“Never had much regard for the so-called nobility,” said Mr. Hardy. “By the way, has anyone heard anything yet about the suffrage vote in Tennessee?” He gave me a teasing glance, letting his eyes rest on my suffrage rosette.
“No politics. Not tonight, Mr. Hardy, if you don’t mind,” declared Mrs. Avery, who seemed to be growing less timid. “I’d like to hear the completion of this story. You can’t leave it there, Daisy. Broken hearts must be attended to. It is, I suppose, something like that story you began with, about the specter bridegroom. Her Italian lover wasn’t a specter, but he did disappear, I assume?”
The piano player inside temporarily ceased his tinkling repertoire of Irving Berlin tunes. He seemed to have a very limited musical education, and two nights in a row of Berlin was making me restless.
“Disappear is the very word,” I said.
So much in life disappears. That’s why, when we pass an old farmhouse where ancient peonies and daylilies still bloom among the weedy ruins, we are so touched by their beauty. Sometimes the most fragile things are all that survive.
Beatrix’s choice to become a designer of gardeners was about creating beauty that outlasts the seasons—and the years. Walk a garden path and you walk in a kind of eternity where love is always a possibility.
• • • •
Nine years later, in the autumn of 1904, Henry James came to visit Edith Wharton at her new home, the Mount. Edith, as my interpretation of her stay in Rome years before had indicated, had previously been impatient and unhappy with domestic duty. Acquiring land right there, in the Berkshire hills, and designing and building her own home on that lovely land, elevated her attitude. She was mistress of all she surveyed, from lake view to china cabinet.
It wasn’t domesticity that had caused Edith’s health problems years earlier, but that kind of social Newport domesticity that requires a woman to spend her waking hours visiting people one does not particularly like and, in turn, being visited by them.
“All that driving up and down Bellevue Avenue, just to show off new frocks,” I had heard her comment once to Minnie. “Can you think of a worse waste of an afternoon?”
Edith and Teddy were still married in 1904, but Teddy had less presence in her life. It was as if he were becoming a ghost, something seen on occasion, a presence one knew was there but didn’t particularly bother with. Edith’s “scribblings” had, by then, turned into a successful literary career, earning both acclaim and royalties. Teddy had some of his own money, but he had begun to creep around his wife’s house in a disconcerting way, sometimes mumbling to himself.
“Teddy is in charge of the wines,” Edith announced at each dinner, and because the wines were excellent, Teddy would smile and puff up a little, and then just as quickly deflate once actual conversation started, since the talk was literary and Teddy was not.
He was still a handsome man, still admired by his friends at least for his charm, dwindling though it was. All I will say of Edith is that as soon as she acquired her own bedroom down the hall from Teddy’s, her nervous depression lifted considerably.
Beatrix, who had not married, had carefully, diligently built her career as a landscape gardener. When she returned from the European tour, she set up an office in her mother’s New York brownstone and let it be known that she was open for commissions. Many people were skeptical: a female landscaper? Thanks to friends and connections, and then word of her skill and creativity, commissions trickled in: she drained swamp for cultivation, tamed forty acres of wild forest into a pleasant grove, and laid out a small cemetery. (“Full of light and attractive views,” she wrote to me. “Remember those terrible catacombs in Rome?”)
Three years after opening her design office, Beatrix was so well known and well thought of that she was chosen as a member of the new American Society of Landscape Architects—the only woman so honored. “Earth-shaker!” Mr. James called her in his letters.
Beatrix was totally absorbed by her chosen work. I rarely saw her without a reference book or a trowel or a sketching pad in her hands. She forged ahead, determined, and only once did she falter, and that just for a day. She and Mr. Sargent quarreled.
She had come back from her European tour full of ideas about garden design. When she had returned to visit the Sargents at Holm Lea, she had talked enthusiastically about how American gardens, while acknowledging the debt to the past, to those formal European gardens, should also look forward to the future and pay due respect for place. New York is not Rome, she said. Boston is not Versailles, so our gardens should not mimic those.
Mr. Sargent had nodded and absentmindedly poked at the fire in the hearth. Who would not agree with such an argument? He had done worse than disagree, though. He had grown bored. “My dear,” he had said, a little too softly, putting his feet up on the fender. “Are you ignoring your research and your studies in botany? There is more to gardens than prettiness.”
The rebuke stunned her, and she saw that she and her mentor had come to an intellectual parting of the ways, saw that men and women often approach the same problem from different angles.
“Of course I will continue my studies and research,” she said quietly, watching embers like fireflies dance over the flames. “And I will design gardens that others may find pretty.”
Mr. Sargent and Beatrix remained the best of friends and colleagues, and he did all he could to aid her career, but after that bored comment from her teacher, Beatrix realized she was breaking ground in many ways: she had entered a career dominated by men, and she had chosen a path different from her mentor’s.
“Daisy,” she wrote to me after the tour, “I sometimes feel like I am the only one of my species, something rare and isolated. A specimen plant, unclassified and stared at in curiosity. Oh, dear one, tear up this letter when you have finished. Throw it into the hearth and turn it to ashes. I am close to complaint, close to loneliness. And you know that I will not give in or give way. Onward.”
She gave an interview to the New York Sun, defying the convention that a lady have her name in the newspaper for only three occasions: birth, marriage, and death. In the interview she was described as “comely” and “majestic,” and I think that helped her career, but it also made her even more of a curiosity to some.
Completely disappeared from her life was Amerigo Massimo. He had written twice to Beatrix after she sailed back to New York. The first was an apology, signed with “all my heart, all my regret, to my darling Beatrix.” I don’t know if Beatrix wrote back. She received a second letter, a year after her arrival home, saying that he had married his princess and both families rejoiced at the match. He left it at that. No complaints, no hints of bitterness or anger at the forced arrangement. He was, after all was said and done, a gentleman, and I imagine he did all he could to make his little princess happy, once the inevitable had arrived.
There were no more letters after that, and if Beatrix thought of him, longed for him, she gave no sign of it. She made almost yearly trips to Europe with Minnie, to continue her studies and explorations, but when in Rome she avoided certain places and explored only gardens and villas she hadn’t visited before.
What was her state of mind? Cheerful, usually. She had her work, and a good job she was making of it. She had independence and had found her way in the world, had swum against the current and landed on a pleasant shore. If she was lonely, she gave no sign of it.
Not till that autumn of 1904.
It was a wonderful season of mild days, chilly nights, and nature’s finest colors as far as the eye could see, and at the Mount one could see very far. Edith had had a busy summer, writing every morning, working with various village committees, and motoring through the New England countryside in a little auto. When that beautiful autumn arrived, she had even more cause to rejoice, because it brought friends: Henry James, Howard Sturgis, Walter Berry, Minnie, Beatrix, and myself. Few things made Edith happier t
han a house full of friends who knew to leave her alone to write in the morning, but in the afternoon accompanied her on motor trips through the countryside.
Henry, who had a secretary (he had permanent cramping of his right hand by then and dictated his work), housekeeper, maid, and little else, pretended not to be slightly awed by the staff Edith had hired for the Mount: her beloved housekeeper, Gross, shared the running of the house with Arthur White. There were maids, footmen, a cook, and kitchen boys. The gardener, Reynolds, had a small army of male assistants, and there was a chauffeur with the incongruous name of Cook. There was Anna Balmain, who had once worked in Minnie’s household, who now worked for Edith, as her secretary.
I caught Henry sometimes running a fingertip over the always dustless furniture, sighing over the exquisite meals, stroking the collar of a freshly pressed shirt, and there on his face, plain to see, was the sixth deadly sin, envy.
Edith was assisted by one other whom Henry envied above all else: her sister-in-law, Minnie, was acting as her agent, and doing that with as much efficiency as she completed all her other work. Minnie had, by then, published a book of her own, European Travel for Women, a travel guide of useful information that Murray and Baedeker hadn’t thought to include: how to tip in London, the correct teatime in Paris, how much it costs to rent a steamer chair during the crossing. Because of her many literary contacts, she was well positioned to help Edith in her own career. Because of her divorce, she appreciated the extra income Edith paid her.
Divorce hadn’t damaged Minnie: her character was too strong, her virtuous reputation too stainless. It helped that she had powerful friends, Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt among them. The divorce had, though, brought changes. Poverty was far, far away, but the velvet drawing room curtains in the brownstone were not replaced even though they were faded; there were fewer expensive dinner parties and more informal lunches; she dressed as beautifully as she ever had but wore her gowns more seasons than others might have agreed to do.
Those small changes did not worry her. Minnie walked through life with the confidence of one who makes all her own decisions. Others might say, “I’ll have to speak with Tom or Lawrence to see if we can come,” or, “No, I can’t come; my husband doesn’t enjoy music,” but Minnie could give a simple yes or no, depending on her own preferences. She answered to no one and if she occasionally remembered that demeaning afternoon in the lawyer’s office in Paris, that castigating letter of accusation from her mother-in-law, she did not mention it.
I was studying Minnie, to see how it was done. Mr. Winters and I had separated. Not officially, of course; there were no announcements. India and Athena were still at home and a few years short of marriage age, so we had to keep up appearances for their sake. But Mr. Winters spent more and more nights at his club, and sometimes entire weeks went by when I didn’t see him at all.
My life and house felt empty without him. I had hoped that a formal ultimatum from my lips would produce the desired result: me or the gambling. Oh, how I had posed in front of the hearth, hand to heart, other hand to forehead, just like an illustration in Harper’s called The Gambler’s Wife. He had smiled and put his arms around me and assured me, again, it was just a run of bad luck and his luck was bound to change. But neither luck nor attitude changed. Thank God Mr. Cadwalader had encouraged me to put the New York house in my name.
That autumn of my visit to the Mount, Clara, already married and expecting her first child, was in New York, in her own home; the younger girls had gone to visit friends in Newport. Gil Jr. and his wife were busy doing up a brownstone on Madison Avenue, Robert was working in a law office in Boston, Jenny was carrying her second child, and Mr. Winters was avoiding me in order to avoid any conversation about finances. I had been left to stew in my own bitter regrets, and it did not agree with me.
“Lenox,” Minnie had said, the day she found me weeping in my dining room, alone, into a bowl of soup. “It is time to visit Edith.”
Beatrix took a week off from work to make the trip, to help Edith with her gardens. Beatrix had been working too hard. There were shadows around her eyes and she was thin, so she let her mother coax her into taking a small vacation.
But when you are ambitious and essentially healthy, and passionate about your work, there really is no such thing as a vacation.
Every morning Beatrix walked through the grounds of the Mount with the head gardener, Reynolds, pointing out which bushes should be trimmed, where spring bulbs would be best placed. Their meetings were often somewhat loud, since Beatrix had grown from girl to woman, and a woman with very strong views at that.
She was not shy in criticizing some of Edith’s ideas for her gardens. Edith wanted an Old World Italian feel to the grounds, with long walkways and closely trimmed hedges; Beatrix urged her to consider the more natural English style that Gertrude Jekyll was still perfecting and that Beatrix herself preferred.
“Suit the plant to the place,” she repeated often, “and the garden to its locale. Plant an American garden, Aunt Edith, not an imitation Italian garden.” Mrs. Wharton would nod, tilt her head slightly to one side, and then continue sketching straight-lined paths and formal parterres. They quarreled over the gardens, and Beatrix did not visit her aunt often at the Mount after that autumn. The disagreement over the gardens wasn’t the only reason she avoided the place.
“It reminds me of Rome,” she said. “Why should a good American garden remind one of Rome?”
I often went with Beatrix on her walks in Lenox, and one day, when we had ventured into a woodsy area with a gravel path strewn with gold leaves and huge oaks towering overhead, she stopped to look at a seedling that had sprouted between two rocks. An acorn had wedged there and sent up a four-inch stem with two sickly pale leaves.
She peered hard at this little plant, and a look of great pity came over her face.
“Poor thing,” she sighed. “It will not thrive. There isn’t enough soil or light.” She bent over and pulled it from its cradle between the rocks.
This seemed ruthless to me. But, of course, she was right. Leave an oak to grow in that place and it would either die quickly or grow large enough to do harm when its roots pulled loose from the gravely hillside.
When she plucked that sapling I understood what had happened to her in Italy. Despite her passion for Amerigo, she had not been able to stay there, had not eloped with him that afternoon he asked her to. She had called it a “hesitation,” but it had been a resistance, a foreknowledge of disaster to come if she tried to plant her very American sensibilities into an Italian setting. Some women thrive in foreign situations. Beatrix would not have. So she had pulled herself free of it, despite the pain. Mrs. Haskett’s cruel visit and gossip about Amerigo’s engagement to another woman had been the deciding factor, not the initial one.
“Walk on, Daisy,” Beatrix said, giving the uprooted sapling a little caress before she tossed it to the ground. There is life, and there is death, and in between we try to make the best of it, her expression said.
Mr. James, who was that year visiting the land of his birth for the first time in two decades, was enamored of Edith’s new home, and of the splendid autumn weather, and he was pleased to get to know his fellow bachelor Walter Berry.
Before Edith had married Teddy Wharton, she had been in love with Walter, and she had married Teddy when she realized Walter would not have her.
She never knew why their friendship had not progressed down the path it seemed to want to take but was perceptive enough to realize that it was not entirely her fault. Walter Berry, tall, handsome, aristocratic, and intelligent, had expensive tastes and a penchant for chorus girls. Such men do not do a favor to the women they marry, and he was honest enough to know that and to act upon the knowledge by not acting. He and Edith began as friends and remained friends, with no hint of flirtation in the relationship. Walter flirted only when and where he could make a hasty exit with n
o backward glance; with friends he was true and stable.
Howard Sturgis was also unwed, but unlike Walter he had a nature more feminine than masculine, and often more childlike than even feminine. When Howard came into a room, that room took on the aura of a child’s birthday party, full of merriment and pleasure.
And so our days passed at the Mount, with card parties, walks, drives through the countryside, vivid discussions about literature and plants. I was often distracted from my problems with Mr. Winters, but they nagged at me like an unremitting pain. I had, years before, taken a step in the direction of self-determination by requiring that the New York home be put in my name. Now I was wondering what it actually meant to be a wife, if marriage was necessary, and if necessary, what a woman should be willing to endure. There were the children, of course, and any sacrifice was worth their well-being; there had been the splendid intimacy with Gilbert, the social status of being wife to a man with an old family name. But when children were grown and gone, intimacy turned to dust, and the name was not gilded enough to pay debts—what was left? I had no answer.
The evenings at the Mount had a different atmosphere from the pleasant days. Sunset brings out doubts and regrets, and autumn does as well; the days may remind us of summer and sunshine, but the evenings look ahead to cold and snow and isolation. Tensions rise; old fears come to the surface; anxieties about the future cloud conversations. Autumn challenges your expectations, makes you aware of your limits. In the evenings our laughter was briefer, with longer moments between. We would all of us, that week, feel a cage of loneliness separate each from the others, once the sun went down.
A Lady of Good Family Page 19