A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  “Do I remember the evening in the Colosseum?” I said. “Of course I remember.” He had arrived unexpectedly, he had thought, though I had planted several clues in his path, should he choose to follow. Hansel and Gretel could not have asked for a better bread-crumb trail leading to the Colosseum, to me, walking in the moonlight with the beautiful Giovanelli.

  “How much?” I asked again. He would not answer, but sat up straighter in protest, all manly indignation that I had been unwomanly enough to question him about our finances. “A dangerous place, the Colosseum after dark,” I said.

  We were home by then, and I jumped out of the carriage without waiting for his assistance, a habit that always made him glower and clear his throat with disapproval, but my little Athena was waiting for me in the nursery—lamplight shimmered through the curtains—and I couldn’t wait to see her.

  I stopped in the hall long enough to unpin my hat and toss it onto the table with my wrap. The French nurse we had hired (less expensive than traveling with a set of New York servants) greeted me with a warning. “She has sneezed. She has a small fever,” she said, her voice making it somehow clear it was my fault. I dashed up the stairs, Mr. Winter clearing his throat even more loudly. A lady moved slowly, he often told me. Even in a crisis.

  Athena was curled up under her favorite blanket, hugging her teddy bear. Her forehead was warm, not hot, and she did not shiver. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.

  “Can I have a bonbon?” she asked. “Daddy won’t let me have any candy.”

  “Later,” I promised. “When I come for the good-night tuck, I’ll sneak some in.”

  “Naughty Momma,” she lisped with approval.

  When Athena was asleep again, safely watched over by the nurse, I made the required inspection of our apartment, housekeeper at my side, running my finger over mantelpieces, checking the sweetness of the milk in the larder, and in general making it clear that I was the general, the housekeeper and her staff the troops. This inspection was a complete waste of time since the household ran perfectly well without me. Sometimes I missed working in granddad’s general store in Schenectady, the merry ring of the register, the friendly gossip with the customers. A so-called lady of leisure was a creature who had little purpose except to produce children and be decorative at dinner parties. I missed feeling useful.

  By the time I had finished the completely unnecessary inspection, Mr. Winters was already in his study, buried behind the evening paper. I knocked before entering.

  “There are letters for you,” he said, pushing a tray in my direction.

  The letters from Gil and Robert had already been opened, though they had been addressed to me. Gil was hard at work at the bank, but he had spent two weeks in Newport, sailing. Robert was in New York, working with a private tutor so that he could begin his law studies at Harvard in the autumn.

  “They are men, no longer children,” Mr. Winters had said when I had first complained about leaving them behind. “Would you raise them as farm children are raised?” I had boasted once that my father had not left the farm, for even a single overnight, till he was nineteen and moved to town.

  It was true: both boys encouraged me to shake their hands rather than kiss them, and they towered over me. But that did not ease the echoes in the empty places of my heart.

  The new, unopened correspondence on the tray was topped by the invitation from Mrs. Haskett. I tore it into quarters without even reading it. Underneath was a letter just arrived that day from Beatrix. This letter I opened gently and settled into an armchair to read.

  “On our way,” she had written. “Tomorrow we cross the channel and begin a tour of England. Fingers crossed that Miss Jekyll will receive me.” She was referring to the famous landscape gardener, with whom she had arranged to meet.

  “Does she write of her Italian?” Mr. Winters asked.

  “She does not,” I said, not liking his tone of voice. I put the letter back down on his desk and, doing so, clumsily knocked over a pile of his correspondence, opened and flattened so that when I picked them up they were easy to read.

  “I’ll get them,” he said, jumping to his feet, but they were already in my hands.

  Bills. Tailor bills, florist bills, the quarterly check for the governess, made out but not signed, not delivered. Copies of IOUs.

  I sat back down, feeling as if an invisible hand had knocked the air out of me.

  “I will not discuss it,” he said, grabbing them and ushering me out of his study. I stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, for a long time, thinking.

  Dearest Daisy,

  I hope the children are well. Please give my warmest regards to Mr. Winters. (Has he wagered and lost much this season? Don’t tell him I asked.) The channel crossing to England was rough but well worth it, now that I have seen London, and the young London ladies, their skirts tucked up to their knees, bicycling through Battersea Park. Remind me, Daisy, should I forget, to install bicycle paths in my future gardens. They are not allowed here in the royal parks and gardens but are springing up all over the place in the public gardens.

  As soon as we had recovered from the travel and settled into Symonds’ Hotel, Mother insisted we take the train to Surrey to visit Mr. Strachey, for a literary afternoon on the terrace and a good catch-up with her old friends. They talked of poor Mr. Wilde, who had been sent to Wandsworth Prison and hard labor for “the love that dares not speak its name.” Mr. Strachey blushed when he said this, and looked shyly at me, but Mother tsk-tsked at him to indicate she had not raised me as a foolish innocent, and I already knew as well as any the sad and strange history of Oscar Wilde.

  One younger man, I have already forgotten his name, jested that during the trial there had been a large migration of young London men to Paris to avoid similar prosecution. This was a little beyond what Mother was willing to gossip, so she asked how Mr. James’ new story, “The Middle Years,” was being received and the conversation was guided into calmer waters.

  I spent much of the afternoon gazing out the window across the beautiful Surrey hills.

  It seems to me that air and its quality of light, and the soil itself, are the essence of any garden or landscape. The plants and trees, that part we call the garden, are the intermediary between the two essences of soil and light. The garden is the earthy part, the temporary part, and therefore the human part. Remember, God first placed us in a garden, so that we might delight, and so that we might gently work.

  The light and air in England are as gauzy as a veil, soft and temperate without the hard edges of challenge of the Roman sun. I find them very agreeable.

  I have met Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who is not quite so agreeable as her garden. I had written, introduced myself as a novice in her own field, and asked to make her acquaintance so that we could discuss gardens. She sent a trap and driver to the station to pick me up and bring me to her home, Munstead, in Surrey. Mother stayed behind in London, visiting old friends.

  Meeting Miss Jekyll, Daisy, was too much like looking into a mirror that foresees the future. There was I, twenty-three, a former musician now turned gardener making her first tour of Europe to study gardens. There was she, fifty-two years of age, a former musician and artist, showing off her garden after her many tours of Europe, her many turns and twists in her own path. When she shook my hand in greeting, she spent a careful moment assessing me, and I, her.

  I think we both agreed, instantly, that we would be colleagues but not good friends. She perhaps had moments in her youth that she regretted, moments of which I reminded her. And she threatened me with a solitary future, a woman struggling to be herself, to make her name, without a man at her side.

  The decision is not always ours, is it? I wonder if Signor Massimo is in Paris yet. If you run into him, you will let me know? I am worried about his well-being; he seemed disheartened when we parted. There is much on his mind, more than he can s
hare with a casual acquaintance. Am I just a casual acquaintance? I wonder. It feels . . . I will not write how it feels, except to say I think I know how flowers feel when they turn to the sun.

  Miss Jekyll has grown fat. (Please do not show this letter to anybody. I write freely when I write to you, but others might harshly judge, and rightly so, my lack of charity.) She has the mannerisms of one who no longer seeks to charm. She slurps her tea and chews cake hurriedly, as if eager to be elsewhere. Indeed, we almost took our tea standing, so rushed was she. When she walks her head juts forward like a laborer’s, and her very round cheeks shake like a blancmange being carried to table.

  Oh, but her garden! I had been warned by Mr. Strachey that Miss Jekyll did not like to speak to strangers of her earlier artistic efforts, before she began this garden. As a young woman, Miss Jekyll had been a painter, and one of considerable talent, had been the general consensus. But eye trouble had forced her to give up close work in order to preserve what was left of her failing sight. That was when she began gardening. Daisy, I remember that night at the fair, when my voice failed, that terrible sense of betrayal by one’s own body. It does seem telling that both Miss Jekyll and myself, disappointed in other arts, turned to gardening. I never think of it as a second best, but as my true course in life, found after other experiments failed, and I’m certain she does as well. “A living painting,” she called her garden. Her garden is a delight. No other word will do.

  In it, the artist has come back to life. There is such a miracle of color, such a temptation of texture, such a delight of shape! No oil canvas could have created the majestic delight she has constructed here at Munstead. In this garden the viewer does not stand before the art, as one does in a gallery, but in it, surrounded by joy.

  Miss Jekyll currently lives in a newly built and temporary house she calls a “hut,” designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, since she and her mother have decided to live apart, and the mother, of course, occupies Munstead House.

  “After Mother is gone, the house will go to my brother, Jekyll,” she told me, a touch of acid in her voice. “I need my own home. Do you have a brother, Miss Jones?”

  When I answered in the negative, I thought I saw a glimmer of jealousy.

  The hut is a sweet little cottage, and the tenement dwellers of the Lower East Side would think themselves deceased and in heaven to occupy such a place, but Miss Jekyll eagerly awaits the completion of her own house. It is being designed to suit her own needs: windows will minimize light to avoid the pain that glare causes her; passages will be wide, and there will be a sheltered place to sit in the courtyard; all the cupboards are to have glass doors so she can admire her collections.

  “My house is to have an overhanging gallery, somewhat like a cloister,” she said, and there was a twinkle in her eye. “Single women belong in a convent, or a house that reminds one of the convent, don’t you think, Miss Jones?”

  “Not at all,” I said, knowing that I was being tested. “Marriage is no requirement for a fully lived life.”

  We paused as she plucked a beetle from a vine and crushed it between her fingers. “A garden is not for the squeamish,” she said.

  But Daisy, it is when Miss Jekyll speaks of gardens that she comes to brilliant life. She seems young again when she talks of plans for borders of pansy, fern, and geranium, of lily ponds and orangeries, and woodland trails she calls “road poems.” Her eyes shine.

  Her garden is still young, but she has designed it brilliantly, so that every time a corner is turned, a curving path followed, the eye is delighted anew. The lilies were blooming during my visit, and I saw she had planted them so that, during blossom time, they would be surrounded by greenery, not other flowers.

  “It is a great mistake in the garden to plant so that different flowers bloom at the same time,” she instructed me. “They must be situated to their own best advantage; otherwise, you end up with a busy hodgepodge of color and shape and fragrance, like a disordered closet.”

  I pretended to jot this down in my notebook, but I had already come to that conclusion myself. Gardens fail when people expect too much of them.

  “You have just come from Italy, I understand,” Miss Jekyll said to me, poking at a weed with her walking stick. “It is disconcerting, isn’t it? All those straight lines. Too much geometry and not enough nature. And some of the villa gardens haven’t a single posy in them. They are all box hedge and stone walls and fantastic fountains. Avoid straight lines, Miss Jones. They do a garden much harm. Color. That’s what a garden needs. And a sense of mystery rather than grandeur.”

  “I agree,” I said. “They should be a place where children can play.”

  “And where young women can fall in love.”

  I must have blushed.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “Italy has much to answer for, hasn’t it? Is he a penniless nobleman?”

  “You are mistaken,” I said.

  The Surrey soil, I was delighted to find, has much in common with our own soil at Bar Harbor, and Miss Jekyll grows many of the plants I grow in my Reef Point garden, ferns and whortleberry, hosta and delphinium. The blues she achieves in her garden are magnificent, not faded or anemic but as bright as the Madonna’s robes in a medieval altarpiece.

  When I described this to Mother later she raised an eyebrow. She worries that Rome has softened me toward papist viewpoints; Rome, or my friend there.

  He was on his way to Paris. Daisy, have you heard anything of him? My mail has not yet reached London.

  The meeting with Miss Jekyll was informative, but not a great success, I fear. It was that initial impression we shared of each other, for as I found her old and unattractive in a decidedly spinsterish way, she must have found me overyoung, perhaps flighty. We parted as fellow gardeners, but not as friends. It would greatly surprise me if she wrote to me, as she promised.

  Mother and I returned to London, a little weary, a little anxious. We go to Scotland next, but after that . . . Paris. Father, the lawyers, the divorce. I will have to be very attentive to Mother, for she will surely be in low spirits. There will be no time for leisurely walks.

  If you hear anything of him, be sure and write me, Daisy.

  Be well, dearest friend. I remain your own,

  Beatrix

  • • • •

  Dearest Beatrix,

  I have had no news of Amerigo Massimo, but Mrs. Haskett leaves her card almost daily. So far, I have ignored her. The children are well, though Athena had a slight fever for a day or two.

  Mr. Winters and I are not on the best of terms at the moment. Yes, it is the old problem. When you are in Scotland, you might ask your uncle for advice on my behalf.

  Always your loving friend,

  Daisy

  FOURTEEN

  In August, there was a great migration of English folk and their visitors to the north, to the Highlands. After visiting London and Surrey, Minnie and Beatrix joined this migration. They took the overnighter to Scotland and then a local coach to Loch Earn. They spent a few days hiking and golfing, and then continued on to Millden Lodge in the lovely, wild heather–scented Glen Esk, where Minnie’s cousin, the famous New York lawyer John Lambert Cadwalader, rented a shooting lodge for the season.

  Ever since Minnie’s husband had abandoned the marital home and relationship, John Cadwalader had been her adviser, and guardian to Beatrix. It was Mr. Cadwalader who had declared, years before, that Beatrix had the intelligence and temperament to make a success of whatever she wanted to do with her life. He had meant it, and even the very young Beatrix knew that such praise was not to be dismissed as mere flattery.

  Mr. Cadwalader was a bachelor, one of those elderly gentlemen who appeared never to have been young or reckless. I had met him only once but felt an instant respect for him. He had fine white hair, a high-bridged nose, curling white mustaches, and a habit of thinking long and hard before answ
ering even the simplest of questions. I wondered what Beatrix would tell him, and what he would say.

  • • • •

  “Lovely weather,” Beatrix wrote in her next letter. “Spending days and days roaming over the moors or following the guns in the field. The house is full of a hunting party, most of the male persuasion, stomping around on the gravel, torsos crisscrossed with hunting bag straps, unloading rifles.”

  I had thought in Scotland he would seem quite distant. This place is as far from Rome and its moods as I could imagine. The only ruin is the old gatekeeper’s cottage, and there are no fountains but natural springs, no topiaries or other forced contrivances, only wild meadows and forests. Yet Amerigo still seems with me, somehow. That day in the catacombs, in Rome. I thought he was there, that he had somehow followed us. I saw something, Daisy. Something that, even as I saw it, I knew it wasn’t real. Yet there it was. A shadow, a form, and it was him, as if a part of him had left his body and stayed with me.

  Perhaps it was astral projection. I read about it in theosophist tracts from Madame Blavatsky. Projection is probably no stranger than seed germination, which is the most wondrous miracle I can think of. But why would such a thing happen? I do not know him well. Despite that, he has rooted in my mind. He grows there, steadily. The acorn will be an oak soon, and I will never be rid of him. What do I wish? To be free. To continue to be free. To pursue the path I have chosen. Yet there he is, standing before me, on that path. What do you think of his smile, Daisy? You saw him there, at Mrs. Haskett’s soiree in Berlin. It is a good smile, isn’t it?

  Uncle says under no conditions are you to leave Mr. Winters. If you do, you will lose the children. He has made inquiries through his banker and various friends in London and Paris. He believes you should ask Mr. Winters to deed the New York house to you. He has lost a considerable amount, and to keep the children safe you should own property outright. Will he agree to this?