The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Now let Mrs. Delany be blooded.

  Let her eyesight fade.

  Let her stop painting.

  Let her sit in a stupor.

  Let food be tasteless in her mouth.

  Let Mrs. Delany’s friend’s son Harry Hamilton be sent with General Wolfe to conquer Quebec. Let the French General Montcalm surrender.1

  Let George Washington don his French and Indian War uniform and stride into the Continental Congress.

  Let George III take his former tutor Lord Bute as his adviser and then discredit him.

  Let the George in his blue wool on the western side of the Atlantic dedicate himself to the same enthusiasm as the George in his ermine on the eastern side of the Atlantic: horticulture, green plants, trees, shrubs, flowers, agriculture, the land.

  Let Martha Washington bear four children before she marries George, and let one of them survive, while Queen Charlotte bears fifteen children and thirteen of them survive.

  Let George Washington give the order to scourge the Iroquois nations from their settlements, and let Joseph Brant lead his people across the Niagara River and pass north of Peacock’s Point.

  Let blood be shed.

  Let the British take Fort Washington, on the current West 184th Street in Manhattan, 147 blocks from the Morgan Library.

  Let Martha Washington insist that the Revolutionary troops be inoculated against smallpox. Let an army be frostbitten but not pocked and dead.

  Let boils erupt on Benjamin Franklin’s body when he crosses the Atlantic with his grandsons and lands at the French court.

  Let Louis XVI finance the American Revolution.

  Let the Loyalists stream from New York up the Hudson and cross the Adirondack foothills to the St. Lawrence River, and let them row into Canada and freeze and die and freeze and live.

  Let the Canada Lily reseed the scorched fields as Damask Roses are cut from the gardens at Kew and placed in silver vases on Queen Charlotte’s breakfast table.

  Let Captain Cook set off on his voyage with Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander.

  Let John Bartram get sick with fear that the Colonial Army will overrun his garden in Philadelphia, but let the British soldiers bivouac there and save it.

  Let blood be bled from every sick man and sick woman in England, let cups of blood, pints of blood, gallons and galleons of blood be tapped from the veins, just as the Ontario Loyalists would learn to tap maples for their syrup. Let some of the sick survive.

  Let bloodlines be formed.

  Let the generations fly.

  Sanguinaria canadensis, or bloodroot, an early springtime flower in North America, is easy to miss, since each bloom lasts for only a day – or less, sometimes a few hours. Each ice white blossom grows sheathed in a leaf that unfurls as the flower matures. In 1777, her fabulously productive year as well as a year of revolution in North America, Mrs. Delany positioned the leaf sheath at the center of her collage. The stem of each leaf and her two snowy daisywheel flowers are pinkish red, and each stem is cut off, separated from the plant, as they were cut in the wild, for when the stems are broken, bright, beet-like juice spills out. It was perfect for warpaint, for embellishing tomahawks, but also perfect for dyeing decorative deerhide with which to make dresses. The Algonquin name for the plant is puccoon. It was a medicinal plant, from the poppy family, and used as an emetic, a cathartic, and as a sedative with multiple common names: Indian Paint, Snakebite, and Sweet Slumber.2

  John Bartram had a special interest in medicinal plants, and in 1751 in Philadelphia he wrote a “Description of a Number of Plants peculiar to America, their Uses, Virtues, etc.” Here he lists “Sanguinaria canadensis, bloodroot” and describes its curative properties:

  Chelidonium, or Sanguinaria, called by the Country People, Red Root, or Turmerick.

  The Root dried and powdered is commended by Dr. Colden, as a Cure for the Jaundice, the Powder being given to the Weight of a Drachm in Small Beer; and by others, for the Bite of a Rattle-Snake.3

  Let citizens be snake-bitten.

  Let them vomit.

  Let their bowels be stopped.

  Let a deerhide dress need decoration.

  Let a bloodroot be the answer.

  Let Sarah Chauncey Woolsey become a nurse in the American Civil War. Let her call herself Susan Coolidge and write a book for children called What Katy Did. Let her get sick of writing the Katy books and edit an abridged version of Lady Llanover’s edition of The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany (1879) and also The Diary and Letters of Frances Burney (1880) for North American audiences.

  Let begats beget.

  Let Mary Dewes beget Anne, who was called Georgina.

  Let Georgina beget Augusta.

  Let the winds disperse the Nodding Thistle seeds.

  Let Augusta beget two more generations, and let them beget a boy, and call him Robert Whytehead.

  Let Margaret Barbour draw Forget-me-nots in her scrapbook.

  Let Ruth Hayden be born to the Reverend Robert Whytehead and Margaret Barbour in 1922.

  { RUTH }

  In 1930, in a leaky Tudor rectory in the Norfolk town of Diss, Canon R. L. Whytehead, an Anglican clergyman, later Honorary Chaplain to the King, and the great-great-great-great-great-nephew of Mrs. Delany, took the hand of his youngest daughter, Ruth. He explained to her that they would be traveling by train to London because he wanted to show her something.

  “It was just my father and me,” Ruth said to me about this excursion to the museum. “I was immensely impressed by the enormous stairs leading up to the Print Study Room.”4 In 1930, as it does still, the museum allowed children into the august room with its tiers of sliding drawers. Her father sat her down at one of the thick wooden tables, the same tables used today, and requested a volume of Mrs. Delany’s flower mosaicks.

  Canon Whytehead let Ruth turn the pages. She must have had to stand or kneel on the chair to obtain the height she would have needed to lean over the massive volume – each of the ten volumes into which Mrs. Delany collected the mosaicks is around two feet tall, a foot-and-half wide, and three inches thick.

  She slightly disturbed the edge of a mounting.

  “Careful, careful!” she remembers her father saying.

  Ruth was more taken by the fact that she had been chosen by her father out of all his four daughters to go on this adventure than by the artworks themselves. Still, she knew she was the relation of someone who had done an important something.

  “Did you take art lessons?” I naively asked her.

  “Well, I might have done,” Ruth said, “if it hadn’t been for the war.”

  Of course, bombs trump art lessons. I was embarrassed, as I often am, by my ignorance of the hardships of my mother’s generation.

  As I was talking to her, Ruth was eighty-six. We sat surrounded by her books and cookies and teacups and a cabinet full of eighteenth-century inherited china, all in the sitting room of the small, airy, light-filled two-story house, just outside of the city of Bath, where she has retired. She invited me to meet her there after I had pressed Angela Roche, the supervising godmother of the Prints and Drawings Study Room, to forward the essay I had written about Mrs. Delany and my mother to her. It’s not the magnificent, leaky house she grew up in, or the rambling, romantic house where she raised her two children, but it is adorned with carefully selected objects from those times. A huge piece of framed flower-embroidered black silk from one of Mrs. D.’s fabulous dresses dominates its entranceway. “As children,” she wrote in her book Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, “my sisters and I were instructed by our father … that if the house should catch fire there were two items which should be rescued first, his sermons and the Delany.”5 (By “the Delany” he meant this panel of the dress.)

  “I’ve left the door open for you!” she called in her strong, clear voice from her kitchen the first time I visited, just after the solstice in June 2008. So my first impression of her (I’d just gotten out of a cab and was stepping up tow
ard that open front door) was actually hearing out loud the very voice I had been hearing internally while reading her book and her letter inviting me for mid-morning tea. Ruth came bustling down the hall, handsome and ebullient. I had had a fantasy of someone very frail – hah! Before me stood a tall woman with thick white hair, Spode-china-blue eyes, and a devilish smile: a sexier, twinklier version of John Opie’s portrait of Mrs. Delany.

  “Didn’t you feel, meeting her,” ventured Mark Laird after I told him I had had tea with Ruth, “that you might have been …” He hesitated. Both a distinguished garden historian and a garden restorer, and, incidentally, my neighbor, he generously introduced me to many of the scholars who are creating what he drolly calls “Delanymania.”

  “Might have been what?”

  “Well,” he said a bit sheepishly, “meeting Mrs. Delany herself?”6

  Oh, yes.

  That day Ruth wore a navy blue linen mid-calf A-line skirt, navy blue pumps, and a floral denim jacket. She moved efficiently as she guided me to my place at the tea table. We gabbed so long that she invited me to stay for lunch. She led me through the comfy living room toward a table set with two placemats in her dining room as she defrosted some homemade watercress soup. But before she served me sandwiches, she asked me to step outside to look at her garden, a small green glade rising up a slope to a vine-covered wall. As she drew the curtain aside and opened the sliding glass doors, she took a handful of dried currants from a bowl. “Now I’ll let you know how old I really am,” she said. “Only a very, very old woman such as I am has time for this.”

  The garden had few flowers, mostly varieties of green, with shaped ornamental shrubs.

  “Quick!” she whispered, commanding me. “Go back inside and hide behind the curtain!”

  She has the kind of ringing but encouraging voice one instantly obeys, though after I was tucked behind the curtain, peering out, I wondered why I was following orders. Why hadn’t I asked why I was to hide? Was I simply in the thrall of a batty old lady? Just because she had the same first name as my embroidering grandmother? Just because her ancestor shared a first name with – well, at this point I should probably confess it – me? Although I’ve always been called Molly, Mary is in fact the name on my birth certificate. Now Ruth stood in the sunshine, looking toward the vine-covered wall. It was a bit like a wall to nowhere, or a wall to Somewhere Else in a fairy story.

  “Here, Blackbird!” she was calling. “Here, Blackbird!”

  A diminutive crow-like bird popped up on the wall. He cocked his head toward Ruth. He owned the wall, the way the robin in The Secret Garden owns the wall of the garden to which the sallow, lank-haired heroine Mary Lennox hopes to gain entry. That robin drops the key to the garden at Mary Lennox’s feet.

  “Here, Blackie!” Ruth’s voice was bell-like, high. She held out her palmful of currant nuggets.

  The blackbird flew straight toward her, hovered in the air like a tiny midnight blue helicopter, landed on her hand, plucked a currant, and flew back up to the wall.

  Then he did it again.

  “Now stay behind the curtain!” she whispered. (I had been edging out.) “Here comes Mrs. Blackbird.”

  The missus, much shyer, was a brown female who hopped at Ruth’s feet, waiting for her mate to knock currants to the grass so that she could pluck them out of the clover and eat them.

  “I must get the rest of our lunch now, my dear. You take some currants and see what you can do.” Me? I was never going to get a bird to eat from my hand. There she was, like Ben Weatherstaff, the crabby old gardener who takes a shine to Mary Lennox and lets her keep the key to the secret garden, handing me the rest of the currants as I stepped out into the sunlight. The door banged. Now Ruth was watching from her kitchen window.

  “Here, Blackbird!” I called with my American accent, my a flattening.

  He hung in the air, inches from my palm. Then, with his feet, he almost but not quite landed, purposely knocking the currants from my hand toward his nervous wife.

  Pretty good, I congratulated myself. A wild blackbird almost ate from your hand.

  Then, as if sent by Dr. Delany, a small, puffy robin redbreast landed on the back of a wrought-iron chair. When he suddenly flew to my hand and began to eat, the light pinch of his claws and the whirl of his flight feathers startled me. I barely kept myself from leaping back and frightening him away. To have an animal eat from your hand (well, to have anyone, or anything, even a pet cat, take food from your fingers) feels like a visitation from a minor god. A message from the natural world we have abandoned but which generated us. The past, to me, feels like this neglected natural world. I felt that light claw of something living through hundreds of years.

  Ruth was full of enthusiasm from the kitchen window. “Oh, did you get the robin to come to you? Good for you!”

  I was in a magic place, though it was quite real. It had a street address. It had a phone number. It had an old navy blue car in the driveway, the color of the skirt on the woman who was moving back and forth in the kitchen preparing lunch. She was quite real. Just as real as the robin from which I’d felt a scratch of the past. Not just memory or metaphor but a scratch – the way a fact can scratch, palpable, undeniable, inflexibly pertinent.

  The rush of waters from the past seemed to swell up and flood the garden, and Ruth seemed to be swept from the kitchen, and I seemed to dive into a current of years moving to us and through us. You can’t step twice into the same river, Heraclitus reminds us, but there is that moment when, jumping into the rapids of time, two people surface together – or more than two: all the generations of Granvilles and Deweses and Delanys, and my own generations, all the Wrights and McManns, all the Peacocks tossed up out of the river of connections.

  After they left the British Museum, Canon Whytehead helped his eight-year-old daughter to negotiate the steep steel steps of the return train to Diss. At home Ruth shed her tight-necked city dress for her country clothes and dashed off with her sisters into the ten acres of garden and three ponds and a wood that belonged to the rectory. She was on a mission to discover flowers and nests, as her mother had done as a girl. Her mother, Margaret Barbour, no relation to Mrs. Delany at all, had painted a watercolor book of her own childhood observations of nests and flowers, an enchanting piece of natural history that Ruth Hayden still owns, and a felicitous thread of connection to the excitement of the world of Mrs. Delany’s specimens.

  This household, with its maids and maids’ rooms and its governess for the four sisters, is a picture postcard from the Edwardian past, the way my mother’s girlhood (she rode a blind pony from her grandmother’s farm to a one-room schoolhouse for her elementary education) is a romantic American postcard. But in 1937, Canon Whytehead sat his then fifteen-year-old daughter Ruth down and explained to her that she, like her sisters, was going to have to earn her living. The family fortune was not going to keep Ruth in the style to which she was accustomed, even if that style was a leaky Tudor roof and chilblains from the lack of central heating. Now, in order for Ruth to secure her adulthood, she was going to have to pass her exams. To ensure this, she was sent to live with friends of the family to be tutored along with the family’s daughter by a young governess who barely had command of the exam requirements. Every day they made feeble attempts to cover the material.

  When the morning for Ruth’s examination came, she put on her wool skirt, her fresh blouse, her jumper, and proceeded to fail the test. “I was a dummy!” she exclaimed to me, still blistered by the disaster. Her parents gave her another try. She studied, sort of. It wasn’t at all clear what exactly she was supposed to do. The young governess was as clueless as ever. The next round of exams came, and Ruth failed again. “Twice!” she chortled in her rich, reedy voice. “I had failed both times!” We were back in her dining room now, eating sandwiches.

  By the following year it wouldn’t matter to the world whether a teenage descendant of the Granvilles had flunked an exam or two, even though it took a permane
nt bite out of her self-esteem. Disconsolate, she lay in her bed and listened to the rats rolling apples overhead in the attic, until she could stand it no longer. She got up and traded the wool skirt for the uniform of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She donned the blouse, knotted the tie, put on the double-breasted jacket with its nipped-in waist, buttoned the black buttons.

  When she was twenty-one, the WRNS transferred Third Officer Ruth Whytehead to Dunoon, Scotland, home to an anti-submarine naval training base. Her job was to look after the cipher books; she was to hand them personally to the straight-postured, clean-shaven naval officer who stopped by to pick them up. The officer was Royal Navy lieutenant Freddy Hayden. “I was attracted to him,” Ruth said to me one Sunday on the telephone, when I was in Toronto and she in Bath. “I knew he was attracted to me because he didn’t send someone to pick up those books; he came himself.” She bought a bicycle and rode it through the Scottish hills, passing fields of that national flower Cirsium vulgare, the Scottish thistle, a cousin of Carduus nutans, the Musk or Nodding Thistle.

  Freddy Hayden, formerly an ordinary sailor “from the lower deck,” as Ruth described him, was one of the few working-class sailors to be commissioned as an officer before the war. Aboard the destroyer La Flore (The Flower! ) he listened to hours of pinging noises, auditory clues for depth charges. But he still went to retrieve those cipher books. Soon the narrow-waisted Ruth Whytehead abandoned her bicycle to sit in a car next to him. “He invited me on board La Flore, and that was quite entertaining,” she said with practiced understatement.

  “Then he came to see my family. Poor man, he was terribly cold, he told me. We put him in a room upstairs – no central heating. He took a rug up off the floor and put it on his bed to keep warm.” A chilly reception. Freddy “had a very good brain and was such a very good leader of men,” Ruth mused. Freddy of the very good brain had decided to marry the girl who had twice failed. “My parents liked him in many ways,” Ruth said stoutly. Her father promised to marry them.