“They can be troublesome, these little boys,” he said, sitting as far away from her as the bench allowed. “It is better not to walk on your own in these gardens.”
“I see that now,” she said, her breath once again slow, steady, her golden voice even lighter, lovelier.
“May I introduce myself? Amerigo Massimo, at your service.”
“Miss Beatrix Jones.”
“Ah. American!” He seemed surprised. She did not have the air of the conqueror.
“Surely you enjoy a steady supply of them in Rome.”
He laughed. “Even so.”
“Amerigo,” she said. “The name of my country.”
“Yes. In fact, he was simply a mapmaker. In my family, the first son is always named Amerigo. In your language, it translates as Henry, does it not? It means ruler of the home. And Beatrix means blessed, the bringer of joy.” He stopped short, embarrassed. Surely that comment had been too personal, not the sort of thing you say to an unknown woman in a public garden.
They fell silent then, both uncertain of what would come next. They had not been formally introduced, and indeed their meeting had been under unfortunate circumstances. He will go back to his friends and laugh at the silly American, she thought. She will go back to her family and sneer at the shopworn Italian, he thought.
He was shopworn, an Americanism he had grown fond of, though he had learned the word in even more embarrassing circumstances—at Mrs. Haskett’s musical evening last week, whispered as he passed by. His suit, though of good quality, then as today, had been mended; his boots, polished till they reflected like a black mirror, had once been worn by his father and were older than many of the young women in the gardens that afternoon.
But she, the American, dazzled in her newness. They usually did. New frock, new hat, new boots, everything so new she sparkled with it. She wore her wealth more lightly than most of them, though, and by that he recognized breeding. Her earrings were small, though the dark amethysts were of excellent quality and well chosen to go with those pale eyes. The silk of her frock had a subtle sheen rather than a glare. Her hat had a single silk flower on it and no ribbons. He liked the openness of her gaze.
His expression pleased her equally. There was no nuance, no flirtatiousness, no double meaning. It was as honest as the sun. Yet she was very aware that he was a man, she a woman. Eden, she thought. That first look between Adam and Eve must surely have been a look of wonder and appreciation, of curiosity, of Eve thinking, He is for me, and I am for him.
The thought alarmed Beatrix. She had come to Italy to study gardens and art, not fall in love. This was not part of her plan and never had been. A volunteer, she thought. A plant that pops up where it has not been planted, a poppy in a cornfield, an oak sapling in a bed of speedwell. She knew how to deal with volunteers. They were dug up and discarded or rerooted in a more appropriate place.
Don’t be a schoolgirl. I shall never marry, she thought, yet she understood that inevitability a seed feels when the first drops of spring rain seep down to its resting place, awakening it.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat, a touch of shyness suddenly appearing. “I seem to have frightened off your potential guides. They were really pickpockets, you know. They are uneducated, these boys who accost visitors in the public places. If you wish, though, to view the Caravaggios, I will be most pleased to escort you. You must not go alone into the casina. Most unfortunate, but one must tell the truth about one’s city.”
“Yes,” she said. A single word. That, too, pleased him. They walked in silence, an arm’s length between them.
As they approached the casina, the shadows grew thicker and closer together; the open vista of the gardens changed to something quite different. Trees hovered over; shrubs close to the ground grabbed passing ankles. The air grew warmer, even more stagnant.
The casina smelled of damp and cat piss, but the white columns were lovely, the arched windows placed to frame scenes as beautiful as those hanging on the gallery walls. I must remember this, Beatrix told herself, burying the strange excitement she felt under a student’s obligation to observe. What is viewed outside a window is as important as what is viewed from the center of any garden. Pleasure and beauty. That was what gardens brought to the world, her world. It was what she wanted to give back to the world. Eden, she thought again. The garden before the fall.
Several clusters of visitors, mostly women escorted by the occasional male, father or brother or fiancé of one of them, paced the gallery where the Caravaggios were hung. They looked in her direction when Beatrix entered with Amerigo. One or two whispered. Rome was a large city, but not so large that people of a certain class were not continually encountering one another. Beatrix thought she recognized one or two faces from afternoon teas, musical evenings, concerts. She nodded and pretended to be deep in conversation with Amerigo to avoid the inevitable confrontation when pleasantries must be exchanged. She was hopeless with names.
Beatrix stood closer to Amerigo to deepen the impression that they were not in the gallery to share small talk with others. This was the mistake, of course. By that evening a certain circle of expatriate Americans in their rented foreign drawing rooms and parlors would be talking about that step closer. My dear. She put her arm through his. Such intimacy. Does the child know nothing?
Amerigo understood the purpose of Beatrix’s gesture and leaned slightly closer. Yes. A deep conversation, one that should not be interrupted with niceties. “See the brushstrokes in this corner. It is said an apprentice, in a fit of temper, painted over the master’s work in this area, for spite,” he said loudly as one of the matrons passed them.
Beatrix peered studiously at the painting.
That squint that would surely produce lines at the corners of her eyes in a few years made his heart skip a beat.
They stood in front of the Madonna of the Palafrenieri, and the glow of the Madonna’s rusty apricot dress cast a blush over Amerigo Massimo’s face.
“She looks a little like you,” he said.
“Not at all,” Beatrix protested, despite the auburn hair and white skin of the Madonna.
“Of course, you are right.” His voice changed. He became what he had promised, a tour guide. “This painting once hung in St. Peter’s, but it was removed. It was considered to have insufficient decorum for the subject matter.”
Beatrix nodded. The Madonna was sensual, her lips parted, her dress revealing more than should be revealed in a church, and the Christ child was no longer an infant but a young boy, standing fully naked and bathed in light. The figures spoke of physical beauty as well as the spiritual.
They moved on to the next painting. Here, she thought, is a source of dread. The boy, that dreadful boy, so serene, almost indifferent, as he holds up the gory head.
They were standing in front of one of the larger works, David with the Head of Goliath, and there was so much Amerigo Massimo wished her to see in the painting. Could she appreciate its glory, the beauty of the shepherd boy, David, dangling the grizzled head of his enemy in his left hand, the decapitating sword still in his right hand? The slingshot of legend was nowhere to be seen, as if Caravaggio were saying, See how victory elevates one from the humble to the grand. Engraved on the sword were the letters H-AS OS. Humilitas occidit superbiam. Humility kills pride. Beatrix remembered the phrase from one of her Latin primers.
“To fully understand this painting is to understand that every victory carries the germ of its own defeat,” Amerigo said.
“The boy is so beautiful. Like an angel,” Beatrix said. “A killing angel.”
“The head of Goliath is Caravaggio. It is a self-portrait.” The boy model painted as the shepherd, David, had been Caravaggio’s lover. Could she see that?
Her quick blush said yes, she saw, she understood the intense sexuality of the painting, the older lover totally defeated, destroyed by the youn
g beloved. This painting was not about victory in battle, but about the cruelty of desire. She felt the hot blood suffusing her cheeks, and more, she understood the aging painter’s lust for that beautiful boy, that destroying angel.
I should not have brought her here, he thought. She wore no wedding ring; she was an innocent, even though Italian girls of her age were mothers two or three times over.
“Why did the artist not paint in a background?” Beatrix asked, ignoring the assaulting sexuality of the painting. “That deep blackness covering everything behind them. Why?”
“You must dream what is there,” Amerigo said. “You must paint it in your own imagination. Caravaggio did not like to put pretty gardens in his paintings.”
“A specimen,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“In a garden, if the tree or shrub is of exceptional quality, one plants it alone rather than in a grouping, and in front of a different planting that does not call attention to itself.”
“Ah. Like an only child, adored and protected.”
Beatrix flinched slightly. She was an only child. “Yes,” she said, not yet knowing that he, too, had grown up in solitude, an only child.
“You must have for your home an exceptional gardener, a man with such wisdom and craft.” He and his family hadn’t had a gardener for many years, only old Magda, who threw buckets of water over the potted trees in the courtyard when she remembered, and raked up leaves, stuck seeds into pots with peasant abandon, indifferent to color and texture and arrangement.
“Yes,” Beatrix admitted. “The plans are mine, though. I designed our gardens myself. I do much of the maintenance as well.”
She said it with pride and more than a touch of defensiveness. He, like most, had already assumed it was man’s work.
“American women! Such viragos of cleverness and ambition!”
Was he mocking her? She stole a quick look at him. His face had closed like a book. They were being watched, she saw now. Mrs. Haskett had come into the casina with her three daughters.
Hadn’t the woman said she had an appointment?
Amerigo strode forward and made a little bow. He said something under his breath. Mrs. Haskett answered in an equally quiet voice. Beatrix understood immediately that they already knew each other.
“I must get back to my family,” Beatrix said. “I have been gone too long.”
“Miss . . . Jones, isn’t it?” Mrs. Haskett said, knowing full well it was Beatrix but wanting to return the insult she had suffered an hour before. “We meet again.” There was an unpleasant note in her voice. Her eyes went back and forth, from Beatrix to Amerigo, and there were questions and judgments in her gaze.
“I will take you back to your family,” Amerigo said, turning away from Mrs. Haskett. “It is not wise to walk alone here.”
Beatrix felt Mrs. Haskett’s gaze burning into her back as they walked away.
They returned by a different path, shorter, he promised, since she was in a hurry. It curved behind the casina, as natural in its flowing lines as a stream. This path suited her better than the formal allées, with their too-strict geometry, their insistence on order above all else.
“Look,” she said, just as the path began to turn into a formal allée and the vast expanse of the Borghese gardens came again into view. A lone flower grew between the flagstones, a pale and fragile stem of veronica. “It is blooming in a very dangerous place. See, it has already been trodden. And it is blooming very early.”
He bent and she held her breath, thinking he intended to pluck it for her. Such a silly gesture, even though it was only a volunteer, something growing out of its proper time and place.
Instead, he straightened its stem, turned it up toward the sun. “It will not last the season, or even the week. But one must give it its chance.”
Beatrix closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her face, thinking of herself as that plant growing where it should not, yet being given its chance. She could almost imagine he had touched her face rather than the veronica.
He kept a formal distance between them, but when they approached uneven steps he took her elbow. By unspoken agreement, the second time this happened he kept his hand on her elbow. They moved a little closer, their steps matching, and it seemed to Beatrix as if a new center of gravity had been created, that Rome and Europe and the planet earth and all the stars of the universe now revolved around them. They had begun with a miracle, that little flower blooming out of season, out of place. She was certain there were other miracles to follow.
I shall never marry, a little voice echoed back in her thoughts, and she felt the private earthquake of dissonance that occurs when one’s purpose no longer suits one’s emotions.
He pulled her hand through the crook of his arm, and they walked like that, not speaking, both totally transported by that casual contact with the other. When they came in view of the table where Edith and Teddy and Minnie sat, Beatrix slid her arm out of that tender angle between his forearm and breast. When they made their farewells it was with a great deal of formality. She felt the change in herself, though.
Mrs. Haskett, watching from the casina, also felt a slight shift of the earth beneath her feet when she saw Amerigo Massimo making that formal little bow to the American girl, Beatrix Jones. The forced and constant smile on her face disappeared.
FOUR
That evening, in their suite at the Hotel d’Italie, Minnie Jones sat retucking strands of dark hair into the chignon low on her neck as Beatrix read to her. The spine of the Baedeker was as broken from use as that of the ancient family Bible; on the round, cloth-covered table towered a pile of books on the history of Italy. Tomorrow they would visit the Casa Respiglia and the Roman Forum; the next day they would travel to Frascati to see Villa Aldobrandini and the ruins of Tusculum. Their custom had become to read in the evening before, as preparation for the next day’s visits.
Despite their efficient preparations, this trip felt unusual, fraught somehow. Like others of her class and set, Minnie had traveled often to Europe. One of her recurring dreams was that of waking up on a ship, in the middle of the ocean, and not remembering if she was being carried to or from Europe. But once the divorce was finalized, her life would be altered. Europe would be where he lived, with his mistress. Every drawing room she walked into would buzz with the scandal and more than a touch of judgment for her failures. Or worse, pity.
The thought of pity from others made Minnie slam her brush onto the table. Beatrix paused in her reading.
Mother and daughter sat still and silent. “Do you want to discuss it?” Beatrix asked after a long while.
“No. There seems nothing to say. Read again that part about the facade of the Villa Medici,” Minnie said. “I like to know what I am looking at.” Her voice suggested that once, when she had been young and vulnerable, she had not known what she was looking at when she first beheld Freddie Jones. Mr. James had warned her, and she hadn’t listened.
A large vase of dahlias stood on the book-strewn table, sent not by her husband but by her husband’s lawyer, who was preparing the papers in advance of her visit. It was deemed wasteful to discard them, yet mother and daughter pointedly avoided looking at those awful orange dahlias from the even more awful lawyer who represented Mr. Jones in his divorce proceedings against Mrs. Jones.
It had been sadly appropriate, Beatrix thought, that the lawyer had sent dahlias. Had he known that the plant was famous among gardeners for its morphological variations? Plant a dahlia from seed and you’ll never be certain of what it will grow into, not the color or shape or height. A seed-grown dahlia was the epitome of unpredictability; a seed-grown dahlia is as dangerous as a marriage based solely on youthful passion.
“Who was that young man you were walking with?” Minnie asked now, putting down the brush and turning from her mirror to her daughter. “Today. At the gardens.”
“Signor Amerigo Massimo,” said Beatrix, who had never told a lie to her mother, nor kept a secret. “He rescued me from a group of boys who were pestering me.”
“A good face. Even seen from a distance,” Minnie said. “He seemed to be a gentleman.”
“He was. And I won’t see him again, I’m certain.”
“Beatrix, you are already becoming a little set in your ways. You have decided against marriage, I know, and therefore have closed yourself off from the possibility of passion. Don’t turn away. I am your mother, and I will speak of this. Not all marriages become disasters. I worry that I have set you a bad example. Edith as well. She and Teddy. Well, I won’t say more.”
“You have been the best of examples.” Beatrix sat next to her mother and put her arm around her shoulders. “You have allowed me to become independent.”
“People will soon whisper that you are becoming an old maid.”
“Let them. I have my work, my gardens. I will make a profession of it.”
“A woman landscape designer.” Minnie raised one arched eyebrow. “They will more than whisper about that.”
“Let them. We can’t live in a manner meant to merely suit casual conversation. Signor Massimo was startled when I spoke of my work, but he quickly ascribed it to American eccentricity.”
“Your conversation with him seems to have progressed to private matters.” Minnie stood and rearranged the books on the table. Her impulse had been to hug Beatrix, but her daughter was several inches taller and such a style of embrace had been difficult for years. That was the Jones’ blood showing up. Her own family had been smaller in stature.
“We had been discussing a Caravaggio, and the painting had made me think of gardens. Did you know that Caravaggio did not like to paint landscapes?”
“He probably found them too pretty, too common. Though how one can find Caravaggio’s work to be pretty is beyond me.” Minnie turned back to the mirror and tied a black choker around her neck. She stared thoughtfully, comparing Beatrix’s auburn coloring and smooth skin to her own darker hair, the beginning of lines at eyes and throat.
A Lady of Good Family Page 4