A Lady of Good Family (20 page)

Beatrix, who had been leaning deeply into her chair, eyes closed, all the better to see the story in her mind’s eye, sat up as straight as if she had heard a fire alarm.

“Let’s stop the reading there,” Minnie said, understanding instantly the memory that had jolted Beatrix. Amerigo, in the Borghese gardens.

Teddy, who had sunk into a light sleep as soon as Mr. James began to read, came to with a start. “Edith,” he shouted, as if she were several rooms away. “What has happened?”

“Nothing, Teddy. Just the wind. Don’t you remember?” Edith asked gently.

“Of course I do,” he grumbled, but it was obvious he didn’t. “The damned lights went out.” Mr. Wharton rose unsteadily to his feet—he had drunk a considerable quantity of wine at dinner—and took the book from Henry. “That old chestnut again, my fellow? I should think you’d want something more lively.” He tossed the book in the air, caught it, then threw it into a corner. It landed, spread-eagled and spine broken, like a wounded animal.

“Bedtime, I think,” Edith said, rising.

I
t took me a very long while to fall asleep. I missed Gilbert and the happy promises of my early years with him. That first time I had seen him in the garden at Vevey he had been all American confidence combined with an Old World charm and sophistication—an irresistible combination to me, who had known only naive younger men with little experience of the world.

And the way he had looked at me, there in the garden. Knowingly, admiringly, with a kind of amazement, as if he had never before seen such a pretty girl. He turned my head. He made me feel special, wonderful.

And now we were broken—that was how it felt—we’d become as broken as a vase that falls from a table and shatters into pieces. Was this how Minnie had felt when she first knew she must separate from her husband? Was this how Edith was feeling, this same night?

When I did sleep, I had uneasy dreams of being chased through darkness by some unseen monster, my dress torn ragged by sharp branches, my hair fallen loose and streaming behind me.

I woke in darkness sometime around three in the morning, startled awake by a noise that ceased as soon as I came to full consciousness. I was no longer used to being awakened at night. When the children had been small it had happened frequently. I would creep from bed so as not to wake Mr. Winters, who could have slept through an earthquake, and then step around the snoring nurse to check on my babes.

That hadn’t happened in years. The youngest, Athena, was already twelve. I was used to sleeping through.

Even so, this noise had been different from the accustomed nightmare moans, snores, and coughs of a household. Like the monster in my dream, it avoided identification.

I sat up and waited for it to resume. It did. A man’s voice talking lowly, slowly; pausing, then starting again as if the speaker were in conversation with another person I could not hear. Was that Beatrix’s name I heard?

The hair on my arms rose on gooseflesh. It was a stranger’s voice. In the house.

I rose and found the candlestick Edith had given me for the night. When I struck the match, the voice ceased, as if I had startled it.

I went to the door, meaning to peek into the hall, but just as my hand touched the knob, the door swung forcefully open.

“Beatrix! You frightened me.”

She stood there in her white nightgown, candle also in hand, forefinger pressed to her lips in the “shh” gesture.

“No one else is awake,” she whispered. “You heard it, too? I think someone is in the house.” She frowned and in the eerie candlelight her eyes looked even larger than usual. “I rang for a servant and no one came.”

When she said that, I realized how strange the atmosphere was. Were we awake, or was this part of my nightmare? We felt isolated from the other people in the house, and for a chilling second I was tempted to call out, to rouse the other sleepers to end this terrible isolation.

Beatrix seemed to intuit this and again put her forefinger to her lips, warning me to be silent. We made our way down the hall, our movements as slow and laborious as if we passed through water. The moonlight shining through lace curtains shimmered in ever-changing patterns over the floor.

Beatrix leading the way, we crept down the stairs, pausing at every twist and turn and doorway to make certain no one lurked behind a chair or around a corner. She picked up a heavy bronze statuette to use, I assumed, as a weapon, should the need arise.

Still, no one else in the house woke or moved but us.

Our search seemed to take years, not minutes. We tiptoed silently through the house—the den, the library, the dining room, the gallery, all the lovely rooms that ran along the outside terrace. Edith had built a strong house. The floors did not creak, nor the stairs squeak. The voices had stopped and the only noise in the dark was the rustle of our nightdresses and our occasional murmurs to each other. I bumped into a table and Beatrix
whispered, “Are you all right?” A leaf from a potted plant brushed her cheek and she jumped back two steps.

The silence grew unbearable, worse even than the muffled sound of conversation that had awakened me. I could hear my heart beating, the pulse roaring in my ears, as we tried to discover the source of that overheard conversation.

In all the downstairs rooms the windows were latched shut, the doors unopened. Nothing seemed amiss; certainly there were no prowlers, though every shadow seemed somehow ominous.

“No one,” Beatrix said after we had peered into the corners of the drawing room where we had sat, hours before, listening to Mr. James read from his ghost story.

“I don’t believe we imagined it,” I said.

“Nor I. Yet aside from those who belong here, the house is empty. Let’s go outside, into the gardens,” Beatrix said. “I don’t think I’ll sleep anymore tonight.” She looked shaken, in need of air.

We opened the French doors and walked through them, across the terrace, down the stone steps to the lawn. By unspoken agreement, we headed in the direction of the walled Italianate garden, with its conical topiaries and trimmed hedges, its insistent reference to Old World formality. The bushes made sharp-edged shadows on the grass and the wind made those shadows dance.

“The voices were speaking Italian,” Beatrix said, sitting on a stone bench. “Is that what you heard?”

“Yes. And I think . . . I think I heard your name in the conversation.”

“I know. That was what woke me up. Someone calling my
name.” We sat in the moonlight and waited without knowing what we waited for. My heartbeat had slowed down; it seemed less frightening outdoors than it had been indoors.

The night around us was silent. We could hear a gentle breeze stir the bronzing leaves on the trees, a faint rustle like a skittering mouse when a leaf fell to the graveled path, but nothing else.

“Strange, the voices spoke in the house, but not here,” Beatrix said, shivering. “We must have dreamed it.”

“The same dream for two people? I don’t think so.”

“I suppose not.”

“Are you warm enough?” I asked, wishing I had brought my cashmere wrap. My slippers were wet through from the walk over the dewy grass. They’d never be the same.

“I’m fine. Are you feeling chilled?”

We sat in silence, each wondering at the significance of what we had heard. One person might have been accused of being overimaginative or mistaking a dream for an actual event. But when two people experience the same event, it is more than imagination or restless dreaming.

“How curious this night feels, Daisy. Before I woke up, if I did wake up, I was dreaming a different dream, in which I was singing a song I heard after we went to the Borghese gardens that year in Rome. ‘My destiny is written in your heart.’ That was the opening line, and when I first heard it I wanted to find the sheet music and learn it myself. Amerigo told me later that most of those songs have never been written down. They are passed from father to son.”

After those years of silence, she had said his name.

“Perhaps Henry’s reading stirred something. Opened some doorway,” I suggested. “Athena and her friends were playing about with a Ouija board last week, and all the girls were convinced some spirit by the name of Gray Wolf came through to instruct them.”

Beatrix smiled. It was a very patient smile; even thin moonlight could reveal that.

“Are you growing superstitious, Daisy?” she asked with a tilt of her head.

“Well, the spirit did tell them that one of the girls, Chloris, should be careful going down stairs. And the next day she fell down three stairs and sprained her ankle.”

“Coincidence is not the same as guidance from beyond,” she insisted, unconvinced. “Coincidence can be very strange, though.”

Gardeners are direct people. They know the ground; they know the plant. Beatrix knew the ground of our conversation and the words that would suit it.

“I recently had a letter from him. Amerigo Massimo,” she said.

I didn’t bother to hide my astonishment. “What did he say?”

“He will be in New York in December and would like to meet with me. He intends to visit the gardens in Central Park. His wife will be here as well. He has three children. Two sons and a daughter. Imagine.”

Beatrix rose from the bench and paced, wringing her hands.

“Have you thought of him often?” I asked, beginning to shiver. Amerigo had contacted her. Was this why we had heard that voice, had that strange shared dream of words in Italian?

“I’ve been too busy to think beyond the work of the day, the week,” she said. “I never determined to be an old maid, Daisy. But I will not marry just to prevent people from saying that. I have met so few men one might marry. They are either already with wife and children, or not of a mind to have either. Or, worse, they are the type that one simply cannot, with any honest logic, sit next to at dinner and say, ‘I could be happy with this person for the rest of my life.’ I will not settle, just to say I have a husband. But to answer your question. Yes, I have thought of him often, and wondered what my life would be if I had gone away with him, as he proposed. I can’t say I have no regrets. Sometimes . . .” She did not finish the sentence.

“Even a great passion for a man does not guarantee happiness when you are finally married to him.”

She took my hands in hers. “Your unhappiness makes me sad,” she said.

“It may come out right, yet,” I said. “I haven’t given up.”

My thoughts kept wandering back to that whispered conversation that had awoken us. We had sat pleasantly in the autumn evening listening to Mr. James read about that sad, confused governess, that young woman aching for a love she would probably never know, imagining the secret delights of meeting a handsome young man around the next turn of the path, setting off a desire so strong, so frustrated, she would lose herself in it and endanger those innocent children in her charge.

The atmosphere had changed once Mr. James began to read, had become oppressive. We had all changed from relaxation to
alertness. And then Teddy had made that scene, not the Teddy who had been charming at dinner, talking of wines and Mediterranean cruises, but the other one, wild-eyed, his movements hasty and ill-judged, his conversation worrying.

Bedtime, Edith had said, and so we had gone to our solitary beds.

“Do you think it was his voice?” I asked. “Amerigo’s?”

“How could it be? There are too many questions with implausible answers.” She bent down to pluck a little round clover that had sprung up in the grass. It glowed white in the moonlight. “In Berlin,” she said, studying the clover, “in Mrs. Haskett’s solarium, I saw an
Orchis spectabilis
. The flowers were not much larger than this, but they were pure white and had a strange hooded shape. Amerigo thought it looked like the ghost of a monk. Which monks are the ones that wear white rather than brown? It couldn’t have been his voice,” Beatrix said decisively. “Besides, it was just a dream, wasn’t it? We should go in. Let’s not speak of this to the others, nor think of it again.”

Shadows chased ahead of us as we walked back up the lawn and stone steps. Things moved. I saw them in the corners of my eyes, but when I looked there was nothing there.

Minnie was in the hall outside Beatrix’s door when we went back upstairs. She looked worried, and her hands holding her dressing gown together at the throat were white-knuckled.

“Where were you?” she asked. “I woke up and thought I heard something, maybe a prowler, and came to make sure you were safe. And you were gone!”

Beatrix could have been a mere child of ten, Minnie looked so frightened for her. But Beatrix was not; with the passing years, strength was flowing from mother to child, and it was Beatrix, now, who put her arm around her mother to comfort her.

“All is well,” Beatrix said. “Come, go back to bed. You need your rest.” She kissed her mother on the forehead and walked her back to her own bedroom.

I
n the morning we gathered around Edith’s breakfast table for tea and eggs and ham, and we all moved a little slowly, it seemed. There wasn’t the usual joking and teasing. The atmosphere remained changed somehow, and we felt like toy figures being pushed about by unseen forces.

At least, that is how Mr. James expressed the strange lethargy we experienced, as a sense of weakened volition. “It began when the lights went out,” he said. “This modern age gives you a false sense of being in control, when a simple wind can cause such havoc,” he complained. “I wonder if all these modern amenities really add much to our quality of life. I, for one, do not trust that little elevator she has had installed.”

“Edith loves the modern age because as a writer she can inhabit any era she chooses,” Minnie said. “Why not also be of one’s own time, not always looking back?”

Edith was not with us. She spent her morning hours in bed,
writing, her work tray spread over her lap, and no one interrupted her work schedule, not even special visitors from England. I peeked in once when her maid had left the door slightly ajar, and there was Edith, awash in white linen bedcovers and nightgown, surrounded by pages filled with cursive blue lines of her most recent story. It was like a fall of autumn leaves around the elegant tree of her own figure.

•   •   •   •

H
enry understood this schedule and perhaps was even a little glad for it, because it gave him some time away from her presence. They truly admired each other, Henry and Edith, but there was always a slight tremble in the atmosphere when they were together.

That autumn, Edith was working on
The House of Mirth
, that story about poor Lily Bart, who aims too high in marriage and ends up falling very low. It is one of my favorites, and my well-worn copy has underlined passages in which marriage is described as a kind of banking transaction or investment. There are many of those passages. Minnie smiled when I pointed this out to her. “Beatrix and I did the same,” she said. “It is revealing, isn’t it? The price we are expected to pay, or be paid, to become a wife of a suitable man.”

We spoke of
The
House of Mirth
at breakfast, trying to guess the ultimate fate of poor Lily, and whether she would ever find a husband.

Minnie, who ate lightly, spread jam over unbuttered toast and looked up at the ceiling, as if she could see Edith through it,
as she said, “Lily’s mistake is in refusing to consider possibilities other than marriage before it is too late. So many women make that mistake.”

“Other women don’t have your resourcefulness,” Henry said. “And you have not been completely without error in your relationships. If a woman as intelligent as yourself is badly caught, what could less intelligent poor Lily expect?”

Minnie did not mind when Mr. James made the rare reference to her failed marriage; she knew he meant no malice.

“Gertrude Jekyll and I have found a different path,” Beatrix said.

“Yes, well, poor Miss Jekyll. I fear finding a husband for her would have been extremely difficult. But you, Beatrix. Don’t smile at me like that. I know there have been offers, and all turned down. Will you not eventually regret that?”

Henry turned a gimlet eye on her, waiting.

“Why, Mr. James, must men believe women are incomplete without them?” Beatrix finished buttering her toast and spread some raspberry jam over it.

“I thought I heard a noise last night,” Mr. James said, turning the conversation into a different path. “Did anyone else? Were you restless last night, Daisy, and wandering about?”

Beatrix and I looked at each other over our coffee cups.

“Slept like a log,” I lied. Beatrix and I had agreed not to reveal what we had heard, especially not if Edith, who was already afraid of supernatural occurrences, could overhear. She had just come into the breakfast room, announced by the little dog barking and dancing at her feet.

“You have finished your morning’s work early,” Henry said to Edith. “Have you plans?”

Edith also had dark shadows under her eyes that morning. What had been in the atmosphere at the Mount that night? Had anyone else heard voices and decided not to speak of them?

“Reynolds asked for a helper, so I’ve hired a young man and I am going into town to fetch him.” Edith fidgeted with a ribbon on her blouse. “The man is new to Lenox and doesn’t know his way about.” Edith was irked, as well she should be, since she was now running an errand during her morning writing time.

“I will go for him,” I offered, relishing another chance to be driven out in the automobile. That automobile had been one of Edith’s cherished modern conveniences, and we were all enjoying the newfound freedom of going where we wished, when we wished, no need to hitch horse and carriage, no railroad timetable to consult and adhere to.

“Why can’t Teddy go?” Minnie asked gently.

“He is still in bed. Let him sleep in,” Edith said.

“Settled.” I stood. “I’ll go put on my hat.”

“I believe he’s an Italian,” Edith said. “Do you remember any of your Italian, Daisy?”

“Two or three words. I’ll manage.” An electric charge had gone through the air. In just a few short days we had become a close-knit group, guests and residents and Edith’s staff, moving in and out of the rooms at the Mount, and one another’s conversations, with the ease of a formal dance. Now we would have to readjust, even though the newcomer was just the gardener’s assistant.

An Italian assistant.

Beatrix pretended to be lost in a seed catalogue but turned the pages so quickly I could tell she wasn’t seeing what was on them. Minnie looked worried, as she often did, and Edith, pouring another cup of tea, gazed out the window to where handsome Walter Berry and childlike Howard Sturgis were strolling on the lawn, deep in conversation.

•   •   •   •

W
hen the car arrived in town, the new gardener’s assistant was already waiting outside the inn where the public coach stopped. He must have come in the day before and stayed overnight in one of the attic rooms the inns kept for servants. His suit was travel worn and he badly needed a shave and haircut. He was too tall, too thin. He didn’t look at all like Amerigo, thankfully. His eyes were black, not brown, his hair course and straight, not curly. Yet there was something in the way he held his head, the directness of his gaze, that reminded me of Amerigo. Surely he would remind Beatrix as well.

“Hop in,” I said, and when he looked up, puzzled, I said more slowly, “Please get into the automobile. We will take you to the home of Mrs. Wharton.”

He scowled at me but did as he was told. He sat in the front, next to the chauffeur, long legs jackknifed in front of him. I asked him, in the little Italian I could remember, his name.

“Arturo,” he said.

I asked him where he was from.

“Prato. Tuscany.”

How long had he been in America?

“One month.”

And that ended the conversation. His hands were flat against the dashboard as we careened around corners and down the green and gold autumn roads of the Berkshires. He was smiling, enjoying the speed of the automobile.

When we reached the Mount, Arturo unfolded himself from the front seat and tipped his hat at Reynolds and Edith, who had come to meet him.

“Is he to live here?” I asked Edith, who was shifting restlessly from foot to foot, eager to get back to her writing. Normally, of course, she would not have come downstairs just to greet a new gardener’s assistant, but this time she had.

“Yes. Reynolds has fixed up a room for him in the gatekeeper’s cottage. This boy seems to bring Italy with him, doesn’t he?” she asked, smiling. “Mimosa, spaghetti, church choirs, ancient stone fortresses on hilltops, Renaissance art.” She sighed a little.

“Yes.” I found myself wishing, for Beatrix’s sake, that he hadn’t come.

“Well, we need the labor,” Edith said, reading my thoughts. “Otherwise, it will be years and years before the gardens are finished.”

•   •   •   •

W
e spent that afternoon in a leisurely game of croquet, one of the last of the season because frost was in the air and soon it would be too cold for outdoor activities, even on the warmer afternoons.

“I love the change of seasons,” Beatrix said, hitting my ball out of the way and skillfully placing hers for a run through the wicket. “Transition. That is when everything seems possible.”

“Even the impossible,” I agreed, knowing she was referring to the events of the evening before. We neither of us had been actually frightened. Why be frightened of a murmured conversation heard in the darkness? Might as well be frightened of a telephone or concert hall. Unlike the poor governess in
The Turn of the Screw
, we hadn’t seen an evil man or a wayward woman, both of them dead, or anything ghostly at all. It had been benign and unexplained, which was to say mysterious in an almost pleasant way.

That’s why, when I looked out my bedroom window later that evening after several hours of charades and another reading from Henry, the light I saw in the sunken garden did give me a thrill of fear. Whatever had happened the evening before had taken on substance. It could be seen. The light was small and moved in a circular manner, staying within the same fixed area, as will-o’-the-wisps are said to do until they turn malicious and lure nighttime walkers into dangerous forests or deadly quicksand.

This was a different matter entirely, and though it frightened me, it did not dampen my curiosity.

I put on my slippers, loaned from Beatrix since my little cloth ones were still damp from the previous night, and my cashmere wrap. When I opened my bedroom door, Beatrix was not in the hall. She hadn’t seen the light. This was not to be a shared event.

Creeping once again down the stairs and halls of the dark house, I went out into the autumn night, dreading what I might find but knowing it must be explored.

When I got close to that part of the garden, I paused behind a tree and waited. The light was still there, still moving, but now it was attached to a figure, a man’s hand and arm moving his cigarette from mouth and down, back up to mouth, back down to knee, as the hand temporarily rested there. He sat on the bench, face always looking forward in the same direction. If he’d had a clear line of view, he would have been looking east, across the ocean.

This was not a ghostly visitation but a clear case of homesickness.

“Who is there?” he said, still staring straight into the east. It was more a command than a question, his voice weary rather than subservient.

I stepped out from behind the tree. “You do not sleep?” I asked.

He had come out in his shirt, no jacket, with the sleeves rolled up, collar open. “No need,” he said. “I am not tired.”

He had looked older in the clear light of morning than he looked at night, his face in shadow. He wasn’t much more than a boy, a boy far from his home.

At that moment, he reminded me of Giovanelli, the boy who had walked with me in the Colosseum by moonlight, the boy from whom Mr. Winters had spent a good deal of effort rescuing me and my reputation, or so he thought. How long ago that had been, before I had become a wife, before my children were born, before love had turned to disillusion.

Poor Giovanelli. Had he really cared for me, and had I hurt
him? When I was young, I hadn’t even asked myself that question. All that had mattered was that my plan had worked: I had made Gilbert Winters jealous enough to want to claim me for his own. I missed Giovanelli, for the first time in many years. Like Beatrix, I wondered about that path I hadn’t taken.

“You are sad?” I asked Arturo, sitting on the bench next to him.

He turned and looked at me. “Why do you ask?” His voice was hostile, that of a boy used to hardship, who had learned to distrust.

Why
had
I asked? He was a servant, an immigrant. I shouldn’t have been sitting with him. But in the cold moonlit night, he was a boy and he reminded me of a boy I once knew. He reminded me of a time when I had other choices, other paths.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said, rising. “Good night. I hope you will be happy here. Mrs. Wharton is good to her people.”

“I will walk you back to the house,” he said, also rising. “There are animals out tonight, hunting. Fox. I heard her. Maybe bigger animals as well. Wolf.”

“There are no wolves in Lenox,” I said.

“Pity,” he said.

•   •   •   •

“H
e knows nothing about gardening,” Reynolds complained to Edith the next day.

“Then you must teach him, please,” Edith replied somewhat
coldly. She did not like her decisions to be questioned, and she had decided to take on Arturo.

“Good chap,” said Howard Sturgis, patting Reynolds on the shoulder. “Give him a chance. I like his face.”

Reynolds, who stood a half foot taller than Sturgis, managed to cower slightly, as servants are supposed to do, but there was defiance in his eyes.

“So do I, Reynolds,” I said, adding my voice to the chorus of Arturo’s defense. “He’s just a boy, a long way from home and family.”

We were all standing in the graveled forecourt of the Mount, where Edith had placed two white statues of youths carrying baskets of fruit. There were cigarette butts in front of the statue on the right, and the gravel had been scuffed into irregular patterns.

“You must tell him he is not to leave cigarettes on the ground,” Edith said. “And that is an end to it.”

Reynolds, not greatly pleased, tipped his hat and stalked away.

“I would look into this more, if you I were you,” Henry said. “A gardener who knows nothing about gardening can be problematic in so many ways.”

“Yes, dear Henry. But there is nothing about gardening that can’t be taught, and we need more help here with the plantings.”

“I agree,” said Beatrix, who had been silent during most of this rustic event, the head gardener sending word to the lady of the house that he must have a word with her, all of us tramping
alongside Edith like children eager for excitement, the pointing out of the telltale litter, the complaints. “You are right to give him a second chance.”