The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Anne Dewes lived for another six months at Bristol (about a dozen miles from Bath), with her sister and the Dean in attendance. Yet, although Mrs. D. must have spent much time with Anne in these six months, she was not present when Anne died, shortly after one o’clock in the early morning of July 6, 1761, not quite fifty-five years old, almost an exact year after she received the letter with the story of the white robins. Just after midnight, Anne drank a cup of pennyroyal tea (an emetic), and then her speech began to falter. Anne did not call out for her sister, keeping their pattern of parting, leaving silently before the other could notice, avoiding the scene of saying goodbye.

  As many of Mrs. Delany’s letters survive from after the death of Anne Dewes as from during her lifetime, but none of them match the joie de vivre of the letters to her sister. A bleakness set in after Anne’s death, mitigated by the fact that her daughter Mary wrote lively letters, following her father’s advice to “endeavour to follow [your mother’s] bright example.”29 In turn, she received from her aunt advisory “sermons,” as she called them. But the full-pillowed intimacy of what had been four decades of letters was never the same. Neverlasting Pea. There are many nevers in a long life, but Anne’s death pierced her surviving sister, who did not have a chance to mourn purely, since as soon as Anne died, the health of the Dean demanded her attention.

  Mary Delany entered into seven years of caring for her husband as he slipped away, then rallied, slipped, then rallied. By 1765 the Dean had “such frequent returns of his disorder that he can hardly bear going out at all.” She fretted about his “constant pain,” which, “though slight, is very dispiriting.”30 He gave up going to Downpatrick, and Mary gave up a trip to England to visit her family and friends. He is “unable to bear so long a journey without great inconvenience. The same painful reason puts a stop to an English journey this year.” Mrs. Delany did what any well spouse of a sick husband does regarding time and plans. “I dare look no farther!”31 The daring not to look, in her case, though, is literal. She developed eye trouble and could not take respite in painting as she had when her sister was ill. “I am afraid to begin with painting; there is a time for all things, and when the sight grows dim I think it is a warning to leave off without losing the small credit I may have gained!”

  She turned to the natural world. “I have lived much in my garden.”

  The following year she wrote to her callous brother. “The Dean continues pretty well; soon fatigued with any exercise.”32 Still, twenty-two years after their breach at her marriage, she was apologetic to Bunny. Even ten years after Mary and the Dean were married, Bunny ceremoniously invited the Duke and Duchess of Portland and their sons as well as his sister to his estate at Calwich for dinner, but he disinvited the Dean on the flimsiest of insulting pretexts: “my brother made an excuse to D.D. for not asking him, as his table would hold but six.”33 He, the collector of Handel manuscripts and the new neighbor of the daring philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who introduced our modern concept of childhood and a whole new style of education for children, whose romantic ideas would galvanize the French Revolution and the next century), had room for the famous and the titled but not for a low-born brother-in-law who made it possible for his sister to thrive. Mrs. Delany in turn held her brother’s new neighbor Rousseau entirely suspect. She considered him “dangerous … to young and unstable minds.”34 She was firmly a Lockean product of the early eighteenth century who believed in knowledge determined by experience and the perception of the senses. One look at the Everlasting Pea shows that.

  But the discipline of art gave way to a fretwork of anxiety. “I have been sadly anxious for some time past for my dear D.D., he has been very ill, and reduced very low, which, to a man of his years, must give cruel apprehensions,” she stated flatly and openly, without disguise, to her friend the pixie-faced Lady Andover, a superb needlewoman and sympathetic listener. Then she broke down. “My nerves have been more shocked than I thought them capable of, for though my heart has felt extreme sorrow, I cannot say my nerves were ever so much affected before. Why should I tell you this? It was unawares. And yet, why should I not? a sigh relieves an oppressed mind …”35

  It was not only the Dean’s health that oppressed her, it was money. The legal bills had come in, and they were enormous. Radically, Mrs. Delany decided to sell the Spring Garden house that the Dean had given her in London, the house that was supposed to secure her for the rest of her life. Behind her back the concerned Duchess wrote to her brother, enclosing a letter she had received from Mary. The Duchess thought that selling the house was a terrible idea, and she was apprehensive that if Mary did sell it, “the money [should] be secured to her.”36 In the real estate deal and in the payment of legal fees, Mary could easily have been left out of the equation. But she was determined to sell, and the Dean was determined simply to hang on. That March of 1767 he turned eighty-three. Debt dogged them. As to the Tennisons, those “pecuniary adversaries have pursued us ever since the [legal] decree.” What this required the Delanys to do, before they could “lay hold of what they [the Tennisons] are to pay us,” was to pay them three thousand pounds with interest and an additional two thousand pounds.37 If the Delanys could have gotten their part of the settlement, they could have paid this money, but since they could not, they came up with a drastic solution. They would close Delville and remove themselves to visit their friends in England for the summer, and then stay at Bath for the winter so that the Dean might drink the healing waters.

  But where would the Dean, on his last legs, stay, now that Anne had died? In a startling reversal, her brother Bernard extended his hospitality, and Mrs. D. wrote Lady Andover from Calwich in June that “the Dean is so greatly overcome with his fatigue that it is impossible for him to think of moving yet.”38 What would the voyage across the Irish Sea have meant for a man too fatigued to move? And then to end up in the house of the man who had hated him for twenty-four years?

  By now, seven years after her sister’s death, all Mrs. Delany could do was practice a discipline of thankfulness. “Am I not in England, are not my dear friends better to me a thousand degrees than I deserve, and is not the Dean miraculously well considering what he has undergone? ”39 By November they had moved into their winter quarters at Bath, bringing Mary Dewes with them to help with the Dean so that Mrs. D. could march off to London to sell her house. It was such a huge job it left her head spinning. “I am so hurried with business that my head turns round, for on examining the house in Spring Gardens I found so much to do.”40 This is the last letter we have from Mrs. Delany for many months. What happened to her and the Dean we learn from the correspondence of Mary Dewes and her brother John. Apparently she even felt the need to sell their coach, which they had brought with them on the boat. “The coach has been made but six years, and by Wright,” Mary Dewes wrote; “it cost a hundred and thirty pounds.”41 Once all their cash was assembled and all their debts paid, she could look for more permanent rooms in Bath. By the time she returned from the empty house at Spring Gardens, she was exhausted and soon entered the state of vigil for the Dean’s last days.

  In the final week of the Dean’s life, he could not sleep, and he quoted to Mary Dewes the lines that begin, “Sleep, thou Sabbath of the mind / And greatest friend of human kind, … / Thy brother Death thy place supplies, / And kindly seals the wretch’s eyes.” (The last two lines are from Mary Barber’s 1734 poem “An Hymn to Sleep.”)42 At 6:00 p.m. on the Thursday night before he died, according to Mary Dewes, he spoke to their amanuensis Mrs. Smith and said, “I thought it would have been over long before this time.”43 The Dean died on Friday, May 6, 1768, at 9:00 in the morning at the age of eighty-four, eight days before Mary’s sixty-eighth birthday and near their twenty-fifth anniversary. He was lowered into his coffin in Bath, the coffin was loaded into a coach, the coach drove to the Irish Sea, sailors took the coffin aboard a ship, and the ship sailed the choppy waters almost twenty-four years after he and Mary first were seasick together.
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  Before they had left Ireland, the Dean had chosen the spot in the churchyard next to Delville where he wished to be buried. According to Lady Llanover, it was once part of the Delville gardens that he and Mary had created together.44

  Here lyeth the body of an orthodox Xtian believer, an early and earnest defender of Revelation to the utmost of the abilities wherewith it pleased God to endow him, a constant and zealous preacher of the Divine laws, and an humble unmeriting penitent. Patrick Delany, D.D., formerly Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, late Dean of Down, hoping for mercy in Christ Jesus, he died the 6th day of May 1768, in the 84th year of his age.

  This is the epitaph he probably dictated to his wife, for it was written in her hand on the scrap of paper preserved by Mary Dewes. It was the epitaph inscribed on his tombstone, except that, so wisely, a decision was undertaken by someone to exclude the word “unmeriting.”45

  Merit: value, worth, importance, significance. Merit: deserve.

  Everlasting peace, both the Dean and his weary wife believed in it with their whole hearts.

  She never saw the tombstone. She never returned to Ireland. She may not have accompanied the casket to the sea for its travel home, or even seen the Everlasting Peas that often grow at seaside, straggling amidst the detritus on the beach.

  { COTYLEDON }

  By the time he reached fifty-six, my husband had grown into his looks. A muscular assurance had supplanted the scrawny nervousness of his youth. His forehead, cheeks, and chin had filled out around his prominent nose, his features now proportional and open. Occasionally across this capable yet vulnerable face would flash the quick expression of a child, the boy he was, alight in the man. The boy would make a joke or run to his computer to get an idea down. The man who had lived with his cancer for twenty-three years accommodated appointments with myriad specialists within his professional comings and goings. The checkups came and went, occasionally with something scary needing to be investigated, often not.

  But sometimes, sitting in a hospital gown on an examination table in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, the man seemed to shrink to half his size, and someone else seized and froze his face, not the fleet boy but a static, narrow half-being, afraid and deathly still. It was as if he were diminished into a sculpture, all of the gestural energy that makes a person large sized down into gray stone. It was as if the blue snowlight from that freezing hotel room in New Hampshire had funneled its cold energy into him but stunned him, as if he had become an illustration from a fairy tale. He was gone, lost to me, in a netherworld of ice that also was his youth, my youth, our first sex together now frozen and – dead. Suddenly he would mobilize on the gurney and lift an arm for the doctor, and become flesh again.

  By the time he was dressed and ready to repair to a coffee shop, his easy mature self would have fully reappeared. The frozen youth had pierced a needle into my heart, though. I’d spend most of such a day worrying it out. By the time we’d been married eleven years, the pattern was horrible but familiar.

  “I think I’m going to write something about Mrs. Delany,” I said to him one day after one of those checkups, “but I don’t know what.”

  What remained unspoken went like this: It’s just us two in the world! If you go, I’ll be alone in the boat.

  “Hey,” my husband said a couple of weeks later, “there’s an edition of Lady Llanover’s edited letters of Mrs. Delany for sale. Should I bid on it?” Wasn’t he supposed to be grading his graduate student essays? “And I found them online, too. I got you a PDF of them.” All six volumes? Nearly four thousand pages? I prefer my literature in poem pages. About fourteen to twenty lines is just fine.

  “And here’s this article on Mrs. Delany from The New York Times in 1986.” It was the long-ago review I had read, which had gotten me to the Morgan Library.

  “So, should I bid?” The boy who had collected the golden Buffalo pop-bottle caps and Classic Comics had a gleam in his scholar’s eye. But the thought of Mrs. Delany defeated me. Role models. Love. Death. Give me sunlight and Philip Larkin, not nine hundred and eighty-five flower mosaicks and chalky curatorial gloves. I didn’t have the personality of a scholar. I’d never read all that.

  “Nah,” I said. “Too expensive.”

  Another fall was approaching with its equinoctial light – time to go to England again. I’d teach a workshop in London and a book of my poems was coming out. We had rented a short-term apartment and I had absolutely insisted that it be located in proximity to the British Museum. Not that I was serious about Mrs. Delany. It was just idle curiosity, a break from memorizing lines for a theater piece I had written which I would perform back in North America. But I made arrangements with the Prints and Drawings Study Room. I had my appointment to see the mosaicks. It was crazy cold that November of 2003. I hurried along Red Lion Square and scooted to the museum, burst in the front door, and walked all the way to the back, turning left in the last gallery, past cases of Buddhas toward a little Alice-in-Wonderland wooden door, which I opened, and lifted the receiver of an old telephone, which rang in the Study Room, then under renovation. “Coming right down!” a voice said. I didn’t realize that yet another Alice threshold was right across from me. It was a wooden elevator door, and a brisk attendant ushered me up, ordered me to divest myself of purse, passport, coat, leaving me in my street clothes with a tiny blank notebook and a pencil.

  Then I was led into the main room and ushered to a seat at one of the long tables. Above, an even, gray, just-about-winter light leaked through the glass ceiling. Which Delany did I want? They gave me a copy of Ruth Hayden’s book and I located the first dated mosaick, the Scarlet Geranium, and filled out a white scrap of paper. Off someone went to get it, only to return with the information that I couldn’t have it. A botanist was already looking at it, checking facts against Mrs. Delany’s vision of that specimen, plainly reliable after two hundred and thirty years.

  The curator lent me a pair of white, powdery gloves, descended an encased short flight of stairs, and heaved up a box stacked with matted mosaicks. I leapt up, leaned over, and started turning them inside the box instead of mounting them one by one on the wooden stand in front of my chair. Three curators dove like raptors and swarmed me. I should hold them like this, with one gloved hand on either side, and prop them on the stand like this, and arrange myself in front of them like so.

  Mortified, I repositioned myself. All the other people at all the other tables, the ones staring at me, drifted back to their prints and drawings, taking notes. How dry the mosaicks were, how fragile. I was used to the glossy photos in books, the online versions on a brilliant computer screen. The real ones are matte, soft, old. It was a miracle that the museum was allowing me to get within inches of them without a plate of glass in between. It seemed they could fall apart just from the intensity of a gaze. The botanical material, the leaves and other plant parts she pasted on with the papers, had all stayed in place for a couple of centuries – hundreds of times the ordinary life of a plant. And several times the life of a human.

  “I’m not serious,” I said to Mike that evening. “Just curious.” The next day I ordered up a volume which the curator placed on a foam-rubber support with a whole new protocol. Now I wasn’t to wear gloves. With the volumes, where the mosaicks are loosely interleaved between pieces of paper, gloves are thought to be such a hindrance they could actually cause damage. Not knowing what else to do, I began drawing them. How free my hand was, just following her lines!

  “Are you writing a book?” Angela Roche asked me. Roche, dark-haired, gray-eyed, and as gravel-voiced as Lauren Bacall, is a mythical figure in the Prints and Drawings Study Room. She sits at a high desk, something like a witness booth in a courtroom, and surveys the area. Among her many responsibilities is the handing out of magnifying glasses – not that it had yet occurred to me to ask her for one. “No, I’m a poet,” I said. “I just have a poet’s attachment to them.” It’s always a disaster to introduce yourself as a poet. Now of co
urse she thought I was crazy. Especially when I returned for a third day, determined to look at every single one. Of course I wouldn’t get through all of them this time. This time?

  Back in North America, in the midst of a rehearsal schedule for that theater piece, with no time to spare but to eat, sleep, exercise, and pay a bill or two, I sat down and started an essay on Mrs. Delany, whose flowering at the age of seventy-two I contrasted with my mother’s death at almost the exact same age. Anything to complicate life. Anything to make sure I wasn’t alone in the boat.

  Chapter Eleven.

  BLOODROOT

  Sanguinaria canadensis, St. James’s Place, April 25, 1777, Prov. Kew [also known as Bloodroot] (illustration credit 10.4)

  { INTERLUDE }

  Mrs. Delany was alone in her exhaustion in Bath. Sally Chapone (now Sandford) packed her godmother’s possessions and sent them from Ireland. Never again Delville. Never Mount Panther, Mount Holly, Downpatrick. Never Barber painting his enamels at the foot of her garden. Never an itinerant harper to play his strings for breakfast. Never the Pearly Bower or the robins that came to Patrick Delany’s hand. They all fluttered behind her. Her Irish life was behind her, caught in an updraft like a kite’s tail.