A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  “I usually do,” Edith said drily.

  The next morning, I caught Arturo in the library. Edith had made this one of the loveliest and most accessible rooms in her house, with two doors opening onto the terrace, and other doors leading from the den, gallery, and drawing room. Arturo had entered from the terrace and stood before the tapestry dominating the one wall not filled with books.

  The tapestry was an Aubusson, a garden scene with a shaggy tree in the foreground and a statue and fountain in the background. Because it was very early morning and the dawn light was still misty, he could have been standing in a real garden, a gentleman with rolled-up sleeves, lost in the pages of his book.

  I studied him for a long while, wondering at the accidents by which some men are born to comfort and wealth and others to poverty so intense it forces them to cross entire oceans in search of menial labor. Perhaps that moment was when I first acquired what Mr. Winters called my political consciousness. Arturo was as handsome as any gentleman I had met in Italy. Dress him in evening clothes and put the correct fork in his hand, and he could pass as a gentleman.

  But he was not.

  “You watch me again,” he said after a few silent moments. He did turn to look at me. He did not blush, cringe, or cower as another servant would have, caught out in this manner, being where he should not be.

  “Mrs. Wharton will not be pleased if you have tracked mud in here,” I said.

  “I wiped my shoes,” said he, coolly.

  “If you want something to read, I will bring it to you. But you should not come in here alone.”

  He turned to me, his mouth turned down with disdain. “You think I will steal.”

  “No. But I think that if something should be stolen or even be misplaced, you would then be blamed.”

  The disdain in his face changed to an expression of curiosity. He did the unthinkable. He extended his hand and expected me to take it.

  “What is your name—your given name—Mrs. Winters?”

  “Daisy,” I said.

  “We will be friends,” he said.

  We heard steps overhead, going in the direction of the staircase. I nodded at the French doors and Arturo disappeared through them, onto the terrace. Moments later I saw him walking past the windows of the library, cap on his head, hands in his pockets. He was whistling. I couldn’t tell what the tune was, but it was sad, in a minor key, Italian with a touch of Gypsy or Arabian.

  Beatrix came into the room a few moments later, looking for a garden notebook she had left there the day before.

  “You didn’t sleep,” I said, remarking on the dark shadows around her eyes.

  “Not well.” She yawned and stretched, the lace on her dressing gown falling back to reveal her lean, sunburnt forearms. “I kept having dreams that woke me as soon as I did fall asleep. I dreamed that I was in Italy with Edith and Mother and Teddy, and we were in an open carriage being driven through the countryside. I’m famished. Has breakfast been put out?”

  Beatrix took my arm and guided me into the breakfast room as she described her dream. “Wild herbs grew everywhere, popping up in cracks between stones and in the dry, lava-dust soil. One herb had a lovely silvery gray color, but I couldn’t think of its name. Grazing donkeys brayed as our carriage passed, their short, thick muzzles opening to reveal yellowed teeth. ‘Silly beasts,’ said Edith. ‘I think they were created just to remind us to laugh.’

  “‘Or because they are cheaper to buy and maintain than finer horses,’ said Mother. ‘The families in Little Italy certainly prefer them.’”

  Beatrix took a seat in her accustomed place at the table, facing the windows so she could look out over the lawn. “That is why I look tired,” she said. “But tell me, Daisy, why did you seem so startled when I came into the library? I would almost guess you hadn’t been alone in there.”

  “I saw the new gardener in there,” I explained.

  “Arturo? He really should have asked. I’m sure Aunt Edith would be happy to loan him a book now and then.”

  “He doesn’t seem the kind to ask,” I said.

  “No. He doesn’t. And whoever he is, he most certainly is not a gardener, as Reynolds pointed out. I saw him planting tulip bulbs upside down yesterday. I had to redo the entire bed. Pass the cream.”

  “Who is not a gardener?” Minnie asked, coming in.

  “The new man. Arturo.”

  One by one the rest of the house appeared in the doorway, Henry, Howard, Walter, hungry for bacon and eggs and strong coffee. All but Edith. We were a full table except for the empty places at the head and foot, because Teddy hadn’t appeared either. We were merrier because of that absence, and Howard, before breakfast was finished, had thrown a roll at Henry, who stood and recited a verse in protest of bad manners.

  And all the while, I kept looking over my shoulder, through the window, to see if the new gardener’s assistant might be passing by.

  • • • •

  The first snow fell at the end of that week, large flakes that floated sideways, up, and down, before landing reluctantly on shoulders, hats, eyelashes. It coated Edith’s lawn and flower beds and frosted the leaves that had not been raked up yet. Her little dog shivered when she walked it and came in to curl tightly on the sofa blanket.

  “Time to return to New York,” said Henry, who disliked cold weather. Edith had marble fireplaces at the Mount, as well as a huge rumbling boiler for heat and hot water, but Henry was afraid of overstaying his visit. “Snowed in,” he sighed, looking out the window. “Can you imagine a worse thing?” Isolation suited Edith; Henry was less fond of it.

  Howard and Walter had departed Lenox the day before, leaving us bereft and at loose ends as their carriage pulled away down the drive. Houseguests, I’ve always maintained, should leave at the same time. Otherwise that sense of being left behind taints those who remain. It’s like waving off people making a sea voyage when you yourself are left alone at the wharf as the ship disappears into the horizon.

  Reynolds, I felt, had been even sadder than Edith and Beatrix and I to see Howard go, since for the past two days Howard had been the peacemaker between the gardener and his new assistant. Arturo simply wasn’t working out. “He can’t plant, prune, or weed. He doesn’t know a rosebush from a bramble,” Reynolds had complained the day before. “You’re wasting good wages on him, Edith,” Teddy said, siding with Reynolds.

  Edith bristled. She did not want the men of the house questioning her decisions.

  “Find something he does know how to do,” she said quietly, “and stop bothering me with this matter.” She was having trouble with The House of Mirth, with painful choices regarding the future of poor Lily Bart, who begins the novel wishing to marry very well, into luxury as well as a good family, and step by step lowers her expectations as men, one by one, let her down.

  “Find something Arturo can do,” she repeated, and walked away, regal and stern in her bearing, her green skirt trailing over the yellow leaves that Arturo had not yet raked up.

  He, meanwhile, had been watching us from a distance, leaning against a tree too far from us to hear what was being said, but the look on his face left me no doubt that he knew. He was laughing at us. I scowled at him. We will be friends, he had said. Friends do not laugh at you. He took the point, grew serious, tipped his hat as Reynolds had taught him, and went off to find the rake he had misplaced the day before.

  • • • •

  With the house empty of all Edith’s male guests, we ladies seemed suddenly adrift. Gone were Henry’s intellectual challenges, Howard’s endearing childish pranks, Walter’s handsome looks and charm. The rooms felt empty, the lawn too large, the dinner table huge with all those empty places. We packed away the croquet set, accepting the end of autumn pleasures.

  On our last day at the Mount, Beatrix and I went for a long walk in the hills, enjoying the
crisp air and the feathery snowflakes. Going for a walk with Beatrix was as much about seeing as it was about moving, and we would pause often so she could admire a stand of trees or the way snow frosted the browned wildflowers standing in the fields. When we passed old farmhouses, she would take a little book and pencil from her pocket and sketch the front door gardens.

  We talked little, reserving comments mostly for the weather and the scenery. Since that night of the disturbances, I had felt Beatrix withdrawing more than usual into her own thoughts. She seemed worried, and that was rare because Beatrix did not have a habit of brooding.

  “You are wondering if you should go to Central Park and meet him,” I said finally, when we were crossing the final meadow that would lead to the Mount and home again.

  “No,” she said, holding aside a branch for me to pass. “I have decided. If I refuse, he will think it is because I haven’t forgiven him.” She released the branch, stooped, and pulled a thistle from the hem of her skirt.

  “And you have.”

  “Completely. Because I understand what drove him. He thought . . . we both thought . . . we had a chance of happiness together. He asked me to go away with him. I hesitated, Daisy. Lovers should never hesitate. When impulse is lost, what is left to us but duty?” She crumbled the browned thistle in her glove and let the wind carry it away.

  She looked young when she said this, even younger than she had looked in Rome, those years ago. There were freckles on her nose from her work outdoors, and she balanced on one foot, then another, checking her hem for other thistles.

  I had an eerie sense that she had somehow stepped outside of time, or at least was immune to it in a way that others weren’t. Perhaps it was just the gray wintry day, come so suddenly at the end of a brilliant autumn, or perhaps it was our new sense of solitude at the Mount, but at that moment I reached my hand to take hers, to make sure she was substantial, not just a shadow or one of those strange moving pictures I had seen at the princess’s salon in Paris, one-dimensional figures made of points of light and dark.

  “Meet with him,” I agreed. “End the wondering and worrying.” She kept hold of my hand and we finished our walk like that, hand in hand.

  TWENTY

  When we arrived back at the Mount, there was a great to-do in the front hall. Teddy had found Arturo in the library and was reprimanding him soundly. Arturo stood there, head high, refusing to be subservient, meek, apologetic.

  Arturo caught my eye, and I saw such dangerous defiance in him that I felt a little dizzy, the way I felt when one of my children stood too close to a cliff edge.

  “It is just a book, Mr. Wharton,” I said, placing myself between the two men.

  “It is not. It is a principle!” Teddy roared. “Servants do not come into the house unless they are sent for, and they certainly do not come in the front door!” He was so angry he spluttered when he spoke.

  Edith, who had been upstairs changing for dinner, heard the commotion and came to the top of the stairs.

  “What is this racket?” she asked, obviously out of sorts herself.

  When I thought the situation couldn’t get worse, Reynolds appeared, hat in hand, face red with anger.

  “He’s cut the boxwood to the ground,” he muttered. “I asked him to trim the bushes, and he cut them to the ground.”

  Arturo shrugged and lifted both hands, palms up, in a gesture I remembered from Rome, a gesture that said both I didn’t know and I don’t care.

  “You’re dismissed!” Teddy shouted.

  “Wait just a minute,” Edith said, coming down the stairs a pace faster than she normally moved.

  “And don’t you tell me this is your house and I can’t manage the servants!” Teddy roared at her.

  Edith smiled her coldest, calmest smile. “Of course I won’t,” she said, though I thought that was exactly what she had intended to say.

  She took a deep breath and looked from Teddy to Reynolds to Arturo and back again at Teddy, and gave up the battle.

  “I will give you a month’s wages,” she told Arturo. “But you should leave tomorrow.”

  Teddy smiled like a playground bully who has gotten in the last shove. Reynolds looked mighty pleased himself. Arturo, for the first time, looked a little frightened, his arrogance driven away by the realization that he was now both homeless and unemployed. Too late, he took off his hat and hung his head. He was still holding the filched book in his other hand. He offered it to Teddy, who refused to take it from him.

  “Put it there,” he said, nodding at the hall table, not allowing even that slight contact between them.

  “What will I do?” Arturo asked, looking younger than ever.

  “Come with me to New York,” I said without thinking.

  “Oh, really, Daisy,” Teddy complained.

  “And do what?” Arturo asked, some of his arrogance already returning.

  “Not work in the garden, that’s for certain,” I said. “There will be odd jobs, perhaps some secretarial work since you are bookish.”

  Nostalgia is one of the strongest emotions. Arturo’s dark good looks, his accent, his young man’s arrogance, had reminded me so much of my long-ago beau, Giovanelli. He was certain to remind Gilbert, as well.

  It had worked once. Perhaps it would work a second time. I had come to a decision, those last few days at the Mount. I had spent a week with Minnie, who had been divorced for a long time, with Edith, who was on the verge of divorce, it seemed, and with Beatrix, who had never married, and I longed for Gilbert, for my marriage, as flawed as it was.

  • • • •

  That afternoon, our bags packed and loaded into Edith’s automobile, Teddy behind the wheel looking dashing in his leather driving coat and goggles, Beatrix and I clambered into the crowded backseat and waved good-bye to Edith. Minnie sat next to Teddy.

  “Don’t forget that some of the peony roots still have to go in,” Beatrix called to Edith, holding down her hat. “Make sure Reynolds waters them thoroughly.”

  “Yes, dear,” Edith said. “Your instructions will be followed.” She was obviously distracted, her thoughts still following the progress of poor Lily Bart’s downfall.

  As Teddy roared down the gravel drive, Beatrix and I looked over our shoulders at Edith and her home, both of them so lovely and regal, both haunted in their own distinctive way. Edith had already turned away and was partly through the door, her guests forgotten.

  I never returned to the Mount again.

  • • • •

  “I’ve never been back,” I said aloud, interrupting the creaking of Walter’s chair next to mine.

  “It is so hard to leave lovely places,” sighed Mrs. Avery. “My daughter has a home on Commonwealth Avenue. Not as grand as the Mount, I’m sure, but quite beautiful. Ceilings so high I can’t touch them even with a stepladder, and lace at every window. She has a piano in her parlor and china from England. I go there at Christmas for the week.”

  It was our last night at the inn. The next day I would return to New York, and Mrs. Avery to Boston. Walter hadn’t said his destination. He seemed out of sorts, undecided about something.

  Because it was a Sunday evening and many of the other guests had already left, the inn was quiet and somehow desolate. No piano music wafted to us from the parlor, and the usual background sounds of conversation from the taproom were muffled. I was reminded of the day Henry and Edith’s other friends had left the Mount, the day that opened the door into gray winter, my last day there. Mrs. Avery was right. It was hard to leave a lovely place.

  “Shall we try the Ouija board again?” Mrs. Avery suggested.

  “No, I think not,” I said, remembering the M it had given us the other night. I didn’t want to communicate with the dead. Not that way. “I have a better idea. Do you have gasoline in your car, Walter? Let’s go for a drive. Mrs. Avery, get your wrap in
case it grows chilly, and put on comfortable shoes.”

  It was a night of a bright moon and countless stars, a beautiful evening. I felt a sense of excitement, sitting next to Walter, the wind blowing on my face through the open window of his Frontmobile sedan. The automobile was different—Edith’s vehicle had been an open black box set atop four wheels, and this sedan was faster, closed, secure—and the company was different. Yet as the trees flew past us, and the hills, and the new homes that had been built in the hills—as I instructed Walter, turn here, slow a bit there—I felt as if I were going to visit not just a house but myself as I had once been.

  “It’s been sold,” I told them, holding on to my hat just as Beatrix had held on to hers the day we left the Mount. “Before the war, when Edith realized she couldn’t continue with Teddy, she let it go. Her beautiful, beloved Mount. It was sold to a banker from New Orleans.”

  “My daughter married a banker,” said Mrs. Avery from the dark depths of the backseat. “They are very well off.”

  “Is that where we are going, Daisy, to the Mount?” Walter asked.

  “Turn here. Stop. Now we must walk a bit.” For days I had been just a few miles from the Mount, but it felt like a universe away, a lifetime away. I was going to see it again. It was time, and perhaps it would be part of my healing, part of that hard walk back from grief.

  Walter pulled to the side of the road and turned off the motor. The night was still, the air thick with expectation and the occasional chirps and whirring of frogs and insects. We got out by the white picket gate at the entrance to Edith’s former home. It was darker there than it had been at the inn. The house was at the far end of the drive, and if lights shone forth from those windows, we couldn’t see them.

  “This is trespassing,” whispered Mrs. Avery.

  “Shh. Look, all the windows in the gatekeeper’s house are dark. He’s asleep, if there is still a gatekeeper. If anyone stops us, we will say we are lost. Come on.” I took her hand and pulled her out of the backseat. She laughed softly and gave in, following Walter, who was following me through the darkness.