A Lady of Good Family (13 page)

“And the monk?”

“The duke waited a suitable amount of time and then had Brother Leo thrown out a high casement to his death, for the embarrassment he had caused. Such a death can never be proven
as murder, of course. It looked at it was meant to look, like an accident. But the family knew. Knows. And they say Brother Leo has never really left the palazzo, but moans up and down the halls, especially on nights of the full moon, when he howls in loneliness for his brother monks, whom he never saw again in this life.”

“Such a strange history!”

A commotion began in the doorway of the orchid room. Another couple had found their way there and stood at the entrance, locked in an embrace, her white arms pale against his black jacket, his hands pressed tightly against the yellow silk of her gown. Amerigo cleared his throat; they heard and fled, laughing.

Beatrix looked at Amerigo and smiled, hiding her own embarrassment.

“Are there no scandals, no murders in your family?” he asked. “In Italy we all have what you call the skeleton in the closet.”

“Most of my family money came from banking. There may have been a certain laxity there. And an ancestor helped throw tea into Boston Harbor, and my great uncles abandoned a widowed sister to poverty. But no ghosts I’ve heard of. There have been marital irregularities,” she finished.

“That is where we have the advantage over you Americans.” Amerigo turned abruptly and walked to the next table. “We accept certain conditions, and what you call ‘irregularities’ become very regular.”

“You mean mistresses.” Beatrix followed him.

“Yes.”

“My father has had a mistress for many years, and now he is divorcing my mother.”

“That would not happen here,” Amerigo said solemnly. “In Italy the husband would not be so cruel, and the wife not so narrow-minded.”

Beatrix’s face blazed red. She could not bear any criticism of her mother, but she knew from the quarrels she had witnessed in childhood that her mother could be judgmental and distant; she could be preoccupied. She was not entirely blameless.

Her mother and father had been ill suited to each other; she saw that now. Mr. James had sent her a note a year before, warning her against seeing too much in this dissolution of the marriage. The scandal of divorce would eventually die down, he had written, but to live locked together in misery would be worse.

“Whenever I see the little
Orchis spectabilis
, I will think of your monk,” Beatrix said.

“I hope you will think of me as well.”

“That would mean I had stopped thinking of you.” She was, you see, free of coyness, as brave in her words as in her emotions. Amerigo perhaps had never before met that kind of girl.

They moved down the aisle of the next orchid tables, their feet crunching over drainage gravel, and when Beatrix was admiring a yellow lady’s slipper orchid, Amerigo again took her hand and would not release it. There is a stage, in love, when mere touch sends such thrills of ecstasy through you that no other gesture is needed than to hold hands and feel that current flowing from one to the other.

They walked slowly, hand in hand, bending at the same
moment over the same flower, commenting on the color and form and fragrance of individual blooms.

After half an hour of this, Amerigo took her in his arms and kissed her. She would not describe the kiss to me, of course. But she smiled at this part of the story. Beatrix had made the first leap. She had taken her first chance.

“Did you enjoy the flowers?” Mrs. Haskett asked when Beatrix and Amerigo joined the other dancers on the floor, an hour later. “You have been uncommonly long about it.”

“Cattleya should not be potted with fern root. The fungus will kill them. You should speak with your plants man,” Beatrix said, gliding away in Amerigo’s arms as the band played a waltz.

Mrs. Haskett watched them dance, her face frozen into its usual smile. There was pain in her eyes, in that slight twitch at the corner of her mouth. She fluttered her fan vigorously and moved away from us.

Minnie, standing next to me, grew even more tense. “I don’t like this,” she murmured. “We should not have come.”

“Too late. But judging by Mrs. Haskett’s expression, I suspect she also wishes we had not come. Look at how she watches Amerigo.”

There was already an undercurrent of gossip buzzing around us like mosquitoes on a breezeless summer evening. Too many eyes looked away from their dance partners’ faces and watched Beatrix and Amerigo instead, with those sly, sideways glances that boded trouble.

Mr. James, in his little novel in which I am the namesake, exaggerated the gossip I endured after my evening in the
Colosseum. But there had been gossip and I had come perilously close to losing my reputation, and reputation was a woman’s most important possession.

Perhaps, I thought that evening, it would have been better if the American girl and the Roman man had never met, after all. Soon I would be absolutely certain that their meeting had been ill-starred.

“D
id Amerigo say why he was in Berlin?” Minnie asked Beatrix the next morning. “It does seem an odd coincidence.”

After the splendid, glittering rooms of Mrs. Haskett’s town house, our own rooms in the Pension Grindelwald seemed even rougher than before, with their mostly bare floors, small-paned windows, and all those taxidermic animals glowering at us.

Impressed by the difference in settings, we had rather let ourselves go, as if in retaliation. Minnie was still barefoot. Beatrix was in her gown and wrapper, her unbrushed hair falling in reddish clouds over her shoulders and back. I had propped my feet up on an ottoman and leaned back into an overstuffed chair with all the unladylike abandon of childhood.

Beatrix was starry-eyed and distracted, as all maidens in love are said to be. “He is trying to sell her a painting, and it seems she is leading him on a merry chase, saying yes one day, no the next,
and never bringing the price up to what it should be, even when she says yes. I understand it is very old and quite valuable.”

“Sounds just like her. Manipulative, greedy, and . . . and common,” said Minnie, who rarely said anything nasty about anyone. She poured milk into her tea and gave it a furious stir with her spoon. “If she must collect and own the best of Europe, she should at least pay a fair price.”

“It is even more complicated. His father doesn’t wish to sell the painting, and legally, his father is still the owner.” Beatrix sighed and leaned her chin into her hands as she gazed out the open window. From a distance, we could hear the sounds of hammering and banging and shouting, the protesting creaking of girders, all the noise that accompanies the rise of a modern building, as Berlin soldiered on in its determination to replace old with new.

“Which painting?” I asked. I had been to the Louvre several times and was wondering if I might not try a little still life painting myself.

“It’s a study for
St. Francis Taming the Wolf of Gubbio
, by Sassetta. Part of a fifteenth-century altarpiece showing the life of St. Francis. Most of the original altarpiece has gone missing, sold off to various collectors. His family owns a rare study for it.”

“I wonder if that fellow out in the hall might have been a model,” I said, having grown to detest the stuffed, ready-to-pounce wolf I had to pass each time I visited Minnie’s rooms.

“Gubbio is in Italy, silly,” Beatrix said. “In the saint’s time, a huge wolf was gobbling up the citizenry of the town and countryside of Gubbio. Francis, being a gentleman’s son long before he became a saint, struck a gentlemanly deal with the wolf. The
townspeople would feed the wolf all the chicken and fish he wished, if he would leave them alone.”

“Not quite fair to the chickens of the town,” I commented, and Minnie gave me a little kick.

“The wolf agreed. The study that Amerigo owns—rather, his father owns—shows Francis and the wolf shaking on it, much as dogs and owners shake hands. He has promised to show me the painting before he sells it.”

Minnie was all alertness. Plans had been made. Their meetings would no longer be accidental. Her daughter had a lover, and now that it was definite, the mother was no longer certain that a leap into the unknown was just what her daughter needed.

“He will sell it without his father’s permission?” Minnie put down her teacup and buttered a slice of toast.

“He is certain he will win his father’s approval before the purchase is made.”

“And when will this private showing occur?” Did I hear a touch of wariness in Minnie’s voice? If Beatrix did, she ignored it.

“When we are in Paris. He doesn’t have the painting with him, of course. It’s much too fragile. But if Mrs. Haskett doesn’t meet his price, he will offer it to other potential buyers in France who have expressed interest. He does so need the money.”

Minnie did not like this at all. Meeting in a solarium was one thing. Speaking of money and commerce—that was another. Even most married couples, for better or for worse, rarely spoke of money. And they had agreed to meet in Paris. Paris, where the lawyer and the estranged husband with his mistress were waiting to confront Minnie, to buy her off with a divorce settlement. This
seemed unwise, the confluence of what certainly appeared to be a beginning love with a dead one.

“He speaks very freely of his circumstances,” Minnie said, latching onto the one concrete element that a mother could criticize, and this time the wariness in her voice had turned to acid. “Is he desperate? Does he mistakenly believe you are wealthy?”

“Quite the opposite. I have told him that when I return to New York I will work as a landscape designer.”

From outside the window we could hear laborers shouting. A flock of chattering birds rose in alarm from the linden tree opposite the hotel.

“You are angry,” Beatrix said. “I should have asked you.”

“No. You are not a child anymore. You don’t need my permission. I just . . .” Minnie twirled a lock of her hair, a childhood habit she had never broken. “I worry. I do so want your happiness, more than anything in this world.”

Beatrix smiled. “And if my road to happiness leads me to Rome?”

Minnie and I both sighed.

“In Italy, you wouldn’t have a chance of establishing a professional reputation,” Minnie reminded her. “You might redesign the gardens for your husband’s home; you might achieve a name as a woman with a good eye for color in the garden. And that would be that.”

Beatrix laughed. “You should not buy the wedding gown just yet. We have had no such conversation. Nor do I intend to.”

Minnie shook her head. It had become painfully obvious that Beatrix did not yet understand the workings of the heart.
What we plan for ourselves so often has little to do with what the heart commands.

We spent that afternoon again in the sunny Tiergarten, with Beatrix making little drawings of the various waterways and statuary. She often sighed and muttered to herself as she rubbed out faulty lines and tried to capture difficult perspectives.

The Tiergarten was as crowded with Americans as the Borghese gardens had been in Rome, and as each separate group passed where we sat, Minnie reading, I knitting, and Beatrix sketching, we received long, intrusive glances. We overheard—were meant to overhear—snatches of conversation. Hotel room. Colosseum after dark. The orchids . . . An Italian! We all pretended not to hear, though Minnie’s face grew a little stormy. She continued to smile vaguely as ladies do in public, but a crease appeared between her eyebrows and deepened as the afternoon lengthened.

When we went to supper that evening at a fashionable inn famous for its cuisine, conversation ceased as we passed already filled tables. Gossip spreads quickly, even more quickly than usual among travelers, but there had to be a guiding hand, and it was Mrs. Haskett’s, of course.

“I think we shall leave Berlin soon. It is too warm on the continent,” said Minnie after we were seated, studying her menu. “It is time to go to England and Scotland, don’t you think, Beatrix?”

“In three days,” Beatrix said, and that was how we knew Amerigo would be in Berlin for three more days. “Where will you go, Daisy?”

“Back to Paris. I miss the children. Everything is so quiet and orderly without them.”

“Will Mr. Winters be there?”

“I’ll have to check the racing papers and see if the horses are still running,” I said.

Minnie and Beatrix sighed.

“Don’t!” I said. “Don’t you dare pity me. He is a scoundrel. We all know that. But I wouldn’t change a thing about him.”

That wasn’t completely true, but one must put on a show. I only hoped I would get back to Paris and discover he hadn’t used our entire quarter’s income during my absence.

The next day we went to Potsdam to see the Charlottenhof Park, Beatrix busily making notes and drawings all the while, vigorously pursuing her studies of the plantings and the landscaping. Minnie’s frown grew deeper.

To be a female landscape designer in America was one thing. America was new, its cities and parks were new, and in the whirlwind of novelty there was occasionally even room for a novel idea: working women. But Europe was ancient, as root-bound as any plant needing, and not receiving, a larger pot. In Europe, Beatrix would be no more than an eccentric, an amateur, frustrated and perhaps growing a little silly as she aged.

Could Amerigo come to America? It says much of the situation that none of us even considered such a plan. He had family, an estate, ties. Men did not readily give up such things, and when they did they were often scorned by the New York Four Hundred as nothing more than fortune hunters.

There were rules about such things. Women took their
husbands’ names. They lived where their husbands wished, kept company with those of whom their husbands approved. They gave themselves and their lives into their husbands’ keeping, for better or for worse. No. If there was to be a union, Beatrix would have to stay in Italy.

Minnie felt a touch of betrayal. She and her daughter had planned a professional life for Beatrix, independence. Was she on the verge of giving it all up for something as unpredictable as love?

At some point during those next two days, Beatrix met again with Amerigo. When we napped in the pension? The summer heat felt oppressive and Minnie and I spent hours indoors, fanning ourselves and pressing cool compresses to our foreheads. Or perhaps it was after dinner, when Beatrix went for her walk and left us behind.

We knew she had seen him because she was able to tell us that Mrs. Haskett had not met the price for
The Wolf of Gubbio
. She was still leading him on.

“That is an ugly phrase, leading him on,” Minnie said.

“The truth is often unappealing,” Beatrix said.

“So he goes to Paris now, to meet with other buyers.”

“He will be there when we are, after England and Scotland.”

“I see,” said Minnie. And she did.

Before we all left Berlin, Mrs. Haskett invited us for a luncheon. The three of us would rather have been dosed with castor oil than attend, but we felt we must, else the gossip surrounding Beatrix would only grow worse. Mrs. Haskett had put us in that kind of position.

The silly woman served English-style roast beef and potatoes
on one of the hottest days of the year, with a warm steamed pudding for a sweet. The conversation, talk of bankers and investment ventures and who had purchased what, was as bad as the food. Some dozen people sat at her table, overwhelmed by all the crystal and silver and lace and courses of food, when all we wanted was a simple cold plate of salad.

Mrs. Haskett’s three daughters were dressed alike, in sunny yellow muslin and with orchids in their hair, and the four young men who had been invited, second sons of the minor aristocracy, studying or pretending to study law, had been seated among them like so many sacrificial lambs awaiting the slaughter. Their manners were excellent, their conversation drivel. They ate with a steady concentration that suggested actual meals were spaced well apart in their lives. I knew the signs. Their allowances went elsewhere. They would be behind in the rent for their rooms, and a bill collector made regular rounds to them. They gambled, I imagined. It was a common enough fault.

I assumed the fourth young man had been invited for Beatrix, but she would have none of this blatant matchmaking over charred beef. She addressed her comments, few as they were, to the women at the table.

“You leave Berlin tomorrow, I hear?” Mrs. Haskett asked after the custard sauce had been passed around. The meal had been so heavy and the air in the dining room so warm and humid I thought I would melt, but Beatrix looked as cool as ever. She had Minnie’s ability to persevere through conditions that would drive other women to distraction, and to stay as fresh as my namesake flower.

“Yes. Time to go to England, and then on to Scotland. I hope it will be cooler,” Minnie said, although we all knew the question had been meant for Beatrix.

“Such a shame your special friend could not come to lunch today,” the terrible Mrs. Haskett said, this time turning physically in Beatrix’s direction so that there could be no confusion as to whom she was speaking.

“Friend?” Beatrix asked, wisely leaving off the adjective that had preceded it.

“Signor Massimo. I invited him, of course, but he declined. I hope you haven’t had a falling-out. Such a charming man.” Her voice dripped venom. Mrs. Haskett’s three daughters tittered behind their handkerchiefs.

Minnie slowly, with exaggerated calm, put her dessertspoon down and wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin. She swallowed once, twice.

“Signor Massimo is a friend of the family,” she lied. “I don’t know what you meant by ‘special friend,’ but if it is as I suspect, Beatrix has none.” She rose, again slowly, majestically.

Beatrix and I rose as well. “Such a lovely lunch,” Minnie said. “We have overstayed, however, and must leave. Thank you, Mrs. Haskett.”

The whole table stood and began to disperse to various corners of the room. Minnie had that kind of authority. If she said a luncheon was over, it was over.

“Do give my regards to dear Mrs. Wharton when you see her,” Mrs. Haskett said, blowing us kisses as we made our way down the hall and out the door.

“Horrid, horrid woman,” Minnie muttered all the way back to our hotel. “It won’t stop here, Beatrix. She means you harm. I see it in her eyes.”

“It’s because she can’t marry off those three daughters,” I said. “They’re like the evil stepsisters in a fairy tale.”

“No,” Beatrix said. “It is because we didn’t remember her name when we met in the Borghese gardens.”

“It may be more than that,” Minnie said. Her sweet, pale face was dark with emotion. “Have you not yet wondered why Mrs. Haskett, certainly no longer young but not quite yet old, has been stringing along—I believe that is the phrase—Signor Massimo? Perhaps she is interested in more than the painting.”

We shrank back into the upholstered cushion of the carriage, our mouths rounded in horror. And then, after a silent consideration of Mrs. Haskett in Amerigo’s arms, we gave her the greatest insult possible. We laughed. If she had been there to hear us she would have done us physical violence, I am certain.