Reef Point, after all, had been purchased by her parents at the beginning of the separation that would eventually lead to the scandal of divorce. I think Beatrix, as well as Minnie, had understood that this was to be a home without a husband, without a father. An incomplete home. And so Beatrix had set about to complete it in the best way she could, to help in the best way she could to bring contentment and peace to the place.
She hadn’t forced turf lawns over the peaty soil or created imitations of what other gardeners had done. As much as possible, Beatrix had cultivated plants suited to the conditions of the island: iris and lilies, ferns, roses, asters, wild plum.
When I visited her at Reef Point, it was a paradise of bloom and scent. That, at least, was what the visitor admired. Beatrix had a more critical eye, and even when walking among the roses, she would bend and sift her fingers through the soil, checking for texture, sniff it to see if it was too acidic, then take a handful back to her workroom for testing.
“It isn’t enough to be beautiful,” she said to me, picking a beetle off a rose and squashing it with her bare hands. “A garden must meet the needs of the soul as well as the senses. You feel at home and somehow enlarged, more yourself, in a good garden. Most of all, the garden must suit the land, not vice versa. The garden should be as much at home in the landscape as the house and the people of the house.”
It was a philosophy of life as well as of gardening: pleasure combined with work, beauty with practicality. The garden would both calm and awaken senses and memory. “Daisy,” she said, “I know I am meant for other things. Work, for one. I want a created life, not a preordained one. Dancing in ballrooms with New York’s eligible bachelors only gets one so far.”
In fact, she was so busy with her garden that she all but gave up dancing.
The next year we both went to the Chicago World’s Fair. For me, the fair’s White City meant gondolas on Venetian waterways, Bedouin tribesmen and their camels wandering the Midway Plaisance, the strange turrets and towers of the Swedish Building, drinking Darjeeling tea at the Japanese Tea House.
After Gilbert and I married, we made several transatlantic voyages to Europe and back. But Gilbert and I never pushed beyond Paris or Rome. “Why would you want to?” Gilbert asked. He had no desire to venture into lands where the hotel concierges did not speak English and where roast beef could not be had for dinner.
I, on the other hand, had wanted to boat on the Orinoco, to taste the honey pastries of Istanbul and visit frozen Lapland. Switzerland, for me, was meant to be the beginning of my journeys, not the end. But I had met Gilbert there, and in Rome he had kissed me in the moonlight in the Colosseum, and that ended my wanderings.
So the Chicago fair was my substitute, that vast expanse of huge domes and gardens seen from the dizzying top of the Ferris wheel—all the lovely foreignness of the world brought to the scrubby shores of Lake Michigan.
For Beatrix, the world’s fair meant plants, some familiar and many exotic. There were the strange spindly cactuses dotting the Wild West Show on the Midway, the Spanish cork trees of the Agricultural Building, the rows of tulips outside the Dutch windmill, the date palms of the Sahara. The Horticultural Building contained acres of plants and flowers: Japanese gardens, a tropical garden, an entire field—indoors, under glass!—of snapdragons, and another field of begonias, along with Australian ferns as tall as two-story buildings. There were, a placard announced, sixteen thousand varieties of orchids on display.
Mostly, though, Beatrix loved the Wooded Island, sixteen acres of pansies and roses, all strung with fairy lights so that people could sit there in the evening and be dazzled by the loveliness of the place. It was there, one evening, that Beatrix made what was the largest decision of her young life. She had studied music and still considered the possibility of a career as a concert singer, but her year of work and study with Mr. Sargent was leading her onto a different path. It wasn’t a straight line that brought her to her decision; she abhorred ruler-straight lines in gardens and in thinking. Life and landscapes required flexibility and a touch of serendipity. A little rain shower made up her mind.
• • • •
Beatrix always dressed according to her internal weather. And she always dressed beautifully, like her mother and her aunt Edith. Beautiful costuming on a woman’s part is a show of bravery and optimism.
On the second-to-last day of her visit, Beatrix dressed according to her internal weather, which was full of summer and the kind of sensuality that encourages you, as the younger set says, to show off a little. She wore a light summer dress with half sleeves and no collar. I think that glimpse of the belly-bared dancer who’d performed at the fair, Little Egypt, and the strange Eastern music with its eerie pipes and wailing notes, had awoken something exotic in Beatrix’s own nature. She was very young, and still making all those choices we take for granted, still shaping herself for an undefined future.
And she was a gardener. She had watched butterflies mating in midair, witnessed the spring courting of rabbits and the yearly litters of barn cats, seen how sprouts shoot out of desiccated husks once they are warmed and watered. There is no more sensual activity than gardening.
Half sleeves and no collar. That’s what Beatrix wore that afternoon at the fair. And of course it rained, just for an hour and not heavily, but Beatrix was caught in it and was soaked. She had just left the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where she had been admiring the Remington exhibit. Forty different typewriting machines, all equipped to typewrite in different languages. She was going to the Mines and Mining Building to see the South African diamonds when the rain began.
A gentleman offered her his umbrella, but it was too late to stop the damage. It was one of those rains that begins quickly and heavily, like a faucet being turned on, and ends just a minute later. The gentleman, seeing she was already soaked, folded his umbrella and let the rain soak him as well. He was a young university professor, a historian with a special fondness for Benjamin Franklin. He told her this quickly and easily, as if it mattered even more than names, which they had not exchanged.
His cuffs were frayed and there was a small hole in his straw hat. Beatrix would remember that, years later. How young he was, how indifferent to his wardrobe, as were many professors.
“Why Franklin in particular?” Beatrix asked, allowing the young man to escort her to the little tram that would take her to her hotel, so she could change into dry clothing.
“I suppose for his wit. And because he loved France. He did not want to cut the New World completely off from the Old.”
“And do you love France?” she asked.
“Who wouldn’t?”
He accompanied her all the way to the door of her hotel, even though, as she guessed, the return tram fare would abbreviate his supper that evening.
“Bon voyage,” he said, tipping the hat with the little hole in it. “I hope we meet again.” They didn’t, at least not until many years later.
Beatrix, starting to shiver from the drenching, changed into a dress suitable for walking in after dark. She had agreed to meet Mr. and Mrs. Sargent for supper at the Vienna Café, to be followed by a moonlight ride on the Ferris wheel and a tour of the Wooded Island.
Most visitors to the fair preferred to spend the evening on the Court of Honor, a spectacular turreted and domed white city lining a large lagoon, where spotlights constantly swept the sky, the crowds, the fountains, and the statues. But the crowd there, often in the thousands, was shoulder to shoulder. The Sargents preferred a quieter atmosphere.
The Wooded Island was one of the many nature areas Olmsted had included in his design for the fair. There were wooden benches, walkways, Japanese teahouses. Quiet places meant to restore the soul to a calm state after the excitement of the day. It was all illuminated by little lamps that gave the isle a fairy-tale quality.
“You look a bit like Little Red Riding Ho
od,” said Mr. Sargent as they found a quiet bench to share in front of a bed of roses. Beatrix was wearing a white lawn dress with a crimson-hooded linen cloak over it, in case the evening should turn chilly.
“I hope there are no wolves around,” she joked back.
“That has always been my favorite fairy tale,” said Mrs. Sargent, sighing with fatigue. “The young girl just beginning her life, the kind grandmother, the wolf always lurking about, reminding us of the constant danger of the world.”
“In the Grimm version, the wolf gobbles up the girl,” said Mr. Sargent, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it.
“I read that version as well. My aunt Edith gave it to me in a collection of German stories.” Beatrix unbuttoned her cloak and let it fall from her shoulders onto the bench.
They could hear the roar of the crowds in the distance and saw the spotlights from the court piercing the sky as they, on the Wooded Island, felt very distant from the bustle, in their own little world.
“It is so lovely here, in this very spot,” Beatrix said. “As exciting as the fair is, I think I would prefer a quiet garden to it, any day.”
“You can hear yourself think,” agreed Mrs. Sargent. “My ears will never recover from this visit.”
“Would you sing for us, Beatrix?” Mr. Sargent asked.
They had dined at the Vienna Café, where a concert next door had serenaded them with Schubert’s Lieder. “Sing something that will suit the fragrance of those roses behind us, and the beams of the fairy lights,” he suggested.
On an ordinary day, this request would not have distressed Beatrix. She had a classically trained voice, a lovely voice, and the possibility of a career as a concert singer was still available to her in that undefined labyrinth we call the future.
She was greatly moved by that Wooded Island, that large garden, and by Olmsted’s vision of a place so perfect for calming the spirit and restoring peace to an overexcited mind. It was gardening at its finest, a realm both natural and artificial, arising from what already existed, the soil, the grasses and trees, the water from Lake Michigan trained into canals and shores, and enhanced by what man had brought to it, the hundreds of roses, willow trees; beds of campion and larkspur flashing color long into the summer twilight; the fragrances of mint and lavender and rose.
It was not by accident that God first put man into a garden. What place is better suited for showing us our own promise and goodness? Certainly not a deep forest, where pagan nature overcomes all, where sharp-toothed wolves and long-knifed robbers roam, and certainly not the seashore, where an almost infinite horizon reminds us of our absolute insignificance. A forest and seashore do not need people. They have always existed and always will. But a garden. A garden does not exist without us. Nor we, without it.
Beatrix thought for a long moment. Of course she would sing for Mr. and Mrs. Sargent, if they wished it. A song was small repayment for their friendship and hospitality, but a song they would have. She decided on another Schubert Lieder, one the Viennese singers hadn’t performed that evening, “With the Green Lute Ribbon.” It was a love song, but a happy one between a young man and maid, and its words had always thrilled Beatrix so much they gave her goose bumps when she sang them. After the boy gives the ribbon to the maid and tells her to tie it into her locks, he says, “Because hope’s far reaches bloom green / We are both fond of green. / . . . Then I will know where hope dwells.”
It was a beautiful song, a perfect song, in a perfect setting, with the perfect audience. But at the last note of the verse, Beatrix’s voice gave way and could not reach the final note. The chill from the rain had gone into her throat. Beatrix froze on the bench, unable to move, to breathe, wishing only that that last quavering note upon which her voice had broken, now seemingly hanging in the air like something tangible—she wished that note would disappear, to never have happened.
That night, at the fair, on the Wooded Island, Beatrix’s musical career ended. How could she base her ambition—and she was ambitious—on something as imperfect as a throat that grew chilled in a summer rain shower?
Mr. and Mrs. Sargent did the polite thing and applauded her as if each note had been true and perfect, but they knew, and Beatrix knew, that the song had changed something. One door had slammed shut, but another was opened to her.
She had been happiest in gardens: her childhood gardens in Newport and Maine, the Sargent garden in Brookline, the arboretum where she had studied.
A gardener, then, she would be. Not an amateur, a professional. She would work for her living, and she would create pleasurable landscapes for her work.
Beatrix sat on the lovely Wooded Isle of the Chicago World’s Fair and promised herself that one day she would make something even more splendid.
NINE
“I would like to hear more about Edith Wharton,” said Mrs. Ballinger, who was president of her local public library board of directors and a great reader.
“I thought this was supposed to be a ghost story,” said Mrs. Avery, tentatively touching the Ouija board still on the table in front of us.
The rain hadn’t come, though lightning and thunder had moved steadily closer, disturbing the dark night.
“My wife kept a vegetable patch,” said Mr. Hardy. “Grew wonderful tomatoes.”
It was almost midnight, but I had no desire to go up to my room and try to sleep. That was one of the most difficult parts of the day for me, entering a bedroom where no other voice would answer mine, no breathing match my own. “You’ll get used to it,” Jenny often told me. “In time.” Perhaps. But I still wasn’t. No, I wasn’t ready yet for bed.
Mrs. Ballinger shifted in her chair, the telltale motion of a woman about to rise and leave, and I thought if she left, so might Mrs. Avery and Mr. Hardy, and I did not want to be alone. That was one reason why Jenny had recommended I spend a week in Lenox, at an inn. There would be the familiar bustle of the breakfast room, the clatter and conversation of the evening dining room, parlors where I could sit and talk or just watch and listen, and of course the shared front porch.
“Edith and Beatrix were both greatly moved by a good ghost story,” I said, and Mrs. Ballinger sat back down. “Minnie found them silly, but aunt and niece shared a predilection for tales of the supernatural, just as they shared a preference for yellow roses and climbing honeysuckle on the front porch rather than wisteria.” That, and independence. How I envied them that, sometimes, when Gilbert was cross or sad and the children demanding. “I’ll tell you a story Edith told me one night. Do you know the story of the specter bridegroom? It’s one of those cautionary tales meant to steer young girls away from questionable choices in matters of the heart.
“It is a story that the German maid told the little girl, Edith, who told it to her niece Beatrix many years later, who then told it to her mother as they rested in yet another hotel in yet another European city, stocking feet warming before the hearth and cups of tea on the table beside them.
“Long ago, Baron Von Landshort lived in a decrepit castle at the top of a mountain in the Odenwald,” I told my porch listeners. “The castle was rough and uncomfortable, an eagle’s nest surrounded by dark firs that tapped at the windows at night. But the baron’s pride would not let him remove himself to more convenient quarters in town. He liked to look down on his neighbors from his eagle’s aerie.
“His daughter was a blooming rose, but she grew up in solitude, an only child, and with her mother and father living in separate countries. Her mother had run away from the cold castle in the Odenwald and the daughter learned early that love was not to be squandered.”
“Oh, no,” agreed Mrs. Avery. “Love should not be squandered.”
“She sang like an angel, this daughter of solitude. Even the wild mountain wind stopped blowing when she sang, the better to hear her. Mostly, though, she liked to work in her garden. She could make plants bloom just by looking at them.
If weeds dared sprout, they saw the magnificence of their surroundings and wilted in self-sacrifice.
“On the day her father announced he had found her a groom, the girl was both cheered and frightened. It is natural for a young girl to yearn for a husband.”
“Absolutely. And she should be obedient to her father’s wishes,” said Mrs. Ballinger.
“But she had never met the intended. What if he was cruel? Or worse, aged and toothless?
“‘He comes from a very important old family,’ the baron said. ‘Almost as illustrious as our own. I have made the arrangements, and your groom is already on his way.’
“The daughter began embroidering her trousseau. Her mornings were still taken over with care for her garden, but this magical piece of ground reflected her own state of mind. The garden began to fret, and the weeds, formerly so agreeable in their habit of wilting away, started to grow. Rabbits chewed the little hedges and the knot garden unraveled itself. The daughter knew that her marriage was doomed.
“Her bridegroom, meanwhile, lingered many leagues away in a city full of distraction, gambling dens, and opera dancers. He, too, had his doubts about this marriage, but his father insisted, and his father held the purse, so husband he would be if his father ordered, though he feared the chosen bride would be old or ugly.”
“My father disapproved of my marriage,” said Mr. Hardy. “That young man should have stood his ground.”
“I don’t see that gambling and taking up with opera dancers is standing your ground, morally speaking,” argued Mrs. Ballinger. I ignored them.
“The time came when the groom must leave his amusements and claim his bride. With a distinct lack of mirth, he packed a travel bag and had his best horse saddled.
“He rode quickly and with few stops to rest and water the horse. He took a forbidden shortcut through a thick, black forest filled with thieves and outlaws. At night, in this forest, you could hear the wolves calling to one another.
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