Voyage Out

CHAPTER 2

LUCIA:

The Grand Tour - a season in Europe - had not been my idea.

It was not that I had ample reasons to be so satisfied with my life that the prospect of a Grand Tour holiday would prove to be an abhorrent punishment. It was not that I was so parochially-minded as to be disdainful of travel, or so well-traveled at that, as to be suffering from ennui at the mere thought of further motion. It was simply...unexpected.

What I had been expecting was a quiet summer to approach, perhaps my last, spent, as was the family custom, at Ithaca, the old St. Clair home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on Lake Mahkeenac, set amongst the Berkshire Mountains. The airy flirtations and frivolities of the New York marriage circuit with their weighty ramifications had wearied me and made me wistful for the vacations to Ithaca and nearby Boston, driving up the avenue, past the gatehouse and Frederick Law Olmstead gardens, and seeing the beautiful white mansion rise from the foliage of Japanese maple trees, lush green in the spring and coppery gold in the autumn. I had been looking forward to those tangerine and violet sunsets, deep magenta twilights, and rosy dawns through the festooned lace curtains of the bay windows. I had longed for the oasis calm of the greenhouses (flourishing with lilies-of-the-valley and fruits and vines grown from cuttings taken in 1870 from Hampton Court, a gift from the Boston Lymans following a visit to their country estate, The Vale, in Waltham) hidden at the end of the back lawn next to the old carriage house, for the serene evenings under the cool of the willows to the muted strains of someone practicing a musical instrument somewhere in the house, the enchantment of a viola at dusk, or contemplating the moonrise while mother's old phonograph crooned softly about faded romances to the darkness; the Gorham Martelé silver vases filled with welcoming bouquets (which held no hidden message or deeper meaning other than to proclaim their beauty) scenting the rooms on the days of arrival; the teas and parties that asked merely for enjoyment in the present without need for thoughts of the future; the days which were purely one's own, with no daunting social engagements or pressing calls to attend; flowers, parties, light-heartedness, coming home in the early hours of the morning from grand parties at the Berkshire Cottages in the neighboring summer resort town of Lenox and watching the ripples across the Housatonic River and Stockbridge Bowl; walks at eventide along the sand dunes on deserted shores; the streets of Boston lined with old trees that in the summer made cool mottled patterns on the pavement and glittered after the rain like a sky hung with starry diamonds; waltzing in the moonlit sunken garden with Nate before he had changed; long afternoons spent in the Beaux-Arts architectural beauty of the courtyard and rooms and Guastavino vaulted halls and arcaded galleries of the Boston Public Library designed, like Symphony Hall on Massachusetts Avenue, by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead, and White (seeking out the literary nutrients that I would ordinarily have found, if I had been in New York, in the library at Montrose) and meandering through the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the rooms at the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum filled with the works of Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Matisse, Whistler, and Sargent; evenings at the theater and opera and the Union Oyster House on Union Street; sailing on Stockbridge Bowl and Boston Symphony Orchestra radio broadcast concerts and picnics on the banks of the Charles with pockets filled to the brim from the "Confectioner's Row" candy counters, swimming and cycling and reading and painting and listening to music, hours of lazy, drifting leisure. I was loathe to sacrifice those pleasures for a few hectic weeks abroad, living out of steamer trunks and persuaded to show interest in useless souvenirs and unwanted suitors. I felt, when I was told of the Grand Tour, that my roots were being pulled out.

Once, Charley - a younger, less worldly, bored Charley - had pushed away the pile of books spread over the picnic rug (pickings from the latest shipment that would eventually find its way back onto the shelves of the great walnut-paneled library at Montrose) and mused: "We are told that, on account of our youth, we should want to suck the marrow out of life, but what does that really mean beyond the immediate gratification of a few pleasures - beyond merely the thrill of being naughty, and not very naughty at that - the consequences of which, by the by, may or may not blight our futures?"