A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  • • • •

  A week later, Beatrix took an hour from her work to visit the museum again. I couldn’t be there that day, so she went alone. She still studied the old masters, as Sargent and Olmsted had recommended, and was sitting in front of one of the Poussins in the collection, sketching the background trees and trying to identify the herbs in the foreground of the painting. She thought perhaps the painter had worked more for effect than accuracy, because she couldn’t place the herbs in her well-informed taxonomy, but only knew they seemed familiar.

  Had they been in Magda’s garden, in Rome? A thrill went through her and she shivered a little at the memory of the old, wild garden in the courtyard of Amerigo’s palazzo. She was certain that, indeed, these were herbs that had been growing there in a crumbling stone trough. She sketched them carefully, determined to go through her shelf of herbals for a definite identification.

  When she had finished her sketch she stood and, smoothing her skirts, turned to leave. On an impulse, she went to the balcony that overlooked the grand marble staircase of the museum. People milled about below, women in their heavy winter woolen dresses and fur wraps, men in their tall hats and black jackets, children in red and white with rabbit-fur mittens and muffs.

  A face in the crowd turned and looked up at hers. Amerigo. He smiled, a warm, brilliant smile, and waved. He blew her a kiss, and that surprised her. He had never before, not in Rome or Berlin, not in Central Park when they had met days before, made such a familiar gesture in public. It moved her in unexpected ways, that kiss in her direction, and she decided to go downstairs and speak with him one more time. He would be leaving soon. They wouldn’t meet again in this lifetime, she thought. She put her pencil and sketchbook in her bag and hurried down the marble stairs. That journey seemed to take a hundred years, and she realized she was very eager to see him once more, to say good-bye. It was a strange compulsion, different from when she had first seen him in the Borghese gardens, or at the ball in Berlin, or even in Central Park. She remembered, she wanted to tell him about the seeds that Magda had given her. She seemed no longer in control of her own feet, so inexorably did they carry her downstairs to him.

  But he was already gone when she made her way to where he had been standing.

  Why hadn’t he waited for her? Well, it didn’t really matter. She pulled on her gloves and adjusted her hat to prove to herself her own indifference. They had said everything that needed to be said, hadn’t they? It would have been good, though, to tell him how unexpectedly well the seeds had grown in her Bar Harbor garden. Her face felt warm, as if that kiss blown through the air had actually reached her. She touched her cheek with her gloved hand and felt a twin kiss, there on her palm, where his lips had once rested.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Oh, how lovely!” said Mrs. Avery. “Sad and happy, all at the same time.” She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  “Control yourself, Mrs. Avery,” Mrs. Ballinger reprimanded, tugging at her too-tight jacket, but her bright pink dress kept peeking through the gap. It was another warm August day, but one of the beeches outside the inn had already started to turn. It was the kind of day when gardeners hurry to give the phloxes and black-eyed Susans a last weeding and feeding before the blooming season is past. Beatrix would be sorting through iris and peony roots, already planning for next year.

  The green, gentle hills around Lenox were as beautiful as a girl in first bloom, but I was looking forward to the colors and the coolness of autumn.

  We were having a cup of coffee in the train station, Mrs. Avery, Walter, Mrs. Ballinger, and myself. Walter had driven us from the inn and decided to wait with us for the train. Our luggage was piled around the table in awkward mountains of plaid and leather cases. I had finally learned to travel with a minimum of wardrobe, toiletries, and books, but at such moments I missed the days when there were maids and footmen to ease the labor and discomforts of travel.

  I hadn’t traveled with a maid in tow for years and had learned the hard way to count my cases and make sure all were accounted for before getting on or off the train. My mother’s mourning brooch, several unfinished novels, a knitted blanket, lambskin gloves, a silver cigarette case . . . all had disappeared with several of my lost travel cases. When I remembered how Mr. Winters and I had once traveled, with carts and carts of trunks and cases, all looked after by servants, it seemed inconceivable.

  “You’ve come down in the world,” Walter had said the evening before, when I had told him about Gilbert’s gambling. Perhaps. Or maybe I had arrived early where many of us were heading—into a more equalitarian age, away from a world of preordained classes and positions. How I wished my mother were still alive, so that I could discuss some of these things with her. She would have laughed to see her little Daisy marching with a placard for women’s rights, her daughter who once cared mostly that her gowns were flattering, that she caught all eyes when she entered a room.

  Walter was quieter than usual that morning as we drank our coffee and waited for the train in the little Lenox station. He was still thinking about the vote in Tennessee, how women’s suffrage would soon be the law of the land. My finishing a love story in which the woman goes her independent way had not lightened his mood.

  “What next?” he grumbled. “I suppose women will want to fly airplanes or become doctors.”

  They already had, but I did not point this out to him. In my years of campaigning for women’s rights, I had encountered so many of his type, decent sorts who worked hard, endured the good and the bad that life puts in their path, but despite their inherent goodness resist change with all their stubborn strength. He would come round eventually, perhaps by the time his granddaughters were old enough to vote. Change does not require unanimity, only that enough people agree that change is needed.

  “Your story doesn’t have an ending,” Mrs. Ballinger complained, reaching for the last tea biscuit. She had given up trying to close the gap in her jacket. “What, for instance, happened to Mrs. Wharton?”

  “She and Teddy were divorced just before the war. It was inevitable. An earlier generation of wives gritted their teeth and endured, but Edith, for all her love of classical styles, was a modern woman. After she sold the Mount, her beloved home, she moved to France. She was there during the war, working with refugees. She’s still there and, from what Beatrix says, intends to stay there.”

  “All very well,” said Mrs. Ballinger, taking a little folding fan from her purse and fanning herself vigorously. “But you promised us a ghost story. Where is the ghost?”

  “There were those strange events at the Mount,” offered Mrs. Avery.

  “I think there was more to it,” said Walter. “You haven’t finished, Daisy.” He winked at me.

  • • • •

  It’s easy to remember the early years, when you are young and full of hope; even the middle years, when life is all busyness, raising children, housekeeping, travel, the constant social rounds. It’s more difficult to revisit what comes after: the children who have moved away and are busy with their own lives, the husband who grows into early old age, the disappointments and worries and fears. Illness. Death.

  “Think of spring,” Beatrix would tell me when I felt weighted down. “Think of yellow tulips and red peonies. Remember the old yellow barn and the field of daisies, your namesake.”

  In the years after that last meeting with Amerigo, Beatrix was too busy to succumb to the darker moods that began to occasionally visit me. She helped design the grounds for Bishop Satterlee’s cathedral in Washington; a walled garden with raised walks and a sunken center garden for Crosswicks, the Newbolds’ estate in Pennsylvania; a country garden for Mrs. Gordon Bell in Connecticut; floral gardens for the estate of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane in Lenox; a magnificent drift of delphiniums and roses for Theodate Pope’s estate at Hill-Stead. (This had been a challenge, because Theodate hated reds and the ga
rden had to be exclusively blue, pink, and white.) For Edward Whitney’s home in Oyster Bay, she built a trellis for roses and vines, and thirty-eight different flower beds, and a dell full of iris.

  Beatrix proved, if there were still any doubt, that it was possible to be a lady and to be employed, to work as hard as a man works. She was born into an age when women were decorative and legally no more than children, and she helped bring women into a new era.

  When she saw a weed in her path, she plucked it, never mind how regal the company or numerous the laborers available to do the work. The young woman who had hesitated in the Borghese gardens over that weed in the path had grown into a superbly confident woman, and one not afraid of either hard work or dirty hands.

  Nor was any task too small for her. My Gilbert died of the Spanish flu. We had survived early passion, a house full of children, the quarrels and hurts of domesticity, and that longer-lasting, deeper pain of his gambling. We had survived all that, and the war, too, but when the soldiers brought home the Spanish flu, Gilbert did not survive that. Beatrix designed his monument, a simple tombstone engraved with a weeping willow—no angels or carved wreaths, just a few elegant lines of Gilbert’s favorite kind of tree.

  “He was weak, but he loved you, Daisy, and he was as true to you as he could be. A wife can’t ask much more, can she?” she said. “A willow is for faithfulness.”

  But I get ahead of myself. Nine years after Beatrix’s last meeting with Amerigo in New York, Princeton University was building its graduate college, and they asked her to work with them on the designs for the grounds. She agreed, after presenting her salary demands, and began her sketches.

  At dinner one night with Mr. John Grier Hibben, who was the college president, she was arguing in favor of a campus based on linkage rather than separation. “No false boundaries,” she said. “Movement should flow freely through an unbounded landscape.”

  Mr. Hibben’s eyebrows shot up. Would that mean moving the golf clubhouse?

  It was a formal dinner, that evening in the spring of 1913, and conversation had wandered from Euclid to Freud. The dinner was long and the meal a little too heavy for Beatrix, who was a light eater. The windows were open and the spring evening wafted in, teasing her with the scent of blue and yellow hyacinths.

  They had sat her next to an art historian who was writing a book on the Elgin Marbles, and Beatrix listened patiently. She became aware of a man seated on the other side of the table, another historian. He was talking with great animation to the woman next to him, his fingers dancing over the tablecloth in the eagerness of his storytelling. Beatrix began to wonder what they were talking about.

  She looked at the professor more closely. He was not young. He was already balding, but he had the broad shoulders of a laborer, not an academic. There was something in his face that intrigued her. She decided he looked like Caravaggio’s self-portrait as he painted it in David and Goliath, shaggy and shocked and intense.

  Max Farrand wasn’t as shaggy or as old as Goliath-Caravaggio, but his expression mimicked the painting strangely. It was, she realized, the look of passion in his eyes. Whatever were they talking about?

  Mr. Hibben poured more wine and asked another question about borders and boundaries, obviously anxious over the proposed moving of the golf clubhouse.

  “Lines of desire,” Beatrix insisted.

  This time, the historian on the other side of the table began to study her.

  “Paths should be established only where people will actually want to walk,” she explained. “Path follows desire, not vice versa. If it means cutting through a lawn rather than around it, that is what should be done. People don’t always follow a route designated for them by others. Nor should they.”

  When dinner was finally over and they were allowed to stand, help themselves to brandy, and wander about freely, Beatrix went up to the historian and introduced herself. She gave him her hand.

  He took it and kissed it, demonstrating how effectively he had studied the manners of the eighteenth century. This gallantry pleased her. People often think that once a woman has chosen a profession, she has renounced flirtation and any offer of courtliness from the opposite sex. Not true.

  Max Farrand was a specialist on Benjamin Franklin and was, at that time, writing his great work, The Framing of the Constitution. He was forty-four years old, a bachelor in tweeds, and a man with an astounding memory.

  “We met once before,” he said, refusing to let go of her hand. “At the world’s fair.”

  “Are you the young man who gave me his umbrella?”

  “I am. Or was.”

  “Such a long time ago.”

  “Time has been kind to you, Miss Jones.” Still he would not let go of her hand. It takes a certain stubbornness to be a bachelor for so long, and across that dinner table Max Farrand had already decided his bachelor years were over. Now he would be stubborn about his unwillingness to let her go.

  “I am so curious,” she said. “What were you talking about at dinner, with your friend? May I ask?” The staff had come in to begin clearing the table, so they moved away from the clatter to the French doors of the terrace.

  Max grinned. “The first time Benjamin Franklin visited old Madame du Barry, she was in her bath. He offered to come back later, but the servant instead showed him into the chamber where Madame was in the tub. He never quite got over it.”

  “Do you speak often of Benjamin Franklin’s flirtations?” Beatrix asked, amused.

  “Whenever possible. He is my academic specialty.”

  “Then I should tell you, my great-great-grandfather was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, when his family lived in Philadelphia.”

  “What a strange coincidence. You must see if you can remember any family stories about him. I will take notes.”

  “Very strange,” she agreed. “Yes. I will.”

  “Will you walk with me in the garden, Miss Jones?”

  The garden was a formal one to match the Italianate house, and as they walked, Beatrix commented on the severity with which the hedge had been trimmed. She favored a technique of “plucking” rather than shearing, to produce feathery, soft edges.

  “Lines of desire,” Max Farrand said. “What an interesting phrase.” He was taller even than Beatrix, and when she looked up at him she knew her life had changed. The woman who argued the merits of New World gardens over Old had met a man of similar sensibility, a man who had devoted his life’s work to Benjamin Franklin, that New World statesman who had been a friend to her great-great-grandfather.

  The walk turned into several walks over the days, and then came letters and phone calls and visits. Max began to court her, and she let him. His conversation charmed her, and he made it quite clear that if he should marry, it would not interfere with his studies and he would expect any wife of his to be similarly concerned with a life of the mind, not just simple domesticity.

  It grew into love. Why would Beatrix resist such a man? To be absolutely honest with him, though, she decided to tell him about her first trip to Rome, about Amerigo Massimo and what he had once meant to her. Not to confess anything, but to warn him, perhaps, that once she gave herself over to a declared passion, this time there would be no hesitation.

  Max listened calmly and with a show of interest, though he was much more interested in Beatrix’s future than her past. “I have heard of the Massimo family,” Max said at one point. “They were in possession of a small sketch Franklin had made, or at least it had been attributed to Franklin, though it turned out to be a forgery.”

  In a garden, paths converge. There are vortexes around which everything revolves, plants, time, history. Beatrix felt the different paths of her life begin to swirl, like a waltz, into this growing intimacy with Max Farrand. She already knew they would be married; they had simply to pick the date.

  But when Beatrix spoke of the last time she had
seen Amerigo, in the museum, Max frowned.

  “Impossible,” he said quietly. “You must be remembering dates and events incorrectly.”

  “No, I am not,” she insisted. “He was at the museum on Sunday, December fourteenth. I remember the date clearly. He waved up at me.”

  “No,” Max insisted. “Amerigo Massimo died the week before, hit by an automobile on Madison Avenue. I remember it specifically because it was the day I learned that the drawing his family owned was not a Franklin sketch. And then that evening there was the little paragraph in the paper about the elder Massimo’s son being struck down by a vehicle in New York.”

  “It was in the paper? But I read the papers. How did I miss it? And I saw Amerigo at the museum. I know I did. We waved to each other. He looked up and smiled at me.”

  Max led her to a bench, just as Amerigo had years before led her to a bench in the Borghese gardens.

  Beatrix sat. “Dead?” she said. “All these years, when I have thought of him, I thought of him in his palazzo, with his wife and children. I have imagined him growing older. Portly and gentle. And he has been dead, all these years?” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her mouth. She didn’t cry. The pain, the surprise, were such that tears would have seemed common, useless.

  “I have made you sad,” Max said. “I’m sorry.” He took her other hand and held it.

  “But how?” she said after a moment. “I saw him. I know I saw him.”

  “Sometimes,” Max said, “we should accept an occasional miracle.”

  “I was going to tell him about the seeds,” she said. “I had forgotten, you see, when we were in the park; I hadn’t told him. He gave me some seeds when I was in Rome, for a vine. I planted them in my garden at Reef Point. I still haven’t been able to identify the plant, but there it is, a Roman vine growing in Maine.”