A Lady of Good Family Read online

  After we set up the board, placed the planchette in the middle, and put our fingertips on it, we waited.

  And waited.

  “Someone is not being open to the spirits,” said Mrs. Avery with more than a little whine in her voice. A stronger breeze stirred the treetops. Inside, the piano player tinkled his way through “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”

  “Maybe they don’t like the music,” suggested Mr. Hardy.

  We laughed. Then the pointer moved. Just once. When we opened our eyes, it had settled over the M.

  “You got your wish, Mrs. Winters,” Mrs. Ballinger told me, sounding envious. “It was to have been a message from the master.”

  “Or my sister, Mary,” said Mrs. Avery. “It was, after all, my idea. It should have been a message for me.”

  “For that matter, it could have been from my poodle, Mariah,” said Mrs. Ballinger.

  “A useful letter, M,” agreed Mr. Hardy. “Could be anyone, anything. He pushed his chair away from the table and refused to continue. We restored our chairs to the assigned row and ignored the Ouija board.

  “Nights like this, when I was a child, we told each other ghost stories to pass the time,” said Mrs. Avery. She had grown up on a farm near Rochester, and though I had known her for only a few days, I already understood that her childhood had been harder than mine. She had fled the hardscrabble farm life, and now she looked fondly back upon what she had hated at the time.

  “Silly things, ghost stories,” said Mrs. Ballinger. We all turned to look at her, trying to convey the message that ghost stories were no sillier than a woman of her age wearing that shade of pink with that color hair, but Mrs. Ballinger was oblivious to such subtlety. “Silly,” she repeated with a condescending sniff. “Give me a good romance anytime.”

  A car backfired just then and jolted Mr. Hardy out of his sulk.

  “I saw a ghost once,” he said. “A lovely thing, all white and floating. Back when I was a boy in County Cork and almost dying of typhus.”

  “That was an angel,” corrected Mrs. Avery. “I’ve never heard that ghosts are lovely.”

  “It was my poor dead mother hovering over, and from what I’ve heard, she was no angel,” Mr. Hardy said.

  “I’ve never heard of anyone who ever really saw a ghost,” said Mrs. Ballinger, her voice even more condescending.

  “I once saw the ghost of Nero in Rome,” I said. “In Piazza del Popolo. It was all the rage that year. Anyone who was anyone saw him.”

  “Rome.” Mrs. Ballinger sniffed, indicating that for some reason Rome was beyond her approval. I suspected she had never been there.

  We rocked in our chairs, listening to the crickets and watching eerie, silent sheet lightning flash in the eastern sky. The crickets were very loud with their ratchety, ratchety, and the frogs in the brackish pond sounded like they were auditioning for the Anvil Chorus. Silence, human silence, was difficult that night, and I felt a need to talk. They would be voting on the amendment in Tennessee in two days, and my nerves were taut enough to be strung on a violin.

  “I know someone who saw a ghost under very strange circumstances,” I said, thinking of that M and seeing in my mind’s eye a piece of stationery with that single ornate initial on it. “Shall I tell you the story?” I asked.

  “Yes!” said Mr. Hardy with enthusiasm.

  “Oh, Lord,” sighed Mrs. Ballinger.

  “It begins in Rome,” I said.

  “I’ve never been,” said Mrs. Avery. “I bet it’s lovely.”

  “I’ve been many times,” I said. “Rome and Paris. London. We used to live like nomads. Newport in the spring and summer, New York in the autumn, Europe in winter. We all did, though of course such travel was new to my family, since money was new to my family. I met my husband on my first trip to Switzerland, and even after the babies came we went back every year. He insisted. ‘My dear,’ he would say, ‘you don’t mean to say you are going to buy this year’s gowns in New York rather than Paris?’ So we would pack up the children and the nurses and later the governesses and board the steamer, seeing the same faces over and over, because society was all doing it. The Lusitania, the German torpedoes when they came in 1915, ended that.”

  Mr. Hardy’s mouth clamped into a straight, sad line. He had lost a son in the war.

  “Well,” I continued. “The story begins in Rome, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. Mr. Henry James wrote about them. My friend Beatrix Jones was there, touring Europe, to look at those gardens. She’s the famous garden designer. The first American woman in the field, really, and making an excellent job of it. Even her male counterparts agree on that.”

  “Women just don’t know their place anymore,” grumbled Mr. Hardy. He gave me a sideways glance of disapproval. I still wore my purple, yellow, and white rosette on my cardigan, the badge of the suffragists. He, like a good many men, was worrying over that upcoming vote in Tennessee, the last state in the union to debate giving women the vote. He was not in favor.

  “We will not speak of politics tonight, Mr. Hardy. We are in the Borghese gardens with Beatrix. Rome. Early spring,” I insisted.

  “Oh, Lord,” repeated Mrs. Ballinger.

  TWO

  1895

  Rome, Italy

  “Is it possible to have a haunting without a sense of evil attached to it? Last night poor Mrs. Madden kept insisting she felt the presence of someone, some spirit, and instead of feeling afraid, she was comforted.” Mrs. Frederic Jones, christened Mary but known to friends and family as Minnie, frowned. Why had she brought this up? She hadn’t meant to speak of it. Everyone knew Mrs. Madden was, well, to be kind, a bit unmoored.

  “I should think so,” said Mrs. Jones’ daughter, Beatrix. “It would be like—let’s see—like spring in the garden before the first seedlings are up. You can feel their presence even though you can’t see them.”

  “Mr. James would disagree,” said a third woman, Edith Wharton. “I think he rather feels that this world and that other world are like Europe and America, with a vast ocean between them. Any spirit still lingering on the wrong side of the ocean must have a grievance, and a grieved spirit must have some sense of anger or wrath. Interesting concept, though, a harmless spirit. I wonder . . .” Her voice trailed off as it sometimes did when her thoughts moved from public discourse to a more private daydream. She looked pale, an indication that she had not slept well.

  The little dog curled on her lap grew restive and barked to be set down. Edith held it closer.

  “Nightmares again, Edith?” Minnie, her sister-in-law, reached over and patted the dog’s head. Edith had been “unwell” for the past year, suffering from depression and nerves.

  “A very strange one,” Edith said. “A long avenue of trees, ashen olive trees, leading to a house I knew was haunted. The ghost was a woman who had been locked up by her husband . . .” Her voice trailed off again. Her hand fluttered in the air for a moment as if she were waving at someone, and then fell into her lap. Her dog barked once more, a high, demanding sound that echoed through a stand of umbrella pines.

  “Hmm,” said Edith’s husband, Teddy. “This is the result of spending so much time reading and scribbling. More fresh air, perhaps. A good long walk after dinner.”

  “The house was called Kerfol. Such a strange name.” Edith ignored Teddy’s comments.

  “Blasted city,” said Teddy. “We should never have come to Rome.”

  “But I wanted to see Minnie and Beatrix, and they were in Rome,” Edith said.

  “It was that nurse who told you ghost stories as a child.” Teddy found a new source of blame, landing on one closer to the point than the city of Rome. Edith as a child had been ill in Germany, had almost died of typhoid, and her nurse had passed the long hours telling old village ghost stories to the child. Lord, how we torment our children.

  Another wife, at t
his point, would have said, “Yes, dear,” and dropped the subject. Edith instead gave Teddy a scathing glare.

  Mr. Wharton was a man who simply ignored what he could not comprehend, the type of person who never read a novel or poetry. This, Edith had discovered, was not a good quality in a husband. When she most needed encouragement to pursue her work—her scribbling, as he called it—he simply smiled and said, “My dear, perhaps we should go for a ride. Get you out of that dark library.”

  “Well, I don’t know houses called Kerfol, but the nervous excitability of ghosts would account for Mrs. Ford’s experience,” said Minnie, anxious to fill a hostile silence. “She swears she saw Nero’s ghost when she visited the Piazza del Popolo. A raging old man in a white robe, making obscene gestures.”

  “Did he have his fiddle with him?” Beatrix asked. “Some people are so gullible. Ghosts. Really. It is the result of being too much amid all these old places.”

  “Women, my dear. Men are not so sentimental as to go looking for Nero’s phantom in the Piazza del whatever it was,” said Teddy. He was very handsome, with a dashing reddish brown mustache and fine blue eyes, but there was something unfinished about him, like a portrait still on the easel waiting for the artist’s final touches.

  Teddy and Edith, though seated side by side, seemed a world apart, as couples do when both have come to the realization that the marriage is a failure and there they are, stuck with each other.

  Edith had been a young woman hungry for approval when she wed. A daughter born twelve years after her mother had already produced the two required sons, she had been a lonely and to a large extent ignored child. When handsome young Teddy Wharton proposed, she accepted with what she thought was love or at least the possibility of it. It turned out to be relief, and relief is a short-lived emotion. Within months she realized that a love of small animals, their only shared passion, was not enough to sufficiently bind man and woman together.

  She had tried to ignore her compulsion to write, to create stories and other worlds with more interesting people than those around her; she had tried to become a good society wife—tried, in other words, to become what others expected of her—only to find that such behavior . . . teas, the constant round of leaving calling cards, the interminable dinner parties, consultations with cooks, and other wifely duties . . . left her physically and emotionally ill. And so she had begun writing again. Some of her work had been published, and now Teddy had a literary wife. Not quite the thing, in New York or Newport.

  And Edith was stranded on a silent, cold island of marriage with a man she neither loved nor was loved by.

  “Piazza del Popolo. That’s where Nero’s ghost is seen,” she said now, her voice metallic with irritation.

  Their knowledge of Roman ghosts having been exhausted by that brief conversation, the four of them sat wrapped in the silence of early-spring heat and foreign places, each secretly wishing to be elsewhere. The Borghese gardens were all very well. But there was an unpleasant sense of requirement to the visit. When in Rome, one must visit St. Peter’s Square, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, the Borghese gardens, and so they had, dutifully, done so.

  This tour of European gardens was to further the education of her daughter, Beatrix, but Minnie was more interested in the Common People than in gardens. Her eyes were focused inward, on the suspicious doings of a certain Nurse Henrietta back in New York, who sometimes filched from the infirmary where Minnie performed charity work.

  Minnie sat straight-backed in her chair, both feet flat on the ground, the proud posture of a woman who could trace her family back many generations, whose ancestors had tossed tea into Boston Harbor, whose lawyer father had visited President Lincoln in the White House; a woman raised to know good wines, read in several languages, arrange flowers. Minnie knew how to dress for a Patriarch Ball and what to order at Delmonico’s, but she also knew that life was serious and short, and a wise woman would use her time well. Minnie, suffering through her own failed marriage, had learned the value of good works and doing one’s duty.

  Some of this wisdom she had already passed on to Beatrix, who sat listening and watching. Waiting, she would have said, though she didn’t know what for; perhaps simply waiting to become who she was meant to be, free of interference, of the need to please others. And that is one of the hardest things in life to achieve, especially for a woman.

  While her friends had been dreaming of marriage, Beatrix, with her mother’s approval, had planned for a career in landscape design. She wanted to add beauty to the world. A fresh morning, a wheelbarrow, and a dozen bushes to be planted or trees to be pruned, no one in shouting distance to yell at her that she was grass staining her dress or ruining her hands—that was what she wanted of life. A lady’s hands said everything about her, Uncle Teddy had stated once, glancing disapprovingly at hers.

  After only a month of the planned six-month tour, Beatrix already missed her home and garden in Bar Harbor. She wanted to be digging in the winter-freshened soil of Maine, planting the first lettuces and peas, working to the music of gulls crying overhead and rollers breaking against the rocky shore. In Bar Harbor, gardens were not far removed from a wilder nature; in Rome the gardens seemed beaten into submission.

  Bar Harbor was more home to Beatrix than either New York or Newport, and their cottage there was a house of women; of long, easy days and Sunday afternoons spent discussing books and music without male bluster and tumult. Her father and mother had ceased living together soon after arriving at Mount Desert Island. There had been shame for Minnie in that separation—a failed marriage was a failed marriage, no matter who was to blame—but a measure of peace as well.

  Now, sitting in that public garden in Rome, Beatrix was all too aware that her long-absent father was only two days’ travel away, in Paris. She was used to having an ocean between them. She thought she preferred it that way.

  Perhaps that’s why she later sent for me to come visit her in Rome, to provide a little taste of home. We had become very good friends. I was in Paris that spring with Mr. Winters and our three youngest daughters. Our two sons were in New York, studying, and the eldest daughter, Jenny, was at Mrs. Prim’s Academy in Geneva, Switzerland. Mrs. Prim wasn’t her real name, of course, but that was how I referred to her.

  “I don’t wish to leave the girls,” I told Mr. Winters when Beatrix’s letter arrived for me. And I didn’t, not even for Beatrix.

  “It is unnatural for a woman to spend so much time with her children,” said my husband, who had spent very little time indeed with his own mother. “You should go. It will do you good. I’m not certain Paris agrees with you.” I suspected that my presence did not agree with Mr. Winters at the moment. It was the racing season and we had had enough quarrels over his gambling and his numerous broken promises that he wished me out of the way. At my husband’s behest, I reluctantly packed my travel case and prepared for a trip to Rome, to visit Beatrix.

  Probably it was just as I was packing my new walking suit that Beatrix was sitting in the Roman sunshine, her strong fingers yearning for the crumble of soil. It was maddening for her to sit feet away from a weed popping up in a flower bed and not be able to bend over and pluck it.

  However, when in a public garden, or a private one owned by another, one did not squash aphids no matter how thick they were on the petunias, or pull weeds. One merely sat, like the elderly, the infirm, or the merely lazy, and admired what others had done, or had not done, or had not done well.

  Beatrix sighed and studied the scenery. All those moldering buildings and old ruins. That weed taunting her from the edge of the gravel path was driving her to distraction.

  “One must expand one’s horizons,” Minnie said for the dozenth time. “Remember there is a purpose to all this. There is always a purpose.”

  The purpose, of course, was to learn, to study, to experience. To see how other people expe
rienced the wonder that was life, what they made of it, how they shaped it. That was what travel allowed.

  That spring of ’95, though, there were more English and American people in Rome than there were Italians. They filled the benches, the gravel walks, the little terrace tables, the men all in gray frock coats and tall hats, the ladies in their pastel silks tightly cinched at wasp waists. They talked of the midnight escapades of the Prince of Wales, the tennis matches at Wimbledon, the debutantes of the New York season.

  They talked, Beatrix thought, of everything but Rome. She was twenty-three years old that spring. It took determination, in those days, to be twenty-three, of a good solid New York family with sufficient income and attractive appearance, and remain unencumbered of a groom. She had busied herself with work and study at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, and now she ran her quick, bright eyes over the Borghese grounds, taking in the expanse of lawn, the temple in the distance, the crumbling casina in the other direction. She was trying to ignore that single taunting weed with all the effectiveness of a child trying to ignore a plate of cakes.

  The flowering plant beds were severe in their geometric rigor and the temple not well placed, fronted as it was by that little fake lake in the middle of what was obviously a dry plateau. Like a tableau vivant waiting for the posers to arrive. No. More like something in a dream from which one is eager to awake. What would Mr. Olmsted think of all this, he who had designed Central Park without a single straight line, who made the plantings follow the lay of the land and the granite outcroppings, rather than the other way around?

  “Lovely day, isn’t it?” An American matron had stopped in front of their café table and addressed Beatrix’s mother. She looked vaguely familiar, though Teddy was completely indifferent to her presence and had already looked away with as much condescension as he would have shown a waiter.

  Edith’s little dog barked so insistently that she placed it on the ground, where it ran at the stranger and worried the hem of her gown.