A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  Harold, six feet tall and looking as though his teeth pained him, came to her side as soon as she beckoned and gave us a stiff, unhappy greeting. It was obvious he would rather be elsewhere, perhaps the nearest tavern or gaming table.

  Mrs. Haskett dismissed Harold with a wave of her hand, and he slunk away to find the nearest punch bowl.

  “Will there be a tour of the house?” I asked. Mrs. Haskett, if she heard the derision in my voice, ignored it. I had once offered a tour of my new home on Fifth Avenue and learned the hard way that only the nouveau riche did such a thing. I had been laughed at, behind my back, for weeks.

  “My footman can show you around, if you want. Don’t miss the picture gallery on the mezzanine. I’ve had my Vermeer and Van Dyck installed. The David sketches haven’t arrived yet.” Mrs. Haskett still had her arm around Beatrix’s waist.

  “Is there a solarium?” Beatrix asked, always eager to see orchids and other exotics. She managed to disengage herself from her hostess and put several feet of empty air between them.

  “Of course!” Mrs. Haskett seemed to think better of her response and quickly added, “Not in good repair, however. Nothing of interest, I fear. You would be much happier seeing the picture gallery.” She turned Beatrix halfway and pointed to an arched doorway. “Through there. All the way to the end of the hall and up the stairs.”

  There was malice in Mrs. Haskett’s face, hidden under the forced smile, the feigned gaiety. I often wondered what had so embittered her, that she must spend the rest of her life purchasing what had once belonged to others and making trouble whenever possible. When I spend time with people such as she, I remember we are a species that once threw our neighbors to the lions for amusement. Mrs. Haskett reached out as if she would forcibly restrain Beatrix, then thought better of herself. She wasn’t smiling any longer, though.

  The band had started playing a lively polka, and a swirling mass of people took to the dance floor. Beatrix threaded her way through them, heading away from the gallery and toward the opposite arched doorway, into the solarium.

  “I warned her,” Mrs. Haskett said.

  “What was the warning?” Minnie asked, her voice colder than the sherbets on the buffet table. At least I assumed there would be sherbets and a buffet.

  “She’ll find out.” Mrs. Haskett’s angular face was fierce in its intensity.

  Minnie took my hand as if she suddenly needed support. We had both guessed. Neither of us knew what to do. Stop Beatrix, warn her? Wouldn’t that suggest we still thought of her as somewhat childish, in need of protection?

  Minnie decided. “Come, Daisy. Let us look at the pictures. Perhaps we will visit the solarium later.”

  Beatrix was already out of sight. She had passed through that arched doorway and was on her way.

  • • • •

  This is how Beatrix later told it to me. I believe she gave her mother the same version, but there is no guarantee. Minnie and I did not exchange notes. Somehow, what had happened had taken on a life of its own and we became mere bystanders.

  Amerigo was there, of course, bending over a pot of orchids. He heard her footstep and turned, his mouth slightly open in surprise.

  “You!” he said.

  “Indeed,” she agreed, equally startled. As soon as she saw him, she understood her combination of fatigue and restlessness of the past weeks. It was, she said later with a smile, like Eve encountering Adam in the garden, as if she had been waiting for this moment without knowing she was doing so. There was pleasure, yes. And fear. And that sense of inevitability that accompanies the great passions of life.

  “What are you doing here?” Amerigo asked. He sounded a little anxious, and that reassured her. She couldn’t stand bullies of either sex. If he had rushed forward, embraced her immediately, taken advantage of the moment and her surprise, she would have fled. Instead, they stood in the solarium, surrounded by heat and green and the earthy smell of humus and loam and flowers, not moving toward each other, only looking, enjoying this last moment of separateness either of them would ever know.

  “I was invited to come hear the music. And you?” She stood in the doorway, enjoying those dozen steps between them, knowing that as soon as she closed that space there would be no turning back.

  “A little family business. Look,” he said softly. “Do you know she has bought a Vermeer?”

  “So I’ve heard.” Beatrix fanned herself. It was humid and warm in the solarium. Perfect conditions for an orchid but not for a young woman already flushed with emotion.

  “Shall I get you a glass of water?” he asked.

  “No, thank you. Has the Vermeer been hung among the ferns?”

  He laughed. “Not even our hostess would make such a mistake. No. But she wished me to see her orchids first.”

  “Ah. I was to view the pictures first.”

  “Perhaps she was trying to prevent our meeting. There are so many people here.”

  “Indeed. We could have spent the night and never encountered the other.”

  “But you found me.”

  “It seems.” Somewhere water dripped, measuring the seconds. Time! It called to them. Never forget time. It will not stand still. Amerigo took the first step. She took the second. They alternated, like children in dance school. When they were within arm’s length, Amerigo took her hand and repeated the kiss he had given her in Rome, on her palm.

  “I am happy to see you,” he said, not releasing her hand. She saw in his face it was more than happiness he felt. She imagined her expression echoed his own.

  “And me, to see you.” There was no coyness in her, no dishonesty. She knew there was no need, and no purpose for it. They were the only two people in the world, and they were in a garden. An artificial one, certainly, but a garden nonetheless.

  They moved slowly, side by side, down the rows of tables, afraid to look at each other for fear of revealing too much.

  Because it was the fashionable thing to do, Mrs. Haskett had assembled a large collection of exotics in her Berlin house, and Beatrix and Amerigo toured the solarium, exchanging quiet opinions and comments on the flowers for the pleasure of hearing each other’s voice. Silence, Beatrix felt, was to be avoided. It was too full of possibility.

  “A Cattleya labiata,” she said, stopping in front of a large pink flower. “First found in Brazil by Mr. Swainson. It is a favorite among collectors. I find it a bit too showy.”

  “Yes, you are right,” Amerigo agreed. “It reeks of a stuffy ballroom, a too-large corsage on the wrist.”

  “The color is much too florid,” Beatrix said disapprovingly of a purple freckled Phalaenopsis bellina.

  “It should be paler. This looks as if an artist has overpainted it,” he agreed, happy to discover that they agreed on such a simple thing as the color of a flower.

  “And look, she has an Orchis spectabilis. It is a North American orchid, and now she has brought it to Europe. There was a whole shelf of these at the Chicago fair.”

  The flowers of the Orchis spectabilis are an inch or so in size, and of a shape that makes them suitable for imposing thoughts on them, much as the shape-shifting clouds are. It is a delicate plant easily found growing in leaf litter but easily overlooked because of its diminutive size. In the solarium, surrounded by the huge, flamboyantly colored tree orchids of Brazil and Colombia, it seemed even more unassuming.

  But Amerigo, who could tell the brushstroke of a Fra Angelico from that of a Fra Lippi, saw more in the plant than many people see.

  He bent to examine it more closely. “It looks like a ghost in a white hooded cape,” he said.

  “I never thought of it that way, but yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Beatrix lowered her head for a closer look, and a coppery lock of hair fell over her forehead. It was all Amerigo could do to leave that lock in place, not to reach over and tuck it back.

 
Beatrix thought perhaps his Roman religion shaped his thoughts on this orchid, but it didn’t matter. In New York, that hint of superstitious Catholicism would not have offended her, for Minnie had taught her better, but would have required her to reconsider some previous opinion of him. Here, in Berlin, it seemed all of a piece and even appropriate. A monk, then. A ghostly monk.

  “Have you seen white-hooded ghosts often?” she asked.

  He knew she was jesting, but he answered seriously. “My palazzo is said to be haunted. I myself have never seen the ghost, but the housekeeper has. On all the saints’ holidays she puts out a plate of food for it, and once a year we open the chapel where his bones are kept and have a mass said. He was an old monk who was persecuted by one of my ancestors centuries ago.”

  “Why? Why was he persecuted, and what happened to him?” They had reached the end of the orchid tables and Beatrix let her shawl drop off her shoulders. It was warm, as any orchid room should be, but the heat was making her dizzy. She could hear the dancers laughing as the musicians played the opening notes of a mazurka.

  “It was over a painting that had been acquired by less than legal methods. A holy relic the monk wanted returned to the church.” Amerigo leaned against a table. There were only inches between them.

  “Not The Wolf of Gubbio?”

  “The same. It was stolen from Sassetta’s studio in Siena before it could be delivered to the church in San Sepolcro. For a certain amount of money, it was delivered to us instead. We are a family known for our love of art and questionable, if traditional, methods of acquiring it.”

  “What happened to the monk?”

  “Brother Leo was sent to the palazzo to bring back the painting, but my ancestor would not give him an audience or even speak with him. The guards at the gate treated him poorly. Brother Leo slept by the gate in all weather, good or bad, for many weeks, waiting for the painting to be handed over to him. He refused to eat and grew thin. He refused to move, so all visitors had to step over him. Most inconvenient. But one night he had a dream about the painting, and the wolf spoke to him. ‘Tell the signor that if he returns the painting, he will get something else in its place.’ It’s the story of St. Francis and the wolf all over again, you see. Give up one thing—marauding and killing—to get another—free meals for the rest of your life. So the duke of the time, my ancestor, gave up the painting and received for it something even more precious: Sassetta’s study for the painting of The Wolf of Gubbio. Sassetta destroyed all the studies, preferring his reputation be based solely on finished works. How this one study survived is probably another tale of theft.”

  “And the monk?”

  “The duke waited a suitable amount of time and then had Brother Leo thrown out a high casement to his death, for the embarrassment he had caused. Such a death can never be proven as murder, of course. It looked at it was meant to look, like an accident. But the family knew. Knows. And they say Brother Leo has never really left the palazzo, but moans up and down the halls, especially on nights of the full moon, when he howls in loneliness for his brother monks, whom he never saw again in this life.”

  “Such a strange history!”

  A commotion began in the doorway of the orchid room. Another couple had found their way there and stood at the entrance, locked in an embrace, her white arms pale against his black jacket, his hands pressed tightly against the yellow silk of her gown. Amerigo cleared his throat; they heard and fled, laughing.

  Beatrix looked at Amerigo and smiled, hiding her own embarrassment.

  “Are there no scandals, no murders in your family?” he asked. “In Italy we all have what you call the skeleton in the closet.”

  “Most of my family money came from banking. There may have been a certain laxity there. And an ancestor helped throw tea into Boston Harbor, and my great uncles abandoned a widowed sister to poverty. But no ghosts I’ve heard of. There have been marital irregularities,” she finished.

  “That is where we have the advantage over you Americans.” Amerigo turned abruptly and walked to the next table. “We accept certain conditions, and what you call ‘irregularities’ become very regular.”

  “You mean mistresses.” Beatrix followed him.

  “Yes.”

  “My father has had a mistress for many years, and now he is divorcing my mother.”

  “That would not happen here,” Amerigo said solemnly. “In Italy the husband would not be so cruel, and the wife not so narrow-minded.”

  Beatrix’s face blazed red. She could not bear any criticism of her mother, but she knew from the quarrels she had witnessed in childhood that her mother could be judgmental and distant; she could be preoccupied. She was not entirely blameless.

  Her mother and father had been ill suited to each other; she saw that now. Mr. James had sent her a note a year before, warning her against seeing too much in this dissolution of the marriage. The scandal of divorce would eventually die down, he had written, but to live locked together in misery would be worse.

  “Whenever I see the little Orchis spectabilis, I will think of your monk,” Beatrix said.

  “I hope you will think of me as well.”

  “That would mean I had stopped thinking of you.” She was, you see, free of coyness, as brave in her words as in her emotions. Amerigo perhaps had never before met that kind of girl.

  They moved down the aisle of the next orchid tables, their feet crunching over drainage gravel, and when Beatrix was admiring a yellow lady’s slipper orchid, Amerigo again took her hand and would not release it. There is a stage, in love, when mere touch sends such thrills of ecstasy through you that no other gesture is needed than to hold hands and feel that current flowing from one to the other.

  They walked slowly, hand in hand, bending at the same moment over the same flower, commenting on the color and form and fragrance of individual blooms.

  After half an hour of this, Amerigo took her in his arms and kissed her. She would not describe the kiss to me, of course. But she smiled at this part of the story. Beatrix had made the first leap. She had taken her first chance.

  “Did you enjoy the flowers?” Mrs. Haskett asked when Beatrix and Amerigo joined the other dancers on the floor, an hour later. “You have been uncommonly long about it.”

  “Cattleya should not be potted with fern root. The fungus will kill them. You should speak with your plants man,” Beatrix said, gliding away in Amerigo’s arms as the band played a waltz.

  Mrs. Haskett watched them dance, her face frozen into its usual smile. There was pain in her eyes, in that slight twitch at the corner of her mouth. She fluttered her fan vigorously and moved away from us.

  Minnie, standing next to me, grew even more tense. “I don’t like this,” she murmured. “We should not have come.”

  “Too late. But judging by Mrs. Haskett’s expression, I suspect she also wishes we had not come. Look at how she watches Amerigo.”

  There was already an undercurrent of gossip buzzing around us like mosquitoes on a breezeless summer evening. Too many eyes looked away from their dance partners’ faces and watched Beatrix and Amerigo instead, with those sly, sideways glances that boded trouble.

  Mr. James, in his little novel in which I am the namesake, exaggerated the gossip I endured after my evening in the Colosseum. But there had been gossip and I had come perilously close to losing my reputation, and reputation was a woman’s most important possession.

  Perhaps, I thought that evening, it would have been better if the American girl and the Roman man had never met, after all. Soon I would be absolutely certain that their meeting had been ill-starred.

  TWELVE

  “Did Amerigo say why he was in Berlin?” Minnie asked Beatrix the next morning. “It does seem an odd coincidence.”

  After the splendid, glittering rooms of Mrs. Haskett’s town house, our own rooms in the Pension Grindelwald seemed even rougher th
an before, with their mostly bare floors, small-paned windows, and all those taxidermic animals glowering at us.

  Impressed by the difference in settings, we had rather let ourselves go, as if in retaliation. Minnie was still barefoot. Beatrix was in her gown and wrapper, her unbrushed hair falling in reddish clouds over her shoulders and back. I had propped my feet up on an ottoman and leaned back into an overstuffed chair with all the unladylike abandon of childhood.

  Beatrix was starry-eyed and distracted, as all maidens in love are said to be. “He is trying to sell her a painting, and it seems she is leading him on a merry chase, saying yes one day, no the next, and never bringing the price up to what it should be, even when she says yes. I understand it is very old and quite valuable.”

  “Sounds just like her. Manipulative, greedy, and . . . and common,” said Minnie, who rarely said anything nasty about anyone. She poured milk into her tea and gave it a furious stir with her spoon. “If she must collect and own the best of Europe, she should at least pay a fair price.”

  “It is even more complicated. His father doesn’t wish to sell the painting, and legally, his father is still the owner.” Beatrix sighed and leaned her chin into her hands as she gazed out the open window. From a distance, we could hear the sounds of hammering and banging and shouting, the protesting creaking of girders, all the noise that accompanies the rise of a modern building, as Berlin soldiered on in its determination to replace old with new.

  “Which painting?” I asked. I had been to the Louvre several times and was wondering if I might not try a little still life painting myself.

  “It’s a study for St. Francis Taming the Wolf of Gubbio, by Sassetta. Part of a fifteenth-century altarpiece showing the life of St. Francis. Most of the original altarpiece has gone missing, sold off to various collectors. His family owns a rare study for it.”

  “I wonder if that fellow out in the hall might have been a model,” I said, having grown to detest the stuffed, ready-to-pounce wolf I had to pass each time I visited Minnie’s rooms.