The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  By Mrs. Delany’s time the Garden was conducting seed exchanges around the known world – and it still does. The Garden still exists, and you can go down Royal Hospital Road in London to the banks of the Thames (which provides a salutary environment to plants in winter) and visit, and even see the rock garden established by Sir Joseph Banks.10

  Ruth and Freddy Hayden felt the great practicality of what they were writing: a Bloodroot, a way to rescue from obscurity not only the miraculous flower mosaicks but also the six volumes of letters, and the amazing enterprise of the busy and long life of Mary Granville Pendarves Delany. Ruth wrote a book that engages with art history, fashion history, political history, and letters, as thorough and comprehensive a look at her ancestor as there was after Lady Llanover’s amazing, if eccentric, piece of editing of the letters in the nineteenth century. Ruth’s book has prompted the research of textile historians, garden historians, botanists, paper detectives, experts in court life, and feminists. The core of her research, although it has been revised, reviewed, and amended by scholars, has inspired them, perhaps because she’s a marvelous storyteller and also because Ruth was a very savvy selector of quotes and images. Oh yes, there’s a third reason. Ruth had a cause, a mission, a root: she had made her ancestor her life’s work.

  “Living with negative things is not much fun, is it?” she said to me twenty-eight years after Freddy died. It was a chilly November 28, 2008, and I had brought her a White Hellebore, a plant that had thrilled Mrs. Delany’s friend the Duchess and which Mrs. D. had portrayed (the British Museum put it on a Christmas card). “Thankfulness and forgiveness,” Ruth said as we mused about all that had passed in the past three decades, “that’s where religion comes in. That’s what Christianity is for.” Soon it would be the sixteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. Ruth was preparing a guest sermon on flowers to be delivered at All Saints Church. The compassionate Rose, she said, “gives off the scent of empathy.” Love-in-a-Mist suggests that God’s response is in a mist, as St. Paul says in Romans 8:38 and 39. Heartsease? “Let the ease of Christ rule in your hearts,” she planned to say. Forget-me-not? “Well,” Ruth chuckled, “we all like to be remembered.”

  I was busy checking facts with her and she was busy making lunch. In our meetings we always seemed to chat much longer than we’d planned. “The old blackbird,” she said, “I think he’s died.” She brightened. “But I have two robins, and one day I stood with one in each hand!”

  { POLLY }

  At the age of sixteen my mother, then Polly Wright, graduated early from high school, cut off her hair, got a factory job, and bought a car, a Model A. It was 1935. With her first paycheck she made a down payment on new furniture for her parents and bought clothes in a store, vowing never to wear another homemade garment. My grandmother Ruth had sewed all of Polly’s clothes to that point. (Watching her sew as a child, I knew firsthand the creative power of a pair of scissors.)

  By the time my mother was twenty-two, with six years of semi-independent living under her slender belt (she still lived with her parents), she packed her car to head for a new life in California. I think of Polly’s California as the equivalent of Mrs. D.’s Ireland. It was Sunday night, December 7, 1941. She planned to set out with her two best girlfriends from the factory the next morning. But by breakfast on the eighth the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed reached their hamlet in upstate New York. My grandmother pleaded with my mother not to go to California – where she would surely die when the Japanese invaded. But Polly and her friends had the car packed! Their compromise was to drive one and a half hours to Buffalo instead and get assembly line jobs at Bell Aircraft. My mother’s boss was Mary Peacock, my father’s aunt. Soon Polly Wright would become Polly Peacock, and a door would shut. California didn’t really become her Ireland. Polly never got there.

  A creeping depression overtook her after she stopped working at her aircraft job to care for her two young daughters at home, and her former exhilaration dissolved into hours of fantasy reading. My mother was never without a book, usually a romance novel or a western. She read while she cooked; she read in the bathroom, of course; she read in bed eating chocolate-covered cherries; she read behind the cash register of Peacock’s Superette, always with a cigarette ash growing to a curved, stem-like shape before it dropped to the page, sometimes burning a little spark-hole in the paper before it went out. She read behind the closed, locked door of her own life. It was the mid-twentieth century, and one would have thought she could have gotten out of the marriage to a degenerating alcoholic, but locked doors can be psychological as well as sociological, and it took her twenty years to extricate herself.

  How is it that Mary Delany, two hundred years before my mother, seems to have led a life of greater liberty? Personality and heredity aside, of course there was the little matter of class. My immediate branch of the family – farmers and small business people on my mother’s side, truck drivers and factory workers on my father’s – had little wealth, and little wealth of memory. I know much more about Mary Delany than my own ancestors at this point, but not for long. Mrs. D. and my husband have turned me from a searcher into a researcher, even though a metaphor can feel truer to me than a fact.

  Pauline Wright Peacock, 1940 (illustration credit 11.3)

  My mother thought about things she might do and things she might have done, but she never did them. She never seemed to decide anything. Drifting from stage to stage in her life, she had ill-formulated goals and never seemed to go after things in a straightforward way. She settled for less in every situation except friendship, whether it was the choice on a menu or the choice of a divorce lawyer. Was this the limitation of class or the limitation of the post–World War II return to a traditional society? Or was it due to the very close mental quarters that were the result of her depressive personality? Or to the fact that she did no art or craft?

  Craft is engaging. It results in a product. The mind works in a state of meditation in craft, almost the way we half-meditate in heavy physical exercise. There is a marvelously obsessive nature to craft that allows a person to dive down through the ocean of everyday life to a seafloor of meditative making. It is an antidote to what ails you. At about the age of thirty-six, my mother executed six paint-by-number paintings, three winter landscapes and three exotic jungle-scapes prominently featuring peacocks. She spread the work out on the kitchen table and, over several happy years, went at it. One can lose oneself, even in paint-by-numbers, and the loss of the self within safe confines nurtures the imagination. To ornament one’s existence, even with six paint-by-numbers paintings, is a key to understanding one’s personal wealth – and acknowledging that wealth in others, too.

  But she stopped. For the next thirty-seven years she did no making.

  In my life I never received a full-length letter from my mother. She did not write anything the length of a page, let alone a book, although she read thousands of paperbacks and library books and kept them in chronological order so that she would know when enough time had lapsed for her to begin a cherished rereading. Her mother, Ruth, the embroiderer, was an impressive epistolarian who probably wrote the equivalent of Mrs. Delany’s six volumes of letters, to friends and cousins from Florida to Alberta. But my mother even refused to write to her mother. I have a few scraps of notes in Polly’s hand. A postscript on a Christmas card was the most you’d get. She generally refused to make social phone calls, though she would answer the phone. You had to come to her. The fury this ignited in me was lifelong. Yet I called. I wrote. Refusing to make, she made me into a maker – into a writer, in fact. Polly inched her way forward in life, making me seize every opportunity. I had to leap, I had to bound. She did nothing fanciful, and nothing ornamental, except putting her makeup on. She was an attractive woman who drew a line of red lipstick with assurance. She drove a car exceptionally well, and even knew how to fix one.

  She did have one important link with Mary Delany: they both had lifelong friends. The two women who started o
ut driving in that car to California and ended up in the aircraft factory with my mother were all devoted until the day she died. I grew up watching their friendships flourishing, foundering, being patched up, and barreling on toward eternity. It took me until I graduated from college to realize that many people feel that husbands are for life and friends are temporary, instead of the other way around. These women’s husbands and lovers came and went, but the three of them were wedded fast, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. “Be careful about reading the nineteenth century back into the eighteenth century,” Alicia Weisberg-Roberts warned me in a telephone conversation. “In the eighteenth century, marriage wasn’t personal. It was contractual. It was external. A woman would never feel personally responsible for a failed marriage. The idea that you could entrap yourself because of your own poor choice didn’t exist.” It was only in the nineteenth century, when women began marrying for love, that your personal responsibility came into play, and guilt. My mother, who felt she made a terrible choice of husband and had to rectify it, would have loved that a woman of Mrs. Delany’s day could have been guilt-free.

  Why go on comparing my mother to Ruth Hayden and to Mary Delany, essentially non-comparable women? Have I secretly never outgrown the fantasy everyone has that they have been swapped at birth? That really I’m the daughter of a childless 247-year-old mother? That I could throw away my mother’s motto and adopt Ruth Hayden’s? I don’t know if Ruth has a motto, but if she does, it might be: You never know what will happen! My mother’s motto was: People never change. But they do. They grow. And they grow old. And despite her motto, my mother changed. It was not in the way Ruth Hayden did, discovering her life’s work aided by a trusty partner, or like Mrs. D., uncovering her life’s work first through the support of a beloved husband, and then through the enthusiasm of a gutsy friend. But in view of the medicinal aura of the Bloodroot, the healthy changes in my mother’s life were the kind you hope your role model will make just so you, too, can tackle orders as tall.

  She gave up marriage.

  And she gave up smoking.

  I know it sounds bizarre to equate the two, occurring almost two decades apart, but they were both things she felt were destroying her, and after a painfully long engagement with each, she did something about them. In a way, my mother entered something like Mrs. D.’s first widowhood after she divorced my father: released into a buoyant freedom. Equating her husband with the toxicity of 300,000 cigarettes, she backed out of that suburban house with a single piece of furniture for her new apartment – a lawn chair – then she slid into a restaurant booth to share a meal with her friends, who convinced her to break the lease and move in with them. And she did, for seventeen years.

  An intense two-pack-a-day lifelong smoker, Polly up and quit cold turkey at the age of sixty-five, eliminating a defeating habit. I had done this some years before, but it had taken me eleven tries, and finally I stopped through a Cancer Society group that held my hand through every stage. My mother walked away from smoking like a gunslinger from a shootout, turning on her heel and striding out of town. Well. There’s hope.

  Chapter Twelve.

  PORTLANDIA

  Portlandia grandiflora, Bulstrode, August 9, 1782, Prov. Kew (illustration credit 11.4)

  Portlandia grandiflora, like the woman it is named after, comes alive at night when its huge flowers, sometimes five inches in length, give off an earthy, chocolatey fragrance. Linnaeus, in the second volume of his Systema Naturae (1758), named the Portlandia after Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland,1 and his tribute embraced two of her most prominent qualities – her largess and her insomnia. Portlandia is a generous, night-blooming plant that will flower almost continually inside if you keep it both in filtered light and somewhat humid and warm, reminding it of its tropical Caribbean home. It is a member of the family Rubiaceae, a large group of plants (which includes coffee and quinine) that grow their leaves opposite from each other, as Mrs. Delany’s mosaick portrait of her flower-friend demonstrates.2 It is cold-sensitive – and so was Margaret, the Duchess, who ran to get quilts to tuck herself and her friend Mary into their chairs so that they could continue their non-stop conversation and their non-stop work. Calling the Duchess Margaret is an anomaly; no one in her lifetime would have done it. But a first name wraps this celebrity up in a blanket of human gestures, the ordinary virtues she displayed day after day to another woman she called her friend. In Mary’s fragment of an autobiography she called herself “Aspasia,” but she gave Margaret an Italianate version of her own name, “Maria,” identifying with her friend and circumventing the formalities of class and address.

  Mrs. Delany’s mosaick reminds us that sepals are the source of flowerings. The bud grows inside them, then the sepals peel away. During the first four years of Mary’s mourning, Margaret became a sepal-like protector. A seeing, noticing, looking-out-for pal. In asking Mary to come to visit for an extended stay of six months every year, Margaret was inviting her to the specially sealed mini-universe she had created at Bulstrode, a protecting environment.

  And Mary Delany really needed it.

  It’s shocking to view the letters she wrote after the death of the Dean. Her hand is shakier, her writing more rushed and haphazard. Her blots and mistakes alarmed her. Rereading a letter she had written to her niece the night before by candlelight embarrassed her. “Saturday morning, eight o’clock.: Now that I see my letter by daylight I am ashamed to send such a blot; but if friends will not excuse infirmities and mistakes there can be no scribbling with ease.”3 She couldn’t grip the quill in quite her usual way. The hand-eye coordination that had been so reliably superb had broken down.

  As I sat in the Beinecke Library at Yale University poring over her letters to Lady Andover, they revealed to me the physical fact of her mourning, the tactile evidence of degeneration of nerves, coordination, poise, perspective, life-force. Most of us notice that our handwriting deteriorates with age. But Mrs. Delany! Her handwriting, c’est elle.

  Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, in gold box, by Christian Friedrich Zincke, ca. 1740 (illustration credit 12.1)

  Margaret had palpable, personal evidence of the weird fragmentation of mourning, the sense that the world goes its way on the other side of a piece of glass. She knew what her friend was undergoing, largely alone. Mary had nieces and nephews, but Margaret had had her children to rally around her, and the stability of her house and her lands. She knew that Mary had none of this. When Margaret’s husband died in 1762, she was able to retain Bulstrode and its magnificent park as her home. She was able to live there as if she were queen of a minor country within England – let’s call it Portlandia.

  Her courtiers were not politicos or major aristocrats. They were men, not usually of rank, who had astonishing intellectual interests and artistic accomplishments, and they were women of rank who participated in the interests of science and art and ideas. She surrounded herself with botanists, ornithologists, conchologists, and entomologists. Eight miles down the road from her tiny country lived the King and Queen of England, George III and Charlotte, and their myriad children, thirteen little princes and princesses. They, too, shared many of the interests of the Portlandians.

  Portlandia was also a state of mind – the state of mind of a woman so ambitious she had decided to try to collect all the previously unknown animals, minerals, and vegetable life in the world. For this woman, creative life was not a question of having a room of her own, but a cosmos of her own. Her energy buzzed into the wee hours. She had to exhaust herself before she fell asleep. (That is what her bevy of attendant readers was for; she was often read to well into the night, and she kept actor’s hours, rarely rising before noon.) A hungry intellectual and a voracious collector, everything interested her: fine art, minerals, shells, fish, wildlife, plants, ceramics – and people, too. Her cosmos, over which she was intellectual, financial, emotional queen, spun on her wealth, her vigor, and an energy born of a curiosity about t
he world that bordered on the fabulous, since her collecting had begun in childhood and continued with a child’s grandiosity.

  Margaret, the only surviving child of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, and Henrietta Holles (daughter of the Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), had been around eight years old when she’d encountered Mary Delany, then the twenty-two-year-old Mary Pendarves. They’d met through Margaret’s mother, the prim Henrietta, to whom Mary was closer in age. (Lady Harley was just six years older than she.) In the summer of 1722, when Mary was living in Rose Street with Alexander Pendarves, she described being “all night upon the water with Lady Harriot Harley. We went into the barge at five in the afternoon, and … rowed up the river as far as Richmond, and were entertained all the time with very good musick in another barge. The concert was composed of three hautboys, two bassoons, flute …”4 In other circumstances, Mary might not even have met Margaret, but as an extremely precocious only child, Margaret had been brought up among her parents’ friends. When she was only five the poet Matthew Prior dedicated a poem to her, “A Letter to Lady Margaret Cavendish Holles-Harley, when a Child.” (The poem told her to please her parents, Edward, a collector of fine arts, and Henrietta, so strait-laced that Mrs. D., many years later, felt she wrecked all the fun at Bulstrode.)5 The child and the young woman bonded with a big sister–kid sister jocularity. What perhaps also knit them together was their shared interest in plants and animals, as well as Margaret’s collector’s instincts, already formed at an early age and encouraged by her father. A sheer sense of play pervaded all they did together, a buoyant creativity that sparked between them as they connected and reconnected with one another over time, through Margaret’s marriage to her “Sweet William,” which joined her considerable fortune with that of William Bentinck (1709–62), the Duke of Portland, through the bearing of her six children, through Mary’s marriage to the Dean.6