“Read to us, please, Henry,” Minnie said after dinner one night when we sat before the blazing hearth. A wind whispered around the house and there were occasional bangs and taps that made us jumpy.
Edith sat quietly, stroking the dog in her lap, thinking. Minnie was knitting tiny baby caps to donate to one of the homes for unwed mothers in New York. Beatrix was thumbing through plant catalogues, planning a new spring border for Edith. I listlessly shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards and laid out hands of patience on the side table.
“The Turn of the Screw. Again?” Henry asked with a little sigh, pretending to be a little irritated though we all knew he was flattered.
“A perfect choice,” handsome Walter Berry agreed, and Henry puffed up a little.
Mr. James was a great literary success, of course, but his earnings were modest. I had overheard Edith complaining to him that her anticipated royalties from The House of Mirth would barely cover the cost of the new automobile she had purchased. Mr. James had replied that his earnings that year would barely cover the old wheelbarrow he needed to paint.
“I’ll get the copy from the library,” Minnie said, rising.
“No. You stay there. I’ll get it,” Beatrix said. She was thirty-two that summer, and strikingly lovely, with her athletic gait, coppery hair, and direct, unblinking gaze.
I sometimes saw Mr. James watching her too closely, studying her, and I later wondered whether it was Beatrix he had in mind when he created that tall, amiable, peacemaking daughter, Rosanna, in The Ivory Tower.
“How is her occupation going?” he asked after Beatrix had left the room to fetch the book. There was a hint of admiration in his voice.
“Such a stern word, occupation,” said Howard Sturgis, grinning.
“Splendidly,” Minnie said. “She is in demand since she designed the plantings for that little development outside of Manhattan.” The “little development” was Tuxedo Park, a new community of summer cottages for Manhattan’s wealthiest, men who wore the new tailless evening jackets from London that would soon be named “tuxedo” in honor of the community.
“Put in some roses, did she?” Mr. James inquired, shifting his bulky figure in his chair.
“Certainly, roses. As well as viburnums, spirea, and lilac,” Minnie said with pride. “After she had graded the lawns and created a screen planting for the entrance lodges. Mr. Garrison was especially pleased that she was able to create the gardens without sacrificing the oaks and birches already there.”
Mr. James shifted again. “It is rare for a girl to be so fond of trees, I think. I always picture her with a little watering jar in her hand, fussing over a bed of pansies.”
“Yesterday that girl, as you call her, lifted an eight-foot-tall maple into the hole she had dug herself. Even Reynolds, who is not impressed by much, was impressed by that.” Minnie grew thoughtful and put down the striped cap she had been knitting. “I think,” she said softly, “Beatrix was dismayed by some of those gardens we visited in Italy, where all the trees and shrubs had been laid waste to accommodate a foolish statue or unnecessary fountain.”
“They have a different aesthetic,” Mr. James agreed. “Beatrix, don’t you agree, they have a different aesthetic?”
“Very different,” she agreed, having just come back into the room. When she felt my eyes on her, she gave me a little smile.
“I should think Italy hard to forget,” said Mr. James, who wrote very clever books—certainly the sentences were a test of endurance and sophistication—and was known to be attuned to the dramas going on about him.
“One should not dwell in the past,” said Minnie, picking up her knitting and clacking the needles at a furious pace.
“But the letter you sent me when you were in Rome in ’ninety-five has become a constant reminder of your travels there. Your description of the Borghese grounds was particularly effective.”
“We had time enough to study them,” Edith said. “Beatrix had gone off and left us sitting for quite a while.”
Minnie, Beatrix, and I grew suddenly absorbed with the ceiling. Edith did not know the story of Beatrix and Amerigo because Minnie had never told her. “What if she used it in a story?” Minnie had said to me when we decided to never openly speak of it. “That would do Beatrix such harm, and much as I love Edith, one should never trust confidences to a novelist.”
The novelist, sensing the unspoken narrative swirling above, on the ceiling, studied us with curiosity.
Mr. James, seeing that we did not wish to pursue a conversation about Rome and the Borghese gardens, picked up his book and turned the pages, looking for a passage he wished to read aloud for us.
“Paris, of course, has superior gardens,” said Walter Berry, meaning, I believed, that Parisian women were more amiable.
Howard, playing cards with Teddy at a corner table, slapped his hand down and said gleefully, “You win again, old man.” Howard often made sure that Teddy won, to sweeten Mr. Wharton’s moods, which were often quarrelsome.
It was dark by then, an early, humid autumn dusk having turned into a dark night shadowed by clouds over the moon. The wind rattled the French doors and we thought we heard a squeal from some small animal, followed by the whooing of an owl.
For a moment I grew nostalgic for autumns past, when just such a wind would have set candles and gas lamps flickering. Edith had installed electricity and plumbing and all modern conveniences at the Mount, even a little elevator between floors.
And just as I was growing nostalgic for flickering candles, the lights went out completely. A stronger wind blew shut the French doors that had been opened onto the terrace and the warm autumn evening.
“What the blazes?” Mr. Sturgis shouted. Mr. Wharton, increasingly unpredictable, laughed.
“A fuse,” Edith said. Her little dog began to yap furiously, jumped down to the floor, and pranced in anxious circles at her feet.
“Perhaps that wind has caused some sort of damage to the system,” suggested Beatrix, who knew about such things.
“Oil lamps!” I cried, excited. “Do you still have some, Edith, or were they all given to charity?”
“I think candles,” Minnie said. “Especially if they are perfumed.”
Edith’s housekeeper appeared a moment later, carrying candles and matches. The wind was picking up and we could hear leaves rustling and that strange sighing of nature that emerges on dark autumn nights. “Do you want a fire?” the housekeeper asked, all concern for her employer.
“No, it is still too warm, and the wind might cause a downdraft. We are fine, Gross. Go back to bed,” Edith said. “Thank you,” she added. “Can you read by candlelight, Henry, or must we sit in pensive silence till the electric problem is solved?” Edith placed three of the candlesticks on the table next to him.
Edith pretended to be gay, but her nerves were showing in the slight tilt of her head. She was uncomfortable in darkness and refused to be in a dark room if it also contained a book of ghost stories. It was an old fear dating from her childhood.
I suppose because she was not alone, she allowed Mr. James to go on with his reading from The Turn of the Screw.
He read from the beginning in a lovely, clear voice, and we three ladies and three gentlemen sat transfixed by the story. We all knew it well. I myself had read the novel at least half a dozen times, yet it still tethered my imagination so that my thoughts could not wander as he read, not even to wondering what Gilbert was doing that evening. We passed a very pleasant hour that way, Henry pausing occasionally to refresh his throat with a sip of brandy.
When he came to one passage the atmosphere in the room changed.
“‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll,’” Henry read, his voice deep and beautifully modulated. “‘One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least
shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.’”
Beatrix, who had been leaning deeply into her chair, eyes closed, all the better to see the story in her mind’s eye, sat up as straight as if she had heard a fire alarm.
“Let’s stop the reading there,” Minnie said, understanding instantly the memory that had jolted Beatrix. Amerigo, in the Borghese gardens.
Teddy, who had sunk into a light sleep as soon as Mr. James began to read, came to with a start. “Edith,” he shouted, as if she were several rooms away. “What has happened?”
“Nothing, Teddy. Just the wind. Don’t you remember?” Edith asked gently.
“Of course I do,” he grumbled, but it was obvious he didn’t. “The damned lights went out.” Mr. Wharton rose unsteadily to his feet—he had drunk a considerable quantity of wine at dinner—and took the book from Henry. “That old chestnut again, my fellow? I should think you’d want something more lively.” He tossed the book in the air, caught it, then threw it into a corner. It landed, spread-eagled and spine broken, like a wounded animal.
“Bedtime, I think,” Edith said, rising.
EIGHTEEN
It took me a very long while to fall asleep. I missed Gilbert and the happy promises of my early years with him. That first time I had seen him in the garden at Vevey he had been all American confidence combined with an Old World charm and sophistication—an irresistible combination to me, who had known only naive younger men with little experience of the world.
And the way he had looked at me, there in the garden. Knowingly, admiringly, with a kind of amazement, as if he had never before seen such a pretty girl. He turned my head. He made me feel special, wonderful.
And now we were broken—that was how it felt—we’d become as broken as a vase that falls from a table and shatters into pieces. Was this how Minnie had felt when she first knew she must separate from her husband? Was this how Edith was feeling, this same night?
When I did sleep, I had uneasy dreams of being chased through darkness by some unseen monster, my dress torn ragged by sharp branches, my hair fallen loose and streaming behind me.
I woke in darkness sometime around three in the morning, startled awake by a noise that ceased as soon as I came to full consciousness. I was no longer used to being awakened at night. When the children had been small it had happened frequently. I would creep from bed so as not to wake Mr. Winters, who could have slept through an earthquake, and then step around the snoring nurse to check on my babes.
That hadn’t happened in years. The youngest, Athena, was already twelve. I was used to sleeping through.
Even so, this noise had been different from the accustomed nightmare moans, snores, and coughs of a household. Like the monster in my dream, it avoided identification.
I sat up and waited for it to resume. It did. A man’s voice talking lowly, slowly; pausing, then starting again as if the speaker were in conversation with another person I could not hear. Was that Beatrix’s name I heard?
The hair on my arms rose on gooseflesh. It was a stranger’s voice. In the house.
I rose and found the candlestick Edith had given me for the night. When I struck the match, the voice ceased, as if I had startled it.
I went to the door, meaning to peek into the hall, but just as my hand touched the knob, the door swung forcefully open.
“Beatrix! You frightened me.”
She stood there in her white nightgown, candle also in hand, forefinger pressed to her lips in the “shh” gesture.
“No one else is awake,” she whispered. “You heard it, too? I think someone is in the house.” She frowned and in the eerie candlelight her eyes looked even larger than usual. “I rang for a servant and no one came.”
When she said that, I realized how strange the atmosphere was. Were we awake, or was this part of my nightmare? We felt isolated from the other people in the house, and for a chilling second I was tempted to call out, to rouse the other sleepers to end this terrible isolation.
Beatrix seemed to intuit this and again put her forefinger to her lips, warning me to be silent. We made our way down the hall, our movements as slow and laborious as if we passed through water. The moonlight shining through lace curtains shimmered in ever-changing patterns over the floor.
Beatrix leading the way, we crept down the stairs, pausing at every twist and turn and doorway to make certain no one lurked behind a chair or around a corner. She picked up a heavy bronze statuette to use, I assumed, as a weapon, should the need arise.
Still, no one else in the house woke or moved but us.
Our search seemed to take years, not minutes. We tiptoed silently through the house—the den, the library, the dining room, the gallery, all the lovely rooms that ran along the outside terrace. Edith had built a strong house. The floors did not creak, nor the stairs squeak. The voices had stopped and the only noise in the dark was the rustle of our nightdresses and our occasional murmurs to each other. I bumped into a table and Beatrix whispered, “Are you all right?” A leaf from a potted plant brushed her cheek and she jumped back two steps.
The silence grew unbearable, worse even than the muffled sound of conversation that had awakened me. I could hear my heart beating, the pulse roaring in my ears, as we tried to discover the source of that overheard conversation.
In all the downstairs rooms the windows were latched shut, the doors unopened. Nothing seemed amiss; certainly there were no prowlers, though every shadow seemed somehow ominous.
“No one,” Beatrix said after we had peered into the corners of the drawing room where we had sat, hours before, listening to Mr. James read from his ghost story.
“I don’t believe we imagined it,” I said.
“Nor I. Yet aside from those who belong here, the house is empty. Let’s go outside, into the gardens,” Beatrix said. “I don’t think I’ll sleep anymore tonight.” She looked shaken, in need of air.
We opened the French doors and walked through them, across the terrace, down the stone steps to the lawn. By unspoken agreement, we headed in the direction of the walled Italianate garden, with its conical topiaries and trimmed hedges, its insistent reference to Old World formality. The bushes made sharp-edged shadows on the grass and the wind made those shadows dance.
“The voices were speaking Italian,” Beatrix said, sitting on a stone bench. “Is that what you heard?”
“Yes. And I think . . . I think I heard your name in the conversation.”
“I know. That was what woke me up. Someone calling my name.” We sat in the moonlight and waited without knowing what we waited for. My heartbeat had slowed down; it seemed less frightening outdoors than it had been indoors.
The night around us was silent. We could hear a gentle breeze stir the bronzing leaves on the trees, a faint rustle like a skittering mouse when a leaf fell to the graveled path, but nothing else.
“Strange, the voices spoke in the house, but not here,” Beatrix said, shivering. “We must have dreamed it.”
“The same dream for two people? I don’t think so.”
“I suppose not.”
“Are you warm enough?” I asked, wishing I had brought my cashmere wrap. My slippers were wet through from the walk over the dewy grass. They’d never be the same.
“I’m fine. Are you feeling chilled?”
We sat in silence, each wondering at the significance of what we had heard. One person might have been accused of being overimaginative or mistaking a dream for an actual event. But when two people experience the same event, it is more than imagination or restless dreaming.
“How curious this night feels, Daisy. Before I woke up, if I did wake up, I was dreaming a different dream, in which I was singing a song I heard after we went to the Borghese gardens that year in Rome. ‘My destiny is written in your heart.’ That was the opening line, and when I first heard it I wanted to find the sheet music and learn it myself. Amerigo told me later that most of those songs have never been written down. They are passed from father to son.”
After those years of silence, she had said his name.
“Perhaps Henry’s reading stirred something. Opened some doorway,” I suggested. “Athena and her friends were playing about with a Ouija board last week, and all the girls were convinced some spirit by the name of Gray Wolf came through to instruct them.”
Beatrix smiled. It was a very patient smile; even thin moonlight could reveal that.
“Are you growing superstitious, Daisy?” she asked with a tilt of her head.
“Well, the spirit did tell them that one of the girls, Chloris, should be careful going down stairs. And the next day she fell down three stairs and sprained her ankle.”
“Coincidence is not the same as guidance from beyond,” she insisted, unconvinced. “Coincidence can be very strange, though.”
Gardeners are direct people. They know the ground; they know the plant. Beatrix knew the ground of our conversation and the words that would suit it.
“I recently had a letter from him. Amerigo Massimo,” she said.
I didn’t bother to hide my astonishment. “What did he say?”
“He will be in New York in December and would like to meet with me. He intends to visit the gardens in Central Park. His wife will be here as well. He has three children. Two sons and a daughter. Imagine.”
Beatrix rose from the bench and paced, wringing her hands.
“Have you thought of him often?” I asked, beginning to shiver. Amerigo had contacted her. Was this why we had heard that voice, had that strange shared dream of words in Italian?
A Lady of Good Family Page 20