A Lady of Good Family (4 page)

Beatrix stood closer to Amerigo to deepen the impression that they were not in the gallery to share small talk with others. This was the mistake, of course. By that evening a certain circle of expatriate Americans in their rented foreign drawing rooms
and parlors would be talking about that step closer. My dear. She put her arm through his. Such intimacy. Does the child know nothing?

Amerigo understood the purpose of Beatrix’s gesture and leaned slightly closer. Yes. A deep conversation, one that should not be interrupted with niceties. “See the brushstrokes in this corner. It is said an apprentice, in a fit of temper, painted over the master’s work in this area, for spite,” he said loudly as one of the matrons passed them.

Beatrix peered studiously at the painting.

That squint that would surely produce lines at the corners of her eyes in a few years made his heart skip a beat.

They stood in front of the
Madonna of the Palafrenieri
, and the glow of the Madonna’s rusty apricot dress cast a blush over Amerigo Massimo’s face.

“She looks a little like you,” he said.

“Not at all,” Beatrix protested, despite the auburn hair and white skin of the Madonna.

“Of course, you are right.” His voice changed. He became what he had promised, a tour guide. “This painting once hung in St. Peter’s, but it was removed. It was considered to have insufficient decorum for the subject matter.”

Beatrix nodded. The Madonna was sensual, her lips parted, her dress revealing more than should be revealed in a church, and the Christ child was no longer an infant but a young boy, standing fully naked and bathed in light. The figures spoke of physical beauty as well as the spiritual.

They moved on to the next painting. Here, she thought, is a
source of dread. The boy, that dreadful boy, so serene, almost indifferent, as he holds up the gory head.

They were standing in front of one of the larger works,
David with the Head of Goliath
, and there was so much Amerigo Massimo wished her to see in the painting. Could she appreciate its glory, the beauty of the shepherd boy, David, dangling the grizzled head of his enemy in his left hand, the decapitating sword still in his right hand? The slingshot of legend was nowhere to be seen, as if Caravaggio were saying, See how victory elevates one from the humble to the grand. Engraved on the sword were the letters
H-AS OS
.
Humilitas occidit superbiam
. Humility kills pride. Beatrix remembered the phrase from one of her Latin primers.

“To fully understand this painting is to understand that every victory carries the germ of its own defeat,” Amerigo said.

“The boy is so beautiful. Like an angel,” Beatrix said. “A killing angel.”

“The head of Goliath is Caravaggio. It is a self-portrait.” The boy model painted as the shepherd, David, had been Caravaggio’s lover. Could she see that?

Her quick blush said yes, she saw, she understood the intense sexuality of the painting, the older lover totally defeated, destroyed by the young beloved. This painting was not about victory in battle, but about the cruelty of desire. She felt the hot blood suffusing her cheeks, and more, she understood the aging painter’s lust for that beautiful boy, that destroying angel.

I should not have brought her here, he thought. She wore no wedding ring; she was an innocent, even though Italian girls of her age were mothers two or three times over.

“Why did the artist not paint in a background?” Beatrix asked, ignoring the assaulting sexuality of the painting. “That deep blackness covering everything behind them. Why?”

“You must dream what is there,” Amerigo said. “You must paint it in your own imagination. Caravaggio did not like to put pretty gardens in his paintings.”

“A specimen,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“In a garden, if the tree or shrub is of exceptional quality, one plants it alone rather than in a grouping, and in front of a different planting that does not call attention to itself.”

“Ah. Like an only child, adored and protected.”

Beatrix flinched slightly. She was an only child. “Yes,” she said, not yet knowing that he, too, had grown up in solitude, an only child.

“You must have for your home an exceptional gardener, a man with such wisdom and craft.” He and his family hadn’t had a gardener for many years, only old Magda, who threw buckets of water over the potted trees in the courtyard when she remembered, and raked up leaves, stuck seeds into pots with peasant abandon, indifferent to color and texture and arrangement.

“Yes,” Beatrix admitted. “The plans are mine, though. I designed our gardens myself. I do much of the maintenance as well.”

She said it with pride and more than a touch of defensiveness. He, like most, had already assumed it was man’s work.

“American women! Such viragos of cleverness and ambition!”

Was he mocking her? She stole a quick look at him. His face
had closed like a book. They were being watched, she saw now. Mrs. Haskett had come into the
casina
with her three daughters.

Hadn’t the woman said she had an appointment?

Amerigo strode forward and made a little bow. He said something under his breath. Mrs. Haskett answered in an equally quiet voice. Beatrix understood immediately that they already knew each other.

“I must get back to my family,” Beatrix said. “I have been gone too long.”

“Miss . . . Jones, isn’t it?” Mrs. Haskett said, knowing full well it was Beatrix but wanting to return the insult she had suffered an hour before. “We meet again.” There was an unpleasant note in her voice. Her eyes went back and forth, from Beatrix to Amerigo, and there were questions and judgments in her gaze.

“I will take you back to your family,” Amerigo said, turning away from Mrs. Haskett. “It is not wise to walk alone here.”

Beatrix felt Mrs. Haskett’s gaze burning into her back as they walked away.

They returned by a different path, shorter, he promised, since she was in a hurry. It curved behind the
casina
, as natural in its flowing lines as a stream. This path suited her better than the formal allées, with their too-strict geometry, their insistence on order above all else.

“Look,” she said, just as the path began to turn into a formal allée and the vast expanse of the Borghese gardens came again into view. A lone flower grew between the flagstones, a pale and fragile stem of veronica. “It is blooming in a very dangerous
place. See, it has already been trodden. And it is blooming very early.”

He bent and she held her breath, thinking he intended to pluck it for her. Such a silly gesture, even though it was only a volunteer, something growing out of its proper time and place.

Instead, he straightened its stem, turned it up toward the sun. “It will not last the season, or even the week. But one must give it its chance.”

Beatrix closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her face, thinking of herself as that plant growing where it should not, yet being given its chance. She could almost imagine he had touched her face rather than the veronica.

He kept a formal distance between them, but when they approached uneven steps he took her elbow. By unspoken agreement, the second time this happened he kept his hand on her elbow. They moved a little closer, their steps matching, and it seemed to Beatrix as if a new center of gravity had been created, that Rome and Europe and the planet earth and all the stars of the universe now revolved around them. They had begun with a miracle, that little flower blooming out of season, out of place. She was certain there were other miracles to follow.

I shall never marry, a little voice echoed back in her thoughts, and she felt the private earthquake of dissonance that occurs when one’s purpose no longer suits one’s emotions.

He pulled her hand through the crook of his arm, and they walked like that, not speaking, both totally transported by that casual contact with the other. When they came in view of the table where Edith and Teddy and Minnie sat, Beatrix slid her arm
out of that tender angle between his forearm and breast. When they made their farewells it was with a great deal of formality. She felt the change in herself, though.

Mrs. Haskett, watching from the
casina
, also felt a slight shift of the earth beneath her feet when she saw Amerigo Massimo making that formal little bow to the American girl, Beatrix Jones. The forced and constant smile on her face disappeared.

T
hat evening, in their suite at the Hotel d’Italie, Minnie Jones sat retucking strands of dark hair into the chignon low on her neck as Beatrix read to her. The spine of the Baedeker was as broken from use as that of the ancient family Bible; on the round, cloth-covered table towered a pile of books on the history of Italy. Tomorrow they would visit the Casa Respiglia and the Roman Forum; the next day they would travel to Frascati to see Villa Aldobrandini and the ruins of Tusculum. Their custom had become to read in the evening before, as preparation for the next day’s visits.

Despite their efficient preparations, this trip felt unusual, fraught somehow. Like others of her class and set, Minnie had traveled often to Europe. One of her recurring dreams was that of waking up on a ship, in the middle of the ocean, and not remembering if she was being carried to or from Europe. But once the divorce was finalized, her life would be altered. Europe would
be where he lived, with his mistress. Every drawing room she walked into would buzz with the scandal and more than a touch of judgment for her failures. Or worse, pity.

The thought of pity from others made Minnie slam her brush onto the table. Beatrix paused in her reading.

Mother and daughter sat still and silent. “Do you want to discuss it?” Beatrix asked after a long while.

“No. There seems nothing to say. Read again that part about the facade of the Villa Medici,” Minnie said. “I like to know what I am looking at.” Her voice suggested that once, when she had been young and vulnerable, she had not known what she was looking at when she first beheld Freddie Jones. Mr. James had warned her, and she hadn’t listened.

A large vase of dahlias stood on the book-strewn table, sent not by her husband but by her husband’s lawyer, who was preparing the papers in advance of her visit. It was deemed wasteful to discard them, yet mother and daughter pointedly avoided looking at those awful orange dahlias from the even more awful lawyer who represented Mr. Jones in his divorce proceedings against Mrs. Jones.

It had been sadly appropriate, Beatrix thought, that the lawyer had sent dahlias. Had he known that the plant was famous among gardeners for its morphological variations? Plant a dahlia from seed and you’ll never be certain of what it will grow into, not the color or shape or height. A seed-grown dahlia was the epitome of unpredictability; a seed-grown dahlia is as dangerous as a marriage based solely on youthful passion.

“Who was that young man you were walking with?” Minnie
asked now, putting down the brush and turning from her mirror to her daughter. “Today. At the gardens.”

“Signor Amerigo Massimo,” said Beatrix, who had never told a lie to her mother, nor kept a secret. “He rescued me from a group of boys who were pestering me.”

“A good face. Even seen from a distance,” Minnie said. “He seemed to be a gentleman.”

“He was. And I won’t see him again, I’m certain.”

“Beatrix, you are already becoming a little set in your ways. You have decided against marriage, I know, and therefore have closed yourself off from the possibility of passion. Don’t turn away. I am your mother, and I will speak of this. Not all marriages become disasters. I worry that I have set you a bad example. Edith as well. She and Teddy. Well, I won’t say more.”

“You have been the best of examples.” Beatrix sat next to her mother and put her arm around her shoulders. “You have allowed me to become independent.”

“People will soon whisper that you are becoming an old maid.”

“Let them. I have my work, my gardens. I will make a profession of it.”

“A woman landscape designer.” Minnie raised one arched eyebrow. “They will more than whisper about that.”

“Let them. We can’t live in a manner meant to merely suit casual conversation. Signor Massimo was startled when I spoke of my work, but he quickly ascribed it to American eccentricity.”

“Your conversation with him seems to have progressed to private matters.” Minnie stood and rearranged the books on the
table. Her impulse had been to hug Beatrix, but her daughter was several inches taller and such a style of embrace had been difficult for years. That was the Jones’ blood showing up. Her own family had been smaller in stature.

“We had been discussing a Caravaggio, and the painting had made me think of gardens. Did you know that Caravaggio did not like to paint landscapes?”

“He probably found them too pretty, too common. Though how one can find Caravaggio’s work to be pretty is beyond me.” Minnie turned back to the mirror and tied a black choker around her neck. She stared thoughtfully, comparing Beatrix’s auburn coloring and smooth skin to her own darker hair, the beginning of lines at eyes and throat.

“I worry,” she said to her reflection in the mirror, “that I have been too modern of a mother. In my day, the only decision a girl made was what color her wedding travel dress should be.” That wasn’t exactly true. She, not her mother or father, had chosen Freddie. They, like dear Henry, had had doubts. And they had been correct.

“What ideas you have.” Beatrix laughed. “Do you think you should have locked me in my room when I insisted on moving to Boston to work with Mr. Sargent at the arboretum?”

“No. You would have left anyway. You would have climbed out the window and might have injured yourself. Couldn’t have that. Are you ready for dinner, Beatrix? Let’s see if the carriage has arrived. Annie, bring my wrap!” The maid came with her arms full of light woolen shawls, blue for Beatrix, yellow for Minnie.

•   •   •   •

O
r so this is the story Beatrix told me. She does not embellish; gardeners know better than to force excessive color or outrageous shapes into a flower bed. The result is garish. Moreover, the event as she described it rings with authenticity, especially that bit about the weed she wouldn’t allow herself to pull. I have seen Beatrix in gardens not her own, witnessed the impatient sighing and tapping of toes at a flower bed not well arranged, a fruit tree in need of pruning. She knew better than to interfere with another’s work and garden, even when badly done, even when accidents like weeds make it difficult to admire a rose bed. And as for the volunteer that Amerigo tried to save, later, what could better corroborate the scene, the meeting? Only a passionate gardener or two people in love for the first time would even notice such a thing.

It is important to establish what Mr. James would call credibility. You’ll understand why later, when I must write of things that are not as easily authenticated as the Latin tag of a plant.

But Beatrix does have imagination. “Daisy,” she whispered after that afternoon in the Borghese gardens, when I had arrived in Rome and we met in the hotel tearoom, “I have seen a face I will never forget. There is nothing remarkable about it, I assure you. Yet . . . it is unforgettable. Am I clear? Remember the white alba?”

The summer before, when I had been visiting Beatrix in Bar Harbor, she had pointed this particular rose out to me during a tour of her garden. My visits to Bar Harbor had become regular
by then, since I, Mr. Winters, and many other New York residents escaped the city for the cooler rooms and lawns of summertime Maine. In fact, Beatrix’s rustic escape was becoming crowded with visitors, and the private homes on Eden Street were, one by one, being replaced by hotels.

The busier Bar Harbor grew with sailing, hiking, lawn tennis, and dance parties, the more Beatrix cherished her garden, started when she was still a very young child. Eden, she liked to remind me, was one of the earlier names for the island.

The white alba rose she grew there was one of the oldest varieties, having been around since before the Crusades and perhaps even before that. The color, to my eye, was pale and nameless, the scent whispery, the petals soft but nothing like silk. Yet gardeners, ones who knew their materials, always planted some bushes of this rose, and it was this rose that visitors remembered.

“It has a quality of constancy,” Beatrix had explained. “It is a trustworthy rose. And it reminds one of so much of the simple goodness of life.”

“Like my Mr. Winters,” I had said, bending down in Beatrix’s garden to sniff the rose. “I know that at this very moment he is still in his dressing room, studying the papers, getting ready to place a bet. When he loses—and he will lose because he always does—he will explain his shortage of ready cash by claiming to have left his money clip in some public place. Then he will buy me a box of chocolates and . . .” Beyond that, one dared not tread, not even with one’s dearest friend, for fear of describing an excess of intimacy. “Dear Mr. Winters,” I finished. “How constant he is.”

“Does he lose much?” Beatrix asked, frowning.

“No more than we can afford, my dear—don’t make that face. Every man must have a hobby.”

“Of all the people I know, only you have succeeded in finding happiness within marriage,” Beatrix said, laughing.

“True. And for that, Mr. James will never forgive me.”

Nor would I forgive Mr. James for killing me off in that novella he wrote. True, he renamed his poor victim Miller, Daisy Miller, but everyone in New York and Newport knew he meant Daisy Cooper, who married Gilbert Winters. Yes, that family. Old streets named after them in New England, an ancestral home inhabited by distant cousins in Sussex. Roman fever, indeed. Mr. James killed me off because he believed that I, only one generation removed from the harsh, up-before-dawn farm life, had married unwisely into a family of taken-for-granted privilege. Like his friend Minnie Cadwalader Jones, I had chosen with my heart, not my head, and despite all the advice of love poems and songs, such marriages often wither on the vine.

“You have used me badly,” I wrote to Mr. James after receiving the copy of
Daisy Miller
he had signed and sent me. “I accept the label of flirt. I admit my naïveté. But to destroy me with malaria? This is a simple case of sour grapes, dear fox. You cannot accept my happiness, that Mr. Winters and I were designed especially for each other, and grow happier every day.” That was true, at the time.

“My dearest Daisy,” he wrote back the same day, “perhaps I did purloin some of your circumstances and your charming
nickname. But you have made your life. I have made my novel. Let us continue to be friends, and continue on these parallel paths. After all, how many New York matrons can claim the honor of being a Henry James heroine?”

He was right about that. My calendar grew twice as busy after the novel began to circulate. The expense was frightful, because supper invitations must be returned and of course new gowns had to be worn to those dinners.

Mr. Winters was none too pleased. He is, after all, a bit of a cad in the story. Prim, self-righteous, easily defeated. “It is unbearable,” he had grumbled. “Henry could at least have written how well I sat a horse, and my infallible rhythm on the dance floor. And he got that night at the Colosseum all wrong. I offered to escort you back to your hotel, and you, little minx, refused.”

“It’s called creative license, dearest,” I said. As for the refusal: I knew exactly what I was doing. Didn’t his proposal a few months later prove it?

But this is Beatrix’s story. Let us return to it.