Paying Attention to Peacock Blue

“I live to dream,” begins the first sentence of an unpublished novel that I wrote years ago. The novel is about a young woman who lives in New York and seeks in sleep a vibrancy she cannot find in life. Her name is Beth, a single syllable that disappears into itself as soon as it is uttered. She sleepwalks through her days, working as some assistant in publishing, though the details of what she actually does are vague. On page 88, she gives up her job—where she finds the funds to do so is not explained--and travels to Paris, where she meets, at the base of the Winged Victory in the Louvre, an older professor, on sabbatical from an American university. He is headed for the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, and persuades her to join him. Not long after they have settled into his cliffside rooms with spectacular views of the active volcano, Beth discovers that he is suffering from a fatal disease.

The story, only loosely autobiographical, was my fictional attempt to prepare for the overwhelming likelihood that my beloved, much older husband would predecease me. When several agents and publishers rejected it, claiming that the character and her dilemmas were not fleshed out sufficiently, I put the novel aside, saving all the rejection letters.

The novel and its narrator were drifting, pollen-like, through my consciousness recently on a warm, May evening in New York. My friend, Christine, and I were walking around the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York. We were headed to a bookstore off Broadway to hear a friend read from his new book of short stories, and had arrived early to inspect the peacocks--one of which was rumored to be all white--in the Cathedral Garden of St. John the Divine.

The peacock-peeping was orchestrated entirely by Christine, who is forever questing after exotic phenomena, especially anything ecclesiastical. When we traveled to north Wales together seven years ago, staying with our mutual friend, Lilla, in the Vale of Clywd, just down the road from where Gerald Manley Hopkins had written, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” we spent many an afternoon tracking down holy wells, tramping through muddy paths in a sea of farmers’s rain-soaked fields, our boots growing brown with sheep dung.

The holy wells were invariably disappointing, small, rock-strewn dips and indentations with only the faintest trickling of actual water. Unlike Christine, I lacked the imagination to time-travel back to the Middle Ages, when life was simpler and earthly quirks more miraculous. My reaction to these vulva-like holes in the ground was that of a bored teenager’s, as in, “So? Are we done?”

I kept my reservations to myself, trudging gamely along and focusing on the afternoon treat we had promised ourselves: the cream tea at the village pub in Tremerchion. Christine was following her bliss, clicking away at her digital camera, and explaining that there were more holy wells in Wales than in any other part of Great Britain.

But this May evening as we were searching for the white peacock, I somehow had the feeling—maybe it was simply because we had scored a parking spot on Broadway—that some epiphany was already winging its way toward us.

Something was stirring at the Cathedral: a whole block of parking spots were sealed off with sawhorses, and everywhere there were fleets of limos and cells of workers dressed in black-and-white catering uniforms. Whatever it was—a concert, a benefit, a surprise visit from the Dalai Lama--we had the sensation, which comes often in New York in the cocktail hours before dusk, that we were at the epicenter of everything magical.

We turned off Amsterdam Avenue and pressed deeper into the garden, putting the secular world behind us, and giving ourselves up to the rhododendrons, irises and bleeding hearts. But where were the peacocks? Surely on a summer night like this, they wouldn’t be sequestered in their cages in one of the Cathedral’s garages, where they waited out the cold, New York winters.

Then Christine grabbed my arm and said, “Look!” And there on the terrace of one of the faux-medieval stone buildings that belonged to the Cathedral School, we spied it: a peacock with its train fanned out in full, as still as if it were posing for its portrait. We crept closer, our footsteps mincing, our voices whispering. But the creature paid no attention to us; he didn’t so much as flutter one of his many-eyed feathers.

I don’t know how long we stood there: two, five, ten minutes, but it felt longer, the way time stretches out and becomes eternal when one is fully in the moment. “I have never been this close to a peacock,” I whispered.

“Me neither,” Christine whispered.

“Look at all those eyes on its feathers.”

“I read somewhere that the more eyespots on its train, the more attractive he is to the female,” she said.

“Well, this guy is definitely the Johnny Depp of peacocks.”

“Look at the tiny crown on its head,” she said. “Look at the iridescent blue of its neck.”

“Peacock blue. Now I finally get what that means.”

Then, as if sensing that it was the object of our awe, the bird did a full 360-degree turn, showing us its fluffy, ivory-colored backside (imagine the end of a very elegant dust-mop).

“Look,” I said, “it’s shaking its booty.”

“There must be a peahen nearby,” she said.

We checked the time on our cell phones and realized that we’d have to hurry if we were going to get to the reading by seven. We passed one of the young caterers, half-hidden by a flowering cherry tree, and taking a cigarette break. We asked her what was going on at the Cathedral that night and she said it was a benefit for St. Luke’s Hospital. Then Christine asked about the white peacock. Had anything happened to it? Oh no, it’s around, the young woman said, already bored with our questions and releasing a scarf of smoke.

We thanked her and hurried away, and then we saw the creature strolling slowly along the stone paths among the hostas and ferns, carrying the tail of its ivory train behind it, a sort of avian version of Pippa Middleton at the recent royal wedding. But extraordinary as the bird was—I had seen only three or four peacocks in my life, and none had been white—it couldn’t compare to the one in full-dress regalia on the terrace.

Or maybe it was simply that all our attention had been concentrated to a fine point, captured in one of those multitudinous eyes on the creature’s train. Perhaps we were worn out with seeing, the way one feels after spending an afternoon looking at masterworks in a museum.

At the reading, my mind kept wandering to my novel, resting in a white typewriter-paper box among the manila envelopes of sympathy cards I had kept after my first husband’s death, one of which had been written by the man who was now giving the reading. (“It’s impossible to imagine,” he had written, “that so much life force is no longer in the world.”) And then it suddenly occurred to me what the novel’s failings were: its narrator had not been paying close enough attention to her life, and because of this it was hard for a reader to pay attention to her, to care about her.

It wasn’t Beth’s fault; it took effort, focus and energy to pay attention. Perhaps, if “absolute attention is prayer,” as Simone Weil once observed, it even took a measure of religious faith. In any case, the work of paying attention was harder if you suffered from depression, as my narrator surely did, as I had when I had written the novel, though I had not been able to own the experience.

At fifty-six, going on fifty-seven, was it too late to start paying attention? Perhaps, but then I remembered that old African fable about the best time to plant a tree: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago,” the fable goes, “The next best time is now.”

The Blue House of Marc Chagall

Polyhedral, the tumble-down logs running vertical, horizontal, higgle-piggledy, the blue house looms as large as a temple, filling the right foreground of the painting. In the distance is a fantasy village of minarets and castles, the ancient city of Vitebsk where Marc Chagall, who came into the world as Moishe Shagal, grew up.

The windows in the house are open, containing the same freakish mix of rectangles, trapezoids, and squares. The door is ajar; there is a figure just inside, half-hidden, crouched over something, perhaps a cooking pot. On the threshold other half-bent figures hover, cast in lumpy shadows upon the mustard-colored ground. The scene, whispering of poverty and privation, evokes Chagall’s own childhood as the eldest of seven surviving children, his father struggling to eke out 20 roubles a month hawking herring, his mother selling dry goods from the family's home. It is a world in which Jewish children are not allowed to attend Russian schools or universities, a time when Jewish boys might be conscripted into the Czar’s army or killed in a pogrom. And yet the scene is without menace, as if the boy Moishe Shagal were stationing himself in that house and saying, Even though life is hard, there is radiance and magic, and that radiance and magic can never be stolen from me.

“La Maison Bleue,” was painted outside in a single sitting in the summer of 1917. Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld had escaped from the tumult of St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd, to the countryside around Vitesbsk. Months earlier, after a minister from Kerensky’s provisional government had resigned, Chagall had written to his father: “the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish…mobs will roam the countryside with rifles…I will not live to see it, and I hope neither will you…”

But Moishe Shagal, or Mark Zakharovich Shagalov as he was known to Russian officials, would live to escape not just the Bolshevist Revolution of October 1917, the burning of Vitebsk, the depressions of Europe, but also the rounding up of Jews in Vichy France, the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I remember the first time I saw a Chagall painting—in the Museum of Modern Art as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, back in the middle seventies. I was young and earnest then, and had long conversations with my then-boyfriend, George, about the meaning of Chagall’s work. There were several Chagalls hanging among Monet’s Water Lillies and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, but the work that captivated me was called, “I and the Village.” Why is the cow’s head transposed to look like a woman’s face, I wondered. Why is a female figure milking the cow inside the cow’s head? Why is the couple in the distance upside-down? Why do noses look like moons and moons like noses? “I and the Village,” seemed to be rendered in another language, and I wanted to translate it, find the hidden correlate between symbol and sense, metaphor and meaning.

Time passed, bringing the usual up-endings. I left the home I shared with George and began a life with Len, whose imagination and life experience seemed as crowded and surrealistic as a Chagall canvas. Born a Jew but recently baptized a Catholic, Len held degrees in medicine and philosophy. He had been analyzed by Eric Fromm, and was working on a multi-volume study in philosophy which would unify the languages of art and science. I believed that he was the glass through which I would finally see the universe clearly.

I followed him through all the museums of New York, and some years later, when he was awarded a teaching post at the University of Leuven in Belgium, through the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Art in Bruxelles, the Louvre and the Centres Pompidou in Paris, through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

We bought EuroRail passes and rode trains from one European capital to another, tracking down Chagalls, Breughals, Memlings, Della Robbias and Michelangelos. We played games of chess speeding through the Ardennes, through fields of lavender in the south of France, through vineyards outside Siena and Gubbio. In Vienna, we visited the homes of Ludwig van Beethoven, and in Munich, we took a suburban train thirty minutes from the city center to a village called Dachau.

Dachau. One of the most heinous of all the concentration camps and yet it had been so scrubbed and sanitized that it had become harmless, historically inconsequential. It reminded me of one of the civilian conservation camps created by Roosevelt in the 1930s. There were rows of new pine-planked bunks and neatly piled army regulation blankets and bare, pillowcase-less lozenges with gray-and-white-striped ticking. Prison uniforms hung upon hooks. There were tin cups, plates, knives and forks. Everything was suffused with an outdoorsy, summer-campy air, as if the Germans had merely been treating the Jews to a crash course in rural education.

But what shocked me most was not to be found in any cordoned-off display or carefully recreated diorama or series of black-and-white photographs in the museum. As the morning rain and fog gave way to the palest flags of noontime sunshine, groups of German schoolchildren gathered at outdoor picnic tables and opened up thermoses full of tea and coffee, taking out sandwiches and munching on potato crisps.

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.” The quote was from Marc Chagall and I stumbled across it many years after that day at Dachau. It was a wintry morning at the end of March 1985, just three months after Len’s passing, and I was a long way from accepting that I would never see him again. I couldn’t read newspapers or magazines; the goings-on of the world seemed trivial, made me vaguely angry. And yet there was an old man with merry eyes and a shock of white hair on the front page of "The New York Times," living and dying in a French village called Saint-Paul, leaving this world just three years shy of his hundredth birthday.

I turned the pages of the newspaper, inhaling the details of Moishe Shagal’s long life. Born in what is now Belarus, Chagall had lived in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Manhattan, finally returning to France, the country that had given him his name and artistic start. Chagall had taken up new addresses, the obituary writer said, the way Picasso took up mistresses, drifting across continents and capitals, searching for a place to call home. The Stalinist government had repudiated him; the Nazis had called him degenerate; a handful of art critics in America had called him derivative. Still, he keep painting, stopping only for a few months after his first wife, Bella, died.

Twenty-six years after that end-of-March day in 1985, my dreams haunted by the fading faces of the dead, my footsteps as uncertain as the upside-down girl in "I and the Village," I turn on my laptop computer every morning to glimpse "La Maison Bleue" which covers my screen.

Its radiance fills me like prayer.
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Wallis Blue

“Whatever happened to Wallis and Edward,” my son asked, “I mean after he had abdicated?” We had just celebrated our son’s seventeenth birthday by taking him to see the “The King’s Speech,” which is about the constitutional crisis in Great Britain attendant upon Edward VIII’s abdication and the accession of his younger brother, Bertie, who overcame a speech impediment to become George VI.

“Were they happy together? He gave up everything for her. Did he have regrets?”

I confessed that I was no Duke and Duchess of Windsor maven. I knew some gossipy details, most of which I’d gotten second-hand from my mother, who was a girl of eleven in 1936 and would have been much affected by what H.L. Mencken called “the biggest news story since the Resurrection.”

My mother never referred to Mrs. Simpson as the Duchess of Windsor but always by the heavy-baggage, tri-partite Wallis Warfield Simpson, her voice erupting in a spitting, dyspeptic rage, which somehow made me think of Adolph Hitler ranting about the Jews.

Wallis had many failings, according to my mother, the first of which was that she was not pretty. Why this could be construed as a fault, I never quite figured out. Given that my mother was pretty herself—she had been a model in New York before her marriage--you would think she would have had more compassion for those less blessed in the looks department. But in the shopworn Keatsian manner, my mother equated truth and beauty: Wallis Warfield Simpson’s mannish looks served as an embodiment of her inner ugliness and duplicity.

“She had the morals of an alley cat,” my mother said, explaining that Wallis was divorced not once, but TWICE. Long before Wallis had started carrying on an adulterous affair with the Prince of Wales, she had “stolen” second husband Ernest Simpson away from his first wife, not long after Wallis had divorced HER first husband.

“She was a gold digger,” my mother continued, explaining that Wallis was descended from an old Southern family that had fallen on hard times after the Civil War, and that she thought nothing of manipulating men to get what she wanted. But if she was so plain, what was her power? How did she get the most powerful man in the western world to fall in love with her?

There was no ready answer to this question, but it came up often at our dinner table when I was a child, with my father never failing to point out that Wallis must have been “some piece of work” in the bedroom, that she had supposedly picked up certain “techniques” in China in the 1920s, and that once she tried these tricks on poor Edward, he was a goner.

“Honestly, what drivel you talk!” my mother said, kicking him under the table and shooting him a look that could have boiled an egg.

My parents’ differing opinions about the Windsors spoke volumes about their own irreconcilable differences, which would lead, some years later, to their divorce. To my father, Edward’s giving up the throne “for the woman I love,” as Edward put it in the famous radio speech delivered on December 11, 1936 showed existential courage, proving that the heart abides by its own laws, and that these supercede duty to country and family.

Divorced once before he met my mother, my father didn’t see a problem with Mrs. Simpson's divorces; it simply meant that she had been “around the block,” that she wasn’t a virgin ("and no one," he said, "could lock her up for that"). Mrs. Simpson embodied the tough-minded heroine who gave convention the middle finger, who followed her heart.

Who were Wallis and Edward, or W.E., as they referred to themselves in their pre-abdication correspondence? Why did they evoke such passion from people who had never met them? Wallis was so famous that “Time” Magazine named her woman of the year for 1936, the first time the publication had ever given that honor to a woman. The Duchess of Windsor also had a color named after her, “Wallis Blue,” a pale tourmaline shade that matched her eyes and was coined by the Parisian couturier, Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress.

Obsession with the Windsors continues, decades after they have been laid to rest side-by-side in Frogmore cemetery at Windsor Castle, Wallis’ stone still missing the HRH title that her royal in-laws stripped her of in 1937 (changing the English constitution to do so). Madonna is rumored to be making a movie about the lovers, claiming that both have been pilloried by history. English Heritage recently considered installing a blue plaque on the apartment building in the West End of London where Mrs. Simpson lived in the 1930s. The government-sponsored agency finally vetoed the plaque for Bryanston Court because of Mrs. Simpson’s alleged Nazi past.

Was the Duchess of Windsor really a Nazi? I don’t remember her politics coming up at our family dinners, but any Nazi association would certainly account for my mother’s antipathy to Mrs. Simpson. My mother had lost her first love, Harold, a Norwegian flyer, who was stationed in England during the war and who perished somewhere over the English Channel; she never shared any of the details with me, only that it happened during the summer of 1943, that she had been a girl of 18, that one day the tissue-thin blue airmail letters he had written to her stopped coming, that she had been so distraught she hadn’t been able to go east to college, and that she’d taken to her bed for months.

Perhaps, in some inexplicably convoluted manner, my mother attributed the senseless death of her beloved Harold to the shallowness and self-centeredness of people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (In 1937, Wallis and Edward made a much-photographed trip to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Wallis was also rumored to be the mistress of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister to London, at the same time as she was seeing the King. Von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, supposedly sent Mrs. Simpson 17 carnations every day to express his gratitude for the seventeen times she had slept with him.)

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those than remain unanswered,” wrote St. Theresa of Avila, whom Truman Capote quoted in his last, unpublished novel. (Capote often partied with the Windsors when they came to New York in the nineteen sixties.) According to two biographies of Mrs. Simpson, Wallis did not want Edward to abdicate, and hoped to remain the King’s mistress while staying put in her marriage. “I intend,” she wrote to her aunt, “to keep them both.”

But the King’s slavish devotion to her (she called him “the Little Man” but his passion was hardly diminutive) proved as unstoppable as Hitler’s desire to annex all of Europe. “How can a woman be a whole empire to man?” she confided in bewilderment to her uncle. Years later, she said that it was not possible to “abdicate and eat it,” and that she would rather be “the mistress of a king, than the wife of the Governor-General of The Bahamas.” (Churchill had posted the Windsors to the Bahamas in hopes that they would not interfere with the war effort.)

“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor is meant to have said, a maxim that she had stitched onto throw pillows in the living rooms of her homes in France and New York. Thanks to the largesse of Great Britain as well as the French government (the Windsors leased their Paris home in the Bois de Boulogne for decades for only a nominal fee), the Duke and Duchess were very rich. They spent their days shopping for the 100-plus dresses the Duchess purchased each year (when asked in an interview how he passed the time, the Duke confided that he had spent his morning helping the Duchess pick out a hat), with time out for the Duchess to have the tiny layer of fat on her tummy massaged, and the Duke to putter in his gardens.

There was a song that my father used to play on the phonograph in his study in the declining years of his marriage to my mother. The song was by Peggy Lee and it was a moody mix of melancholy and gaiety: “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…”

When I think of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, together and together and together in their rooms of Wallis blue, I think of that song.