“You will tell her?”
Beatrix has never, before this tour of Europe, before Massimo, kept anything from her mother. Their conversations have been almost sisterly, open and intimate and trusting.
“Yes. I must. And are you telling your father?”
“I cannot.”
She thinks about this for a moment and all it implies. The space between them, those two or three inches of open air required by good manners in public places, now feels like a mile of distance. The sun blazes down, yet Beatrix shivers. A price must always be paid. What would hers be? “All the more reason, then, to tell Mother. We must have someone on our side,” she tells him.
“And she will be?”
“She wishes my happiness. And I think you are it. Amerigo.” She takes off her glove and reaches for his hand. Sometimes, at the Bar Harbor garden, she has been able to put a leaf between her palms, close her eyes, and feel the living vibrations of the plant, judge its vigor and determination to thrive. She places Amerigo’s hand between her two palms and closes her eyes. She feels the blood flowing through his veins, the warmth of his living self, the mystical combination of flesh and spirit in the way his hand rests quietly between hers. Acceptance.
What does it mean? Is he accepting all he has required her to accept? To live among strangers, to brave the disapproval of those whose approval her safety and happiness most depend upon. Or is his a more passive acceptance, more responsive to commands than to choices?
A garden path is most interesting when one cannot see the end of it but must walk through the twists and turns and make the discovery, footstep by footstep.
• • • •
The next day, Beatrix and Minnie were resting in their rooms when a page boy brought them an envelope on a silver-plated salver.
Minnie looked at it with dread. “I am quite tired of unexpected notes,” she said. “Let’s tear it up without reading it. What if it is from your father? What if he wants another meeting for some reason or other?”
“It’s not Father or the lawyer.” Nor Amerigo, Beatrix thought. “I believe it is from Mrs. Haskett.”
“Ignore it.” Minnie had a presentiment.
“Can we do that?”
“I can,” Minnie said, tearing the envelope and its single interior page into long strips and crumpling them.
They sat for a while, drinking tea, breaking their morning roll into crumbs, but neither of them eating.
“He has asked me to go away with him,” Beatrix said. “An elopement.”
Minnie looked at her daughter, at her radiant face, feeling that tug at her heart that mothers feel, wanting to love and protect, yet knowing they must set their child free, all at the same time.
“I think I expected this,” was her response. “What was your answer?”
“I told him he must meet with you first, that we needed your approval and goodwill.”
“You know that I wish only what brings you joy and fulfillment.” What else could a loving mother say? She had not forced Beatrix to marry when she came of age, as most mothers did. She certainly would not now require her daughter to stay unmarried. They sat in an even longer silence as mother and daughter adjusted to the new reality, the old dreams on the verge of being abandoned, all sureness evaporated as surely as the sun dried up the dew in the hotel garden.
“Does he have his father’s approval?” Minnie asked, realizing they must now discuss practical matters.
“I think not.”
She is the daughter of a divorced woman, Minnie thought. This is terrible, terrible timing. If only they had met a year or even six months earlier. If he were Protestant American rather than Catholic Italian, they might have had a chance. Now there would be no approval from the father; they would begin with a black mark against them.
“You could live half the year in New York and Maine, and the other half in Rome,” Minnie said. Both of them, in their thoughts, had moved on to the next difficulty.
“That would give me only half a year for my work, wouldn’t it? Even if Europe were ready for a female landscape designer, my languages aren’t good enough for me to be able to discuss plans with clients.” Beatrix put down her teacup and leaned her chin into her hands, looking young and lost.
“Do you love him enough to risk that?”
“Yes.”
“Then all other plans must start from there. You will work it out. I have faith in you.” But Minnie was heartsore, thinking that from now on her daughter would be lost to her for much of the year. Ceres herself could not have been sadder, thinking of Persephone, gone from her to the other world. But it must be borne.
• • • •
Amerigo, realizing that the only way to win Beatrix was to also win Minnie, asked to meet with them, and Minnie agreed. I saw him the day before, when I was walking in the park with my little girls, and he looked like a man about to jump from a ledge.
“Have you slept?” I asked, worried about the shadows around his eyes, the feverish quality of his complexion.
“Not much,” he said. “I see Beatrix tomorrow. And her mother.”
“Ah.” What else could be said? Wish him luck? Great matters were at stake.
On Thursday, Beatrix and Minnie stayed in their hotel, waiting for him, as arranged. The best tea service had been sent up, flowers put in vases, lamps lit since it was a cloudy and dark day. Beatrix was nervous about so many things. What if he was late, as he had been that day in the park? Minnie admired punctuality. What if he behaved too informally or, worse, too stiffly? It was imperative that Minnie like him, approve of him.
Minnie was exhausted and worried. She looked often at Beatrix, opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again upon a confused and anxious silence.
At a quarter to three someone knocked at the door and was admitted. Early? thought Beatrix, confused. Why has he come early?
But it wasn’t Amerigo. Their maid ushered in Mrs. Haskett.
Beatrix and Minnie shared the same thought: something was about to be stolen away from them. A perilous journey had led them to this one single moment, and there would be no turning away from it.
Minnie tried, though, for her daughter’s sake. “I can’t ask you to stay,” she said, rising and politely offering her hand. “We have an engagement.”
“You will want to hear what I have to tell you,” Mrs. Haskett insisted. Uninvited, she took a chair by the window so that she was backlit. A dim, fuzzy light seemed to emanate from her so that she seemed otherworldly, more ghostly than angelic. Her hat had two bows on it and they stuck up like monstrous ears.
Beatrix sat, too. As soon as she had seen Mrs. Haskett at the door, she had had a presentiment of something important, something vital being stolen away from her. The tea tray sat on the little table in front of the settee where Beatrix sat. Beatrix stared at the teapot but did not pour.
“He is already engaged,” Mrs. Haskett said. “May I?” She didn’t wait for a yes; she reached for the pot and poured herself a cup. “To the Princess di Cosimo. A pretty young thing. Wealthy family, of course.”
Minnie, who had been standing in the doorway, hoping Mrs. Haskett would leave, sat down. She did not, could not, look at Beatrix.
What could they say? Any answer they gave would allow Mrs. Haskett the knowledge that Beatrix had been lied to, by omission if nothing else. Or they themselves could lie, say they already knew (and neither of them had doubted it as soon as the words had been spoken; they believed the woman though they couldn’t trust her motives), but if they pretended they already knew, why would Beatrix have allowed herself to be seen with him? They were well and truly trapped.
Beatrix was heartbroken. He had let her believe he was free to give his heart, but he had not been. He had involved her in a triangle, a bitter contest, and she hadn’t even known. He had deceived her. She wanted
to weep, to hide her face with her hands and let the tears stream through her fingers. But she could not, not with Mrs. Haskett sitting there, watching so closely.
Minnie passed Mrs. Haskett the plate of sandwiches and petit fours. Only their visitor ate and drank.
“Everyone seems to have known of the engagement but you,” Mrs. Haskett said. “An arranged match, of course.”
“Are you enjoying your stay in Paris?” Minnie asked. “I’ve heard there is a wonderful exhibit of floral paintings at . . .” She paused, unable to remember the name of the gallery. But they could not, they must not, have this conversation. They must go back in time, weeks back, months back, to the Borghese gardens, and Beatrix does not leave her chair, does not go for a walk alone, does not meet this man. But it has happened.
“I know the one you mean. Everyone is talking of it. Courvier. He’s showing Monet’s work,” Mrs. Haskett said. “Atrocious.”
Beatrix sat, straight-backed, smiling, revealing nothing of the interior storm that had uprooted trees, flooded streams, washed away rose beds and destroyed the garden of her trust. Calmly, she discussed Monet’s paintings, the wonderful colors, so like a garden when seen through a glowing dawn light. Minnie was never prouder of her daughter than she was that afternoon.
Amerigo arrived promptly at three and was shown in by the same maid that had admitted Mrs. Haskett. Like all young men in love, he required his eyes to find the beloved first in that room, and to be blind to all else. So it was without awareness of what had already occurred that he went to Beatrix, took her hands, and kissed them.
“My darling,” he said, still blind to that awful figure seated in the chair by the window.
Minnie stood. Her voice was like ice. “We have not been introduced.” She recognized him as the young man who had waltzed her daughter away from her at Mrs. Haskett’s Berlin soiree and saw with some regret that, had he arrived before Mrs. Haskett, before that terrible announcement, she would have liked him, would have been prepared to welcome him. Now she saw only the man who had harmed, perhaps broken, her daughter.
In turning to face Minnie, Amerigo saw the other visitor. His face became ashen; the light in his eyes dimmed.
“I see,” he said, and his voice might have been announcing a death or a bankruptcy.
“Good day,” said Mrs. Haskett, rising. “I will leave you three to your private conversation.” She was smiling.
• • • •
“We were affianced when we were still children. Neither of us wishes the marriage to go through. She, too, loves someone else. Yet our families insist. I had hoped to pay our debts by selling art, and in that way free myself from this family burden. Mrs. Haskett made offers. Never high enough, never enough that my father would agree to them.”
Amerigo refused the chair that Minnie had offered him. Manners above all else, she had been taught. This man has just broken your daughter’s heart, but you must offer him a chair or, the alternative, ask him to leave, immediately, and never come back. That she could not do. The look on Beatrix’s face would not allow that particular finality. An explanation was needed.
So Amerigo paced, back and forth, back and forth, between the seated girl and her mother, trying to explain. He ran his shaking hand through his hair, ruffling away the fierce brushing that had tamed thick black curls. He tugged at his high collar, loosening it so that his throat and the vein that corded his neck showed. He resembled, Beatrix thought, the David who had slain Goliath in the Caravaggio he and she had stood before just a few months before . . . beautiful, and a murderer.
What explanation could argue away the problem he had created, being engaged to one woman and offering elopement to another?
“What more is there to say?” Amerigo asked. “I have broken your heart, and mine as well. Yet if I had been more open, would you have consented to see me? I would have been a good husband. A loyal husband. And so I took the only chance I saw.”
“That you could marry Beatrix before she found out. The marriage would have been based on a lie,” Minnie accused.
“I see that now,” Amerigo said. Finally he sat, and it was an admission of defeat.
Beatrix, who had been staring out the window and looking at him in quick sideways glances—it was the only way she could control herself—reached over and took his hand.
“I do understand,” she said softly.
“Do you?” There was a note of hope in his voice.
“Yes. But you must understand, we can never meet again.”
“If you had gone away with me that day . . .”
“It still would have come to this moment, except then we would be trapped forever in the dishonesty. Don’t you see, Amerigo? My mother has divorced. Your father would never approve. And you have humiliated your fiancée and lied to me. There is no future for us, unless we wish to be alone, completely alone, moving from hotel to hotel seeking the company of other outcasts. Could you live like that? No. I thought not. Neither could I.”
When Amerigo left a few minutes later, Beatrix felt the way a garden appears after it has been destroyed by storm and flood. She went to her room without another word to her mother, closed the door, and fell to her knees.
Minnie, on the other side of that door, heard the sobbing and knew she must let it run its course.
A Garden for Second Chances
A garden in which one can reconsider past decisions must be more than a garden in which one feels regret. If simple regret is to be the theme, then a bed of rue will do nicely. Rue is a plant of insignificant flowers, of loose form unless grown in strong sun, and with no fragrance. But a single plant does not constitute a garden, any more than a single decision constitutes a lifetime.
No. A garden of second chances must contain fragrant plants and strong colors interspersed among shrubbery. Hyacinth in the spring, of course, and roses, roses, and more roses in early summer, especially Rosa moschata. This climbing rose grows so vigorously it can be fiercely pruned back yet will still, in the following season, cover an entire wall with blooms.
In back of the roses, like a curtain in a theater, a thick planting of tall false indigo, and to the side of the false indigo, a bed of Cheiranthus cheiri, English wallflower, which if sown in summer does not bloom until its second season.
The flower beds should be edged with sweet alyssum, and the alyssum must be cut back every few weeks to keep it blooming till frost, just as hope occasionally has to be trimmed back to allow the unknown to flourish. Other flowers should include pansies for thought, heart’s ease for regret, bleeding heart for pain, and autumn-blooming crocus to represent that just when we think all is lost . . . it is not. New fresh blooms arise when and where we least expect them.
The bordering hedge, representing the cutting off of yesterday from today, should not be excessively neat; rather than trimmed, it should be plucked, leaving a lacy and uneven edge.
The lines of a garden for second chances can be straighter and more formal than the lines for a garden of first meetings. This is, after all, a garden in which one looks over the shoulder as well as straight ahead. Garden structures should include a bench nestling in a small glade of ferns, where one can sit and reconsider. The ferns should be Osmunda claytoniana, known more familiarly as the interrupted fern.
In the center of this more formal garden there should be a sundial to remind us of time and its passing.
SEVENTEEN
“Poor, poor girl,” said Mrs. Avery. “Oh, poor thing. To have to endure such heartbreak . . .” In the early-evening light her face was as white as the moon that hadn’t yet risen. She looked as if she would weep.
“Young men often do not speak plainly enough,” said Mr. Hardy. “Still, to not tell her of a previous attachment was very, very wrong.”
“But don’t you see? He was in love, and people in love often do wrong things. I myself . . .” I stopped in time. I h
ad never told another soul, not even Beatrix, how far along that attachment with Giovanelli had gotten when I was still trying to convince myself I was in love with him and not Mr. Winters.
Mrs. Ballinger did not sit with us that evening after dinner. I was glad of that, since I thought that stiff-backed, righteous woman’s judgment of Beatrix and Amerigo would be less than generous. It was just Walter and Mrs. Avery and myself, and a friendly threesome we made of it, though we were almost strangers. For two years, other than the time I spent campaigning and marching for women’s suffrage, other than a few parties for my young grandchildren, I had been alone.
One year for formal mourning. A second year if you actually loved your husband. That had been my mother’s formula when my father died. She had stayed in formal mourning for three years.
“It did not end there,” I said. “Neither the love, nor the complications. When Minnie went to the door the next morning, determined that she and Beatrix would book passage home that same day, she found that Mrs. Haskett had left a note on the little table, leaning up against the vases of roses the hotel had sent up the day before, sent by Mr. James to Minnie.
“‘When we are in residence in New York, this autumn, I would be so pleased to visit you,’ she had written. ‘Of course, when I return I will be speaking with a journalist from “Table Topics.” They are always so eager to print news of Americans traveling abroad.’
“It was a threat, you see. Blackmail. Invitations into Minnie’s inner circle would be the price for not talking of Beatrix’s affair with Amerigo.”
“Dastardly!” said Walter.
Such a sweet and old-fashioned word!
“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you, Walter. She did have those three daughters to marry off. Enough, perhaps, to make any woman desperate. And Minnie, practical and good-hearted woman that she was, knew she would help Beatrix, and Mrs. Haskett, even though she had asked for help in such a nasty way.
“When they were back in New York that winter, Minnie invited the woman to a few salons, and soon other people were inviting her as well. ‘A friend of Minnie’s,’ they would say. Perhaps it was blackmail, but it was practiced commonly enough in those days, when a single misstep could ruin a woman forever. Do you know, one of Mrs. Haskett’s daughters eventually married an English lord? Imagine. All because Minnie invited her to her salon a few times, and then Henry James agreed to have tea with her as well.”
A Lady of Good Family Page 18