The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Mary was not going to have Twyford, but she was going to have a morning. Music and breakfast. And she was going to have an afternoon. Crewelwork and walks with her friend, and then dinner. And she was going to have an evening. Words floating on the night air read aloud by her father. Though it was an order imposed from without, a domestic order, it was one that she could internalize. Daily-ness, like sewing, puts one stitch after the other. At first you don’t see how on earth you will cover a whole piece of linen with manipulated thread. And then you start, making each long stitch count, each short stitch, each French knot as good as you can make it, as perfect, pouring all your energy into the measure of the thread, like a measure of music, and watching the work grow under your very hands, and going to bed, and getting up the next morning. Having one day, and then the next.

  Her life at this time was a mere paragraph in a novel. In novels, especially the romance books my mother took out of the library, routines are boring and the novelist must dispatch them in a sentence or two. But in life our routines are the signposts of destiny.

  By the time I reached high school the routines of our household had frayed, and I had become a silhouette of a person. My outline to the world was efficient and sharp (editor of the high school yearbook; a girl capable of cleaning a house top to bottom, cooking six nights a week, and writing an A paper), but the inner world, the place one grows from, lay fallow as all my energy was pushed to maintain that exterior. We lived in an impossible situation: my father was degenerating; my mother was trying to earn a living; my little sister was trying just to be a girl; and I was trying to be good, to hold it all together, since an enormous amount of adult responsibility fell on me. At the dark hollow of the silhouette of responsibility, something nameless roiled and formed lines: poems. In some ways the poems themselves were Hound’s Tongues: terrifying and curative. Sometimes they were Mary Blue-Eyes, sweet to eat. And always they were Creeping Forget-me-nots, insisting I remember. I hadn’t discovered that I could drive this wild whatever-it-was inside me into a sonnet or a villanelle, propelling it into lines, stanzas, and rhymes. I did not yet know that these patterns, just like the embroidery patterns my grandmother gave me to guide my colored floss into chain stitches and knots (and like the much more fluid, enticing patterns that survive from Mrs. Delany’s designs for embroidered chair cushions, bed curtains, and ladies’ stomachers), were crucial to crafting a poem. All the discipline I learned was outside me: the timetable of a fast-track academic suburban school and the extreme schedule of the demands of our household. It tamed me from the outside in.

  At Kenmore East Senior High in Tonawanda, New York, with its baby boom bulge, Mike Groden had turned into the smartest boy in the Advanced Track. (We were also briefly exchange students at our sister school, Earl Haig High School in Toronto.) He earned his own money from his summer jobs, so he had bought a used chrome-dazzler of an old Chrysler. Into the passenger seat I slipped on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1964. We had been assigned our senior papers, and we were driving to the Grosvenor Research Library of the Buffalo Public Library system. In ecstasy he catapulted through the oak card catalogs amassing references, only to discover me in the P section, with nothing as yet on my ruled tablet. He was a researcher in his bones; I was just a searcher, distracted by the smell of the polished wood in the high-ceilinged room, the fretwork of shadows that the wrought-iron balcony cast over the army of the card catalogs.

  Unable to do a thing, half fainting from exhaustion, I was nearly sobbing. He doesn’t remember that he guided me to the section of the card catalog likeliest to show resources for Japanese poetry (my subject) and started me off. How easy he made it. How clear. Then he got busy cruising the open stacks and picking out a library carrel for himself, one with a beam of light shafting down from the high windows. It wasn’t always easy or clear for me. I almost never had enough sleep, for one thing, rocked by the late-night extravaganzas of the Peacock household.

  My mother, when she wasn’t working, could be quite a noticer. The previous week she had looked at Mike’s pale skin, mottled with tiny black moles, and remarked presciently, “That boy had better stay out of the sun.” She was layering pieces of memorabilia in a yellow Cutty Sark box she had picked up from the liquor store next door to Peacock’s Superette. It was a Sunday, her big day off. One of the prized possessions she stacked in the box was that silhouette of my profile that my teacher did when I was in elementary school.

  On each night other than Sunday my parents staged their battles. Sitting in the blue duster she wore to Peacock’s Superette, my mother would lay against my father the charges of failed promises and overspending, and repeat her negative syllable: no, no, no. My father, his workpants drooping (by day he worked as an electrician for the power company, and by night he was supposed to man the grocery cash register), in turn begged my mother to respond. Each day after high school, I came home to our empty house and found the wilderness of college applications, the basket of ironing I was supposed to do, the groceries to unpack, the note my mother had left about what I should cook for dinner for my sister and my dad. I hacked iceberg lettuce into chunks, drowned them in catsup and mayonnaise, burnt the hamburgers, and threw the dinner onto Melmac plates. I ditched the ironing to flee into the arms of Mike Groden.

  My responsibilities were my posture board. But Mike Groden was my Robert Twyford. The fall after graduation, having necked, petted, and groped our way to everything but the final act of sex, we made love at last in a freezing room in a New England inn outside of Hanover, New Hampshire. There, in the blue snowlight with the frost figuring the insides of the windows, we became living proof of the fact that two kids could have the right instincts for a life partnership. It was 1965.

  In 1716, less than a year after she had to refuse the marriage proposal, Mary sat at a dinner table at her uncle’s house, hearing one of the guests mention that Robert Twyford had been “struck with a dead palsy.” Mary “blushed excessively,” wondering if she herself could have been the cause. Twyford, who may have had a stroke, or perhaps epilepsy, could no longer speak above a word or two, although he could write. His brain disorder caused him to write “perpetually,” Mary says, perhaps a kind of hypergraphia. Many, many years after that dinner, Mary met a woman who had been a great friend of Twyford’s, who told her that Twyford’s obnoxious mother’s “cruel treatment of him, and absolute refusal of her consent for marrying” Mary Granville “affected him so deeply, as to throw him into the palsy.”

  “He lived in this wretched state about a year.”

  After he died, Mrs. D. found out what he’d stolen. As they removed his body from the bed where it lay, his pillow was overturned. And there beneath it was a piece of cut paper – cut by Mary, and stolen from her closet at Buckland.

  “I could not help thinking I might perhaps have been the unfortunate cause of his misfortune, as in truth I was, though I did not know that till some years after his death.”20

  How many lifetimes does it take to learn the facts of life? (And how long do you have to live to recover from them …?) Is it fact that helps us recover – or is it metaphor? Is it the hard knowledge of what really happened, like actual botanical material? Or is it the flesh of comparisons between what happened and what that was like, the blooming of explanations? The story that Mrs. D. heard about Twyford’s death may have been apocryphal, but she believed it with her whole heart.

  When Mrs. Delany sat down to the enterprise of her botanicals, she was at that grieving moment of reviewing her life. Making the flower portraits was like assembling a visual memoir, an album. She collected all the Flora, in alphabetical order, into albums, and starting in 1781 she called the group the Flora Delanica, directly attaching them to her name.21 But that was sixty-some years after Robert Twyford. Not only had little Lady Jane Douglas filched cut-out birds and flowers from Mary to keep and delight in, but Twyford, as far as Mary was concerned, had purloined cut paper to keep and love. To have what you have made so esteemed that it se
ems to be keeping a person alive, or comforts a person as he makes his transit to the next world, is to assign a magnitude to what you do that is so tremendous you must keep doing it.

  Chapter Four.

  DAMASK ROSE

  Rosa gallica, Cluster Damask Rose, Bulstrode, July 1780, showing an insect bite cut in a leaf (illustration credit 3.2)

  Rosa gallica, the subject of the flower mosaick that eighty-year-old Mrs. Delany hovered over at Bulstrode in the humid summer of 1780, is the rose whose attar is distilled to produce essential oil, and it provides the inspiration for one of Mrs. D.’s most famous, most popular images. It appears on placemats, coasters, postcards, note cards, aprons, tea cozies, tea towels, and canisters, and it offers possibilities for anything else that can be adorned by a rose.

  Mrs. D. composed the main flower of Rosa gallica, Cluster Damask in seventy-one pieces (the number that my eye can count), each a separate single color, from tongue pink to inside-the-lower-lip pink to under-the-fingernail pink – all accented with three slivers of red. The effect is as deep as a blush. After it was assembled, she painted certain shadows over the petals with a grayish pink watercolor. Under the Ultra Optix lens, it looks as if she either dry-brushed it in gray or penciled in other shadows at – if the rose had a round watch face – 1, 8, 9, and 11 o’clock.

  The number of colors and the shadows give the muddled head a heaviness. It has the quality of curtsying, or bowing, from its stem. “Muddled” is actually a technical term for a type of flower head. It means a full but flat-faced flower with petals of various overlapping sizes, a rosette. Who is more like a rosette than a blooming teenage girl, and who more muddled?

  Rosa gallica, detail (illustration credit 4.1)

  Into the silence of the household routine at Buckland after Robert Twyford left came a letter, an invitation all the way from Longleat, a stately house outside of Bath. The invitation issued from Mary’s paternal uncle, George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, the poet and playwright who had been released from prison and had married the adorable and wicked widow Mary Villiers. Villiers was an arch-coquette English rose who had first married the Marquess of Bath and bore him a son, Lord Weymouth. When the Marquess died, she became the mistress of his estate, Longleat, which would be inherited by their son when he came of age. George Granville, exhilarated by his freedom after two years in the Tower, moved into Longleat with his new wife. There they entertained scads of guests with country dancing every night. The house hadn’t been used for several years and the income from the estate was down, but they hired a cook, a housekeeper, a butler, and laundry maids, and retained a group of musicians so that their extended house party could go on for days, weeks, months, a vortex of socializing and celebrating being alive – and, for Lansdowne, consolidating lost political power, too.

  The letter noted that it was time for Mary to come out into society, and it said that her uncle and aunt would be delighted to show her off. Another chance! The dressmaker would be called for, the glover would be visited, and dancing shoes would be cut out from brocade. All this finery would be packed up in trunks for Mary, and she would travel with her father to Longleat.

  When Mary and her father entered that splendid house, it was already two hundred and fifty years old. In the attic, even the laundry maids’ rooms sported rugs, with mirrors over the fireplaces. There was a smoking room and an armory with pikes and blunderbusses and body armor. In the cold dairy an exhausted hound tied to a dogwheel churned their butter.1 (Longleat House still exists, and you can visit it today. You can pay admission, see the high-ceilinged Great Hall where Mary danced, descend into the kitchen where the banquets were prepared, then tour the grounds – or just view them on BBC’s Animal Park. The estate is a safari park now.)

  Life for Mary at Longleat was breathless – outdoors in the daytime, riding the horses from the stables, indoors at night where the roasts slopped over the plates, then dancing till exhilarated and exhausted, and rising again the next day. Colonel Bernard Granville was there to watch the precise steps and sometimes the moments of lip-to-lip kissing in his daughter’s minuets, her sarabandes, her gigues, seated in his brother’s ebony leather-backed chairs. The largess pumped up the Colonel’s hope of an increase in his allowance, but his older brother had a different idea. Why should Bernard need his current allowance at all? Shouldn’t it, in fact, be reduced? After all, Mary would be living at Longleat, George would be providing for her, and Bernard would have one fewer mouth to feed.

  How many times had the younger brother had to humble himself, to ask and be subject to his older sibling’s whims? It’s not easy to become a man in an atmosphere of lifelong dependency; Colonel Granville did not act like an adult but like a boy in need of understanding when he confessed his desperation to his daughter. Mary had grown into some of her adult wisdom at Buckland, as well as into her adult body. She began to have a command of this new, fresh self that she was developing, partly because of the attention of her father, and the example of his realism, as well as her realistic rejection of Robert Twyford. Her father’s sad news that his income would be reduced was a crucial piece of information for her. Hearing his confidential news, Mary took on her father’s disappointment, and with it the knowledge that she was the linchpin in her family’s financial life. Colonel Granville left Longleat then, returning to Buckland, leaving his daughter to the violin, the flute, the continuo, the dancing, the platters of game.

  Things changed at Longleat after his departure. Strangely, Mary’s two aunts, her Aunt Lansdowne and her Aunt Granville (her father’s spinster sister Elizabeth, who lived at Longleat), seemed to be conspiring to keep her away from her uncle. During the beginning of her stay, Mary read aloud to her uncle whenever he wanted, and he, the poet and playwright who would one day be the posthumous subject of an essay by Samuel Johnson in The Lives of the Poets (Johnson opined that Granville’s dramatic poem “The British Enchanters” had “passages which are at least pretty, though they do not rise to any high degree of excellence”),2 had praised her reading and her voice to these jealous aunts. Now, with the adroitest social moves, they prevented this intellectual intimacy.

  Dr. Kate Harris, another lithe, artlessly lovely, makeup-less member of that sorority of conservators of corners of the eighteenth century, is curator at Longleat. I found her office up scores of stairs and down multitudes of oak-floored hallways, the kind of oak floors that feel unfinished, unvarnished, because they were scrubbed for centuries with ale. The seventeenth-century library, which is one of the few rooms still existing that Mrs. Delany would instantly have recognized, is off limits to the public, but it contains the silhouette of six children reproduced in this book. Dr. Harris and I sat together on two straight wooden chairs by the shelves where Mary Granville would have gone to fetch books to read to her Uncle George, and we gossiped about the past. I declared that I hated George Granville, who partied while his younger brother made do, and Dr. Harris told the story of how the Lord conspired with his wife to keep her son, his stepson, ignorant of the fact that the boy would inherit Longleat. The little Viscount thought his house, his lands, his bailiff, and his stables belonged to them. Meanwhile, they spent his money on their high life – and on his older cousin Mary Granville’s marriage.

  One day at Longleat it rained horribly. Alexander Pendarves had ridden hard from his dank castle with crenellated towers called Roscrow, in Cornwall, nursing an old hurt. It involved his manhood and his family name, which, unless he acted soon, would die with him. Roscrow, whose stone passageways dated back to the fourteenth century, was empty of wife and children. Now, without an inheritor, the widower had dreamed up a plan.

  He had a niece who could inherit his estate, and she had recently married. Pendarves’s idea was that he, who was sixty years old, would deed his estate to this niece’s husband, for them to take possession of and live in immediately, while he would spend his old age elsewhere. All her husband had to do was take his name. It was a fantastic deal the widower thought he offered t
hem, but his niece’s young husband refused. His own manhood and family name signified more than money. The nephew-in-law held his ground so firmly that Pendarves had left their home in a rage, slopping his horse through to Longleat to visit his fellow Jacobite Lansdowne.

  Sopping wet from having ridden for hours in the rain, the drunken squire of Roscrow appeared at the great doors. When the servant announced him, the Lord leapt from the table and invited his political ally in to dine. “I expected to have seen somebody with the appearance of a gentleman,” Mary wrote decades later to her friend the Duchess, “when the poor, old, dripping almost drowned [Pendarves] was brought into the room, like Hob out of the well, his wig, his coat, his dirty boots, his large unwieldy person, and his crimson countenance.”3

  His behavior fascinated her. It disgusted her. Pendarves, who held political cards that were necessary to complete Lord Lansdowne’s hand, was invited to stay awhile. Mary was always at table, observing and recoiling in the intense repulsion that a sixteen-year-old girl might feel at the sight of a slobbering old man. She had developed a friendship with Mr. Villiers, her Aunt Lansdowne’s young brother, and together they made fun of the geezer. His wig askew, his blubber hanging over his belt, his face perennially red from drink “were all subjects of great mirth and observation to me,” Mary wrote. “I diverted myself at his expense several days, and was well assisted by a young gentleman, brother to Laura; who had wit and malice.”4 (Laura was the name Mary used to disguise her Aunt Lansdowne in her sketch of a memoir.) They were young, they were nasty, and Mary was a little bit afraid. Why was the old guy staying so long?

  “His age I have already told you;” Mary wrote, “as to his person he was excessively fat, of a brown complexion, negligent in his dress, and took a vast quantity of snuff, which gave him a dirty look … he had an honest countenance, but altogether a person rather disgusting than engaging.”5