A Lady of Good Family (7 page)

Again, something in the shadows moved. There was a blur, a soundless shift that no one else seemed to notice.

This place is unwholesome, Beatrix thought. She had visited cemeteries, stood before towering chiseled monuments of loss, and peered down at flush markers half buried in the grass, but this city of the dead was different. There was a complete absence of light, of life, aside from the feral cat that had brushed against her. Even in cemeteries there is life, she thought, but only when they are above ground, in open air. There are flowers and trees and birds and breezes to remind you that time stopped only for the person for whom you grieve. Here, everything had stopped.

“Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista.” It was something Nathaniel Hawthorne had once written to her mother in a letter she had saved. Beatrix the child hadn’t understood the phrase when he read it so softly, so casually, teacup in hand. But now, in that closed, suffocating underworld, she thought she understood. She shivered and longed for the light, the open sky.

Years later she would remember that moment, how wrong it felt to dishonor the dead with dank darkness, and when, after the Great War, she was asked to design memorials for those fallen in battle, she placed the memorials in patches of sunshine, where flowers could grow around them.

“No,” said Beatrix. “I don’t want to see the Gorgon’s head. I don’t want to go deeper into the catacomb.”

“Ah.” Brother Tommaso sighed. “A shame.”

“Indeed, I am ready for some fresh air.” Her mother took her by the arm. They turned around and began to retrace their steps.

“Hope the rain stopped,” said Teddy, following behind.

When they emerged into the light, Beatrix felt like Persephone running away from Hades, hating the sterile darkness where nothing could grow except regret. She lost her footing on the last step, and when she reached into thin air, trying to regain her balance, her mother’s hand grasped hers. For a blind, confusing second she had expected the hand of a man who wasn’t even there with them. She had reached out for Amerigo.

“I
had a painted fan once,” said Mrs. Avery. “It had such strange flowers on it, like Beatrix’s fan. My mother gave it to me when I was sixteen.”

“I bet you looked charming, holding that fan,” said Mr. Hardy, in a pleasant rather than flirtatious manner. Mrs. Avery had the surprising ability to bring out the nature of those around her: Mrs. Ballinger became even haughtier, while Mr. Hardy became kindly. In the days that I’d been in Lenox, I noticed that people tended to gravitate to Mrs. Avery, thinking at first, as I had, that they would be nice to her, and then discovering that they enjoyed her company. In a garden she would have been the smallest and palest of flowers, yet one with a very sweet scent, I imagined. Alyssum, perhaps. You barely know it is there, but a garden would not be complete without its fragrance.

“Useless things, painted fans,” said Mrs. Ballinger. “I’m glad
they’ve gone out of favor. Worse than kidskin gloves for getting lost or stepped on and ruined.”

“But how beautiful they were,” I said. “Fans and gloves. There was a time when you felt naked if you didn’t have both.”

I had been holding a painted fan on the evening in Vevey when I met Gilbert Winters.

There was so much Mr. James didn’t write about that night. The garden, for instance. I had to go down stone steps to reach it. It was halfway between the wrought-iron-balconied front of the hotel, with the beautiful mountains behind it, and the lake itself, so that when I stood in the garden I was tempted to keep swiveling my head about to take in the scenery. I knew better, though. My grandparents blew on their soup and ate peas off their knives, but I had been instructed by a careful governess and kept my head and eyes looking straight ahead. Most uncomfortable.

Thankfully, I had already taken in the scenery for two nights before Mr. Winters appeared in the garden, so the temptation to swivel my head and gawk had been thoroughly tamped down.

I saw him sitting on the bench in the twilight, my little brother plaguing him with demands for candy, and I thought, I must rescue that gentleman from Raymond.

He stood, of course, as soon as I approached. Our eyes met. Music floated down to us from the hotel, a waltz, and for a dizzy moment I thought he intended to ask me to dance with him. I would have, despite how slippery some of the stones were. Instead, he gave me a polite little bow and looked immediately away. Undoubtedly, his tutors had studied the same etiquette
book as my governess. I looked away as well, not to be outdone in this business of proper manners.

We stood, both pretending to be completely absorbed by the scenery. There was I, seventeen, fresh from Schenectady; there was he, handsome and seemingly indifferent, though I was wearing a particularly pretty dress that evening, with enough bows on it, as Raymond had commented, to make a pink streamer to the moon and back.

I didn’t know yet that Gilbert was in Vevey for two purposes: to visit an aunt, upon whom he was somewhat financially dependent, and to begin the process of recovering from an affair, for his mistress, an older widow, had sent him packing the week before. A young girl was not told of such matters; I had to discover them later, in Rome, through careful eavesdropping at several salon doors.

Gilbert would never explain to me what had gone wrong between them, but wrong it had gone, which pleased me greatly. By the end of that evening in the garden in Vevey, I had already decided I would marry him.

His aunt refused to allow me to be presented to her, of course. She hadn’t heard of my family—very few had—and she decided instantly I was common because I had allowed a strange man to talk with me in the hotel garden. Her disapproval helped my cause, I believe. Every man, even one raised by aunts in Switzerland, has a bit of the rebel in him.

“Did you just sigh, Mrs. Winter?” Mr. Hardy asked, concern planting a furrow between his brows.

“I was just remembering something,” I said. Another flash of lightning split the sky, and a gust of hot air blew on our faces. Mr. Hardy wore a white linen suit and he had opened the collar and loosened his tie, as my grandfather used to do after Sunday dinners in the hot summer. When I looked at him, my inner eye saw a yellow barn against a blue sky, a row of red hollyhocks.

“A happy memory, I hope,” he said.

“Very.”

•   •   •   •

“W
hat disturbed you this morning, in the catacomb?”

Minnie and Beatrix were in their Roman hotel suite again, reading the morning’s mail and drying their shoes before the small coal brazier that the concierge had brought up to drive the chill damp out of their rooms.

“I didn’t like the atmosphere,” Beatrix said. “The air was heavy with mold and rot. It felt like being buried alive.”

“Like a vestal virgin. That’s how they were punished if they broke their vow of chastity.”

“You do acquire the strangest facts, Mother.”

“That’s from Murray.” Minnie waved a guidebook at her. “He seemed quite pleased at the idea. When women have outlasted their appointed function, what more can be expected from them except to die?”

From the acrimony in her voice, Beatrix could tell that Minnie was thinking of her husband. Or perhaps her husband’s mistress, those rooms in Paris where the couple had cohabited for so many years. There had been another letter from his lawyer
awaiting them when they returned to the hotel, another discussion of terms and conditions. “Ending a marriage seems to require more legal maneuvers than ending a war,” Minnie had commented. “I guess they do have much in common, the two situations.”

“It was more than the air in the crypts,” Minnie said now, returning to their conversation about the morning expedition. “Something upset you.”

“I began to imagine things. Movements in the shadows, someone, something, watching us.”

“Rome is giving you fancies. You seem to be changing before my very eyes.” Minnie sat in the chair opposite her daughter and watched as Annie poured them coffee from the service tray a bellhop had brought. Their rooms were still being straightened, and a couple of maids peeked in at them from the separate bedrooms.

Their own maid, the very protective Annie, watched them closely. She had decided that all hotel maids were little better than thieves and that nothing would go astray under her careful gaze.

“I hope this trip was a good idea,” Minnie said.

“It was a necessary idea,” Beatrix countered. “For both of us.”

“Yes,” Minnie agreed. “We will both go home changed—that is certain. Is that the point of travel? Unfortunately, the travel does not seem to agree with Edith and Teddy. They have decided to leave Rome.” The maids finished and left.

Annie gave the bedding a proprietorial straightening, punching pillows and pulling coverlets tighter.

“Thank you,” Minnie called to her. “You have been on your feet all day. Why not have a rest?”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Annie bobbed a little curtsy.

“The trip does not seem to have improved relations between Aunt Edith and Uncle Teddy,” Beatrix agreed.

“You see that, too. No. I would say it has worsened the situation. Teddy used to enjoy traveling, but this trip seems to be causing him distress. That may be the secret to achieving serenity in an intimate relationship,” Minnie mused, more to herself than to her daughter. “Two people who simply want to be in the same place at the same time. After a few years of marriage your father and I never even wanted to be in the same room together.”

Beatrix leaned over and took her mother’s hand, giving it a gentle shake, the way mothers do to distract unhappy children away from the barking dog or grumbling nanny.

“Oh, Beatrix, I shouldn’t speak like this in front of you. You will lose heart before you’ve even tried to live. It wasn’t all Freddie’s fault, you know, the separation. He needed a wife who would be more devoted, who would spend all her time with him, not in charity wards and committee meetings.”

“But shouldn’t a woman’s world be larger than what he expected?” Beatrix asked.

•   •   •   •

W
hen Minnie took her afternoon nap, Beatrix sat in their shared sitting room, thinking. Between her mother and her aunt, marriage did, indeed, seem a dismal prospect. But without it, how could a woman experience life fully? Was it better to remain a virgin, safe and unsullied, or to test those vestal vows and eventually be buried alive in the debris of lost love? Passion,
it seemed, could not survive the tests of the simple day-to-day routine that marriage required.

She should have been born a man. They did not have to choose between home and profession, tame marital bed and wild, secret passion. She stood and paced, back and forth.

The hotel room seemed too small to contain her restlessness. She would go for a walk and leave her mother to her rest and then her writing table and that letter from the lawyer in Paris that must be answered. Annie was snoring gently in the little dressing area where her bed was set up. Beatrix decided not to disturb her. She could go out alone.

She put on her wrap, the dark-colored one that covered most of her figure, and a plain hat that did not invite glances. She strode quickly down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the door, aware of eyes following her with curiosity and disapproval. A young woman going out alone? There would be talk that evening in the dining room.

Beatrix paused as soon as she had reached the street. Which way? She’d had enough of the places One Must Visit in Rome, enough of formal gardens.

She turned left instead of right, away from the Corso and the popular tourist sections. At the next corner, she walked in the direction of the more open sky, where the buildings were lower; at the next corner she chose the narrowest street and followed it. She walked uphill, turned again, and up another hill.

After half an hour, she was in a neighborhood of rutted streets where housewives had hung their linen out the windows and over balcony railings to air. Some of the houses had
enclosures where donkeys brayed; this was the section of Rome where the carters and laborers lived. She could smell cooking cabbage playing in and out of the wonderful honey scent of mimosa. Children paused in their rough play to stare at her, but none swarmed at her as they had in the Borghese gardens.

“Look for beauty in rustic places,” Olmsted had told her. This place, this neighborhood, was beautiful. It was full of life and small dreams, the everyday hopes not of those who moved through the rarified atmosphere of the wealthy and the foreign, but of those who knew this place, this soil, the plants and birds and the names of all the local children, the color of the sky in January, in June. The simplicity of it was the same as honesty, in the way that the waves at Bar Harbor were honest, and the barrels in the shops where people bought their pickles and flour were honest.

There, in that rough wooden doorway, a vine climbed up and over the lintel, cooling the ochre walls with white flowers. An urn of geranium and ivy shone red and green against a brick wall. A crawling weed sprawled over a dusty gravel path. It was the same plant she had plucked from the formal gravel walk of the Borghese gardens, but here it looked at home, even pretty. She would have to discover its name.

The homely beauty of this neighborhood took her breath. Why had she wasted her time in all those villas and plazas, with their mathematical precision and coy, artificial plantings?

If Aunt Edith and Teddy could walk down this street, they might enjoy each other’s company here, she thought. They might smile together at that birdcage hanging in the window, the pretty
pattern of the quilt draped over that railing. They might be friends again.

Beatrix turned in circles in the narrow street, trying to take it all in at once, delighted even by the children who had begun to watch her, to giggle. She closed her eyes and lifted her head, letting the heat of the sun warm her face. The gray morning drizzle, the dark catacombs, seemed a long time ago.

“Are you lost?” An old man stood before her, frowning.

“No. I simply wished to go for a walk. Away from the others. What is this street?”

“Via dei Serpenti.” He nodded, frowning with concern.

Now, she thought, he will warn me about thieves and men who are too bold and threatening. He will tell me to go back to the safety of my hotel. But he did not.

“You were looking at that vine,” he said, “over my door. Do you wish to see it closer? Come. I will bring you a glass of water. Sit here. Rest.” He used his dingy handkerchief to wipe clean a stone bench placed where the hot sun could not reach, then disappeared through his dark doorway.

When he came back out carrying a stoneware pitcher and two glasses, she gratefully accepted one of them. “What is the name of this vine?” She reached up to touch one of the white flowers and rub its waxy petals. It was cool and smooth, like the sweet water he had brought her.

“If it has a name, I do not know it. My mother planted it. She stole a piece from the garden at the villa one day and put it here, by the door. She could make anything grow, even dead sticks.”

He spoke slowly so that she could understand. “Would you
like some of the seed?” he offered. “Take it to your home and plant it. They say it lives forever. The vine at the Palazzo dei Serpenti, where my mother stole her cutting, has been growing for many, many years, much longer than this. Perhaps it saw the Caesars. Who knows?” He laughed, showing strong white teeth.

“Where is this palazzo?” Beatrix asked. She had never heard the name before; it was not a part of the usual itinerary of those visiting Rome. Perhaps this would be a chance to see a smaller garden, one for housewives to cool themselves in and children to play in.

“Just there.” He pointed to the end of the street. “The housekeeper is Magda. Call for her, and she will show you the garden.”

Beatrix thanked him and walked with some hesitation in the direction in which he had pointed. She had grown up in a world where everybody was familiar, whether she was in Maine, New York, or Newport. Strangers were still a bit of a difficulty for her, one she would have to overcome in her chosen profession.