Two Sisters: A Nonfiction Story (Part 3 of 3)

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

“When he [Ruspoli] died, all of his property and that of his wife was to be handed over to his nearest relatives. The rest of the Ruspolis brought suit against Aunt Jennie and of course Aunt Jennie appeared to me like she just loved a good lawsuit more than anything. Really she was one of the wealthiest women in the world in the early 1900’s, through Bruton her first husband. That’s really what set her up.”

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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.
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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:

​“I wish that you... would realize how much you are depriving Isabel [sic] in not letting her come over with me...I think you found Isabel very well improved, and I would love to give her six months more to continue her studies. She can never have the same advantages in Rome, Georgia. She needs six months more to lift her out of the rut that all Southern girls have if they stay at home. I know how it is, for I went through it myself. She would gain for all time a nice distinct pronunciation of English... Little Isabel will be ‘somebody’ if you let her have a European education. She will never be ‘anybody’ brought up in Rome Georgia or any other little town in the South. It somehow leaves its mark as you know, although the South is adorable and lovable always. But not for a cosmopolitan education.”

On another occasion Aunt Jennie wrote to her brother:

“Little Isabel is old enough now to begin her education in a rational way... No more public school. She is too [nervous?] a little girl to go to a public school. She should be taught English correctly and also French. Have her go to a refined private school and also have individual lessons from a teacher of English. As it is, she cannot speak a connected sentence in any known tongue, through no fault of hers, but through the superficial routine of a communal school for the masses. Do not fool yourself, dear Tom. Fool anybody else in the world, but do not fool yourself. It is your duty to do better by little Isabel. She is too highly-strung to go in and out of town on a street-car. She would be a charming child if only she had the education of a gentleman’s daughter. Remember what I say now, as life is so full of duties and work that I may not have the time to think of this problem again.”

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.

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​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”:

“Gosh! Can you believe it! Over to Ventura -- acted like a child who didn’t want to give her nickel up. Stamps her ft. Child! Child! Spoiled selfish child! The man who called her one in Rome was perfectly right! Anyway it was a big bill! But why buy if you don’t want to pay! 8000 lira ($750) Then I took the child to the dentist! Et puis! She actually bought [...] tickets! Of course first class! ... Back home the trunks still stood in the hall – the nine suitcases (2 were mine ... had to be finished.) The slow [...] lunch had to be eaten! Then the household went mad! Tearing around. At 1:30 we were still closing up. At 1:40 the darn servants were screaming here and there; the suitcases were being taken down; the taxis filled. Gosh! Then the keys had to be taken to the Duchess Ravel -- then of course we arrived at the station at 1:55 the time the train pulled out -- leaving we 3 with a million things... the child’s darn camera, racket, etc. which I had to pick up all the way, to wait for the slowest train in Italy. At 9:30 we got into Bologna, then of course A.J. [Aunt Jennie] had changed again -- we got off there, stayed in the worst possible hotel and got off at daybreak to get the 8 o’clock train for Milan. At noon we got off for lunch. More damn odds & ends! Wait -- finally at 3 we get off for Lausanne -- Then the customs - (damn nice tho’) and at 10 o’clock we finally arrive in Lausanne! Then, my dear, what do you think, I called Tommie [her brother Tom, then staying in Lausanne] -- was I ever glad to hear him after leaving with [living with?] spoiled selfish children for 3 months ---”

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 . . . “
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And that, Reader, is how this story begins.

[2] Harriet Holman, “A Jamesian Georgian: Princess Eugenia Ruspoli of Rome,” Collections of the Georgia Historical Society. Unfortunately my xerox copy of this article has no date; it is circa 1968-1970. The “Jamesian” in the title is a reference to Henry James, whose novels are full of Europeanized Americans like Aunt Jennie. Note: My thanks to Dan Biggers, Curator of the Martha Berry Museum, for allowing me to quote from some of Jennie Berry Ruspoli’s letters.