IN THE LAST QUARTER of her life, Alice Brayton’s garden in Portsmouth, on the island of Rhode Island, became a social magnet for visitors to Newport, “society’s summer capital,” a fifteen-minute drive away. I was first brought to see it in 1949, when I had moved to a farmhouse on Union Street, Portsmouth, and already, on that first afternoon, I had the sense of being taken to a delightful little circus with its own P. T. Barnum in the form of a small white-haired spinster (“I’m not an old maid, I’m a spinster”), the owner, the impresario, and a principal exhibit of the show.
Officially the property was famous for its topiary work, the “Green Animals” she had decided to name it for at about the time I met her. Before that, it had no name, not pretending to be an estate; the address was simply “Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth”—an address it shared with the Priory, a boys’ school run by “black” Benedictines across the country road. The land sloped down to Narragansett Bay, which made for very mild winters allowing her to grow figs, virtually unheard of elsewhere in that part of the world, and bamboo for staking. The topiary collection stood on an elevation like a grassy platform behind the large white frame house, and several of the privet animals—the giraffe, the camel, the ostrich, the elephant, the horse and the rider—besides being raised on clipped green pedestals, were unusually tall in their own right, so that the impression on one coming from Cory’s Lane was of a sheared family of Mesozoic creatures—dinosaurs, pterodactyls.
That impression remained even though the greater number of the animals belonged to the classic repertory—a swan, a pair of peacocks, a unicorn, a bear, a boar, a cock, a she-wolf (copied from the Roman bronze of Romulus and Remus’s foster-parent); there were also baskets with handles, tall tubular forms resembling tops, and (the greatest hit) a policeman at the entry with a night stick and a metal star on his bristly green chest.
The general assumption was that the animals were a collaboration between Alice Brayton’s fancy and the clippers of a family of Portuguese gardeners who worked and lived on the place. But sometimes she would disown her own part in the creation. “Folk art,” she said dryly when in that humor. “It all came out of Joe’s head.” At other times she insisted that the topiary was as old as herself; in that version she was just the curator, maintaining it “as it was”—this despite the fact that there were accessions to the collection, including, if I’m not mistaken, the policeman, who could hardly have been “in restoration” when I first saw the garden.
It was the same with the inside of the house: she could never decide whether she preferred to have us think that wallpapers, draperies, and so on were “original,” i.e., more than 150 years old (the age of the house varied too, according to her mood), or testimony to her prowess as a decorator. Was it better to have had “ancestors” or to be a genius in one’s own right—self-made? I don’t think Miss Brayton was ever able to settle her mind on that point, which nevertheless was the pivot of her existence. The truth was she had created something indisputably her own—her gingery self, her evolving animals, her continually revised mythology of wallpapers, draperies, carpets, bell-pulls—and never knew whether to be proud of that or ashamed.
Alice Brayton did not come from Portsmouth. She was a Fall River woman, from one of the ruling mill families; Lizzie Borden she claimed as a cousin or cousin once removed. The Fall River gentry—Hazards and Durfees, Bordens and Braytons (there was also a “Satan” Drayton)—were plain people, largely undisturbed by their wealth. In Fall River, I was told, husbands and wives were seated side by side at dinners, on the ground that at least they would have something to talk about. Practical, hard-headed people; the main business block was called “Granite Block” and looked it. Another Brayton I knew, a granitic young lawyer with an office in the block, gave me his matter-of-fact prescription for surviving the “wild” late-starting (6:30 P.M.) cocktail parties of a Westport Harbor hostess: “I have my supper first.”
In fact, as I now know, the Portsmouth house was not a family property but a purchase Alice Brayton’s father made. It was normal for well-off Fall River people to have summer houses near the seashore, which was how, I suppose, “Green Animals” started out. But the vicinity of Newport, for Miss Brayton later a strategic height to be scaled with rope ladders, was a little “different.” Usually Fall River men did not take their wives and children so far; they went (and still did in my time) to Westport Harbor, Sakonnet, à la rigueur to Little Compton. I would love to have seen the inside of Alice Brayton’s “real house” in Fall River; if I remember the outside right, it was gray, stone, square, without frills—no gazebo on the lawn, not so much as an arbor. But she had not lived there for many years when it was pointed out to me, on Cliff Street, naturally—she herself never spoke of it, as though it were a divorced relation.*
Now, ten years after her death, I learn from a book on Eastern public gardens that her father, Thomas Brayton of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Co., Fall River, bought the Portsmouth house in 1872 and that the topiary dates from 1893. According to this authority, he had seen topiary work in a botanical garden in the Azores and hired a gardener, Joseph Carreiro, a native of the Azores, to make something like it for him on Narragansett Bay. But is there a botanical garden in the steep volcanic Azores, mainly noted for the growing of pineapples? And what was a Massachusetts mill owner doing in the Azores anyway—hiring Portuguese labor to sweat? I feel very skeptical about that part of the tale. It sounds like a typical Alice Brayton invention, very much in her narrative vein, and has the virtue of providing her animals with ancestors.
Miss Brayton was a fabulist. I do not think she lied about other people (she was mischievous but not malicious), nor to obtain advantage or get herself out of a scrape. She was a pure spinner of tales and myths centering on herself and her life story. She lied constantly, inveterately; it was almost one of her charms. You discovered to your amazement that you could not trust anything she told you pertaining to herself or to anything she owned.
And did she sometimes catch herself lying? If so, what an awful experience. She professed to hate liars, and I believed her. As she grew older, she grew more class-obsessed, and it distressed me to hear her talk more and more wildly after her second martini on themes of class and race—I felt ashamed for her. One of her phobic convictions on the subject of “them”—Portuguese, Catholics, Irish, the whole race of millhands—was that they lied. When the fit was on her, she liked to explain that the difference between “us” and “them” boiled down to the fact that “we” never told a lie. As an observant little party, she knew better. It is a puzzle to me where she got her obstinate delusion of being a truth-teller either as an individual or as a representative of her class. I wonder whether for her it may not have figured as a synonym for outspokenness, the habit of speaking her mind. Maybe she honestly did more of that than the lesser breeds—she could afford it.
But to leave general speculation and get down to brass tacks: did she plant the pair of Turkish oaks that stood at the head of the garden, by the water-lily pool? She maintained that she grew them from two acorns that she had buried at the spot when she was a little girl. Oaks are slow growers, yet here the two were, nodding as she told their story, ninety or a hundred feet tall. Years ago, alas, when I looked them up in a tree book with the thought of planting a pair of my own, I found reference only to a “turkey oak” (Quercus laevis), a small Southern variety whose popular name is said to derive from the wild turkeys attracted to the sweet acorn—no resemblance to the ones on Cory’s Lane.
But wait. Hers, I now discover, trying an older book, must have been Quercus cerris, also known as “turkey oak,” a fast grower that was brought to England from the Turkish peninsula and became fashionable with nurserymen in late Victorian times. So Miss Brayton stands vindicated; even the dates tally. If the trees had reached their full height when she was seventy years old, she could well have been eight when she planted them. There is just one bothersome note: in today’s descriptive flyer, issued by the Newport Preservation Society, no Turkish oaks are listed, and in the spot where they ought to be, bordering on the lily pool, is “White oak, Quercus alba,” a common native article, of which in the diagram there do appear to be two.
And what about the stair carpet she tacked up the front stairs, “for Mother,” because Father would not let Mother have one? “Drugget,” said Miss Brayton, with a droll little sniff to show she was speaking figuratively, drugget being a lowly cotton material, brown or dun colored, that one read about in old novels where the characters are struggling to make ends meet. With the memory of tears in her old gray-blue eyes, she drew a word picture of herself on her knees on the bare treads, with hammer and carpet tacks hastening to finish the loving task before Father came home. It was her notion that I, though in less cruel circumstances, might use a strip of tan canvas (from Wilmarth’s in Newport) for our front stairs in the old Coggeshall house on Union Street. I obeyed, and there is still a runner of tan duck (no, not the same one) on the front and back stairs of my house in Maine—people often ask me how I came to think of the idea.
Concede her mother’s stair carpet and the Little Dorrit figure kneeling with tacks in its mouth while Father thunders, concede her the Turkish oaks of Victorian taste, but what of her claim to have run welfare for the city of Fall River during the Depression? The city was bankrupt; unemployment figures stood at 50,000—half the population; Roosevelt had not yet moved in with the Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration or perhaps he had not yet taken office. In the background was a history of strikes and labor violence. Into the crisis stepped Alice Brayton, enlisted by a desperate mayor to run a relief program. It was not clear how the city happened to turn to her. She had had no previous experience; her education had stopped with Fall River High School, where they gave Greek and Latin but scarcely economics or urban administration. Yet for her, embarking on the story, apparently it went without saying that her city should have called her in its hour of need. And matter-of-factly (as she told it) she put up the money, out of her own pocket, to tide over the initial crisis. How much that amounted to she did not say—only that every cent was repaid.
I forget all the unique features of the relief plan she ran. The main outlines were that it was cheap and gave value. She cited her first decision: every man on relief should receive a pair of shoes. To ensure good quality (cheaper in the long run), she checked on where the men in her family got their shoes and ordered the same, with the choice of low shoes like her brother’s or high like her father’s. Next she bought shirts: every unemployed man had the choice of work shirt or dress shirt of Father’s or Brother’s brand. That was her picture of democracy in action—every man jack wearing Father’s shoes.
For groceries she issued food stamps redeemable at the family grocer’s. In fact, she claimed to have invented the food-stamp idea. The mayor of a big English city—Manchester or Leeds—came to Fall River, she well remembered, to study how her methods worked. As with any public-spirited action, criticism was inevitable. But upholding her hand throughout was the Catholic bishop of Fall River—Bishop Cassidy, I think it was—who became a friend and steady admirer, figuring in more than one of her narratives.
Naturally, she was anti-bureaucratic. From a small office in City Hall she administered the program single-handed, receiving all complaints personally. And complaints were what Alice Brayton knew how to handle. She liked to tell the story of the man who objected because his groceries weren’t being delivered. Your average welfare administrator would have used the rough side of his tongue on him, giving fresh grounds for complaint. Not Alice Brayton; she agreed to delivery and outsmarted him. She hired a boy to follow the complainer from the office and observe his goings and comings. That done, the same little boy was detailed to wait in a doorway opposite the man’s house till he had gone out for the day, then quickly deliver the bags of food to his doorstep, making sure to leave them in the sun. Soon the man was back in Miss Brayton’s office asking to have the special service discontinued. ...
The anecdote, of course, is a story against the poor, of the classical coal-in-the-bathtub type but with retribution added. Miss Brayton was a prankish moralist. Most of the fables she related of human wickedness showed people getting what they asked for, in perfect justice. The Christmas party she gave every year was a neat illustration of a morality play. Neighbors and relatives, old and young, arriving by tradition in mid-morning, found the tall spruce tree by the back door hung with brightly wrapped presents and beside it in the snow little Miss Brayton, wearing a hat and muffler and stamping her feet to keep warm. There were no names on the presents, and when you began to unwrap the one she had pulled down for you, you knew—or if it was your first time somebody explained—that what you got now didn’t matter, you would be able to exchange it inside. That was the point of this Christmas.
Inside, in the dining-room, the long table had been converted into an exchange, and the guests, having taken off their outdoor things and been given a glass of hot mulled wine and a biscuit, circled slowly around the table, on which were laid out bolts of tweed and silk, cars and tracks for electric trains, paint boxes, gloves, golf balls, scarves, sweaters, stockings, bottles of sherry and claret, flower vases, books, games, perhaps a chess set of little ivory men, delicate batiste place mats, a French cheese, a piece of old lace ... Some years there was a lazy Susan in the middle to hold more presents, and once a whole electric train was whirring around on a sort of trestle. You turned in your door-present and chose from the table the thing you wanted most. Some chose fast and some kept circling, undecided, fingering, looking at a label.
The exchange was a character test. Whatever you took, or failed to take, you gave yourself away. Children, inclined to grab without second thoughts, came off better than their elders, inhibited by an awareness of our hostess’s watching eyes. But there was one year when a ferrety youth earned, I thought, Miss Brayton’s eternal contempt (not to mention that of his brothers and sister) by picking something for his mother, to help her in her cooking, rather than the top or kite his natural heart should have craved.
The table was full of traps for hypocrites. One year she set out her bait almost too crudely. A single small flower—let’s say an unseasonal hyacinth—stood in a small container between a large box of Louis Sherry chocolates and a Nuits St. Georges. “Food for the soul,” Miss Brayton, behind us like a tempter, could not forbear hinting. Whereupon the silly man next to me in line leapt forward with abandon to claim the spiritual remembrance.
As usual, that year I picked the most expensive thing on the table. Those traps of hers held no terror for me. Being a hypocrite about my wants was never one of my faults. Hence I greatly enjoyed those Christmas mornings, though for some of her guests (and I fear she intended it) they must have been quite an ordeal. To covetous children who, intoxicated by the display, chafed at being limited to one present, to adults who felt they had taken a present that was much too big or else not big enough, the exchange “taught a lesson,” and “learning your lesson” was maybe not in the Christmas spirit. Was it our Redeemer or our Judge whose birth we were celebrating?
Possibly Christmas brought out an ambivalent imp in Miss Brayton. The giving of gifts was a provocation to naughtiness. With many generous people, the pleasures of bestowing have their counterpart in the joy of withholding, or at any rate in a barely controllable reluctance to part with something one has. The coexistence of the two in Miss Brayton was never more marked than in her Christmas-morning reception of the monks from the Priory across Cory’s Lane. Every year an invitation went out, though relations were never what they had been with Bishop Cassidy of Fall River and were strained almost to the breaking-point sometimes by a boundary dispute. But Christmas was Christmas, and the monks always came—last, after the guests had gone and after the servants had received their gifts.
The once-groaning exchange table must have been down to the hard-core remains when the Prior, by appointment, knocked. There were never witnesses to what happened next, but doubtless it varied from year to year. Sometimes it seems to have been a decidedly convivial party. Then there was the dreadful time referred to only in reminiscence: “Yes [musing], that was the year I gave the Father Prior bubble bath.” Often, I suspect, the exchange-table procedure was followed normally, albeit with diminished stocks. But I remember hearing of a time that was still close to the telling when she was boasting of it, like a bantam cock. That was the wicked Christmas when the monks were shown to a sumptuously laden table: wines and cordials, fruit pastes, cheeses, liqueur chocolates, Turkish delight, nuts—everything calculated to speak to the Friar Tuck in a “black” Benedictine. Then, having allowed the poor men a full minute of contemplation, she barked, “Well, you’re monks, aren’t you? You’ve renounced all that,” and marched them out of the room. And there was another year, I think, when in the same taunting spirit she gave them all books. Religious books, irreligious books, books on the Index, the story did not specify. But they might have been books written by herself and published at her own expense.
Rather surprisingly, Miss Brayton was an author, an historian, and not a bad one. Her books—George Berkeley in Apulia, George Berkeley in Newport, Scrabbletown—were handsomely produced, well written, and carefully proofread. She is thought to have got her start as a garden-club chronicler. She had been attracted to Berkeley for the obvious reason that the idealist philosopher had spent three years in “Whitehall,” a house in Middletown, near Newport and the rocks called Purgatory and Paradise. But I am not sure to what extent she had looked into his philosophical writings. After Bishop Berkeley came Scrabbletown, a biting analysis of records found in a trunk in a Massachusetts town between Fall River and New Bedford; this is the most personal and the best, in my view, of her books. There were the makings of an intellectual in Miss Brayton, I always thought. That she did not use her mind more fully, direct it to more interesting ends, was her own doing and represented a choice in life.
It must have had to do with “Father.” During my years in Portsmouth, it was my firm conviction that she had made a devil’s pact with him. It partly concerned the house. She wanted the house and garden, and in order to get them she had to wed herself to him, stay with him, turning into a spinster, while her sisters left home (one went to Bryn Mawr) and made their own lives. She loved her mother and she may have put it to herself that she stayed to protect her, interpose her small figure between her and the tyrant, fight her battles for her, including the Battle of the Stair Carpet.
But her mother died, and Alice stayed on with him, doubtless thinking that, having made the loving sacrifice, now at least she should get the good out of it—the house and old Joe’s topiary. There must have been a large share of the money too, to judge by her train de vie—winters at the Colony Club, a well-paid pair of nice servants, Joe and Bertha (Bertha must have been French Canadian but Miss Brayton called her French, pretending that that was why she cooked so well), gardener and gardener’s helpers, the cost of publishing her books, donations to the Preservation Society, membership in Bailey’s Beach, furs, and couturier clothes from Bergdorf. She had the usual charities and subscriptions of a society woman. Yet the strange thing was that when you saw her, winters, in New York in her long mink coat and smart small gray hat on her way to a wedding or a matinée, she looked like an old rural body—liver-spotted hands under the white gloves, weathered cheeks, strawy white disobedient hair rearing up beneath the hat brim. Toil had left its signature on her.
She emphatically did not belong, and much of that emphasis was her own. She capitalized on her homely traits, on the Scrabbletown in her. The Lizzie Borden connection, for instance, which may once have been an embarrassment (“Not a cousin,” her nephew firmly told me). Now she plumed herself on it; someone had sent her a record that she delighted in putting on the phonograph: “Oh, you can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts, Not even if it’s done as a surprise. ...” She was proud of her Yankee cunning. In dealing with the New York maids at the Colony Club, she boasted, she always got her room made up before anyone else’s; that was simply because she always left her door ajar and an open box of chocolates on her dresser (“Never fails to lure ’em”). Her laconic wit put you in mind of a sharp rustic having the last word.
My favorite illustration of that is a true story that took place in Portsmouth one Sunday morning when I brought an old White Russian, Serge Cheremetev, to see her and her garden. Both of these old people were what they claimed to be—he was a former governor of Galicia under the Tsar, his uncle invented Boeuf Strogonoff—yet there was something spurious somewhere about both of them, and each felt it in the other. Ignoring her topiary, Cheremetev, dressed in an ancient suit of coffee-colored silk and carrying a stick, began to talk of the roses on his former estate in Grasse; she countered with a terse dismissal of roses, having only a few “pernettys” to show. Her rows of espaliered fruit trees, so exciting at the time to Americans, said little to him. Still less did her gourds. If he tapped her Sensitive Plant lightly with his cane, he did not stay to witness the quivering response. I was dying with shame for both of them: she was boasting more than usual, and in Cheremetev’s hoarse rasping voice, a repeated “honored lady” crackled like gunfire.
Since things were not going well in the garden, I suggested that she show him the house. He glanced at the library, somewhat overstocked with detective stories, that lined the walls of the billiard room; he was a rare-book dealer in Washington and she was a member of the Hroswitha Society, but no common chord was struck. In the front parlor, he peered at a Piranesi on the wall. Just below it on a table stood a small bronze statue that echoed a detail in the engraving; the arrangement was one of Miss Brayton’s witty visual puns, and underneath the statue or beside it was a rare edition of Piranesi plates—I forget which—that had belonged to the Tsar. Cheremetev, by invitation, examined the flyleaf, which stated in the imperial handwriting that the book had been the property of Nicholas II of Russia. “Ah, dear lady,” he croaked, “I see you have the book of my godfather, the Tsar.” Miss Brayton started, as if for once taken aback; her blue eyes took in her dark-eyed visitor with his Tartar cheekbones. Then she let out a sort of cackle: “You’ve got the blood. I’ve got the book.” Mr. Cheremetev bowed. She had won. Yet if I had had only her word for the story, I would not have believed it.
She had come a long way up from the cotton mills to be able to meet the Tsar’s godson in single combat in her front parlor, and he of course had come a long way down. On her side, it was the privet animals—the legacy of her pact with the devil—that had put her in a position to score. First of all, they had put her on the social map, marked Cory’s Lane as an outlying bastion of Newport, which was still the society to get into while the summer lasted. But first Father had to die for her to emerge as a debutante on the Newport scene. That happened in 1939. She was sixty-one years old.
Despite the late start, when I met her ten years later, she had made it. Her social strategy, as carefully worked out as a Napoleonic battle plan, was based on reaching the child that she counted on finding in every Newport dowager and tycoon.
After Father was gone, she started giving her lawn parties, featuring a big rented merry-go-round near the gate on the Priory side and a clambake on the beach below the railroad tracks, with well-stocked bars dotted about in between. These parties were an instant success; old-time leaders like the Misses Wetmore were teetering down the slope in their heels and long dresses to view the oddity of the clambake.
It was the child in Miss Brayton who knew that to succeed you must make a party an adventure or a treat. Even an ordinary afternoon visit to her garden, ending with a tray of strong martinis, obeyed a canonical rule of children’s parties: each guest must get a present to take home. In the summer it was flowers from the garden, which she picked as you walked along and unexpectedly handed you on the front porch as you left, or fruit (her white clingstone peaches, a variety no longer to be found in catalogues, a basket of figs, or her slipskin grapes, Delaware or Catawba). Then—aside from the clipped animal and geometric figures, appealing to the scissors artist in all of us—she had funny plants like that Sensitive Plant, which quails when you strike it, carnivores like the flycatcher and pitcher plants, freaks like the parrot tulip (new then), and the tropical-looking bamboo.
With these arts and wiles, she swiftly conquered the territory she had designs on, designs perhaps dating back to her maiden visit to Bellevue Avenue with the Fall River or Tiverton Garden Club, where the society bug may have first bitten her—why not in Mrs. Arthur Curtiss James’s blue garden, whose grass was once said to be dyed? It was at about the same time that she had got her start as a writer, too, in her local Garden Club Bulletin. Father’s death, when it finally came, had had a double effect, opening the gate of ivory as well as the gate of horn. It had not only set her free to pursue her social ambition. It was what had allowed her to become an author. The first of her Berkeley books, George Berkeley in Apulia, came out in 1946; Thomas Brayton had been dead seven years, some of which she must have used for travel and self-education. After that came George Berkeley in Newport (1954) and after that Scrabbletown, which peculiarly has no date but which I know came out toward the end of my years on Union Street—1949–54. Following that, her publications were of less interest, probably because she was no longer interested herself. The two paths that had been opened up to her by her father’s death, though she may not have thought so, were divergent. She could not take both even if suddenly having so much more money seemed to promise it. She chose society—the Chilton Club, the Colony, opera seats, Joe’s chauffeur’s uniforms.
She could not have maintained “Green Animals” and herself in the Bellevue Avenue orbit and continued to be a scholarly historian with a lively pen for the simple reason that she had run out of local material—after Berkeley, what? There were only Governor Arnold’s burying-ground and the so-called Viking tower. If she was determined to stay put at the place where she had arrived, she could not move on mentally. That she should become a social historian in the line of Henry James and Edith Wharton was out of the question. To do that would have required a real break, and probably she was not up to it because she had stayed with Father too long, bargaining for freedom. Who sups with the devil must bring a long spoon.
Though she claimed off and on to be a Quaker I think she had no particular religion. She was a natural rebel (that was the great thing about her), naturally independent in her views, and what she worshipped was a kind of intelligence that, given her self-imposed limitations, had to be visual and aesthetic. Once I heard her enunciate almost fiercely the principle she lived for, standing by her mantelpiece, chin out, like one willing to be counted. “Taste!” she cried, virtually shouting. “T-A-S-T-E.” She spelled it out as if we might fail to understand her and then struck her small chest. “I have it. T-A-S-T-E.” She stared at us all belligerently. “Yes, Miss Brayton. Of course you have.” We laughed. “Obviously you have.” The proof was all around us, in the flames leaping in the fireplace, in the shaker of unbeatable martinis, in the sandwiches of thin-cut soft white bread, thick white meat of chicken, and “Bertha’s mayonnaise.” But it was tasteless of her to say so. Once the word was pronounced, you had lost the thing it was meant to designate: an eye, an ear. It was embarrassing and sad, as if poor little Psyche had spilled the hot wax of her taper on a sleeping Cupid. Wishing she wouldn’t, we hastily left.
She was ninety-four when she died in 1972, leaving “Green Animals” to The Preservation Society of Newport County. I was no longer living in the U.S. and had not seen her or had news of her for more than ten years. Her relatives, probably forgetting about me or thinking I would not be interested, did not send me an announcement of decease or an obituary notice from the paper. But I see from The Great Public Gardens of the Eastern United States that she left no endowment and the garden depends for its maintenance on gate receipts and profits from the gift shop. Does this mean she was living on capital at the end, like the grasshopper in the fable? Or expressing in that spare legacy her Yankee faith in the self-help principle? “Green Animals,” like a relief client, should learn to be self-supporting. Somehow the end and final secret of her story must lie laconically in the willing of her property. If she intended “to live on,” she may have hoped to be planted, warts and all, like a tiny rugged Turkish acorn up by the lily pool and turn by force of character into an indomitable tree.
December 1983
* In fact, her nephew tells me, I was shown the wrong house, the property of some other Braytons. Her own had been torn down.