​On a trip to Rome, Georgia, in 1985, I asked my uncle about Aunt Jennie. He said:

​
Robert, my husband, remarked: “So that when he died, according to Italian law or custom, her property would have been his -- and she would have lost it all.”


“Right,” continued Uncle Tom, “she had his holdings as long as he was alive. It was the whole ‘Mirror of Diana’, the lake which is an extinct volcano, the whole thing.”

“If she had been a more docile type,” Robert said, “she might just have given in.”

Uncle Tom: “No sirree boy. We’re going to fight over this!”

Robert: “Who won?”

Uncle Tom: “She lost part of the vineyards that go all around the lake. And incidentally that lake is where the Roman emperors had their little flings, their barges! At one time when I was there, they drained the lake, pumping the water over the edge of the crater, and they lowered the water down to where these old barges were and they actually found a barge of the Emperor Caligula. As soon as the water got off it, it started falling apart, so they wrapped it with cloth, shored it under with a sled, and pulled it... on the shore and built a museum around it. All that belonged to Aunt Jennie at one time.”


My mother visited Aunt Jennie three times in her life, for months at a time, when she was about ten, fourteen, and nineteen years of age. She kept journals of her experiences and travels with this “difficult and fascinating” aunt. There is a sense of the incommensurability between Rome, Georgia, and Rome, Italy: the two worlds, in Isabelle, remain distinct. Only with Bingo did the temptation present itself to live another life, to be another person, to forsake the provincial Rome for the cosmopolitan Rome. But marrying abroad happened to another one of Aunt Jennie’s nieces, not to Isabelle.
​

My mother’s journals read like a narrative from a vanished world of soul-culture. It was lessons in French and Italian, music lessons, visits to museums and crowned heads. But the social proprieties and formalities little Isabelle brushed off as “so much guff.” It was not about to turn her head. “I did not want to go to tea to meet Princess Camporeales,” Isabelle wrote in 1935, “old royal people so of course Aunt Jennie got mad -- I became angry and such fussing and going-on -- oh my Lord -- she finally went out.”


It was Aunt Jennie’s plan to uplift and educate her young nieces and nephews from that other, and benighted, Rome. Isabelle, writing from Nemi in 1934, says that she is reading and studying French and Italian and hearing her aunt’s admonitions: “She wants Henry [her brother] to study, Randy [another brother] to be a lawyer -- all of us four might love to read good books. They are my best friends now, by crackie!”

​Aunt Jennie, writing to Isabelle’s father in 1930, counsels him to let his daughter come again to Europe for improvement:

The matter of speech and pronunciation seems to have been of some concern to Aunt Jennie: “When one realizes that ‘manner, speech, and knowledge’ make the man as the woman, then everything else is of small importance.” She writes in 1929, while Isabelle is visiting, that “I have an excellent French governess who is coming on the 24th of this month, also the English nurse who has a first-rate accent... I want her [Isabelle] to lose her neglected English accent, and acquire a nice, clear and distinct speech. She has already improved. But there is much to accomplish yet.”


The lessons in speech and pronunciation bear curious fruit in a later day. Many years later, while visiting in Birmingham, Isabelle spoke to a young man on the phone -- a blind date was being arranged -- and was able to impress him with her best English accent. He had had some doubts about going out with a country girl from Rome, Georgia. But when Isabelle spoke to him it was not Rome, Georgia, but the perfected English gained in Rome, Italy, that won him over. So much for speech lessons -- that man being my father-to-be.

​
​But Isabelle’s less-than-sanguine views of these proceedings at the time can be surmised from her descriptions of her aunt: she finds Aunt Jennie childish and spoiled, always making difficulties about things, selfish, domineering, and having trouble trusting people. This is from her 1934 journal, in which Aunt Jennie becomes the “child”:

As for being able to trust others, Aunt Jennie may not have always been in the wrong. Some troubles had developed with another sponsored niece who turned out to be ungrateful. This was the other niece who forsook that other Rome and married into the Italian aristocracy. Perhaps it was with this niece in mind that Jennie wrote her brother in 1929, when the Depression had made some dents in her fortune, that “My poverty has proved a benefit in other ways, as I have not the mountain of envy and greed rolled around me. Even rays of sunshine, as I should say, false light, have come from abroad in the way of sweet, sweetest letters. So sweet, that I have economized on ice cream & bon bons this Christmas, and still feel my mouth cloyed.”


Touchingly, Isabelle writes in her journal of 1934 that, “I shall do everything I can to please her -- only if she didn’t have the idea that I was doing it for something. I don’t want her money. I want her love & trust.”

To other visitors, however, Aunt Jennie could present a surface as smooth as the Mirror of Diana. Harriet Holman describes a visit to the Princess Ruspoli of the American author Thomas Nelson Page and his wife, who were entertained in company with Mr. [John Walter] Cross, husband of George Eliot, and Prince Sigismondo Bandini. The Pages found in Princess Ruspoli “not a single affectation, and the very soul of hospitality.” Mr. Cross they found “a tall old fellow, with good manners, quite vain, rather pedantic, and none too clever.” On a second visit, in 1912, the couple found the princess as ever gracious and hospitable, but embroiled in lawsuits -- “the effect has not been favorable upon her.” [2]


In 1966 I was living for a few months in Italy, pursuing studies at the British Institute in Florence. At Christmas of that year my parents flew to Europe and met me in Rome. During that time we made a visit to the Castello di Nemi. The castle had been bombed during the Second World War and was mostly in ruins. Still, “Some shadow of the awe-inspiring feudal age, seems to cling to this grim ancient stronghold,” writes Eduardo de Fonseca, in his Castelli Romani. The view of the lake, at some distance below, like a perfect blue jewel in its crater, was impressive. Fonseca remarks that, “The absence of any reference concerning Nemi in ancient writers, justifies the belief that the heights overlooking the lake were almost wholly uninhabited, owing no doubt to the barbarous custom observed, of sacrificing on the altars of the temple, all persons who chanced to penetrate within this fearful district.”


In returning there with my mother, I wondered what she felt at revisiting these scenes of her memories. By then she had lived out her own joys and found that some of them, at least, had led to ruins. Or maybe there was something in the environs of Nemi that stamped some of my thoughts with the tinge of fatality. The ghost of The King of the Wood, prowling around at my shoulder. Call it Time, or Death -- the knowledge of the precariousness of existence, that everything will be swept away, that I was standing in this beautiful and terrible place for such a short time. Maybe the Golden Bough is made of human memories that have soaked the earth with history. We roam in the woods for a little while, doing what we can to watch and wake and stay alert before our Golden Bough is cut down.


Princess Ruspoli died on January 26, 1951, at the age of 91 in her Fifth Avenue Apartment in New York City. The obituary in The New York Times says that in her later years her litigations were directed against the Italian government “for damage done to the medieval castle both by squatters and by occupation troops during the second World War.” She was twice decorated by the Holy See for her work in philanthropy and large donations to Catholic charities. “She was active in this country in support of the Berry Schools, founded by her late sister, Martha.”


The Scottish poet Edwin Muir once wrote: “There are times in every man’s life when he seems to become for a little while part of the fable, and to be recapitulating some legendary drama which, as it has recurred countless of times . . . is ageless.”


Nowadays our fables are filled with history -- as in the fable that begins: “There was once a wealthy landowner who had six daughters. The eldest daughter had hair the color of the raven, and she was proud and imperious. The second daughter had hair the color of the sparrow’s wing, and she thought herself called to a life of service . . . “
​

And that, Reader, is how this story begins.

About the time Mr. Henry Bruton passed away, or not too long afterwards, Martha was telling her stories to the mountain children in the neighborhood who used to steal out of their hills and shacks on Sunday morning to hear her. 


The Anglo-Saxon race may have made its mark in history, but it has never been a stranger to hardscrabble poverty either. The people that James Agee and Walker Evans wrote about in their photographic text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, -- those Gudgers, Gumps, and Googes  -- these were the same people Martha Berry  told her stories to.  The difference was that  Martha Berry believed in  noblesse oblige and James Agee and Walker Evans were sentimentalists.  Martha Berry  stood behind the Gudgers, pushing them into the modern world, whereas James Agee stood in front of them, marveling at how little of the distance they had come and what a  transcendent mystery poverty was. 


The Berry School grew from these intervals of Sunday storytelling  to one building,  then another and another and another.  Miss Berry, like her father before her, was not the least bit averse to going North to beg for money.  Henry Ford,  by then famous in the field of automobile manufacture, contributed funds for many beautiful buildings. But when Mr. Ford wanted to open an automobile manufacturing plant on the Berry campus, he found that not even his riches could sway Miss Berry on this point.   She was horrified at the idea of her students doing the rote  work of the assembly line, and she let him know it.  On another occasion, it is said that once when Miss Berry and Mr. Ford were driving back to the campus one afternoon,  Martha asked to be put outside the gate rather than be driven to the campus. “Why,” asked the genial Mr. Ford, curious at this latest turn of Martha’s whimsy.  “Because people will think you’ve given me money,” she snapped, “and you haven’t.” 


Occasionally the Berry School philosophy of educating the whole person - head, hands, and heart - would be talked about in some newspaper or journal, commended, and as soon forgotten. This was because (though people wouldn’t put it like this) it was “a school for the poor.” Rich people do not need  having their hands trained or their hearts developed. But poor students would pay for their education by working in agriculture or carpentry or home economics or crafts or engineering. The idea was not only to gain a liberal education but to become skilled as well. 1 


In the entry under Martha Berry for the Dictionary of Georgia Biography, it is estimated that Miss Berry raised over twenty-five million dollars for her school: “Her continuous fund-raising ventures and growing reputation as a reformer kept her near the stage of the politically and socially prominent from the Progressive era to the New Deal era,” it said. Teddy Roosevelt, visiting the school in 1911, declared it “the greatest practical work that has been done for American citizenship in this decade.” 


Still, all was not harmonious in this educational paradise. In August, 1933, the students enrolled in the Berry High School for Boys went on strike, ostensibly over the low wages they were being paid for their farm work. A reporter from The New Republic, Hamilton Basso, visited the school and later wrote “About the Berry Schools: An Open Letter to Miss Martha Berry,” (April 4, 1934). It criticized the school for excessive supervision of the students, inadequate social life, not allowing the older boys to have a smoke openly now and then, and for treating the students like wards of charity. “These mountain boys and girls, also, have more pride than one is likely to imagine. They are not ‘poor whites’ in any sense of the word... The way they think about themselves is that instead of working for a living they are working for an education. The idea of accepting charity is intolerable to them. It seems to me, Miss Berry, that it was a combination of little things like these, rather than a single big thing like a wage cut, which motivated the Berry strike.” 


Mr. Basso acknowledged that he was received courteously by Miss Berry and the school, but then accused her of “shadowing” him with a detective. He invited her response to this letter, but none was forthcoming. The editors of The New Republic said that, “if any reply or comment is received, it will be published at the earliest possible moment.” 


None ever was, apparently. No word was forthcoming from the calm citadel of Berry. The New Republic, back in those days, was pretty polite, and it wouldn’t have wanted to hound Miss Berry too far into the wilderness of self-justification. Even so, Miss Berry was not about to dignify the journalist by replying to his challenge. Neither of Captain Berry’s two eldest daughters was known to flinch at the prospect of opposition or let themselves be intimated by mere journalists or plutocrats.  


But Martha Berry was not without her critics.  One comment from my brother, who was not a liberal of the Hamilton-Basso-New Republic stripe, but a conservative after the darkest, deepest forgotten heart of the yearning world, almost shocked me. “One of the least attractive features of the twentieth century,” he said, “is using other people’s needs to build up one’s own empire.” Those poor children were convenient for Martha Berry’s good - all the better because  it was not for herself,  or for her own sake, but for their sake and their good. Hers became the prototypical liberal way, that of achieving self-fulfillment and moral superiority at the same time. This nearly drove my brother to despair.  But he did later amend his judgment to acknowledge that what Martha Berry achieved as an individual was later taken over by agencies of the government. 


As a character, the regal, selfish Jennie appealed to him more. Or maybe the difference was that Martha had crossed the threshold into history and had become, at least in a minor way, a historical character, whereas Jennie was just a character.  Thus people outside the family might have heard of Martha, whereas only insiders knew about Jennie.  We were free to like or to detest Jennie. But Martha demanded at least a semblance of obeisance, family loyalty, closed ranks.

   
And on my mental horizon, too, it was Aunt Jennie, the Princess Ruspoli, who came to assume legendary proportions, due no doubt to my mother’s frequent association with her.  It was the imperial Jennie rather than the historical Martha who left a mark upon my mother - the willful and imperial aunt who bequeathed to my mother such a struggle between notions of sacrifice and selfishness. And yet, in reflecting upon this dilemma as it helped to shape my mother’s philosophy of life, I wonder if the legend of Jennie’s selfishness was quite fair. Jennie must have been difficult to live with, but her letters and writings show a vigorous mind, and one deeply involved with questions of duty and care to others. Her notions on culture and education were no doubt strict, but from the perspective of American educational philosophy today (and it is generous to use the term “philosophy”) even snobbery begins to reveal its redeeming features. It begins to seem like the price that has to be paid for human development beyond that of the savage.   


But all of that, my brother and I agreed, was another liberal lie. Liberals pretended to decry snobbery and ‘elitism.’ But what they really stopped caring about was putting any meaningful energy into shaping  human character.  Liberalism had turned sloth into a virtue.


After Henry Bruton died, Jennie moved to Washington, D.C., where she began to cultivate ties in diplomatic circles. As my Uncle Tom Berry put it, “She was up there speaking all these different languages with all these different foreigners.” In these circumstances she met the young Prince Enrico Ruspoli from Rome, Italy, who was attached as a consul in the diplomatic corps.  Family legend has it that he followed Jennie back to that other Rome, in Georgia, where he duly proposed. He was twenty-three, she was forty: though some have disputed this great gap in their ages. 


Such marriages in diplomatic circles were not uncommon. In The Social Side of Diplomatic Life, Maude Parker Child writes of a conversation with a diplomat on the subject of the difference between European and American ideas of marriage. It could have been a page, perhaps it was the very page, from the Berry-Ruspoli chronicle: ​

Whether or not the actual personages in this drama are those of this narrative can only be guessed. But in any case the marriage was a quid pro quo: Jennie got the title, Ruspoli the money, or at least the  use of it. 

​Curiously, in this same book by Child there is a reference to a Ruspoli, though the name given is Eugenio (!), not Enrico. I do not know if the same prince is meant: ​

There is little further to be learned of Prince Ruspoli. He too passed away after seven years of marriage to the formidable Jennie.  Each of Jennie’s two husbands had a seven-year run; after this magic number of years the lease on affection or durability was cancelled.


Ruspoli’s death precipitated an international scandal when his relatives brought suit to recover his property and Jennie contested it. According to an article in The New York Times on March 28, 1910, when Jennie returned to the United States after the death of Ruspoli - “The dispute over her husband’s will ended in her being dispossessed from the ancestral estate near Rome, which she said she had bought from him, and in her accusing her husband’s relatives of seeking to cause her death.”


On this voyage home the Principessa Ruspoli was accompanied by her brother, Thomas Berry (my mother’s father.)  At this time it was not known whether she would ever return to live in Europe. The Times noted that on this voyage, “The Princess and Mr. Berry occupied suites de luxe on the steamship, took all their meals in their rooms and did not mingle with the other passengers, few of whom had any inkling of the story of the princess. There was much mystified gossip over her actions.” 


The ancestral property referred to in the Times article was the castle in Nemi,  a village about twenty miles south of Rome. The Castle had changed hands many times since its original bestowal on Cistercian monks in 1153. In the twelfth century it belonged to the Orsini family and it was also this same family that owned it, many centuries later and after many intervening changes in ownership, when it was purchased by Signor Ruspoli. 


From the terrace of the Castle, you can see the lake of Nemi, far below, a perfect little blue ovoid. The lake is a volcanic crater, called the “Mirror of Diana.” The sparkling blue water, the little round lake, the sloping hills covered with strawberry bushes - it is a beauty of heartbreak, of otherworldly envy.   Lord Byron talks of a sinister quality of the lake and its environs in Childe Harold where he says – 
​​

“As calm as cherished hate”? “A deep cold settled aspect”? A sleeping snake coiled round itself? These are strong metaphors for a piece of real estate that used to be one of the pleasure grounds of the Roman emperors.


It was in the wood near the Lake of Nemi that, in ancient times, a certain ritual was yearly enacted among the priesthood of the cult of Diana, goddess of the hunt and protectress of women. 


The description of this ritual, the slaying of the incumbent priest and the assumption to that office by the slayer, opens Sir James Frazer’s study of folklore, The Golden Bough. Frazer describes the precarious tenure of the King of the Wood in somber tones: ​

I try to imagine that figure, the King of the Wood, slipping in and out of the woods beside the lake, alert and on edge to whatever went prowling in the dappled shade, that beckoned  from the other side of the water and twitched in the arboreal gloom.  A contender. Rival.  Newcomer.  Leaping.  Sword glittering.  Hoo hee. ​