A Lady of Good Family

by Jeanne Mackin

  “Beatrix, my dear. Don’t look so stricken. I think I am growing jealous. It is not an emotion Franklin approved of.”

  She smiled, as he had intended.

  She didn’t sleep well that night. She thought of the night at the Mount, the whispered conversation, sitting in the Italianate garden in the moonlight and thinking of Amerigo. “You will see wonders,” the monk had told her years ago, at the catacombs in Rome. She thought, then, that he hadn’t been talking about the ruins they were about to visit, but events later in her life. Sometimes, you see a wonder and don’t even realize it till years later.

  The next day, Max took her to the station, to get the train back to New York. “What do you say about a winter wedding?” he asked her. “I don’t think I want to wait till next spring.”

  And that’s what they had, a lovely winter wedding, so that Beatrix would be free to travel and work when gardening season began again in the spring. Minnie didn’t cry, as mothers so often do at weddings. She put Beatrix’s hand into Max’s, and blessed them both, and with all her heart wished them a long and happy life together. Beatrix’s first “heart history” had been a sad one, but Minnie liked the directness of Max Farrand’s gaze, liked the way his eyes followed Beatrix, how their steps matched when they walked together. She knew, with all the special senses that mothers develop, that her daughter would have what she herself had not had: a marriage that strengthened her rather than weakened her, that made her larger, not smaller, that allowed her to be all she wished, all she was capable of.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The train we had been waiting for arrived in a cloud of steam and grating of iron on iron.

  “There’s the ghost story,” said Walter. “Massimo hadn’t really been there. At the museum.”

  “Who is to say what is real and what is not?” I argued. “I think perhaps he was there, though not quite in the usual way.”

  “It is hard to be alone. I’m sorry your husband died,” Walter said, following my train of thought.

  When we love someone, are they ever really completely gone from us?

  “It’s been two years. I’m beginning to recover. I stayed busy.” Too busy, even Beatrix had argued, as I marched with the suffragists almost every week, traveling, campaigning. And now it was over, Tennessee had voted yes, my week at the inn was finished, and there was nothing to do but go home, to the smaller apartment that had replaced the sold brownstone, where on Sunday children and grandchildren might visit but the rest of the week the apartment, small as it was, echoed with emptiness.

  Gilbert’s middle name was Maxwell. When the Ouija board had landed on M, I had almost jumped out of my chair. It was a coincidence, of course. M for Mary, for the master, or for the poodle, Mariah. M for Massimo. It was, as Walter said, a convenient letter.

  I hastily swallowed the last of my coffee and grabbed my cardboard hatbox and leather travel case. Mrs. Ballinger was taking the same train and she had already cornered the single porter at the little station and was hoisting her bags into his arms until I thought he would topple over.

  “I liked your stories,” Walter said. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  “Maybe.” He took my two cases and carried them into the train compartment for me, ducking his head through the low doorways. When it was time to say good-bye, he took my hand. He didn’t shake it. He kissed it.

  “Good-bye, Daisy.” He took a little notepad from his pocket and hastily wrote in it, then tore the page off to give me. “My address. And phone number.” He blushed a little. “Maybe you’ll call me sometime?”

  • • • •

  When, a few months later, Beatrix asked me to join her at a new garden she was designing, she suggested I travel with someone rather than come alone.

  “You are alone too much, I think,” she said. She was fifty years old that year, and she and Max had become the kind of husband and wife that other people wished they had become, wished they were. Whatever bad luck had hounded her mother and aunt into bad marriages and divorce, Beatrix had outwitted it.

  “Is there someone you can bring?” she asked. “You might enjoy the trip more.”

  I dug into the bag I had used during my week at Lenox and found the scrap of paper with Walter’s phone number.

  He picked up on the second ring.

  “Walter? This is Daisy.”

  “I know it’s Daisy,” he said. “I listened to you talking long enough to know your voice. I’m so glad you called.” He chuckled into the phone.

  We drove down to Washington, D.C., together in his sedan, windows open, talking sometimes, sitting quietly lost in our own thoughts other times. He was easy to be with. Some people wear silence like an uncomfortably tight suit, eager to be out of it. Walter was not like that. His silence was like the silence of dawn, a restful pause before the bustle of day begins.

  • • • •

  Mildred Bliss and her diplomat husband, Robert, had just purchased the Oaks, the hundred-year-old brick Italianate house in Georgetown, with its rocky, sloping grounds. They wanted their friend Beatrix to design the gardens.

  “The grounds are a dream,” Beatrix said, rushing to the automobile and opening the door when we arrived. She was in her work suit, with boots, knee-length skirt, loose blouse, wide-brimmed linen hat, heavy woolen jacket, stained and frayed garden gloves. “Mrs. Bliss and I are in agreement on design, and she will give me free rein.”

  She took off her glove before holding out her hand to Walter, who shook it with enthusiasm.

  “Have you known Mrs. Winters long?” Beatrix asked, leading us toward the old brick house.

  “Not as long as I would like,” he said.

  “We will go into town for a tea later,” Beatrix said. “Mildred and Robert are in Buenos Aires and the house is closed up, so we are, at this point, planning the garden by correspondence. Walk with me, and I will show you what we have in mind.”

  The grounds were, to my eyes, mostly uncared for lawn, unpruned hedges, huge oaks, and little else. But gardeners see differently. They see beneath the sod to the nourishing soil and ancient rock; they see the journey the sun will take in the southeast and the winter blasts of wind in the northwest corner; the colors of forsythia, not yet planted, seen from a distance; the curve of green bushes around a doorway.

  “This,” Beatrix said, taking long, eager steps, “will be a brick ribbon path to the library. I will add some carved stone arabesques off the path. There will be a terrace of beeches, a rose garden with a wrought-iron gate, an urn terrace—and the urn will be a copy of a French terra-cotta urn. The cutting garden will be edged with a double row of plum trees. In the northeast there will be a circular garden of lilacs. Imagine the color in the spring!”

  Even Walter with his long legs found it hard to keep up with Beatrix as she walked us over the grounds, inviting us to see not what was there, but what would be there.

  “And this,” she said, coming to a complete stop and taking a deep breath, “this will be an Italian-style garden. Close your eyes, Daisy. Listen to the fountain playing, the birds singing in the bushes.”

  “It reminds me of Rome,” I said, closing my eyes, imagining.

  “Yes.” Did one single word ever mean so much? “There’s the delivery van. I have to go for a moment. They are bringing the bricks for the walk. We start next week.”

  Beatrix strode off, humming.

  “Imagine this garden in the evening,” I told Walter when we were alone. “Shadows, moonlight on white flowers, and the sound of water.”

  Walter closed his eyes, imagining.

  “I think I can see it, Daisy,” he said.

  The late-winter sun was dazzling and sent red fireworks across my closed eyelids.

  “Kiss me, Walter. Here, in the moonlight.”

  A Garden in Which No One Can Weep

  Such a garden must
be walled. There is no other way, and for those who are recalcitrant on this matter I would remind them that our word “paradise” comes from an ancient Middle Eastern word meaning, simply, a walled garden. Only in a paradise garden are tears impossible, and only a walled garden can be a paradise garden. Think of a medieval cloister, if you will, the sanctuary from the storm.

  The trees should be fruit bearing: cherries, apricots, apples, and within this small grove of fruit there should be a bench large enough for two people to sit upon. The bench should be placed not on gravel but on Vinca minor, also called myrtle and “glory of the ground” because its pale blue flowers are the color of an April sky.

  The walled garden should contain a large bed of woodland ferns growing on the north side of the fruit trees, and in front of the ferns, Galium odoratum, sweet woodruff, whose white flowers can be used to flavor May wine.

  Roses of any variety may be planted, as long as they are in front of the south wall and receive plenty of sunshine. Highly recommended is an arbor over which grows a Réveil Dijonnais, the old French rose with its pink petals and white center, a rose of sturdy and serene character.

  Other flowers should include the English daisy, sometimes also called “day’s eye,” and the daylily, both of which remind us that even in a garden in which no one can weep, joy may be fleeting.

  This garden should have a fountain at its heart, and two paths at right angles meeting at the fountain. These paths divide the garden, and the world, into quarters: north, south, east, and west; past, present, future, and eternity, which encompasses all time.

  All senses are activated in this garden: flowers for perfume and color, water for sound, fruit for taste and texture. The last element should be a wind chime that sounds in the key of C minor when stirred by the breeze, the key preferred by the writers of the old stornelli.

  Sit in this garden. Listen to the water and the wind chime, taste the fruit, smell the fragrance. Tears will be impossible.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Henry James called the factual reality upon which a novel was built his donnée. The donnée that prompted this novel was the European trip of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872–1959), the famed landscape gardener and niece of Edith Wharton.

  Beatrix Jones Farrand, like many ladies of good family of that age, valued privacy in a way we modern Facebook followers and Twitterers may not understand or appreciate. When her mother died in 1935, Beatrix burned many of her letters and many letters of her mother and aunt Edith as well, to preserve their privacy. Was there an Amerigo in her life when she visited Rome in 1895? There could have been, and that was my beginning point, as a novelist. I do know that she ceased keeping her journal of her European travels when she and Minnie arrived in Berlin. It could have been the fatigue of her travels that made her put down her pen. Or it could have been something else.

  For the character of Daisy, I wanted to make amends for the ghost of that poor character killed off by Roman fever (malaria) in the Henry James novel Daisy Miller (“I’ll never forgive Henry James for what he did to Daisy!” some wonderfully passionate reader once posted on Facebook). I thought it would be interesting to take Daisy as her original creator presented her, innocent, playful, flirtatious, and see what she became after a typical marriage of the times. I don’t think Mr. James would have minded. He himself rewrote Daisy Miller when he re-created it as a stage play, giving it a happy ending. He thought playgoers would prefer a more cheerful resolution.

  The ghosts: Edith Wharton had a true fear of ghosts and wrote a collection of the finest ghost stories I’ve read, though she herself would not sleep in a room that had a book of ghost stories in it. After the Mount was sold, and then resold, it acquired a reputation for ghostly events.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Anna, Charlotte, Diane and Peggy, and Joyce, the reading group friends who a few years ago pointed me back in the direction of two of my favorites, Henry James and Edith Wharton; thanks also to Nancy Holzner and to Tom and M.K., and as always, special thanks to my husband, Steve Poleskie.

  My editor at NAL, Ellen Edwards, has been a spectacular colleague, and I am grateful for her advice, encouragement, and perception; I owe a happy debt of thanks to my agent, Kevan Lyon.

  The lovely and haunting epigraph that begins this story is from the professional writings of Beatrix Jones Farrand, contained in the Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.

  A CONVERSATION WITH JEANNE MACKIN

  Spoiler alert: A Conversation with Jeanne Mackin and the Questions for Discussion that follow tell more about what happens in the book than you might want to know until you read it.

  Q. Which interested you more about Beatrix Farrand—her passion for gardens or her connection to writer Edith Wharton?

  A. The two worked together for me. The bond between Beatrix and Edith, aside from family kinship, was that they both loved gardens. In fact, Edith used to call her writing time her “secret garden,” and when she decided to build her home at the Mount, the garden was one of her primary concerns and delights. It made such a strong impression on me that Edith Wharton’s niece became one of our country’s most famous garden designers.

  Edith and Beatrix didn’t always agree on gardens and their designs: Edith favored a more classical, European approach. Beatrix had a strong sense of place, and she thought gardens in America should reflect that sense of place. Perhaps the two women helped balance each other’s proclivities and provide a sounding board for their ideas.

  I am myself a passionate gardener, have been since I moved to the house I now live in, more than thirty years ago, so I understand that twitching in the thumbs that gardeners feel when they see a weed and want to pull it, even in someone else’s garden. It’s as automatic a response as brushing lint off your darling’s jacket before he goes out, and it’s a response I believe Beatrix would have had. And, as a writer, I am a great admirer of Edith Wharton’s work; in fact, I am more in awe of her than I am of Henry James’ novels, so I very much appreciated the time I spent rereading some of her work in order to also understand Beatrix. They were both groundbreakers but also very much women of their time.

  If Beatrix hadn’t been related to Edith, I’d still want to write about her and her passion and her gardens. She was a fascinating person and she made gorgeous gardens.

  Q. In A Lady of Good Family, you focus on a small part of Beatrix’s life rather than covering a major portion of it. Can you tell us more about the genesis of the novel?

  A. When I finished college, I packed a knapsack and spent a year traveling in Europe and some of the Middle East. It wasn’t the grand tour that earlier generations made; it was hitchhiking and hostels. In some ways that wanderyear was more important to my education than what I received in formal classrooms. The impressions were so strong and memorable: the taste of autumn beer in Germany, spicy with herbs; the heat of the Sahara; the colored light streaming through rose windows in French cathedrals. When we travel, our senses are more alert, and our memories more ready to hold impressions. At least that is so for me.

  So when I knew I wanted to write a novel about Beatrix, I decided to begin it with her travels and some of her impressions: the information she took back with her to New York and Maine as she began her professional life. I wanted to choose a particular moment and place—that accidental meeting with Amerigo in the Borghese gardens—and make that the beginning of an arc that wasn’t a full life story, but a story about how she became a professional gardener.

  Q. The epigraph—“One felt more and more that some moonlight nights in May . . . the ghosts of the people who once lived there must come back”—suggests why you wrote the novel as not just a love story but also a ghost story. Care to elaborate?

  A. Gardens are such haunted places! Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother’s garden behind her house on Elisha Street, in Waterloo, New York. I still dream about that
garden, and when I began planting mine I realized, one day, that I was more or less trying to re-create her garden, to get back to that place and to those people, many long dead. Sit in a garden, any garden, and you can’t help but feel the presence of the other people, dead and alive, who may have sat in the garden.

  Gardens are mystical places, part natural and wild, full of green and growth, and part manufactured and artificial, in the true meaning of the word, with laid paths, wooden benches, and terra-cotta pots. The old Celts believed that whenever there was an important transition and overlap—when day meets night, or when one season gives way to another—that’s when magic happens and doors open into other worlds. In a garden, wild meets cultivated, nature meets human made, so a garden, for me, has always been one of those transitional places, where magic comes alive and mystery abides.

  And isn’t lost love always a kind of ghost story? The lover may be nowhere around, and yet he’s always with you in some sense. Ghost stories are about loss and regret and failure; hauntings are about unfinished business.

  I love ghost stories, and so did many people of Edith’s generation. She herself wrote several and they are my favorites, especially one called “Afterward,” which was another touchstone for this novel. And of course there’s Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, one of the greatest haunting stories ever. It made sense, when I was writing about gardens and those characters, that a ghost would also emerge.

  When I found Beatrix’s quote that opens the novel, I was ecstatic.

  Q. The novel contains obvious references to two Henry James novels—Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw—and to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Why was it important to you to explore and echo these writers’ work?

  A. I was never satisfied with the way Henry James ended Daisy Miller, by simply killing her off.