A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  There is something exciting about being in the dark night when you are supposed to be asleep, being where you are not supposed to be, when you are not supposed to be. It reminded me of the night in the Colosseum with Giovanelli, that sense of adventure and rule breaking.

  We stumbled about till our eyes grew accustomed and we could make out treetops against dark sky, green grass reflecting patches of moonlight. When I felt the comforting crunch of gravel beneath my feet, I stepped firmly onto it, Walter and Mrs. Avery on either side of me.

  “This,” I said, “is the drive that Beatrix designed for Edith’s house. It is one of the most beautiful paths in the world, a journey you make with your soul as well as with your body. Can you see?”

  “Barely,” whispered Walter, though I could sense he was excited, too.

  We walked for almost half a mile through a tidy double avenue of sugar maples, that distinctly New World tree. Their leaves whispered overhead. Once the maple avenue ended, the drive curved into a dense wood where different varieties of trees huddled together in thick groups on either side of the path. “Do you feel the difference,” I whispered, “moving from that formal avenue of trees into a dark woods? Beatrix meant this as a journey through time as well as space. You can move backward and forward. You go through the tame and the wild before you arrive. Appropriate for a writer’s home, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a little frightening,” Mrs. Avery whispered back.

  “But look. See what happens when you come out of the woods.” We arrived in a clearing, and before us, on a hill, was Edith’s beautiful Mount, white and regal, almost glowing in the darkness, surrounded by green shapes and gray paths illuminated by moonlight.

  Mrs. Avery sighed. Walter took my hand and cleared his throat.

  “Quite a house,” he said. “They don’t build ’em like this anymore.”

  “No,” I agreed. “They don’t. Edith planned every detail herself. I think she loved this house as much as she ever loved a person. Maybe more.”

  “Look,” whispered Mrs. Avery. “There are lights in the windows upstairs. We had better leave, in case they set out dogs.”

  I didn’t want to go. I wanted to sneak up to the window that had once been Henry James’ room and look in and see if some shadow of him still slept there or wrote at the little desk. I wanted to sit in the Italian garden where Beatrix and I had sat after that evening, wondering what it meant to hear voices in the darkness, where no one was. I wanted to erase entire years, all the loss and worry, and go back to my week at the Mount, so that I could also go back to that day when I returned home to New York, and Gilbert was there, waiting for me.

  “Come on, Daisy.” Walter pulled gently on my arm.

  We were quiet during the long walk back to the automobile and the drive to the inn, lost in our own thoughts. A visit to the past does that, makes you feel ghostly, like a visitor from a different world. It wasn’t really that long ago since I had left the Mount, a decade in real time, yet I was so different.

  The world was different, too. It wasn’t just a matter of unused calling cards and dated flounced skirts, Irving Berlin being played in the parlor rather than Strauss. Since 1915, when the Lusitania had been sunk by the Germans, when fear became the common mood, and then in 1917 when we had formally entered the war . . . since then the world had become a changed place.

  Some were calling those previous decades the Gilded Age, but I think Edith had been closer to the real meaning of those prewar years. They had been an age of innocence. A kiss in the moonlight could change a girl’s destiny forever; a marriage that ended in divorce was a moral catastrophe, not a mere incident of living arrangements.

  Had they been better times? Not for most. They had merely been different. I think that was why Beatrix wanted an American rather than Old World sensibility for her gardens. We move forward. We must celebrate who we are now, not who we used to be.

  And yet . . . in a garden time doesn’t really exist at all, except as a season that comes and goes and then comes again.

  It was well past midnight when we arrived back at the inn. Walter left his automobile parked on the street rather than waking the parking attendant, and we crept up the steps of the slumbering inn like teenagers sneaking in after curfew.

  To our surprise, Mrs. Ballinger was sitting on the porch, waiting for us.

  “I think you’d want to know,” she said sternly. “They voted for women’s suffrage in Tennessee. It was on the radio.”

  “Hurrah!” I shouted, not caring whom I awoke.

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Walter, scratching his chin.

  Every state in the union had approved voting rights for women. Soon they would have to make it a national law. We had won.

  “Where have you been?” Mrs. Ballinger asked suspiciously.

  “For a drive,” Walter said. “Only a drive.”

  She sniffed, looked down her nose, then went upstairs to her room.

  “Well, I’m for bed. Good night, Daisy. Good night, Walter.” Mrs. Avery gave us each a little kiss on the cheek and disappeared into the dark shadows of the downstairs hallway.

  “I’m not tired yet, Daisy. Are you?” Walter asked when we were alone.

  “Not at all. Shall we sit on the porch for a little longer?”

  “I’ve a better idea.” He went into the darkened taproom and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “I left a dollar on the bar,” he said.

  We sat on a bench in the rose garden, surrounded by their fragrance and an occasional hint of pink where the moonlight fell on petals.

  “What happened?” Walter asked, when he poured our second drinks.

  “When? So much has happened,” I said.

  “Something that was like a curtain falling, or a door shutting.” Walter was perceptive. “After you left the Mount.”

  And I resumed my story for him.

  • • • •

  When I arrived home after my week at the Mount, Mr. Winters was there, waiting, and he was none too pleased to learn I had hired a new servant, and an untrained one at that, and without speaking of the matter with him first.

  What he meant by “speaking of the matter” meant asking permission, and I knew if I had, he would have said no.

  I said that to him.

  “And yet you went ahead and did it. He looks somehow familiar. Daisy, what has happened to us?” His eyes were red, his collar loosened.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me, Gilbert?” I asked. “I am very pleased that you are here tonight. You’ve been away so much lately.”

  We were in his study, that room that always smelled richly of leather and cigars and newsprint. Gilbert, in our travels, had collected Oriental pieces, and his study was outfitted with inlaid tables, a wall-sized carved dragon screen, and displays of two-sided embroideries. It was, I thought, too busy for Edith’s taste, but I enjoyed the effect and had always envied him that study.

  We sat in the early-evening darkness, and when a maid came to light the lamps, Gilbert sent her away. Through the heavy closed door I could hear Robert speaking with the new footman, Arturo. Robert was home from school for a few days, taking time from his law studies to recover from a cough, except the cough wasn’t going away. My son was ill, and there were Mr. Winters and I, frozen anew in silent combat over . . . over what? A new servant in the house?

  “You should be thankful,” Mrs. Manstey had said to me the month before, at her dinner party. “It is only the horses, a card game now and then. So many husbands keep mistresses. Oh, this new age. Where will it all lead?”

  “I’m tired,” I said to Gilbert. “I will go to bed now.”

  “Not yet. I have to tell you something.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Please.” I feared what he had to say, and I wanted one more night of my old life, just one more. But it wasn’t to be.
<
br />   “Daisy, I’ve lost it all.” He ran his hands through his hair.

  I sat down in the chair opposite him. He reached for my hands, but I folded them into my lap.

  “Surely not all,” I said quietly. “We can sell the house in Newport.”

  He laughed unpleasantly. “I mortgaged that years ago.”

  I felt cold and wished we could light the fire in the hearth, but no wood had been left there. There was dust on the mantelpiece; the carpet was unswept; the twin vases on the mahogany bookcase were empty. They were antique Japanese bronze, and they had been an anniversary present from me to him; I couldn’t remember when ever before they had been without flowers.

  All this in a single week, I thought. What will it be like a year from now? Ten years from now?

  “I’ve let two of the maids go,” he said. “And the sous-chef. There will have to be more cuts.”

  “What about India?” She was to have a coming-out ball that winter. “And Athena’s tutors?”

  “Athena can continue her studies on her own,” he said, running his hands through his hair, then flattening his hands against the top of the desk, the way people do when they are trying to get ahold of something to stop a fall. He looked like he was going to weep.

  Everything was lost except the brownstone on Fifth Avenue, which was in my name. We would keep our home. But we would do what others had been forced to do: sell my remaining jewelry, some of the art we had acquired, make do with less, become invisible, people who lived in large houses behind closed doors and thick drapes, rarely seen in public, certainly no longer invited to the balls and opera opening nights, because we couldn’t afford the box, return the supper invitations, purchase the necessary wardrobes.

  I laughed, and Gilbert looked up in amazement. “Don’t you see?” I asked. “This is how it began. Beatrix and I in Europe, hounded by Mrs. Haskell, who was buying everything she fancied, except the one thing that would have meant Beatrix’s happiness. Amerigo’s heirloom, The Wolf of Gubbio. Now we will be the sellers.”

  “I’ll get you some brandy,” Gilbert said. “Sit down, Daisy. Calm yourself.”

  “Have you told my brother?” I asked when he came back with the decanter and two glasses. Raymond had never liked Gilbert, even as a child, when he had found Gilbert in the garden in Vevey and Gilbert had refused to give him any candy. Oh, how Raymond must have gloated over this news.

  “Yes. We will still have a small income from your trust, enough to live on.”

  “In reduced circumstances, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  I think it devastated Gilbert and the girls more than me. They had been born to wealth, but I could remember a time when my own mother cooked Sunday dinner, a time before the full household staff was hired, before the house itself changed from a two-story farmhouse to a three-story brick town house.

  “I’m sorry, Daisy,” Gilbert said that evening. When he wept, he put his head in my lap, like a little boy.

  What a dreary autumn that was. The house staff shrank and shrank, one position after another gone, with tears and slammed doors, till there was a cook and a maid and not much else. Arturo stayed, having nowhere else to go, and worked for bed and board. I sent the seamstress away when she came with samples for new winter coats and gowns. I canceled our weekly order with the florist, and the French lessons and drawing tutor. India sulked when I explained her coming-out party must be held at home instead of in a ballroom, but she recovered herself soon. Athena promised she could learn as well on her own.

  The four eldest children were already living on their own and doing well, but they felt shame for what their father had done. It was months before Gil Jr. would visit us, months before Robbie would look him in the eye and speak with him.

  Life went on, just as gardens do. Winds and floods and frost may destroy them, but each spring some little green shoot appears, announcing that life does indeed go on. Some days, I felt like Lily Bart, who crept down and down the ladder instead of up, but I put that feeling away and determined there would be no self-pity, no long faces. My grandmother had milked a cow. I could darn my own stockings.

  I did not leave Gilbert, as more than a few friends advised. He had come back to me in his troubles, he had wept with me, and there was more to hold us together than there was to drive us apart. I had loved him once with all the passion and ambition and dreams of a young girl, and to deny him would be to deny a large part of myself.

  Eventually, I did forgive him. I realized his gambling was a weakness, stronger than himself, but not stronger than the promises I had made on our wedding day. Our love changed, became less about passion, about what intimacies happen between a man and a woman, and more about two friends trying to help each other through difficult times. He was much diminished and began to stoop and stayed at home rather than going to a club, but he was still Gilbert. I still belonged at his side.

  Our lives grew smaller, yet some friends stood by. Minnie invited us over for her Sunday afternoon salons, and we met some of the more interesting minds of the time there, either in person or through discussion of their works, the writers and politicians who were slowly reshaping the world, Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Theodore Dreiser; even that very strange woman who wrote in the rhythms of a stalling and starting automobile, Gertrude Stein.

  One of the most argumentative salons was about The Ladies’ Home Journal article by Grover Cleveland, who had written, “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Gilbert said. “It seems to me that society is doing the assigning of positions, and perhaps not all that well. Daisy has more common sense in her little finger than many men I know, and I don’t see that women could make any more problems in the world than we men already have.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Beatrix. Gilbert and I had sold most of my jewelry that week, and we would go home to bread and cheese for dinner, yet it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was snowing heavily the day Beatrix went to meet with Amerigo, almost two months after our week at the Mount. The sidewalks were icy and Fifth Avenue was a contrast of new white snow and brown ruts where traffic passed over.

  Beatrix was working on garden plans for several commissions that autumn, and though she didn’t speak of Amerigo, I knew she had been thinking about him. I could see it in the garden plans she showed me, the slight Italian influences that crept into her designs. We had made a point to meet once a week, and more and more it seemed those meetings with Beatrix were the lightest moments of my week. I could laugh, say anything that came into my mind, and know she would judge neither me nor Gilbert.

  Minnie had found me a small job at the hospital dispensary, which was very kind and thoughtful, since I could permit people to think that, like Minnie, I was a volunteer rather than a paid laborer. Such things mattered, for the sake of my two youngest daughters, who still had to be settled in life; it was necessary to spin a few illusions about our circumstances. There is poverty and there is genteel poverty; we aimed for the latter.

  So, that day when I met Beatrix, just before she was to have her reunion with Amerigo, I was coming from the dispensary, she from her office. We were two workingwomen meeting for an hour at the museum. I still had the smell of ether in my nostrils; she had ink on her fingers. That was the day when I looked hard at the question that had been swirling through my thoughts for months, perhaps years. Why should women be mere appendages to other people’s lives?

  Beatrix and I often spoke of the suffrage movement, but that day she had other things on her mind.

  “What is the point of it?” she asked that afternoon at the museum. “I have agreed to meet with him. But to what purpose?”
>
  They had just installed a new collection of Chinese porcelains, and we sat in front of them, admiring the whiteness of the glaze, the intense azure of the blue decorations, how a single brushstroke suggested a bird in flight, three strokes created a bridge over a river, eight strokes created a pair of lovers on that bridge. There was such a serenity to the ancient objects, a simplicity based on two colors, craft, a scene that the mind must register for exactly what it was: a lovers’ tryst.

  “Miss Jones?” A woman’s voice interrupted our thoughts. “Beatrix!”

  The wolfish Mrs. Haskett stood before us, cutting off our view of the Chinese porcelains.

  After marrying off her youngest daughter to an English lord, Mrs. Haskett had become, under Minnie’s influence, a “woman who read” and, having read, enjoyed having the authors come to visit her and provide interesting talk for her teas and dinner parties. She had purchased one of the brownstones on Fifth Avenue, not far from my own house, though hers was newer, larger, and grander in every way.

  “Mrs. Haskett,” said Beatrix, standing.

  Mrs. Haskett looked better as a woman of fifty than she had at forty. Her hair was white, but still very thick and full of waves, and the whiteness of her hair offset her olive complexion. The skin had shrunk back a little around her eyes, making them larger. She was well dressed, in sedate colors and soft lines—no more bustles and frills, but a sensible, if expensive, walking skirt and little jacket trimmed with fox.

  “How is Minnie? I saw dear Mr. James last week,” she said. “He came to visit and was full of tales about his adventures in the wilds of Lenox. Imagine. How clever of Mrs. Wharton to avoid Newport and instead build in Massachusetts.”

  “Are you here to see the new porcelains?” I asked, changing the conversation.

  “No. I am here to meet with the acquisitions committee. I have offered to sell them one of my paintings. You know it, Beatrix. That sweet little painting that Amerigo Massimo was offering. The Wolf of Gubbio? I purchased it some years ago.”