A Lady of Good Family Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  A LADY OF GOOD FAMILY

  “Reading one of Jeanne Mackin’s historical novels is the next best thing to having a time machine at your disposal. A Lady of Good Family is so immersive, so captivating in its depiction of famed Gilded Age landscape architect Beatrix Farrand—niece of Edith Wharton and friend of Henry James—that I devoured it in one sitting.”

  —Jennifer Robson, author of After the War is Over and Somewhere in France

  PRAISE FOR

  THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN

  “The Beautiful American will transport you to expat Paris and from there take you on a journey through the complexities of a friendship as it is inflected through the various lenses of nostalgia, pity, celebrity, jealousy, and—ultimately—love. Jeanne Mackin breathes new life into such luminaries as Man Ray, Picasso, and, of course, the titular character, Lee Miller, while at the same time offering up a wonderfully human and sympathetic protagonist in Nora Tours.”

  —Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist

  “Beautiful. . . . Mackin has created a fascinating account of a little-known woman who was determined to play by her own rules . . . definitely does the period justice.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “Jeanne Mackin’s portrait of Europe in the years encompassing the Second World War is achingly beautiful and utterly mesmerizing, and her vividly drawn characters, the legendary Lee Miller among them, come heartbreakingly alive in their obsessions, tragedies, and triumphs. The Beautiful American is sure to appeal to fans of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Erika Robuck’s Call Me Zelda, or indeed to anyone with a taste for impeccably researched and beautifully written historical fiction.”

  —Jennifer Robson

  “The story’s haunting ambience will remain in the reader’s thoughts and feelings for a long time after experiencing this exquisitely depicted story of love, betrayal, forgiveness, haunting memories, and so much more!”

  —Crystal Book Reviews

  “From Poughkeepsie to Paris, from the razzmatazz of the twenties to the turmoil of World War Two and the perfume factories of Grasse, Mackin draws you into the world of expatriate artists and photographers and tells a story of love, betrayal, survival, and friendship. As complex as the fragrances Mackin writes about, The Beautiful American is an engaging and unforgettable novel. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Renée Rosen, author of Dollface

  “An exquisitely imagined and beautifully rendered story of the talented, tragic, gorgeous Lee Miller.”

  —Becky E. Conekin, author of Lee Miller in Fashion

  “A gorgeous tale. . . . I envy those who get to read it for the first time.”

  —Book-alicious Mama

  “Jeanne Mackin blends a tale as intoxicating as the finest fragrance. Spanning wars both personal and global, The Beautiful American leaves its essence of love, loss, regret, and hope long after the novel concludes.”

  —Erika Robuck, author of Call Me Zelda and Fallen Beauty

  “Jeanne Mackin’s luminous novel about Man Ray and his model-mistress, Lee Miller, evokes the iridescence of 1920s Paris, when youth and artistic freedom and sexual excess were all that mattered. The Beautiful American, which readers will rank right up there with The Paris Wife, takes readers from the giddiness of the flapper era to the grittiness of World War Two. It is a brilliant, beautifully written literary masterpiece. I love this book!”

  —Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author of Fallen Women

  “Lovers of the film Midnight in Paris will definitely enjoy this.”

  —Chick Lit+

  “The setting is fascinating, the real and fictional characters intriguing.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS

  OF JEANNE MACKIN

  “Rich in detail, from descriptions of food and attire to historical personages, this first novel is well written and entirely believable. Mackin is positioned to join the ranks of popular historical novelists.”

  —Library Journal

  “Jeanne Mackin has written a multilayered, multigenerational story of a spirited encounter with the spirit world.”

  —Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

  “I read this novel in two sittings, eager to learn how the lives and love stories turned out. . . . Before I realized it, I was swept up in Maggie and Helen’s intersecting worlds. . . . One of the book’s many charms is how wisely it reveals the values and passions of two women from very different eras who, nonetheless, have everything in common.”

  —Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife

  “[Mackin’s] narrator, while asserting that she is no ‘hagiographer of spurious mystics,’ is an engaging woman, solid in her station, widely conversant with the deeper reaches of the paranormal, and magically involved with her quest. Here she leads the mind in a chase as she finds herself tempted to believe in the return of departed spirits, in prose that is as amiable to read as the palm of a hand. A haunting book in every way. Masterly and fervent.”

  —Paul West, author of The Secret Lives of Words

  “A sensitive, affectionate, and appealing portrait of [Maggie Fox], the uneducated girl who at fourteen escaped rural poverty and a drunken, abusive father to become America’s first and most famous Spiritualist medium.”

  —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs

  “The author of The Frenchwoman again imaginatively samples French history and here constructs a witty, lightly satirical, entertaining amalgam of murder, greed, and revenge . . . a richly intelligent and charming spellbinder.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Other Novels by Jeanne Mackin

  The Beautiful American

  The Sweet By and By

  Dreams of Empire

  The Queen’s War

  The Frenchwoman

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © Jeanne Mackin, 2015

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Mackin, Jeanne.

  A lady of good family / Jeanne Mackin.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63563-6

  1. Farrand, Beatrix, 1872–1959—Fiction. 2. Women in landscape architecture—Fiction. 3. United States—Social life and customs—1865–1918—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A3169L33 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2015001019

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living o
r dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Jeanne Mackin

  Other Novels by Jeanne Mackin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Garden for First Meetings

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Garden for Second Chances

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A Garden in Which No One Can Weep

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  To all gardeners, everywhere

  The place had an air of refinement . . . one felt more and more that some moonlight nights in May . . . the ghosts of the people who once lived there must come back. Again their long dresses trailed rustling over the walks, and the sound of their voices laughing, for no one could cry in such a garden.

  —Beatrix Jones Farrand

  A Garden for First Meetings

  This is the most difficult type of garden to design, since who can tell when first meetings will occur? However, if you are inclined to plan for the unforeseen, to hope for limitless possibility, I recommend a garden that includes elements of the romantic, the antique, and the implausible.

  The romantic element should include a series of intersecting winding paths, trails from which, at the beginning, one cannot see the ultimate destination but only guess at it. The gravel for these paths should be very fine and make only the slightest whisper of noise when walked upon.

  The antique element should include a small folly or casino, a shelter of some sort in which those meeting for the first time can find objects to feed their conversation. First meetings often involve a certain amount of shyness, diffidence, and anxiety. It is therefore helpful if the garden provides distraction.

  The implausible should include a plant growing out of place. I do not normally recommend such a thing. Plants, after all, know where they like to grow and do not like to grow. Roses do not like shade and ferns do not like direct sun. If, however, you can convince creeping speedwell to grow in one twist of the gravel path, this serves as a reminder to those meeting for the first time that life is full of uncertainty and unexpected happenings. Above all else, we must cherish the mystery.

  For plants I recommend pines as a backdrop, especially Roman umbrella pines if your climate will allow them. If not, a very small grove of Black Forest pines or, even better, pines from the Odenwald area of Germany, planted thickly.

  Flowers should include angel’s tears daffodils of the narcissus species. They are smaller than other varieties and require a more observant eye; Aquilegia vulgaris, or common columbine, which looks best grown in semishadowed areas; Chrysogonum virginianum, goldenstar, which will bloom all summer in case the first meeting should not occur quickly.

  And roses, of course. There should be roses in all gardens, and in a garden for first meetings the rose should be Rosa gallica “Officinalis,” the old apothecary rose, also known as the rose of Lancaster. This rose, with its very dark green foliage, blooms just once in the season, reminding us that first meetings are not to be taken for granted. It will also spread of its own will, sending out shoots in all directions, and is a good plant for sharing.

  ONE

  1920

  Lenox, Massachusetts

  My grandparents had a farm outside of Schenectady, and every Sunday my father, who worked in town, would hitch the swaybacked mare to the buggy and take us out there. I would be left to play in the field as my father and grandfather sat on the porch and drank tea and Grandma cooked. My mother, always dressed a little too extravagantly, shelled the peas.

  A yellow barn stood tall and broad against a cornflower blue sky. A row of red hollyhocks in front of the barn stretched to the sky, each flower on the stem as silky and round as the skirt on Thumbelina’s ball gown. In the field next to the barn, daisies danced in the breeze. My namesake flower.

  I saw it still, the yellows and reds and blues glowing against my closed eyelids. The field was my first garden, and I was absolutely happy in it. We usually are, in the gardens of our childhood. I, who had lost so much, wondered if I could ever be truly happy again.

  When I opened my eyes I was on a porch in Lenox, a little tired from weeks of travel, a little restless. My companions were restless, too, weary of trying to make polite conversation, as strangers do.

  Mrs. Avery suggested we try the Ouija board. We had, before that, been discussing rose gardens, and the new hybrids, especially the Miriam yellow with its garish, varying hues.

  “Roses should be red or pink,” Mr. Hardy complained.

  “Or white,” added Mrs. Ballinger.

  “I like the new hybrids,” I said. “Those bold colors.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Avery.

  Guests at the old inn, we perched in a row of rockers, recovering from a too-heavy supper. There was me, just back from campaigning for the women’s vote in Tennessee; Mrs. Avery, the youngest of us all yet seeming the oldest, a rabbit of a woman who spoke too quietly; Mrs. Ballinger, as round as a pumpkin, with hair dyed the same color; and Mr. Hardy, a tall, gaunt man who stooped even when sitting.

  It was a late-summer evening, too warm, with a disquieting breeze stirring the treetops as if a giant ghostly hand ruffled them. Through the open window a piano player was tinkling his way through Irving Berlin as young people danced and flirted. In the road that silvered past the inn, young men, those who had made it home from the war, drove up and down in their shiny black Model Ts.

  It was a night for thinking of love and loss, first gardens, first kisses.

  The moon was cloud covered, and the inn’s proprietor did not turn on the porch lights, since they drew mosquitoes and moths. We sat in darkness, except for the occasional small flare when someone lit a cigarette.

  An uneasiness charged the air, the feeling that something was going to happen. It is an uncommon sensation in summer, when the world seems to have settled into its own idea of Eden. The wind had a premature autumnal feel to it. “You feel the seasons in a garden, the passage of time,” my friend Beatrix told me once. “Whether you want to or not.”

  The hotel had a rose bed in front of the porch. I wondered whether the roses were the same variety as what had grown in the garden at Vevey, Switzerland, where I had first met Gilbert. Pink roses all look alike to me. Perhaps that’s what Gilbert thought of me that evening at Vevey when we met. One pretty American girl looks much like all her sisters.

  In a way, all hotels look alike, too. Some are grander than others, some have the Alps for scenery, some a little town in Massachusetts. I was staying, as my finances required, in one of the less grand inns of the town, but I was always aware that in those Berkshire hills nestled some of the most famous houses ever built, cottages where Melville and Hawthorne had resided, and later, after Lenox became fashionable with the wealthy, the larger estates where Vanderbilts and Morgans, and the writer Edith Wharton, had passed summer days.

  I was content to be in an inn, where strangers come and go and you feel a bustle of life about y
ou, what Mr. Henry James described as the rustling of flounces and late-night dance music, the cries and sighs as young people court and play.

  Fashionable young girls did not wear muslin flounces anymore. Those were as out of style as calling cards.

  We had, that night, already finished a game of bridge, and I had fleeced the others of their pocket money. I was usually popular with my peers, but not with their children. They found me a very expensive proposition, a bad influence. That from grown children who danced the black bottom and tango, the young women with their skirts almost to their knees.

  What had most shocked me, during my years of campaigning, were the young people who had tried to shout us down, who did not want change. You expect complacency in older folks, not in the young. “Aren’t you satisfied with your homes, your husbands, your children? Leave politics to the men!” they had shouted.

  Thank God my daughter, Jenny, had not felt that way. She had bailed me out of jail when needed, housed me often despite her husband’s antipathy toward me, and wined and dined a judge now and then when required. She had also paid in advance for my week at Lenox, so that I could rest after my traveling and marching.

  “Penny,” said kindly Mr. Hardy, interrupting my thoughts.

  I liked his face. It was open and somehow vulnerable. You could see that his life had not been easy, yet he was not bitter.

  “I was thinking about gardens, and then about politics, and power, and men and women,” I said, but no one encouraged me to develop this conversation.

  Instead, Mrs. Avery suggested we try the Ouija board. Since the war, it had become a national obsession.

  “Let’s,” I agreed eagerly. “Perhaps Mr. James will come through.” He had died four years before, and I would have enjoyed a message from the master. Henry James’ letters to my dear friend Minnie had been so entertaining, and of course she had shared them, as he had meant her to do.

  Mr. Hardy, grumbling a bit, went in to fetch the board as Mrs. Ballinger, Mrs. Avery, and I rearranged our chairs around a wicker table.