A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  Yes, I thought. You made up your mind, finally, after you led him that merry chase, refusing to purchase the painting till Amerigo had married and performed his family duty. After he and Beatrix had parted.

  Beatrix had gone ashen. She understood the timing as well as I. She lifted her chin higher. “That is wise of you,” she said. “I’ve heard that painting does not bring good luck to its owner. Wasn’t there a story about a murdered monk who follows the painting from place to place?”

  Mrs. Haskett frowned. “I have heard that story,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.” As if she herself wasn’t fully convinced, she added, “Superstitious nonsense.”

  “Well, we must be on our way,” Beatrix said, beginning a somewhat hurried step in the direction of the archway leading to the central stairs and the exit to Fifth Avenue.

  “Wait.” Mrs. Haskett reached out and put her hand on Beatrix’s arm. Beatrix looked at it as if a spider or mouse had landed on her coat sleeve. “Will you come to my salon, Beatrix? This Sunday?” She pointedly did not invite me as well, but I was already getting used to that. Gossip spread quickly on Fifth Avenue.

  “I wish I could say yes,” said Beatrix, choosing each word with care. “But I am afraid I will be busy.”

  “Amerigo Massimo will be there. At four. And you, too, of course,” she added as an afterthought to me.

  She turned on her heel and left, her little maid scurrying behind her, trying to keep up with Mrs. Haskett’s long, quick stride.

  “Well?” I asked, after Mrs. Haskett had disappeared.

  “No,” Beatrix said. “It would be difficult enough to see him again, alone. But at her salon? No.”

  We spent a few more minutes pretending to study the porcelains, but Beatrix’s thoughts were miles away, perhaps in Rome, in the Borghese gardens.

  “That was a sign,” she decided. “This must be ended.” An hour later, she went to the park. Gardeners do not like unfinished stories; they are like bare ground that has been cultivated but not seeded. So much ruined potential, when there is a beginning without an ending.

  • • • •

  Central Park was humming with activity that day. Children pulled one another on wooden sleighs, mothers and fathers playfully pummeled one another with snowballs, young girls and boys walked up and down the paths, whispering and laughing as their governesses flirted with their own beaus. It was a winter wonderland, and Beatrix took her time as she walked to the skating pond where she had agreed to meet with Amerigo.

  Beatrix was filled with that sense of renewal that comes when a new year is on the horizon. She’d had a very busy year, many very busy years, in fact, since she had first met Amerigo, and she wondered what it would be like to go to him as a woman, a successful woman, rather than as the young girl she had been in Rome. She wondered what he would be like as a man with a wife and children and the fully accepted burden of responsibility, someone to whom she could no longer say, “Run away with me!” and mean it. Well, some people with responsibilities could say that—certainly many have—but she knew with all her being that Amerigo was not that kind of man.

  She thought of Amerigo as she walked through Olmsted’s marvelous park, the gardens and forest, ponds and paths in the midst of what was becoming one of the grandest cities of the world, where everyone, rich and poor, tycoons and shoeshine boys, could enjoy nature.

  She was glad the park was so busy that day, because gardens, she had come to believe, never feel complete until there are people in them, enjoying them.

  Beatrix walked through Olmsted’s miracle of green, not rehearsing in her thoughts what she would say to Amerigo, because she knew the words would come when they were needed. Perhaps they wouldn’t even need to talk. They could just look at each other, hold hands for a moment, and know that all was well since all was as it should be. They had each done the right thing: he to marry and she not to marry.

  Was she nervous? Who would not have been? She was not made of stone, and while she was pleased with how she had cultivated her life and made it bloom, she remembered, too, long nights of solitude. When you are as busy as Beatrix, it is difficult to be lonely. Loneliness requires a certain amount of free time. But solitude requires no such thing. Solitude can descend on you in a crowd, in your office, even in your favorite garden when it is filled with people.

  Loneliness can be chased away as easily as a skittish alley cat. Solitude is a wolf that stalks you wherever you go.

  There was an organ grinder in the park, with a little monkey all dressed up in a blue wool suit and hat. Beatrix paused and listened to the squeaky, sentimental music and put a nickel in the monkey’s cup. He tipped his hat at her and the organ grinder began to play a different song. A stornello from the Spanish Steps of Rome. Had Amerigo arranged that in advance? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Such coincidences happen.

  He was there, waiting by the skating pond, leaning on the railing, hugging his arms to his sides, a Roman man unaccustomed to the harsher winters of New York. A group of children, poorly dressed and too thin but laughing anyway, swarmed between her and Amerigo, reminding her again of that first meeting, when she had been swarmed by children in the Borghese gardens.

  The air, she told me later, felt thick, as it had that frosty autumn night at the Mount, when we had heard conversation and music and wandered through the house, looking for their sources. As she walked toward him, another man, a stranger, stood next to Amerigo and shouted something to the skaters on the pond.

  Amerigo laughed and began a conversation with the other man, who continued to nod and wave at the skaters. She was close enough now that she could hear the murmur of Amerigo’s voice, but not the words. She stopped, listening to the music of his voice, a melody in a minor key that had both sadness and joy.

  The stranger laughed again, louder this time, and moved away, leaving Amerigo alone.

  She did not call out to him but he turned to her anyway, sensing her arrival in the way that lovers do, even years later.

  He had changed from boy to man. His lean face had widened and acquired lines; his full beard had threads of silver. His eyes were the same, and his smile.

  Beatrix would not tell me what they talked about, only that they talked and walked for a good hour and it felt exactly as she had hoped it would, as a meeting of two old friends who once meant much to each other, lost touch, but then found each other again.

  There are so many kinds of love. Some grow in deep soil and cannot ever be uprooted; some grow in thinner soil and their flowers bloom for a day. Yet even that is a kind of love.

  As they talked, a burden fell from her. She, who had lived with the uncertainty of her hesitation, now knew that it had happened in the only way it could have happened, and she had nothing with which to recriminate herself. If they had eloped, they would have lost their families, their blameless friendship, their positions, and their plans for the lives they intended to live. Eventually, they would have lost each other, just as Minnie and her husband, Edith and Teddy, had lost each other, down long avenues of disagreement, disparity, resentment.

  They had avoided that.

  When Amerigo said he had to go, back to his hotel, to his wife and children, Beatrix felt sad, but not devastated.

  I loved you, he said.

  I loved you, too, she said. A long time ago.

  They had met in one garden, and parted in a different one, and the parting, to her, felt complete. She was tempted, for a second, to turn back and wave one more time, but she didn’t.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I went to Mrs. Haskett’s salon without Beatrix. Curiosity would not let me stay away. Mr. Winters refused to come with me, but that was perhaps just as well. Aside from afternoons at Minnie’s, he no longer cared for society and avoided the people who had once sat with him at card tables or at the racetracks in Saratoga and Longchamps. “Why fuel the gossip by appearing in public?” he woul
d say, newly and painfully sensitive to the looks he sometimes received, the whispered condemnation he imagined he heard. He had failed in the worst way a man could fail in that world, financially. That was the standard, you see. Men could do as they wished as long as they obtained and retained wealth. Money was the great leveler, and once you no longer had it, you no longer counted for anything, with certain people.

  Mrs. Haskett’s Fifth Avenue home was luxuriously garish. To describe it would be to describe what has already been noted in her accommodations, even the temporary ones: the excess of gilt and glitter and plush, the expensive foods on the buffet, enough food to feed all of Little Italy for a week, had she been so inclined. The musicians were of the best, though they did not play well for her, knowing that she was no expert at pacing or expression. The servants were unobtrusive and well trained, but if you looked closely at them, you could see the narrowed eyes of employees unhappy with their posts.

  “Beatrix did not come?” Mrs. Haskett accosted me rather than greeted me, as soon as I was announced.

  “Miss Jones has an excess of work and is engaged with it.”

  “Even on Sunday,” said Mrs. Haskett with great disapproval. “It is too bad, really too bad, that Miss Jones must work.”

  “She rather enjoys it,” I said.

  Mrs. Haskett moved on to the next guest. I took a glass of champagne from a passing maid and looked around, greeting those people I knew, though eyebrows lifted when women spoke with me. Some friends were kind and unchanged toward me. Some moved quickly away, as if misfortune were contagious.

  Head up, my mother would have said. I kept my head high, shoulders back.

  I found Amerigo in the music room, a gaudy overstuffed affair of spindly-legged chairs, grand piano, several harps, and gilded side tables. There was so much clutter in the room that the acoustics would have been terrible. Perhaps the hired musicians had refused to play there because of that. I couldn’t help but think how Edith, with her gracious taste and fondness for simplicity and comfort in furnishings, would hate this room.

  I made my way through the maze of furnishings to where he stood beside a window looking out onto the street. When he turned and saw me without Beatrix, there was unmasked relief on his face.

  “Ah. She didn’t come. Good,” was the first thing he said. I understood his meaning immediately.

  “She has no particular fondness for Mrs. Haskett.” I gave Amerigo my hand.

  “It would be unspeakable,” he said. “To meet her here, like this, with people like Mrs. Haskett.” Amerigo flushed. “To have to make polite small talk with her. Unbearable. Will you sit with me for a minute?”

  We sat near the window, a difficult silence winding around us. So much had happened, so long ago, and I could not reduce it to inane questions about his voyage, his activities in New York.

  “She has made a name for herself,” he said, breaking the silence. “She was modest about her accomplishments when we met, but I have heard other people talking. She said she would be a gardener.” He smiled.

  A couple, laughing at some secret joke, brushed past us and then fled into an adjoining room for more privacy. Her crimson dress was cut too low for the afternoon; his striped suit did not fit well. One could tell they were not husband and wife. Amerigo waited until we were alone again before speaking.

  “I remember her, sitting in my garden with Magda. Magda remembered her, too. The American lady, she called her. I was sad when Magda passed away. She was the only person I could speak with about Beatrix, the only one who had known her.”

  “I am sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Magda was very old. It comes for us all.”

  The musicians began to play, and strangely enough, they played a song I remembered from Rome, something the street musicians had favored. Amerigo listened to them for a moment and smiled, the lines around his eyes creasing even more deeply.

  “It is strange, hearing that old song played as a piece for chamber musicians. It needs the sound of crying babies and street sellers, doesn’t it?” He tapped his fingers to the music.

  “What is its name?” I asked.

  “It is something they play at the Spanish Steps. ‘The Poison Flower.’ A young man falls in love with a girl who cannot love him back, who can never leave her father’s garden. They say that your author, Hawthorne, heard this song and wrote a story about it.”

  “It is a sad story.”

  “Most love stories are, I have found.” He realized that this sounded bitter and quickly amended his comment. “I have two sons now. And a daughter. They are the joy of my existence. They make everything worthwhile. I wonder that Beatrix has not married.”

  Was that hope in his voice? Pride that, after him, she would allow no other lovers in her life?

  “She chose a different path,” I said. “She wanted to do something that had not been done before. Marriage is, alas, all too common.”

  The musicians in the other room stopped playing, and I could hear how much laughter there was in the rooms, too much, and too many couples, not wedded to each other, stood whispering together. Their secrets melded with the gilt and excess of Mrs. Haskett’s house, and I was glad that my husband had chosen not to come with me. I still valued his opinion, and I knew what his opinion would be of this house, these people. He had lost money, but he still had a sense of honor and loyalty, unlike some of the people at the salon. Some of Mrs. Haskett’s guests had lost much more.

  “This place is terrible,” Amerigo said, a little too loudly. “I come only because I am trying to buy back from Mrs. Haskett a painting I sold her.”

  “The Wolf of Gubbio,” I said.

  “She has told you of it. Yes. My father is very old. He wishes to have the painting back, where it belongs. I sold it without his approval, and not for a very good price, I think, though that is not relevant. I sold it for a reason that no longer mattered. The painting belongs with my family, and now it is possible for me to purchase it back. My wife brought money with her to the marriage. I know you Americans speak freely of such things.”

  “Will Mrs. Haskett sell it back, do you think? She mentioned to me that she planned to sell it to the museum.”

  “So she threatens, but I think I will give her better value for her money. She will make me dance on her strings, I think. A puppet. That is how she sees those of us with less wealth than she has. She knows nothing, and when all is said and done, she is a very stupid woman. Without her husband’s money, she would be nothing.”

  He turned away from the window. “And now, I will go to Mrs. Haskett and try to amuse her. That is her price, you see. Good-bye, Mrs. Winters. I doubt we will meet again.”

  • • • •

  I left soon after and walked the long way home, up Fifth Avenue to the park, and then down again, the other side. It was snowing and very beautiful, but the roads were icy. Several vehicles had slid into half turns, tying up traffic and creating little groupings of angry men and frightened women and children who shouted and pointed at their automobiles or carriages.

  The air had been so close in Mrs. Haskett’s salon, so heavy with perfume and the smell of liqueurs. The cold air and the long walk revived me, and I thought of the world we had created, the world of Lily Bart and Henry James’ poor unnamed governess, where women believed they must marry, and if they did not, they were mere weeds in other people’s gardens, things to be plucked and discarded.

  I thought Beatrix had found a better way.

  My walk took me past the new Waldorf Astoria Hotel, with its long line of waiting carriages outside the sheltered portico of the front. Police in their blue uniforms stood by, trying unsuccessfully to look unobtrusive. The very wealthy do not like to be reminded of their vulnerability, of the crime and the criminals waiting to lighten them of their purses and jewels. Mr. Astor and his hotel managers usually stationed plainclothes detectives in the
lobby and entrance of the hotel for that very reason. Yet today there were police in full uniform, swinging their billy clubs.

  The reason was just opposite them, on the other side of the avenue, a group of men and women dressed in the drab and coarse garments of the working class. They stood quietly and fiercely holding placards on sticks, large-lettered signs asking for better wages, for reduced hours for their children, for decent housing. Some of the women carried signs demanding the right to vote.

  This, too, was part of the world we had created, the haves and have-nots and that dangerous gulf between them.

  Before I turned away I saw Arturo marching with them.

  • • • •

  When I arrived home, Gilbert was in the study with the door closed. India was at an afternoon dance party—oh, how thankful I had been for that invitation, for India’s sake—and Robert was in bed, trying to sleep away the cough that plagued him.

  Rather than dine alone at that huge table, I had a tray sent into the library, where I could sit before a fire, my feet up on an ottoman. I kept the door opened and listened. When I heard footsteps in the hall, I called to him, and Arturo, still wearing his hat and coat, came in.

  “That was dangerous,” I said. “If Mr. Winters or anyone from this house had seen you marching, you would have been sent away.”

  “You saw me,” he said. He spoke to me as if I were an equal, prepared to quarrel and stand his ground with me rather than wait for orders, instruction, or reprimand.

  “That is different.”

  “How?”

  “Because,” I said. Because he reminded me of Giovanelli? It was more. We will be friends, he had said to me at the Mount. I thought we should be. “Was there trouble with the police?” I asked.

  “No. There was an accident, though, at the corner of Fifty-first Street. Serious, I think. The police went away to that.” He turned to leave, to warm himself in the kitchen with the other servants. He gave me a quick “Thank you” over his shoulder, and a grin of complicity.