is in Paris yet. If you run into him, you will let me know? I am worried about his well-being; he seemed disheartened when we parted. There is much on his mind, more than he can share with a casual acquaintance. Am I just a casual acquaintance? I wonder. It feels . . . I will not write how it feels, except to say I think I know how flowers feel when they turn to the sun.