“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.
• • • •
Or 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.
FIVE
That evening, after Beatrix’s encounter in the Borghese gardens with Amerigo, the meeting that almost did not happen, Beatrix and Minnie, accompanied by Edith and Teddy, attended Mrs. Haskett’s musical evening. They felt they must, but what they didn’t know was that the damage had already been done. Mrs. Haskett took slight easily and was slow, very slow, to forgive. Mix passion and jealousy with insult and there is guaranteed trouble ahead. It was going to be a difficult evening.
There are two ways to acquire an ancient and noble Roman house. The first is to marry the son of the house. This was beyond Mrs. Haskett’s abilities. She had a sharp-faced attractiveness, an animal quality of health, but she lacked youth. First sons, heirs, tended to marry young women, and she was middle-aged. The second way to acquire an ancient palazzo, of course, is to simply purchase it. This was not beyond Mrs. Haskett’s talents, since the late Mr. Haskett had left her a tidy fortune. My Mr. Winters had been a friend of that family and we had spent long evenings gossiping about—and, true, also being jealous of—that fortune.
The old house, as the merrily widowed Mrs. Haskett called her Roman palazzo, was close to the fashionable Spanish Steps, not far from where the poet John Keats had died seventy-five years before. He was one of Minnie’s favorites, and she often recited from memory his “Ode to a Nightingale.” “Singest of summer in full-throated ease,” she whispered to Beatrix that night as they climbed the steps to the palazzo. There were forty or so rooms, two separate courtyards, and enough American modifications to make the old Roman
families sneer with distaste. They did, however, accept her invitations: her personal chef, we had been told, had been lured away from the Ritz, and she hired the best musicians available.
Beatrix’s party arrived promptly, followed by their two maids and one manservant, only to discover that most of the other guests had decided to follow the European custom and arrive half an hour late. The huge halls and reception rooms were almost empty, except for the predictable down-at-heel bachelors and poorly paid professori, who arrived as soon as possible so that they could dine for free at the buffet. Rows of servants in red satin and white stockings and white wigs lined the rooms, waiting, and a trio of violinists tuned their instruments with a series of squeaks and twangs.
Mrs. Haskett herself was still upstairs in her dressing room, so Edith and Beatrix, Minnie and Teddy, sent the maids and footservant to the back of the house, found a door into a pleasant courtyard garden, and sat there, feeling strange and a little miserable.
At ten, the music began and their hostess came to find them, apologizing profusely and insincerely for having kept them waiting.
“What a day it has been!” she exclaimed, pretending to have forgotten she had met them in the Borghese gardens. Insult for insult. By then the other guests had arrived and the palazzo buzzed with activity.
An unfamiliar soprano of great beauty but questionable vocal range sang Mozart and Goldoni in the yellow parlor. Beatrix tried to close her ears to the faltering notes, but ears are not like eyes: they will not abandon the world as easily as eyes do. The music seeped into her consciousness, reminding her of things better forgotten.
A late supper with ices and greenhouse strawberries was provided in the conservatory, amid a great quantity of orchids and ferns. It was, Minnie kept complaining in Beatrix’s ear, a great crush of people.
“But look at the orchids!” Beatrix whispered back. “Do you think I will be permitted to tour the new greenhouse?” The violin trio in the conservatory was playing a waltz, and Beatrix couldn’t help swaying a little to the music.
“They will be certain to ask you to sing,” Minnie warned her. “Will you?”
Before being accepted as an apprentice at Arnold’s Arboretum in Boston, Beatrix had studied to be a concert singer. As Amerigo had already discovered, she had one of those voices that made people hold their breath when they listened, not wanting to break the magic even with the noise of their own breathing. When she sang, her voice made people remember first love and cradling their first newborn in their arms, or a certain moonlit evening with an irresistible lover.
“No,” Beatrix said to Minnie that night in Rome. “I will not sing for Mrs. Haskett. Not even as payment for a visit to the private greenhouse, not even if she is once again offended.”
She and Minnie moved deeper into the throng.
• • • •
On this particular evening, the five salons of the house were opened to the party. Guests in formal and very expensive evening attire wandered back and forth, admiring the crystal chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries, and large collection of recently acquired pictures, mostly old masters, all hung from walls and ceilings newly reinforced with American dollars and ingenuity. It was rumored Mrs. Haskett had a staff of no fewer than three curators, hired away from the Louvre, scouring Europe for her purchases.
Beatrix found it compellingly repulsive, this combination of new wealth, greed, and impersonal tastes. She found her repulsion to be just as repulsive, as if somehow her disapproval was part of this scheme, accommodating Mrs. Haskett’s rampage. The mix of so many brilliantly colored satin gowns, randomly placed Fra Lippis and Berninis, huge urns of ferns, roses, and orchids, made her fingers ache for soil, her neck for the feel of sun browning the nape . . . for the honesty of labor. The salons of the palazzo made her miss the simple single drawing room of her mother’s New York brownstone, the cozy comfort of the Bar Harbor cottage.
“How soon can we leave?” she asked Minnie, extending her hand to a count who had clicked his heels and bowed over it.
“An hour more. Anything less would be rude. Do smile, Beatrix. You look as if you are about to have a tooth pulled.”
Minnie had known in advance that the evening would be distasteful. Mrs. Haskett, like other nouveau riche, had a reputation for overdoing things. But Minnie was determined that her daughter should have a taste of Roman society whether she wished it or not. It was dangerous to turn one’s back on the untried and untested. Life was, after all, an experiment. What is the planting of a single desiccated seed if not an experiment in hope?
It was inevitable that some of the experiments would be failures, but some would not be. Marriages, for example. Hers had failed, but without the marriage there would have been no Beatrix, and that single child was worth all the possible failures of the world. There was the single seed blossomed into a lovely woman, a future, a life to outlast her own.
“I think I would rather be at the surgeon’s,” Beatrix whispered back.
The rooms were too crowded for her. Tall as she was, she still felt herded like a wayward sheep, pushed this way and that. She had become ensnared in a group of young girls in silken pastels who were carrying her away from her mother, toward the table of ices.
The violinists were beginning another waltz, and couples swirled into the middle of the room. Across the way, a young man waved enthusiastically and began pushing through the crowd toward her. She knew Timothy Whipple from the Newport tennis club and understood that he wished an association with her. She found him boring, one of the indiscriminate mass of young men who study lethargically at Harvard and then settle into society and family life with equal lethargy, rousing only for games of tennis or bridge—young men who do their duty with little enthusiasm, who seem permanently asleep by the age of thirty. She had no desire to waltz with him in this overcrowded room.
“Miss Jones!” Another hand reached out to her.
“Signor Massimo.” She could think of nothing to say, once the name had been said. But she grasped his hand and let herself be pulled out of the current of humanity.
“It seems my fate to rescue you from swarms. Come, this way.” He guided her to an alcove festooned with red and gold velvet curtains. They sat on cold white marble. “Are you enjoying your stay in Rome, Miss Jones? How strange to have—how do you Americans say?—bumped into you, twice in one day.”
“Yes.” She winced at her lack of inventiveness. In New York ballrooms she was not this naive, tongue-tied maiden. Rome seemed to be rendering her speechless. They did not look at each other. They did not look at each other so hard that the other’s face was all they could see in their mind’s eye.
“Shall I bring you some punch?”
“No, thank you. Don’t leave. I mean, if you leave . . .” She stopped.
“I see. That young man still waving at you from across the room will claim my place. Then, I will guard it with all my strength.”
That seemed to be the end of their conversation. They sat there, side by side, neither looking at nor touching each other, yet conscious only of the other, as if the soiree was a mere stage setting for what was to occur between them, except they had forgotten their lines.
Had she really met him only that afternoon? Why the sense that he had always been there, at her side? When he brushed at a bit of lint on his coat sleeve, she felt it was a gesture she already knew. She had already known his evening cologne would be vetiver, and that the handkerchief in his pocket would be simple linen with neither lace nor monogram.
The waltz ended. From the next room she could hear subdued applause, a woman’s voice announcing a set of songs she would perform accompanied by the violinists. The musicians played the opening notes of Zerlina’s aria from Don Giovanni, the song that promises a remedy for pain and ends with Zerlina placing Don Giovanni’s hand over her heart. There was a problem, a false start. The soprano cleared her throat and the violini
sts began again. This time she joined them, her coloratura voice sending the sensation of honey through Beatrix’s veins.
“A fine love song,” Signor Massimo said when she had finished.
“Her final notes seemed to quaver.”
“It is true her voice no longer has the clarity for which she was so famous in her youth. But still, it is a fine love song.”
From across the room, she could see Timothy Whipple staring at her and whispering to another young man at his side. Their faces were stormy with disapproval until two young women stopped before them, laughing, saying something that made the two boys bend closer to their whispers, forgetting Beatrix and the Roman who seemed to have claimed her for the entire evening.
“How long are you staying in Rome?” Amerigo asked, still not looking at her.
“Just days. I am here to see the gardens and monuments, and then there are other cities I must visit.”
“Ah! You wish to return home and style your gardens in the European manner.”
“Not just my gardens. Others as well. I am to work in the profession. And no, not exclusively in the European style. We need a new style for our New World.”
“But that is the work of laborers, of men,” he protested.
“There are some who believe it can also be women’s work,” she answered quietly.
“Americans.” He smiled and shook his head. “So industrious, so new in their thinking in that New World.”
“Not all of them.” Her father, the man she hadn’t seen for years, had sent a letter of complaint when he heard his daughter was pruning trees and turning compost at the Boston arboretum. “She will ruin her hands. Who will marry her?” Beatrix had read the letter after her mother had crumpled it into a ball and left it for the maid to take away.
“Your father doesn’t approve,” Amerigo guessed. “They are a difficult breed to please, fathers. Mine as well.”
A Lady of Good Family Page 5
