Old Friends & Flowers on Memorial Day

 

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Where to read Mozart's Wife

Perennials are my favorites. I can't claim to be a master gardener, but I do love to put my hands in the dirt and grow things.

Walking around the yard this spring, I'm pleased with all the color. We're past even the latest daffodils here in PA, but it's Memorial Day now and so the peonies are going great guns, as well as the irises and various other plants whose names my brain has misfiled. Perhaps I have forgotten the names, but I know that they come back reliably this time of year and that they have a delicate fragrance that I enjoy when I'm sitting on the porch. 

Many of my plants were gifts but ever so many of the givers are now dead. Each time I gaze at those  plants, blooming away with all their might, I think of the nice folks who shared them with me and I am grateful. 

Emily was one of the prolific givers. An athletic, charismatic red head, she and her equally good-looking husband Ray had a lovely down-a-country-road property. Over the years, Emily, who undertook nothing she did by halves, had turned their surroundings into a show place, with a stellar Koi pond surrounded by and ornamented with plants. There were the expected cattails and water lilies, but the papyrus she brought home from the nursery was a revelation, as I'd never actually seen a living breathing specimen before.

Over the years all the local wildlife found the pond, from deer to leopard frogs and tree toads. These little guys hatched in the water, then climbed, for the next part of their life cycle, into the nearby trees. They filled spring twilight evenings with their sweet quivering choruses. Herons came too, enraging Emily because they didn't just eat the frogs out of the pond, but her enormous Koi. 

We were visiting one night, enjoying their company on the deck--they worked together in their auto dealership and had a big supply of "people are crazy" stories--when suddenly Emily shouted, leapt up and ran, an Amazon screaming curses, towards the pond. It was all explained in a flash, when an enormous blue heron, his long, yellow landing gear still dangling, executed an emergency take-off. I'd never seen one of these big birds so close, and certainly never one with a large, flapping red and white Koi in his narrow beak!

                                                

These peonies came from Emily, who told me a long story about her favorite Aunt Pard, whose flower garden and warm presence she remembered with equal pleasure. These were the old-fashioned kind of peony, no ginormous blooms, but, instead, a fragrance you don't often find in modern cultivars. These peonies were not happy in her yard, but, for some inexplicable reason they loved mine. Consequently, over the years, I've split them many times. Now they perform their brief, bright celebration of May in many groupings all over my yard--and they do smell sweet! 

Today, enjoying the flowers, I remembered this couple, their out doors parties--blazing fires under 60 foot oaks, and barbecue-potlucks that lasted all night, their hunter's venison feasts and the annual trout opening day Bacchanalia begun before dawn, just behind their house on the rushing, brown Quittaphilia. So many laughter-filled, good-company evenings with them! 

Now, astonishingly, these active, vital people are both gone. Like many long-married couples, Ray followed his Em to the grave within 6 months. Although they are no more, I have these lovely peonies to always remind me of them both.

~~Juliet Waldron

Where to buy Mozart's Wife

The Narcissistic Villain

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Villains can be a tricky proposition--in fiction as well as in our day to day world.  We all hope we don't become entangled with malevolent people--ones who wish us harm--in real life. "Mad and Bad & Dangerous to know," was said of Byron, who was definitely NOT the kind of man you wanted to enchant your daughter. However, in a story, a villain provides driving force to a plot, and gives the hero and heroine an antagonist with whom to spar.  Inside a book, we are safe; there is no actual blood spilled.

By the way, the gentleman on the spooky cover above is not the villain, although he is a shape-shifter. The villain in Zauberkraft: Black is "a man of wealth and taste" who also happens to be a vampire. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and vampires, certainly, have eternity in which to brood and plot.

Villains can be fun to write--my cohort were brought up on movie theater cowboy serials, thus today, in our most entertainment ready mode, we still enjoy a good melodrama. Here, the white hats win and the black hats are carted off to justice. And what could be more melodramatic than a movie like "The Heiress"? Though this picture was made before I emerged from my mother, it's one of those movies I vividly remember seeing for the first time. I remember long cold Skaneateles winter-frigid afternoons, wrapped in woolens and watching a small Zenith TV. The somber black and white flickering on the screen matched the mood of the frozen world outside.

For anyone who isn't familiar, here's the plot. A naive, lonely heiress falls prey to a narcissistic con man, whose plan is to marry her, drive her mad, and then have her committed so he can assume control of her fortune. At first, he is the caring, genteel lover of whom she's dreamed. He does every little romantic thing for her so that, without knowing anything about him, she accepts his proposal. In modern psychological parlance this is called "love bombardment."  It's the full charm offensive with which the narcissist sweeps his target off her feet.

Next, the husband seduces the parlor maid and enlists her aid in his plot. Then the two of them begin to undermine his wife's trust in her sanity. Every night, he turns down the gaslight in the hall just a little bit, all the while staunchly insisting that his wife's "just imagining" it. The setting, in 19th Century America, where women were easily dispatched to asylums by husbands who had tired of them, smooths the villain's way.

Now, more than half a century later, "gaslighting" is a term with which most are familiar. Now, however, instead of referring to the actions of a single smooth sadist in an old film, it's commonly used by therapists to describe one of the ways in which a narcissist first undermines and then controls his relationship partner. In the real world, the narcissist is a dangerous creature, and lately it seems they are everywhere.

Back to the more innocuous world of fiction, where a narcissistic personality type makes a great villain. The narcissist, it turns out, has a sort of universal playbook. Reliably unreliable, considering only their own advantage, they love nothing and no one. In their world, empathy, or its cousin, sympathy, are incomprehensible, concepts "for suckers." They swallow up the people around them like a black hole. Absolute power, a constant stream of praise from sycophants combined with blind obedience to their whims is a narcissist's dream of heaven.

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Some of the other traits that characterize a narcissist are grandiosity, an excessive need for admiration, disregard for the feelings of others, inability to accept criticism, and an air of entitlement and superiority. They target vulnerable, empathetic people who have something they want; they are masters of manipulation. When they don't get what they want, they become epic bullies, hounding their targets into submission.

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Without really knowing what exactly I was doing or sticking a label on and then writing a character to fit the diagnosis, I have used this type of antagonist in several of my books. In some of these stories, the character is somewhere along the spectrum toward utter self-centeredness.

After all, the true full blown malignant narcissist (at least, as a fictional character) is one who seems constantly in danger of "over the top." There is, after all, a wide spectrum of human behavior and one of the first duties of a writer is to convince the reader that the story is--on some level--believable. So many of my villains are somewhere in the dark gray end of the zone, not irredeemably black.  Still, there are some terrors in these books of mine. 

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~~Juliet Waldron
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