The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  On the same day of his last angry low bow, she “fell ill of a fever.… As it fell on my spirits, I was for some days in a great deal of danger. During my whole confinement he never once enquired after me.”56 Just as she had refused to go to him years before at his sister’s house when he’d called for her, he did not return. Instead, he put a coda on this affair, marrying the very rich Mary Janssen (Janson), and when our Mary saw the couple after nearly a decade had passed, she was still stung. In January 1740 she described meeting “My Lord Baltimore [who] was in light brown and silver, his coat lined quite throughout with ermine. His lady looked like a frightened owl, her locks strutted out and most furiously greased, or rather gummed and powdered.”57

  Mary’s feverish delirium replicated the confusion of Baltimore’s baffling overtures and her mixed desires. It also replicated her Aunt Stanley’s last illness. Aunt Stanley, her adoptive mother-of-courage, her strict and succoring rescuer, the woman who supported her even as Mary refused to wed the man she wanted her to marry, as a generous mother would exasperatedly but steadfastly love the daughter who went against her advice, also lay ill.

  “Before I was well my Aunt … died,”58 while young Mary Pendarves lay in a stupor of illness. Opiated? The older Mary Delany doesn’t say. No doubt she was bled. Perhaps more than once, in the belief at the time that bleeding would remove her ills.

  The sensuous blood-red poppy also sports a seed pod to the left of the main diva bloom. This pod is the part of the flower that comes into its own after the petals fade and drop to the ground, what exists after the bloom dies. Mrs. Delany cut the seed pod as an abstraction, as close to a Matisse cut-out as she got. She snipped a fascinating straight, absolutely un-organic line right across its main panel, dividing a minty-green top shape from a Prussian-blue bottom and side shape. I know it is a little thing, one sleepy pod among nearly a thousand flowers, so many with seed cases and buds. But here, composed of six pieces of paper, the top yellow and olive, the bottom the same olive, the midsections mint and blue, is a miniature world, balanced between yellow-based green and blue-based green. It is something to concentrate on when the lavish poppy exhausts your eye. A little pod of life-after-death. Or life-after-marriage, all on your own, knowing you won’t have “Lady” in front of your name. An inheritance. Not of money, or of title, but of character, perhaps.

  { BUDDING FORTH, REDUX }

  Mike Groden, now a lean man, a marathon runner, sat in the back of my classroom watching the seventh-graders cut and paste in twentieth-century New York City, not nearly as adept with their scissors as those petticoated kids in Mademoiselle Puelle’s school in eighteenth-century London. We were savaging magazines with dull, unwieldy, round-tipped scissors, slicing out pictures to paste onto the covers of our Merchant of Venice notebooks. He was bald, and his dark chest hair curled up over the T-shirt he was wearing. He had become a literary man, but not a Shakespeare scholar – a modernist. He’d dropped math for James Joyce’s Ulysses – to me like the paintings of Picasso I was supposed to slog through a gallery to look at and love. He had edited all sixty-three volumes of the facsimile edition of James Joyce’s manuscripts. He had written a groundbreaking book on Joyce’s writing of Ulysses. I never connected my first name with the Molly in Ulysses, Molly Bloom, and certainly never made the connection to a deliciously obscure novel by another writer, Katharine Tynan, published eight years before Ulysses, called Molly, My Heart’s Delight. Tynan modeled her Molly’s adventures after those of Mary Delany, right down to her flirtation with Baltimore, and quoted from Mrs. D.’s Autobiography and Correspondence. The book then by my bed was the Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen – reflecting my retrograde taste for miniature, each story small as an egg.

  Mike seemed mystified by the clutter of the classroom – the noise, the tables askew, the globs of glue, the hacker-scissors, the construction paper sliding off the surfaces, the kids jostling one another, the lost rulers, the desolation when we ran out of black, their favorite Goth background for their notebooks. From his world of rare book libraries with their paper-scented quiet and pencils-only rules, he exhibited a fastidious curiosity about us, like a clean city boy visiting a farm.

  It was the spring of 1986. In a few months I would see my first Delanys.

  A year and a half before, two months after my father died, I had published a book of sonnets full of images, some floral, of bodies having sex. They had produced a passing shock in the poetry world. He found me again through a review of that book in The New York Times – almost exactly at the same time I heard about him. We were thirty-nine. I happened to sit next to his colleague at a dinner at my alma mater. She was thin, with bobbed hair, and she was sipping consommé. I was tucking into an alp of chocolate. “I think I know someone you might know,” she said coyly. The next minute Mike’s name hit the air.

  “I remember the smell of his mother’s laundry detergent!” I practically screamed. “I used to dance with my nose pressed into the shoulder of the shirts!”

  The thin woman’s face folded up and closed. Oh, his girlfriend. This fact deterred me for only a beat. I crammed my address onto the bottom corner of the last page of my book, tore it out, jammed it into her hand, and said with military firmness, “Give it to him.”

  “Can’t possibly,” she said. “I’m on my way to Paris.” I followed the bitten nail of her index finger as she pointed toward the restaurant coat check. There, too big to fit in the closet, was an enormous roll-aboard suitcase, obviously bound for a foreign destination. I extorted from her the name of the university where he taught. So, he lived in Canada now. If she wouldn’t deign to give him my address, I could find him. But like my mother, the thrower-outer who saved the silhouette, she saved the scrap of paper. An almost empty envelope arrived for him in London, Ontario. Stuck in the corner of it was the ragged triangle with my address.

  Before the girlfriend-colleague picked up her suitcase, she told me something else: he had had cancer. Melanoma. In the long dormancy of nineteen years when our relationship was frozen in time, something had bitten away at the seed. Mike wrote to me almost at the time I wrote to him. When we received each other’s letters, we devoured them with the complicated hunger of connecting with who we were and not knowing what we really wanted from each other now. We made a date to meet, as carefully circumscribed in time as if it had been set up by a dating service for perfect strangers.

  The sun swathed Second Avenue in the East Seventies in its early spring light. He nervously tapped his wrist against the metal outdoor table at a little place called Café Bianco, long gone now. The crisp flag of its green and white striped awning was probably chucked into a Dumpster and sent to a landfill – but then the awning was in full sail. He asked to move farther beneath it, into the shade. My mother’s voice from long ago bit its prescient hole in the afternoon. “That boy had better stay out of the sun.” He didn’t explain why he wanted to move into the shadows. His health never came up as we listed all our accomplishments to one another, the professor and the poet creating for one another the exterior outlines of our silhouettes in the world. He looked scrawny and raw. I sported a pink blouse that made me look pale as a gerbil, rundown in the way only an overworked, underpaid middle school teacher crawling toward spring vacation can be. He did not tell me about his cancer, and I did not know how to ask him. Instead he said he had become a marathon runner. I took that in, but somehow it didn’t dislodge my assumption that he was dying.

  We did not say one romantic word to one another about our kisses in the back seat of his Chrysler or our sex in that freezing New Hampshire inn. In an efficient awkwardness we said goodbye.

  Was he afraid to tell me? That couple of hours might have been our last exchange. I had to break through that over-defined edge between us, and I did it in the only way I knew how: I wrote a sonnet. Fourteen lines wasn’t long enough. A double sonnet, then. It recalled our first love-making in that cold hotel. When the poem was published in The Paris Review, I sent him a copy. />
  He was thrilled – but called to tell me the conclusion was wrong.

  He was very much alive. He had been diagnosed with melanoma and had had one recurrence, but he had been cancer-free for two and a half years. Then we began to call each other and remember together. We told each other that our fathers had died. We learned that we had both had early marriages that had begun in the same year and ended in the same year. We learned that each of us was bent on a gigantic reconstruction job of who we were. We hadn’t a clue about ourselves when we were sixteen. Or had we? Here we were on the phone, resuming a conversation we had begun then with the ease of two kids who had shared physical, emotional, sexual, intellectual cores. We tracked our dreams and told them to each other long distance on the telephone. We gradually woke to each other, but it took us six years – we were both in other relationships.

  Periodically he called me for advice about his much, much younger girlfriend, of whom I thoroughly disapproved. “Leave her!” I never said as I listened to him analyze this girl who seemed, emotionally, to be just the age I was when I left him in college. And he didn’t. He hung on, just as I did through all the storms in my own relationship – replicating my father’s rage and my mother’s reproaches. In our years of phone calls and lunches when he came to New York, and in his periodic visits to my class, we seemed to be layering tissue papers of our stories, one thin layer on the next, one color on the next, creating through the fractions of filament complete histories for two individual persons.

  After our other relationships withered away (in his case) or exploded (in mine), we ratcheted up the phone calls. At last I got on a plane to London, Ontario, just at the time that North American poppies bloom in Canadian gardens. The minute I hurled myself into his surprised arms in the Toronto airport, a new pattern cut in. I certainly didn’t know that, within a year of my pressing my nose into the collarbone of Michael Groden at Terminal Two, I would begin a life of negotiating two currencies, two tax systems, two literary worlds, two allegiances to two countries, one that stayed loyal to the very crown that Mrs. Delany had served, and one that had rebelled against that crown.

  Chapter Seven.

  CANADA LILY

  Lilium canadense, St. James’s Place, August 20, 1779, Prov. Mr. Lee (illustration credit 6.2)

  When Mrs. D. cut out her Lilium canadense (Canada Lily) in the summer of 1779, she positioned twin flowers into her portrait, each sharing nearly the same colors, with only subtle differences in their habits. Their lines swoop and swoon with freckled energy, making a study in positive and negative space. This is one of the collages that she contoured, raising the freckles on the lilies with dots and circles of pasted paper. The left lily contains thirteen of these goosebumps. The Canada Lily can grow to a height of five or six feet, taller than Mary herself (she was probably between five feet and five feet four inches),1 and she gives the impression of the plant’s height in her mosaick by placing the flower heads way at the top of the paper. The plant has the lanky feel of two tall, talky girls.

  One Saturday morning toward the end of l’affaire Baltimore, Mary settled herself into a wooden pew to hear a rehearsal of church music with Ann Donnellan, her new friend, the daughter of Nehemiah Donnellan, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland.2 After the rehearsal, Mary took Ann home and “gave her boiled chick, roast mutton, and apricot tart.”3 Donnellan in turn moved Mary with a story. She described a close friend of her exact age, a girl of “uncommon accomplishments of mind and body.” They had grown up together. But Donnellan had lost her companion – twice: first to the breach that marriage brought to women friends, then, tragically, to death from consumption. “She spoke so sensibly and movingly,” Mary wrote about Donnellan, “that it touched me … I pitied her prodigiously, and it gave a serious turn to our discourse. I could not help indulging her in that way, because I am sure, under the same unhappy circumstances, I should have liked it.” In Mary’s atmosphere of consolation, and in the aura of Ann Donnellan’s parable of deep attachment, their intense relationship began. It strengthened after Ann rushed to Mary’s bedside when she lay tossing in a fever just as her Aunt Stanley lay dying.

  If the prerequisite to love is understanding – or feeling understood – then it’s safe to say that an understanding was forming. The touch of Ann’s cool hand to Mary’s fevered forehead held a romantic mix of nurture and new intimacy. Rejected by the ambiguous Baltimore, now losing her difficult but loyal Aunt Stanley, Mary was in need of understanding. In an earlier time of ambivalent romantic disappointment, after she’d dismissed Robert Twyford, she had befriended Sally Chapone, whom her father distrusted because he thought the girl too “masculine.” One scholar, Lisa Moore, has written eloquently and not without controversy about the atmosphere of gay attachment in Mary Granville Pendarves’s life. Did she? Did they? We can’t know this any more than we can know if she and possibly impotent Pendarves did it. Given Mary’s protean vitality, it makes sense that she was drawn passionately to Ann Donnellan, however we would like to imagine it, but not just for a rebound dalliance. There was something deeper in the reflection she saw in Donnellan’s face.

  When Mary looked up from the rumpled nightclothes of her illness, she fixed her gaze on an Ann who mirrored her sister Anne, the mainstay of recognition and love. This new Ann was also a like mind and a like spirit. Musically talented, expert at handiwork, lover of her independence, Ann Donnellan had come to rescue, to sing, to sew, to read aloud, to pet the cat, to share a meal, to connect. Mary later nicknamed her “Sylvia” or, more often, “Phil” or “Phill” for Philomela or Phillis. She used affectionate nicknames for many of her friends, partly as a way to disguise them in letters, partly as a custom of her class and time, and partly as a way to outline them against the rest of life. The name Phillis comes from the Greek for foliage, and of course the goddess Phyllis. Philomela means sweet singer, or sweet song. And Donnellan had a lovely voice.

  Soon Mary made a proposal to Ann, that they take a house together in Richmond, “the pleasantest village within ten miles of London.”4 They joined their resources and found a spot. She was grateful that Donnellan’s “good sense, her peculiar agreeable talent for conversation, our variety of works – reading, walking, going on the water, seeing all the fine places in the neighbourhood, gave me a new turn of thinking, shook off the gloom, and restored me to my health.”5

  How unusual was it for two women to set up housekeeping together at this time? Mary certainly could have gone to Gloucester to live with her mother and sister. She was not out of bounds by living on her own, or by living with Donnellan; she was just comfortably within the thick outline of propriety’s confines, eased in just at the edge of suitability. Going to Gloucester would have meant leaving masquerades and concerts, and the court – all of the city’s liveliness – as well as leaving someone who deeply understood her. If she had not lived in London’s environs, she wouldn’t have been able to laze in a boat up the Thames while Donnellan sang, as a gentleman in another boat on the river described it, “the finest water language he ever heard.”6 Nor would she have experienced something so crucial to the development of her late-life art as watching Hogarth paint his portrait of the Wesley family, who included Ann Donnellan in their group, absorbing Hogarth’s advice on her own artwork.

  I am grown passionately fond of Hogarth’s painting, there is more sense in it than any I have seen.… Mr. Wesley’s family are drawn by him, and Mrs. Donnellan with them. I have had the pleasure of seeing him paint the greatest part of it; he has altered his manner of painting since you saw his pictures; he finishes more a good deal.7 [“Mrs.” is a term of respect; Ann Donnellan never married.]

  To watch a multiple-figure portrait being done by a painter she was “passionately fond of” was a striking experience. Hogarth became a role model. “I think he takes a much greater likeness, and that is what I shall value my friend’s picture for, more than for the excellence of the painting.” It’s his accuracy she appreciates, but what made the e
vent even more significant was that “Hogarth has promised to give me some instructions about drawing that will be of great use, – some rules of his own that he says will improve me more in a day than a year’s learning in the common way.” If only we could know what the rules were. She doesn’t say. What would improve a person in a single day more than instruction for a year?

  The stems of Mrs. D.’s two lilies start an S-shape as they meet the flower head, but it doesn’t continue. Even though we don’t have her words about what she learned from Hogarth, we have his from his book The Analysis of Beauty, in which he wrote that the “serpentine line,” the S-shape, is among “the most expressive figures that can be thought of to signify not only beauty and grace, but the whole order of form.”8 Yet, her flower mosaicks seemed to require the opposite of Hogarth’s shortcut: a lifetime of trying to get things right.

  Part of Mary Pendarves’s quest for accuracy was training herself to look intensely, even at her own face in the mirror. “As for my countenance,” she confided to her sister, “I cannot say much in its commendation; it is somewhat thinner and paler than usual, and my complexion is altered.… thirty years is enough to wear off bloom, and I must submit to be tarnished by time.”9 Soon after Mary saw her dull reflection in that mirror, Ann Donnellan offered to take her to Ireland to soothe the embarrassment after Lord Baltimore’s announcement of his engagement. They would visit Donnellan’s snooty sister Mrs. Clayton in her grand digs on the south side of St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Her sister (who had first introduced Mary to Ann) had married Dr. Clayton, the Bishop of Killalla. Thin, pale, altered Mary seized the invitation – but she could not just pick up and go. She needed permission, and she collected her okays first from those quickest to assent: her mother and her uncle John Stanley. Finally she approached her testy brother Bernard, who had for vague reasons, possibly disillusionment after a romance, glumly retreated to the estate he’d bought himself, Calwich Abbey in Staffordshire.10 (He never married.) Grumpily he gave his assent, and the women booked passage on the Pretty Betty, paying five guineas for the best accommodations, and sailed to Dublin in September 1731. Mary was thirty-one years old.