The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  Not now?

  Nothing.

  My stay-at-home aunt, ever in a domestic dither, checking the burners on her stove a dozen times a day to be sure all the knobs were turned to OFF, her ranks of Tupperware containers stacked in a kitchen cabinet, silver sheathed in Saran Wrap, her shoes housed in marked shoe boxes like relics in their reliquaries in the closet she reorganized in ever more meticulous order, this careful woman who rarely left her house and spent the entire day fixing dinner for her husband—she had escaped assault, she had only almost been raped. She remembered nothing. She had a husband who was crazy about her, Bill. They had no children and sang to each other and were happy—Button up your overcoat ... You belong to me!

  There was no story, just the lucky absence of a story. She’d been saved from the worst.

  I DIDN’T LIKE MOTHER to start her party stories with people, with action, anyway. She used to try that, telling little vignettes, passing along a dry barb of gossip, building in background and subplots. Left to her own devices, she had an unfortunate tendency toward the cautionary tale. The story of the St. Paul lawyer (“a good customer of your dad’s”) and his young secretary found in the backseat of his Pontiac in a Highland Park cul-de-sac, motor running, the car’s tailpipe jammed against a snowbank: dead in each other’s arms, asphyxiated by backed-up carbon monoxide. Adultery with a Minnesota twist.

  Or the little revenge tale she was determined to convey about the hot number she referred to as the Barefoot Contessa, a spoiled Summit Avenue girl who, years before and newly married, had tried to get my father to stay for drinks (“and who knows what else”) when he was called in to discuss the possibility of root rot in her ficus tree. That one! Drunk as a lord last night and not the pretty thing she had once played at being.

  Fat?

  “I wouldn’t say fat,” she said judiciously, “but definitely ... thickening.”

  Or the mother of three, wife of another florist, who ran off with her daughter’s skating instructor—to California of all places (“not many rinks for them out there—ha!”). And the woman on Edgecumbe who always ordered flowers for her parents’ graves in May—can you believe it, she swallowed a bottle of pills. That was the end of her. Apparently here too there was a backstory where heartbreak lurked, a secret lover, great sadness under cover of beautiful manners.

  She developed a keen eye for reading a scene from the gestures of minor characters. Item: the woman at the St. Paul Hotel bar, head lolling while the husband said harshly, “You’ve had enough.” The barman, she said, turning a detail worthy of Chekhov, looked away, practically strangled the rinsed shot glass in his hand with a bar towel.

  But I discouraged this pursuit of character and plot development. You have to start at the beginning.

  “What’s the beginning?” she asked. I see now she was amused.

  The beginning’s where you tell what the room looked like. Then you can let the people in. After. I wasn’t after stories. I wanted the stage set of life. Location, location, location. I kept her to the surface, taking snapshots of my father’s decorative world.

  Weather and landscape were fine too. Our savage Minnesota winters were often the harrowing mise-en-scène lending necessary drama to our otherwise humdrum lives. Overlaying the impressively ruinous weather was the provincial touchiness of St. Paul’s hierarchical social order whose weddings and parties, funerals and “affairs” my father planned and decorated. Something of setting, of our city and its stiff ways, insisted that truth was not folded away like lavender sachet with the dry goods of mere “character” or even in alarming action (the Pontiac in the snowbank, the Edgecumbe Road matron opening her bottle of pills).

  The truth of existence was webbed into the organic structure of the atmosphere, in the eternal look and feel of things around us. We were part of that, residents of the provincial capital of God’s country that Leo the Lion bound over in her photographic sentences as we sat at the kitchen table where everything was safe.

  STICK WITH DESCRIPTION.

  What was the room like? Describe the room, Ma.

  Maybe I didn’t long for the Great World after all, where risky things happened or almost happened. I craved my father’s art, her sharp sketch of his craft working its charm on everyone. People were extras, called in by Central Casting to participate in my handsome father’s magic. It hardly mattered what fool things they did in real life, what trouble they got themselves into. They were just assembled for the fete he created, brought in like so many Kentia palms rolled in as backdrops for touring theatrical productions that came to town from New York, or like lemon-leaf garlands pegged to a Summit Avenue mantelpiece in his artful holiday constructions.

  My narrative restrictions seemed to liberate her. Once she understood her audience, she hit her stride. She described a serrated lemon slice floating in a finger bowl (no, you don’t eat it!) and the mink stole that fell to the floor behind Mrs. Briarson’s chair. “Oh, just leave it,” said she. Imagine, not caring!

  She was a master of the vignette.

  I could count on a tally of the jewelry and a full shoe report—Did anyone wear a pair of those clear plastic high heels that look like glass slippers?

  Several. A tone suggesting plastic shoes meant to imitate glass slippers were a mistake though she usually swept the debris of detail into her capacious descriptive holdall without resorting to approval or critique.

  She could describe a vestibule for ten minutes, a veritable Proust of the breakfast table where we sat, she with her black coffee and pack of Herbert Tareytons, piercing the cellophane with a pointy red nail, pulling the thin blue band that bound it, tapping the enamel table until she nipped out a white cylinder. Her silver Ronson was in the shape of Aladdin’s lamp. She snapped the flint and bowed her face like an acolyte to the flame. The oily scent of lighter fluid flushed the air. The sweet burn of tobacco clouded around us.

  I sat before a congealed fried egg I would never eat no matter what she said about the starving children in China. It didn’t matter. Her attention strayed to the black-and-white diamond-shape marble tiles that carried you past the glass double doors into the first parlor. New arrivals stamped their feet on the Persian carpet by the cloakroom. The fresh snow sparkled for a moment before it darkened to dampness. (People should always be encouraged to tramp fresh snow into a house—helps fight the low humidity of central heating, she said. A rare, but characteristically subversive, household hint.)

  The panes of the glass doors were beveled. The light from the chandelier made little rainbows. Rainbows, I said, seeing them. She took a long drag, her hand on Aladdin’s lamp. She knew how to let things sink in and shine and become real. She gazed off to the middle distance, not noticing me, going, going, gone.

  But this was alarming. Was she still here? Or could this be a sign, the trigger of her...condition? She didn’t permit us to use the word fit. She hated seizure. And epilepsy was absolutely forbidden. She reeled back to the nineteenth century for the word she could allow—One of my spells, she said.

  A spell started that way, her face gazing off and up intently. An enthralled look indistinguishable from her storytelling face—celestial blue eyes fixed, lips in an abstracted smile as if she were seeing something miraculous in her mind’s eye and might—or might not—tell you what it was.

  But then a brutal fixity clamped the face, an awful rigidity robotized her body, things dropped from her taut hands. Convulsive jerking shook her, the mouth not smiling anymore, the jaw grinding. I was eleven the first time, Sunday morning after Mass, a terrible thud in the kitchen, pancake batter sloshed all over the stove, the stainless steel bowl still rolling across the floor when I got there. I was the first to reach her.

  Grand mal, the doctor told us. The first French words I learned. Big bad.

  But we didn’t say grand mal, we didn’t say seizures. As the years went by, punctuated now and again—not often—by these spectacular mime shows, she would sometimes refer to her condition more distantly as �
�what happens.” Seizures were just what happened.

  I understood she was made of volatile matter. Certain things—what were they?—could set her off. Later, when the Czech grandmother came to live with us, it was a terrible blow to my mother’s independence, the presence of that Birdie otherness come into the house. One summer evening Nana came bustling onto the porch and Mother smiled gorgeously into the old peasant’s face. I was so glad to see the usual look of impatience gone, replaced by that welcome. But then, in a mad twinkling, it was gone, she was gone, shuddering into grand mal. It was impossible to think she wasn’t making a statement.

  The rest of her life she took her medicine, two pills—one little, one big—three times, then later twice a day. Phenobarbital and Dilantin. The names were reassuring. Modern medicine had solutions. Everything’s under control, my father said, his face taking on its own rigid set. Your mother’s fine.

  I once asked her if there was any advance notice, any indication it might ... happen. She looked at me for a moment, hesitating (I had trespassed on forbidden territory). Then in a slow, shamed voice, “There’s a ticking.” Her index finger went to her temple, as if touching a locked canister. But from the outside where I watched, the signal was the beatific smile, her enthralled storytelling face.

  She looked down, tapped her Tareyton lightly on the side of her plate as she described the night before. So everything was all right. For now. She hadn’t been set off. Most of the time, as my father said, she was fine. Most of the time. But that was the thing: you never knew when the dreamy gaze might blossom into calamity. This gave her storytelling a heart-stopping note of suspense and danger.

  A column of ash fell from her cigarette harmlessly, and she kept going, unfurling the airy nothings of the night before. This would have been one of her descriptions of the Summit Avenue mansion that had come into the possession of the Archdiocese sometime in the 1950s, and was used for charity balls. My father had done the flowers—that’s why they were invited. We aren’t donors, she explained unnecessarily. The people at the party were philanthropists, she said.

  Rich?

  Certainly, she said. Some can be very nice.

  She and my father were New Deal Democrats, Humphrey Democrats. Later, when I marched in protest against Humphrey during the Vietnam War, she was dismayed. How can you be against Hubert? He’d brought the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party together, she said, ever a Minnesota DFL champion.

  He co-opted the Farmer-Labor Party, I replied from the certainties of my new poli-sci textbook lingo.

  You don’t remember 1948.

  One of her points: Humphrey had been for civil rights before any of them. For her, he wasn’t the apologist for the Johnson Administration—he was the northern idealist who’d stood up to the Dixiecrats.

  She loved to tell the story of her high-school civics teacher who always voted for Norman Thomas. Had the woman thrown her vote away? Not at all! She’d voted her principles. That’s what mattered, not winning, not losing. In fact, maybe losing was better. Losing was honorable, proved you had principles. Winning was power. And power proved nothing but itself.

  But her real allegiance was to some anarchic guild of Irish grudge-bearers. Her eye for detail was lyric, but her vision burned with the acid of her potato-eating ancestors. “They wouldn’t let us learn to read!” she would cry full throttle, as if she had fought her way out of illiteracy beneath a hedgerow, “the English” stalking her contraband first-grade primer at Cathedral Elementary where the Sisters of St. Joseph, thank God, ran a tight ship.

  And by the way, no Jesuits here. Archbishop Ireland wouldn’t let them get a toehold in St. Paul, she said, glad to claim in the immigrant priest who built the Cathedral another mistrustful Irish heart.

  Just look at the map—Jesuit colleges in Chicago, Milwaukee, Omaha, all the way west to Seattle. The missing link? St. Paul! (Minneapolis wasn’t on her map, being Scandinavian and Lutheran, and therefore without spiritual substance.) You live in a Jesuit-free state. You can thank Archbishop Ireland for that. Never forget—the Jesuits ran the Inquisition.

  And though you didn’t want it in your own backyard, the Inquisition did not cast an entirely sinister shadow on Mother Church. Not for her, natural liberal though she was. The Inquisition conferred a dark majesty on the history she was part of, on history itself. It made her complicit with grandeur and danger, not a wan cipher lost in the flyover snowfields. We, right here, were part of the Church Universal, an essential bit of the DNA of the Mystical Body.

  The world is eternally embattled, good and evil contend, people burn. That’s history. You’re part of that. Your father plants gardens in the summer and decorates parties in the winter. But life’s no party, no matter how much we count on them, live off them. Life’s a fight.

  THE CHARITY BALLS she described were held in November or early December, before the holidays, before everyone (she said everyone though we both understood who this meant—not us) went to Florida. Some will go to Arizona, she said. Even Hawaii. Mrs. Bertrand to France. A villa near Nice. Imagine.

  I imagined.

  Go back, back to the room, I said if she started to follow the trail of one person or another. Describe the parquet floors, the shape of the crystal (yes, there was champagne, the glasses are called flutes, I don’t know why), the buffet table (the shrimp lay in mounds, there was lobster).

  She always gave a rhapsodic evocation of my father’s table arrangements and his cunning ballroom decorations, and what people said about them. Much oohing and aahing, she reported. Oh Stan! the ladies said. We knew his matinee-idol looks were part of it. We could smile at the sighing charity ladies: after all, he was ours. That we never doubted. Only the flowers themselves might have a stronger claim on him, the petals panting in the moist glass houses on Banfil Street below the hill. The harem of fragile dependents my handsome father tended, even rising from bed in the middle of the night if the boiler went out in the winter.

  Wealth impressed him, but also dismayed him. “It’s the cotillion crowd,” he said once, “that don’t pay their accounts or pay slow.” Said with sad wonder, without rancor, as of a mysterious health problem in a good friend—diabetes or heart disease, something hereditary. An unfortunate condition beyond individual control. More to imagine—imagine not paying your bills, living beyond your means, imagine not having a budget. But they were gentlemen—a category he believed in, a caste he judged not by credit ratings but by manners.

  “Your father trusts those gentlemen too much,” she said, emphasizing the word with the same scorn she heaped on the English. Unlike him, she was ready to see an oppressor on the doorstep, a casual cheat in the accounting department, a hypocrite lurking behind a creamy smile.

  I was on my father’s side—the side of trusting people and pleasing them, the side of flowers and winking party lights. He and I had no argument with the apocryphal Fitzgerald remark that “the rich are different from you and me.” Of course they are! They’re supposed to be!

  But she was likely to be right—I sensed that. Or perhaps I understood she had the world in sharper focus than he did. I resented her for it, as if she perversely turned on harsh fluorescent lights in a room gently glowing from beeswax candles he had placed there for the pleasure of all and the betterment of the world in general.

  Leo the Lion only pretended to be a mouse in the corner. In fact, she could at any moment be set off, could explode. Somehow her irony and watchfulness and her seizures were balled up in my mind as part of the same thing. Put together, they were what made her sit at the kitchen table, talking, talking, describing the night before. I understood obscurely that she was on to something about life with all this describing. She owned it all with her talk, by turns sardonic and lyric, as my silent father earnestly plying his magic box of color and light did not.

  She handled the money in the family (my father’s idea), “reconciling” their checkbook to the penny (and I mean penny, she would say) every month at the dining-room table. Sh
e ticked off the canceled checks, bearing down so heavily that the X was embossed onto the next page, a ghostly tattoo of rectitude. The bundle of paid bills in their stamped envelopes sat with a red rubber band on the dining-room table for my father to put in the mailbox. No account ever in arrears, she would say with a satisfaction that was almost malicious, as if no one was going to catch her. Not the English, not the gentlemen, not the Jesuits, not First Grand Avenue Bank.

  It was understood that my father couldn’t keep track of household money to save his soul, a sure sign of an artistic nature. He had better things to think about—the big orders he supervised, the crops in the glass houses of the greenhouse. And though she too worked, first at an insurance company (“I love bookkeeping!”) and later and most happily at a college library (“I love books!”), it was understood that these were just jobs, and lacked the demands of art that my father contended with.

  Yet she was the one who took things in. Maybe art was not, after all, the making of beautiful things as my father was devoted to doing. Something unlovely and unblinking, un-fooled and purposefully marginal was at the heart of it. A cool-eyed notetaker in the corner, getting it right, getting the last word, though unnoticed and mistaken for handsome Stan’s birdlike wife.

  We might live in St. Paul, pallid capital of the frozen flat-land, but a significance of the sort I later recognized when I read the party scenes in Tolstoy radiated from the rooms my father decorated and my mother described. She could haunt an empty room with description as if readying it for trouble. End of a charity ball and she passes by the woody old Gopher Grille at the St. Paul Hotel on the way to the garage under the Lowry Medical Arts building where my father had parked the car.

  The Grille is almost empty. Some of the heavy drinkers are still at it, murmuring at a dark table, having abandoned the ballroom when the private bar closed and the dancing began. They sit, the drinkers, beneath the rows of photographs of former Queens of the Snow from bygone St. Paul Winter Carnivals. So sad, Mother said, topping off her tableau with an enigmatic editorial caption.