The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  The capacity for friendship with her sister, and with other, newer friends, such as Charlotte Hyde, the sister of Pendarves’s friend Lord Baltimore, also filled Mary’s afternoons and evenings with ballast for the terror and disturbance of the middle of each night, for now, night after night, Pendarves returned home inebriated.

  Mrs. Delany’s dancing thistle with its turned-away head whirls in a wind that has no apparent source. The ghostly fingers of the sharp-edged leaves poke into the blackness with an energized, hallucinatory feel. “I had that day a kind of foreknowledge of what was to happen.”23 A strange dislocated light, like firelight in a wind, circulates around the toughened leaves of her Carduus nutans, the prickers that are at once warding off and feminine, almost dancing. “The night before, shocking dreams, and all the day following a dread on my spirits.”

  Mary had been married seven years. She had been out that night at the home of her friend Lady Sunderland, but she was so disturbed that she looked at her food on the supper table and could not eat. She sent for a sedan chair. These leather-covered wooden boxes, fitted with oar-like carrying poles, were one-person taxis, small enough to be brought by two men directly into a house, and even up a stairwell. Mary may have stepped into the chair just outside the dining room and wedged her skirts inside it, sitting on the velvet seat. Then she was carried home.

  Strangely, Pendarves had arrived just before her. It was not the usual night. Instead of being dragged up the stairs by the servants, insensate, he was speaking his heart. He told her what a good wife she was. He “wished he might live to reward ” her. She had never heard him compliment her so much. He asked her to ring the bell for a servant to bring paper, so that he might write a new will, or so her descendant Augusta Waddington Hall surmises from what her mother, Georgina Mary Port Waddington, told her, and what her grandmother, Mary Dewes Port, had told her mother. Pendarves’s money and estate went to the niece, the wife of the husband he was so jealous of.

  But Mary said he could just as well change his will the next morning.

  He went to bed a little before midnight, six or seven hours earlier than his habit. He snorted and heaved. “He slept (as usual) very uneasily, drawing his breath with great difficulty.”

  But Mary lay wide awake. Finally, about four o’clock in the morning, she closed her eyes and slept till seven. After a mere three hours, in the hypnogogic state that the nodding head of the thistle also suggests, she lifted her hand from her covers and rang the bell. Her servant crept into the room to the window and opened the shutter. Mary pulled the bed curtains aside and softly swung her feet to the floor, not wanting to wake Pendarves. But as the light from the window shone back in through the curtains she saw that the color in his face had changed.

  It was the color of iron gall ink, “quite black in the face! At first I thought him in a fit, but immediately it struck me he was dead! ”

  She ran screaming from the room, and the flummoxed servant sent for Mrs. Catherine Dashwood, a neighbor. Then the doctors and the surgeons came running. Then her Aunt Stanley and her Aunt Lansdowne and her friends. The physicians “judged he had been dead about two hours.” Offending the aunt who had locked her in the room with the French roué, she fled to her Aunt Stanley and the protection of her Uncle John. She was twenty-three. It was over.

  Now she would never have to sleep in the same bed with him again. She would never have to smell the port, the ale, the stout, and never whiff the whiskey breath, never see the slobber, never inhale the reek of piss and fecal residues. She did not have to feel him fumbling up her petticoat or shoving his hand between her legs. She did not have to turn her head as he pinned her down and heaved on top of her. A line had been drawn by his death, as sharp as the line drawn by their marriage. Instead of a gradual merging of one phase of her life into another, she was startled awake.

  { SHELLS }

  When the first-married teenage Mrs. Pendarves walked the beach gathering seashells, she could be at home in herself, looking not up toward the horizon but down into the sand for those inspirations of tight, organized space, shells. She was collecting material specimens, not the vast visions a horizon suggests. Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. It doesn’t yield a product, like the results of an art, but it stops time, as making art does.

  In gathering shells the young Mrs. Pendarves was preparing for her great work, though she couldn’t possibly have known that. She was just watching; shelling trains the eye. However stuck Mary Pendarves was, she could always watch for those mollusks. Robert Phelps, a biographer of Colette, said about watching, “Along with love and work, this is the third great salvation. For whenever someone is seriously watching, a form of lost innocence is restored. It will not last, but during those minutes his self-consciousness is relieved.”24

  Noticing keeps you alive. When we say, “I felt so alive!” doesn’t it mean we were observing the ordinary world around us as if it were new? Isn’t that what a romance is? But I, around the same age Mary was when she picked up shells on the beach, was killing romance. I stood at the black plastic telephone with its curly wire in my dorm at Harpur College in the spring of 1966 breaking up with Mike Groden. He stood silent at the other end, in the wooden telephone booth in his all-male dormitory at Dartmouth – though the background noise was full of tenor laughter and the crash of flying beer cans. I had refused to wait for months for a two-day reunion to sustain us. We were over. At nineteen I couldn’t manage a commuter relationship between two faraway universities. I wanted a love-fest. At our separate schools, he and I had grown like sunflowers, inches in days in the high heat of the intellectual life that we had been starved for. When we would get together, we’d hardly recognize each other, we had branched upwards so wildly and flowered so madly. In the two days of fumbling transition that was all we had, we’d have to get to know one another all over again.

  I stoutly deplored his taste in literature: Eugene O’Neill. Ugh. Why spend time with that epic of drug addiction and alcoholism Long Day’s Journey into Night – the reverse-role story of the Peacocks pumped up into a Victorian house on stage – when you could read and reread a metaphor in a poem that, like a tightly folded bud, contained all a person would need in life?

  I disdained the fact that he was a math major. As the so-called creative one, I never thought of his boyhood organizational capabilities, his endless rearrangement of bottle caps from Vernor’s Ginger Ale, Birch Beer, Loganberry, and other local brews of soda pop, his orderly collection of Classic Comics and MAD magazines, his collection of 45s, as anything but a waste of creative time. For me, the creative act was the imaginative leap – what Mrs. Delany made when her mind leapt from the geranium to the scarlet paper.

  Foolishly, for most of my life I separated looking and organizing from creativity. Poetry, I thought when I was young, sprang solely from the emotions, and emotions certainly had nothing to do with the orderliness of science. Yet the first thing I did when I was overwhelmed by the vastness of a subject or a feeling was to start observing so that I could describe it to myself. You might not be able to draw a conclusion from what overwhelms you, but if you describe it, you will come to know it. And when you come to know it, you are less afraid of it. And when you are no longer afraid, you have balance. And when you have balance, you have the poise that is control. The systematic noticing of details is at the foundation of science, too. Mrs. Delany did not live in our ultra-specialized world, but she was poised at the beginning of it. She loved differentiating all types of details; in describing as she did, she participated in the birth of taxonomy. The lines between science and art in her day were fluid, but in 1966 they had become as thick as the stays in eighteenth-century ladies’ clothes.

  Mrs. D. enjoyed taking in vast quantities of particulars. After she collected her shells, she tucked them into special cabinets. She scrutinized them and mentally noted minutiae. Though she hardly could have known it, she was preparing hersel
f for her later work, busy noting the natural world just as carefully as if she’d had to record data for a biology class. Such observing is discipline, practice, a way of being that leads to art. Well, if a person has time.

  My mother, after the twenty-year lock-up of her marriage, was running out of time. She might have felt that Mary got off easy when the Squire kicked the bucket in 1726. After all, she might have reasoned, Mary was only twenty-six, whereas she was forty-six. In the finale of her divorce, just after my act of cowardice on the phone with Mike Groden, the soon-to-be ex–Mrs. Peacock had the Great Throw-Out. She was not in any way a collector. She called both of her daughters and asked them if they wanted anything. Otherwise, it was getting pitched. I shouted at my mother from that same telephone in my college dorm, “I don’t care, Polly! Do what you want!” In my fury I called her by her first name.

  Then she started her new life. I was resentful and wished she had begun it earlier, but I was happy because she had come into her own energy. She seemed to collect herself, even as she was refusing to collect.

  Ten years after the first Throw-Out, when I was twenty-nine years old, just out of graduate school, married and divorced myself, in attendance at a tiny conference held by the funders of the fellowship that had supported me through my degree, I was exhausted by the prospect of fashioning my adult life. In the cushy living room of the mansion commandeered for the purpose of debriefing their newly degreed students, I heard an exasperated voice belting out of me. “I’m sick of being a pioneer!” I declared, but what I meant was that I was sick of the loneliness of having left my working-class family. Not that I loved them in a fairy-tale way – you can’t love depression or alcoholism in that way – but my family was a family. Fractured, bleak, and bizarre as it all was, my mother encouraged me to make my own life. She firmly felt it was possible for me, but she didn’t know how to show me.

  Polly never remarried. Once was absolutely enough. She sold Peacock’s Superette. She sold the little suburban house that she and my father had painted pearl white with pink trim. It had glowed in the snow as if it were a shell on a frozen beach. She cared for her sister, who died in her forties. She cared for her father, then her mother, until each of them died. Every Friday night she drove from her secretarial job at Buffalo General Hospital to the little house-and-general-store that my grandfather had built in the early 1920s near Perry, New York, to take care of them, and then, after they were all gone, to indulge herself in another Great Throw-Out, this time pitching drawerfuls of paper goods: sheet music and dress patterns of the 1930s and ’40s as well as all of my grandmother’s correspondence. On one of my visits I rescued the diaries.

  I think of Anne, Mrs. Delany’s sister, saving her letters, and generations saving her embroidery. I saved some of my grandmother’s embroidery. To save, one must value. And to throw out, one must value moving on. Interestingly, though she threw out a great deal, I don’t think my mother did move on. Wholesale throwing out only closes a door against the past, like the door that closed on her life when she married. You have to sort through the details of the past in order to process what happened and then to move. In tossing it all out, I think my mother actually stopped herself from that slow growing, that layering upon layering that is growth in maturity. She had her great triumph of energy when she got rid of so much, including my father, but that force diminished. Eventually, she even sold the little house-and-general-store, by then a dilapidated shell and far from what it had been when my grandparents were alive.

  Even as I contemplated moving ahead, I continued searching for role models. The teenage Mrs. Pendarves, now the Widow Pendarves, about to have to move back in with Aunt Stanley, is a role model I would have fled.

  Chapter Six.

  OPIUM POPPY

  Papaver somniferum, the Opium Poppy, Bulstrode, October 18, 1776 (illustration credit 5.2)

  Mrs. Delany’s Opium Poppy steps from the dark like a hennaed opera diva dressed in a ruby gown, wrapped in the emerald cloak of a leaf. The lower part of the topmost petal, which appears black, is actually composed of purple and violet pieces of paper. The right side of this petal seems to have been cut from dull pink paper dry-brushed over in red. Its crown is bright, orangey red, but detailed in shadowy purple-gray watercolor. The three other petals, in colors from orange to maroon, are likewise pieced. The bloom is as lavishly complex as a mantua, petticoat, and stomacher, the elements of the gowns worn to the courts of George I and II from the 1720s through the 1740s.

  When Mrs. Delany pasted the finishing bit of scarlet on her Papaver Somniferum at Bulstrode, she dated her portrait October 18, 1776. This was the year that the British colony of Maryland became an American state, drawing up its first constitution. At the time of Alexander Pendarves’s death, Maryland’s proprietary governor had been the sixth Baron Baltimore, Charles Calvert. He was the brother of Charlotte Hyde, one of Mary Pendarves’s friends. Charlotte was the young wife of one of Pendarves’s associates, and, like Mary herself, was “of a noble family” but was “of very moderate fortune”1 – unlike her wealthy brother. Lord Baltimore, with his haughty brows and slight double chin, was, perversely, the only one of the younger men of whom Pendarves wasn’t jealous – though he should have been. The Baron was the man his young wife had called “dangerous.”2

  The Papaver somniferum can be dangerous. (Papaver is the Latin for poppy and somniferum the Latin for “bringing sleep.”) The latex-like sap from its unripe seed pods contains isoquinoline alkaloids which produce narcotics. But before the pericarp (the part of a fruit that surrounds the seeds) of a poppy’s mature seed capsule is slashed, and before the raw white opium drips and oxidizes black in preparation for its transformation into morphine, codeine, and heroin, it has been surrounded by a deep-lobed temptress of a flower.

  After Pendarves died, Mary escaped not to her mother and sister in Gloucester but to her aunt and uncle, where instead of shouting for joy she immediately collapsed and fell ill. The Stanleys took care of her. She needed them not only for emotional succor and nursing but to a degree for financial support, since she had failed to inherit the castle that Pendarves would have bequeathed her if she had insisted that the old coot change his will the night before he died. Settled only with her widow’s inheritance of a few hundred pounds a year, Mary couldn’t ever be as extravagant as her friends, some of whom had thousands of pounds at their disposal. “As to my fortune,” she stoutly claimed, “it was very mediocre, but it was at my own command. ”3 When she recovered, she realized that she had joined the freest group of women in Britain: widows with means. (But could she have made that money work for her? Perhaps, according to Dr. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, another member of the cadre of eighteenth-century women scholar-detectives. I met the curly-haired curator with the laser-beam eye for detail when she occupied a desk wedged into a row of other desks at the Yale Center for British Art, but she has moved on to a curatorial position at the Walters Art Museum in – where else? – the city named after the family of Lord Baltimore, in the state the dangerous man once more or less owned. She informed me that it was possible that Mary Pendarves was getting financial advice; someone may have been investing her widow’s income for her, since she herself could not.4)

  About six months into Mary’s widowhood the long-nosed, full-lipped Charles Calvert, then Lord of the Bedchamber to his cousin H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, rapped at Sir John and Lady Stanley’s door. Even though strict Aunt Stanley had given permission for him to call – her niece “consulted” with her “on all occasions”5 – the old lady was alarmed to see him saunter into her drawing room. He was twenty-five years old and as eligible a suitor as her niece could have imagined – though Aunt Stanley had a different plan in mind. With her pale face above her widow’s weeds, Mary must have entered the room like a self-possessed black swan. The potent possibility of her widow’s self-determination had begun to infuse all she said and did.

  Baltimore may immediately have sensed her gathering strength. It mad
e for a powerful and disturbing visit. She inhaled a few grains of the narcotic that a rich, glamorous, titled man can be and in turn exuded her own allure, the scent of a young woman beginning to own herself – the ultimate tool of seduction. Yet her heat was contradictory; it was fueled by the warmth of attraction but inhibited by the sparks of her new refusal to be tied down. Baltimore was attracted, yet hesitant. Though independence can be romantically hypnotic, was that what he wanted in a wife? Mary began to fall for him in a complicated, slantwise way. Her “inclination towards him increased,” she wrote of her own behavior, at the same time as she “grew more reserved.”6 While Aunt Stanley calculated how to circumvent him and press her case for someone else, the Baron paid his respects, wafting off on a current of charisma.

  What does an arty young widow do with her new-found time? Mary woke up, called for her tea, felt the chamber pot cold beneath her derrière, then stood still while her maid put on her day clothes (these were a less-corseted version of the going-out clothes). Then she called for the hairdresser. The hairstyles of the 1720s sharpen the idea of hairdresser, because they conjure up a sense of fabric, reminding us that hair, like clothes, wasn’t washed very often. The lard-stiffened, sometimes powdered locks took on the texture of a cloth weave. She adhered to the rules of mourning, such as those she wrote to Anne after their father’s death and not long before Pendarves died. “Dear Sister, – You should, if you keep strictly to the rules of mourning, wear your shammy gloves two months longer, but in the country if it is more convenient to you, you may wear black silk; you might have worn black earings and necklace these two months.”7