My Grandmother's Peonies

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Gran's peonies stand at the other extreme of this bizarre discrimination, since the ground they come from is my own past. Their transference out of the past into the present is legacy, and it carries a light burden: The sole living remnant of a lost landscape will dictate the nature of its new surroundings. I'll say it was in their honor that my mother and I began to work in her yard—it's only a guess. But soon we were making walls of stone and laying out beds, apparently trying to make a garden as elegant as the one the peonies had come from.

It can't be broadly true, but every male gardener I know attributes the genesis of his interest in gardening to a grandparent. In their retirement from moneymaking and in their quieter, more nurturing attentions, grandparents might be well suited to unveiling the happy work of horticulture. In my own case, going through the vegetable garden with Gran was an easy pleasure uncomplicated by labor. The garden was situated on a broad natural terrace above the house; in June we cut flowers there, and in July we collected peas. On hot days in August we ate warm tomatoes off the vine.

Down in the house there was a staff and staff's quarters. There was "the man" to drive the car, "the girl" to wash the laundry, and Mary Mack to cook the dinner. Outside the house, the lawns and gardens were tended by groundskeepers—we called them "the men." By vocation Gran was a sculptor, and in the working world she served many years on the board of Planned Parenthood. But the work of her home life was purely administrative: She had no other task but the management of staff. I remember she liked to give haircuts to her grandchildren, and to cut and arrange flowers.

Her diminished, overstaffed domestic life is illustrated to me in the memory of her doing these things—the movements of her hands, her delight—as though nothing in her life was as simple and pleasurable. It was as though these few manual tasks had been sanctified, raised or compressed to poetry, by the removal of any and all labor from her life.

This may have been just as she wanted it—or not.

She was more complicated than I can convey here. She had a decorative mania for all things faux. I have from her house a fruit basket made all of wax, which sits under its own glass dome, and stone fruit—marble apples and pears of a really pleasing verisimilitude—on two-tiered porcelain salvers. My mother has faux vases piled with faux fruit and flowers made of painted tin. Which is to say that for all the do-lessness and perhaps isolation that her wealth caused her, Gran still thought money was pretty fun. In the attic she kept a huge trunk full of elaborate costumes for capers and plays that were the occasion for large parties, parties that were the occasion for singing and dancing and speechifying. She liked gaiety, as she called it, and her own sparkling moments define this word for me.

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