A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  A breeze caught the leaves on the trees and shifted sun and shade together in a moving mosaic. There were those who thought the new painters—the Impressionists, they were called—were untalented charlatans, but I liked their work, how they made light and its workings on our eyes a character on the canvas as well as their ballerinas and water lilies.

  “Athena no longer sucks her thumb,” I said.

  “You sound sad. Surely that is a good thing.”

  “She is my last baby, and soon she will be all grown up.”

  “Not that soon,” Beatrix argued back. “There are mumps and multiplication tables and the first afternoon dance to be got through. It will be a while yet before she packs her trunks.”

  “You are making fun of me.”

  “Never.” She slipped her arm through mine. “I am trying to cheer you.”

  “I thought I was to cheer you. You are seeing Paris under trying circumstances.”

  “There will always be trying circumstances. The point is to take a good look around, get your bearings. Soldier on.” There was a softness in her smile that made me think Paris would not simply be a matter of soldiering on for her. Had they met yet, she and Amerigo?

  The jam-mouthed child in the sailor suit picked up his wayward marble, made a clumsy little bow to Beatrix, and scuttled up the little hill to his friends.

  “When I saw Signor Massimo at the Louvre last week, he said he would like to take us to the opera. Minnie as well,” I told her as we walked on.

  “Yes. He told me in his letter.”

  “I doubt he can afford a party of that type,” I said. “He is here to sell a family heirloom.”

  “The Wolf of Gubbio. A pretty little painting. I’m sorry he has to part with it.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  So. There had been a second visit to the palazzo on the Via dei Serpenti. Perhaps a third or fourth?

  “You know, Daisy, there was something in the painting, some expression in the wolf’s face, that reminds me of Mrs. Haskett.”

  “She is here as well,” I said. “In Paris.”

  Beatrix stopped walking. “Mrs. Haskett seems to be everywhere I go,” she said. “It can’t simply be bad luck.”

  “It seems to me she is everywhere Signor Massimo goes.”

  “We do seem to have made some awful threesome.”

  “Perhaps Edith can write a short story about it.”

  “Now you are making fun of me, Daisy. Let’s have a look at the greenhouses,” she said. “They are quite, quite large. Did you know that when the British were chasing Napoléon all over the continent and beyond, they camped here, in the bois? Thousands and thousands of trees were cut down to make tent poles and firewood. Most of the trees you see now have been planted in Mother’s lifetime. They are doing quite well. Paris takes its gardens seriously.”

  We turned down a little gravel path, shadowy with large trees touching branches overhead.

  “The original plan for the park called for all straight lines,” Beatrix continued. “But the designer forgot to measure elevations and ended up with two streams at different altitudes. Haussmann decided to use curving paths rather than straight lines. Much more pleasant, don’t you think? The problem with straight lines is that you see the ending of the path too quickly, so the journey is not worth the while. With a curving path, the garden keeps its mysteries and surprises. The ultimate ending stays hidden and therefore worth exploring.”

  She began to hum under her breath, something she rarely did. She often said that humming, rather than singing, felt like trying to run with your ankles hobbled together. But she hummed that day, and if I’m not mistaken, it was an Italian love song.

  • • • •

  When I saw Beatrix two days later at her hotel, she was no longer humming. She and Minnie had met with the lawyers and with Mr. Jones.

  “It was a nightmare,” she said. “The lawyers sneered at Mother. And Father . . . I can barely say the word . . . Father read a letter from Grandmother, blaming everything on poor Mother. It was, she said, even Mother’s fault that he took a mistress. If she had been a proper wife, none of this would have happened.”

  Minnie and I had sometimes discussed this penchant for mothers to prefer sons above all others, but especially above daughters. My mother had done so, placing my brother, Raymond, on such a tall pedestal that I could not, in her opinion, even touch his shoes. Minnie’s mother had done the same, and her mother before her, back through time. It was one of the many reasons Minnie had encouraged her daughter, her only child, to be independent, to be more than a woman standing obediently at a man’s side.

  “Nonsense,” I said, though we knew many would agree. It was the price of divorce in those days, that irrational judgment and condemnation from people who really were themselves in no position to judge.

  Meanwhile, there was the divorce to be gotten through.

  “The letter was ridiculous.” Minnie stood in the doorway of her room, immaculate in a white frock and white pearls, her dark hair brushed into a tidy chignon. “We all thought so, even if not everyone said it aloud. I’m only surprised that Freddie didn’t bring his mistress to the meeting as well. But it is finished. The divorce has been settled.”

  She came to join us where we sat at a lace-covered table and poured herself a cup of coffee. If her hand trembled, Beatrix and I pretended not to notice. “Now,” she said, “I get on with my life and my work. Wife no more.” She lifted her chin. “Lovely words. I shouldn’t speak like this in front of my daughter, but we have no secrets, have we, Beatrix?”

  Minnie smiled and sat straighter than ever, but her eyes were bright and damp. Much as you might look forward to independence and ending painful relationships, that parting, almost as final as death, is a type of failure, a turning away from a dream you once had, a dream lovely enough to carry you into the future.

  Frederic Jones had Paris and his mistress and his set of friends. Except for Beatrix, Minnie was alone.

  Poor Beatrix, I thought. First love is difficult enough to navigate, but when one must choose between a lover and one’s mother, between different continents . . . impossible.

  • • • •

  After the meeting with the lawyers, Minnie stood even straighter, though there was a suggestion of wariness and pain in her face. “A lady does not give way,” I heard her say to herself more than once. There were no more damp eyes, no trembling hands, yet the grief was visible.

  “Not today, dear ones,” she said when Beatrix and I tried to persuade her to attend some Parisian diversion with us, an afternoon concert or event at the Louvre, and she sounded so like a woman in mourning that I found myself tiptoeing in her presence, afraid of making a loud noise.

  Beatrix and I made our rounds alone, inspecting, it felt to my feet, every tree and plant and parterre in the area. She no longer made notes or sketches, but sometimes brought her camera with her, relying on that and her memory to record anything that needed to be recorded. We spent long days at Versailles, walking the impossibly straight allées. “Much too grand and formal for the New World,” Beatrix commented. At Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Beatrix admired the way an old quarry had been planted as a pleasure garden, and at Parc Monceau we stood under a huge mass of exotic banana trees and pretended we could hear monkeys chattering.

  On Beatrix’s fifth day in Paris, we returned from our investigations to find Minnie at her desk, feet propped on a stool, pen in hand. She looked up and smiled at us.

  “I’ve had a letter from Edith,” she said, waving it at us. “She has begun writing a collection of short stories and wishes me to help her find publishers. I’m to be her agent. Beatrix, we will return home. I’ve made our bookings. I think we have both had enough of Europe.”

  Minnie was again engaged in active labor. That was all she asked of life. That, and
her daughter’s happiness.

  Beatrix, though, was a study in conflict. Her face clearly reflected her great relief that her mother’s good spirits had returned. But to leave Europe meant leaving Amerigo. How could she leave what had not yet truly begun?

  We none of us had the answer to that question. Maybe she would not leave with Minnie. Was that the likely outcome?

  The next day, I had arranged to take Beatrix and Minnie to meet Princess Esterhazy and to see the moving pictures of Louis Lumière. This time Mr. Winters chose not to accompany me—rather, us—saying that the carriage would be too crowded, he would crush our skirts, and it was better to let “the ladies” have the afternoon to themselves.

  There were plenty of gentlemen at the princess’s salon, however, and Beatrix caught many an eye. Oh, how she bloomed that season. When we took our chairs and the red velvet curtains were closed to dim the room, many heads turned in her direction, observing her under cover of the semidarkness.

  The moving picture had just started with a strange crackle and whirring noise when there was a larger commotion in the foyer, a woman’s voice, the giggle of young girls, apologies being offered, the soft, noncommittal voice of a servant. Princess Esterhazy rose and went out of the room and came back a moment later with Mrs. Haskett at her side, the three daughters trailing.

  “So sorry,” Mrs. Haskett apologized several times. “Mary couldn’t find her new gloves.” She waved a heavily ringed hand at the tallest of her girls.

  Minnie, Beatrix, and I avoided looking at one another. The impossible woman had managed an invitation to the princess’s salon. We knew then the depth of her ambition.

  We watched the moving picture several times . . . it was only a few minutes in length, and quite funny, but it was also very thrilling to see that something once completely static, a photograph, now could move. It had time in its makeup as well as light and shadow.

  “Like the difference between a silk flower that never changes and a rose that buds, blooms, then wilts and leaves a hip,” Beatrix whispered to me. “How marvelous.”

  Over my shoulder I twice caught Mrs. Haskett staring at the back of Beatrix’s head, and I knew Beatrix had a dangerous enemy in this woman. I was more certain than ever that she had schemed to have Amerigo for herself. She wouldn’t have been the first wealthy woman to purchase a younger lover. So many things were for sale.

  SIXTEEN

  This part I must tell as a re-creation, based on many intimate conversations over the past years. Beatrix was and remains an intensely private person, yet even the person who is strongest in solitude occasionally needs to voice sentiments and emotions. That is especially true when speaking of one whom one has loved. Memories must be voiced now and then, or they begin to fade away, as pale as any ghost. It is a form of grave visitation, I suppose, another way to leave flowers or a memorial wreath, even if only imaginary, in salute to a lost one.

  The Sunday afternoon of her reunion with Amerigo, Beatrix could neither sit nor stand still nor eat, knowing a decision would be made that day that would affect the rest of her life, and she still did not know what that decision should be.

  She did not wish to leave her mother alone. Nor did she wish to give up Amerigo, to sacrifice him and their feelings for each other on the altar of custom and family duty. She was, after all, an American, an American from New York, where self-determination is one of the highest virtues.

  The people of the New World were not accustomed to bowing meekly before the standards of the Old World.

  Beatrix herself was constitutionally unsuitable for bowing and blind obedience to custom. She was not like her father or her uncle Teddy, who would have been happy to live just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived. Why change? such people seemed to say. The scheme of things as they are has worked well enough for me. Leave well enough alone!

  And then there are the Minnies and Ediths of the world arguing back: No, the scheme works only for a few. What about the rest of us? Why must we be silent, in the shadows? A new century was coming. Beatrix cast her vote with the new century, not the old one.

  So now you must imagine. An elegant, passionate twenty-three-year-old woman who is experiencing for the first time the kind of emotion that requires one to defy sense and tradition. And believe this, Beatrix was passionate. She knew how to dress, how to serve a tea and guide a dinnertime conversation into safe lanes, avoiding the quicksand of religion, politics, and money. She attended church and wore gloves and hats and sat a horse perfectly. But none of those qualities interfered with her natural disposition, which was a wonder with the world and all its pleasures, a determination to be fully in the world. To love.

  This passionate young woman, as new to love as a just-fledged bird is to the sky, sits alone on a café chair in the Bois de Boulogne, waiting. The chair is strangely identical to the one on which she sat in the Borghese gardens, and just as in the Borghese gardens, there is a weed taunting her from the middle of the gravel path.

  After months of travel and touring, she has learned to stare down that weed, hands folded calmly in her lap. For this, too, she must wait, to be at home in her own garden, where she is master and keeper and worker, all in one, and no one can eye her askance when she takes off her gloves and plunges her bare hands into the soil to tug away what is not wanted.

  A group of children with their nurse pass by. Some women on horseback, their habits spread like blankets over the glistening chestnut flanks of their horses. A balloon seller, tipping his hat and tugging at the confetti-tailed strings of his wares. A quartet of young people, arm in arm, laughing, showing off their stylish summer clothes, followed by an elderly couple, walking so closely together, side by side, they seem a single entity.

  The last, Beatrix eyes with some envy. The number of times she has seen a married couple so obviously content with each other can be counted on her fingers and toes. Perhaps simply her fingers.

  She wonders if she will be coupled, and if that coupling will last. She thinks it strange to be sitting in a Parisian park on a late-summer day, thinking coolly about couples lasting or not, as she waits for the man she so patently loves. It is as if she is two people, not one. This happens sometimes in plants, especially in hybrid trees and shrubs. Something will stir underground; perhaps lightning runs through the soil or there is too much or not enough sun. The hybrid becomes aware of itself and the fact that it has been manipulated. It snakes up through the ground a new shoot that refuses to follow the rules bred into the parent plant; it changes color or shape and the plant has, in effect, twinned itself.

  If she were rude enough to take the little pocket mirror out of her purse, she wonders if she would see two reflections, not one, the passionate girl and the coolheaded one.

  He’s late.

  Another couple, one she recognizes though she can’t remember their names, strolls by. They nod at her but do not stop to chat. As they pass, she hears that one word, “divorced.”

  Beatrix and Minnie understand there will be a required period of punishment. And then, if all goes well, they will eventually be welcomed once again, not in all parlors, not at all events, but at enough of them that they will not suffer permanent or complete exclusion. When a woman takes her destiny into her own hands, as Minnie has done, there is a price to be paid. But because Minnie is of good family, the price will not be more unbearable than the marriage itself had become. There is some justice in that, though Beatrix, who yearns for the new century, wonders why there need be a price at all.

  In the garden, when you make a mistake, you dig it up and throw it on the compost pile. Just like that.

  Still, he does not arrive.

  Her chest begins to ache with a warmth that is not unpleasant yet makes her eyes itch, as if tears were starting. She wants to jump up and leave, quickly, pretend this afternoon did not happen, but she knows she cannot. She is here, waiting, and she will w
ait.

  Twenty minutes past the agreed-upon time, he appears, walking so quickly his coattails flap as if in a wind. His hat is askew, his face flushed. He has dropped a glove somewhere on his path and clutches the other so tightly the tawny kid leather has creased itself into pleats.

  “Beatrix.” He doesn’t bow or tip his hat. Instead he throws his arms around her and kisses her, on the mouth, a long kiss that dances her head in sensual circles, a waltzing kiss that leaves her dizzy.

  She should say no. Not here.

  She doesn’t. She kisses him back, putting her arms around him as well.

  People walk wide circles around them. Some pause and stare and chuckle. A woman harrumphs with disapproval, but the kiss goes on, ending only when both of them are panting for air.

  “Come away with me,” Amerigo says. “Now. Leave a note for your mother, take an overnight valise, and come away with me. It is the only way.”

  She knows what he is saying. This is not an improper proposal but a request that she become his wife, now and without family approval.

  Her mouth opens to say yes. But the word won’t come. She lets herself drown in his gaze, but something holds her back from giving him that one simple word. She wants this more than anything, this vision of a quick flight followed by a lifetime together. Yet she cannot speak that word.

  Instead, she closes her eyes and leans even closer to him. She wants another kiss, like the first one, his mouth on hers, warm and moist, sending shooting stars into her veins.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he agrees, when they are sitting again on the bench, calm, admiring the fine day like any of the other hundreds of couples strolling and talking in the park.

  The moment has passed.

  “Not tomorrow,” she says. So calm, so cool, scheduling her elopement as well as possible around already made plans. “I must prepare her. I will not simply disappear.”