Chanticleer and the Girl Beneath the Water's Edge

A few days after Christmas, I received a comment on a long-ago post from someone who calls herself Barnswallow. She wondered about this statue that keeps appearing in my books—in Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and then again in the YA novel, Undercover. She is a real statue, as the photos attest. Her home is Chanticleer garden. I've always called her The Drowning Girl, but only because when I first found her, I was drowning myself and full of false projections.

I promised Barnswallow that I would find out more from Bill Thomas, the executive director of Chanticleer, this garden that has in some way or another inspired so much of my work and teaching and which appears again, in fictionalized form, in Nothing but Ghosts.

Today Bill writes to say that this statue was designed by a sculptor named Edward Hoffman III, who was born in Philadelphia and whose work appears in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He reminded me, as he always does, that the Chanticleer gardeners never think of her as drowned, but as a peaceful image under the water. She is owed that, this correction of terminology, and in honor of her, and in respect for Bill and Chanticleer, I reprint a small bit from Ghosts in the Garden here—a piece nested toward that brief book's end.

March 6 2009: Anne Sims of Chanticleer has just written with new news (research will do that!). Her words today revise the words above: Hi Beth – I’ve been doing a little research on our lady – in checking the archives and old appraisals, I believe the artist for this sculpture is Paul Anthony Greenwood; Ned Hoffman made some other pieces for the Rosengartens, but not the bronze of our lady. I didn’t see her in her non floating position here, but there are photos of where she was in the garden off Minder House.

It happened that I met the gardener who’d thought to nest the girl inside the pond. He had found her, he told me, near one of the houses, sitting in dry air, on a pedestal, and she had seemed lonely to him, in need of water.

So he conveyed her down the hill (this I imagine as a struggle) and placed her in that little pond, making sure she did not topple. At first, the gardener said, the girl suffered from a slight miscalculation, for she had been placed so close to the small pond’s edge that children stroked her head too often. So one day the gardener moved the girl out further toward the pond’s just slightly deeper center, again taking care so that she would not fall or topple.

I told the gardener that at times (on darker days) I called this girl the drowning girl; disappointed, he shook his head. She was not drowning at all, he said; her life was neither violent nor tragic. She was peaceful, she was serene, and besides, she was in love with an old catfish. “Catfish?” I said, for I had seen the rosy-red minnows and the three goldfish and the uncountable frogs, but not a catfish. And he said, “A catfish, of course; he swam from far away to find her. Swam down a stream and up a pipe and through something else until he was there, where she was, with all those minnows.

“He’s with her all the time,” the gardener said. “And somehow you didn’t see him.”