What was sad? The drinkers huddled in the dark corner? The history of our civic beauties lost and faded? What? What? So sad, she said, shaking her head at the kitchen table, tapping her cig against her plate, like a good writer, refusing to explain what she had laid out for all to see.
She let the scene shimmer. Trouble twirled down the blue-and-gold wallpaper, infidelity winked in the gleam of the wood, embezzlement and sneaky deals were worn into the satin marble of the dead millionaire’s house. Can’t you just see it? she would say, taking another drag, exhaling while I made it all up in my mind’s eye as she instructed, an intricate weave of delight and dirt, but one eye watching covertly to see if she was still with me, still in her right mind as she gazed off in that absent way of her storytelling, which was also the signal of one of her mysterious spells.
BUT I’VE MISSED THE POINT of my demanding description from her—no stories, no “characters,” no “action.” It was I myself who walked—floated—into these rooms my father designed, the rooms he made as complete and wonderfully intimate as the rooms in fiction. If I allowed her to fill in the space with other people’s stories, where would I be?
There could be no better life than to take notes on the world as it passed by in all its oddity. This was my mother’s way. It was poetry. But her astringent tone and sharp judgments cut into the loveliness of my father’s no-fault world, the world that was made-up, that was art. The two of them only appeared to be united, kneeling in front of the Magnavox, toiling through the Holy Mysteries of the Rosary.
In fact, she wasn’t his cheerleader, the innocent chronicler of his handiwork. She was a spy in the house of beauty, an ironist regarding the world he decorated so earnestly for people he trusted, people she regarded with a narrowed eye, waiting and seeing. Up to no good—the baleful phrase she employed so often I can’t remember anyone specific it was meant for, though certainly for the owners of the floral business, her arch enemies, the prime takers-of-advantage of the too-trustful Stan, their faithful retainer. The ones she foreshadowed all my girlhood as the cheats they proved, in time, to be.
I didn’t want the deathly Pontiac rammed into the snowdrift, love and betrayal frozen in the backseat, or the aging Barefoot Contessa given her comeuppance. Description only, please, the spongy thinginess of life, the harmlessness my father purveyed, relayed across the kitchen table by my detail-sniffing mother. The heavy-jowled Victorian furniture of the Crocus Hill houses and the iced snowdrifts along the streets gave St. Paul a curiously historical look, bathing God’s country in glittering significance, draped in the same white stasis year after year. Just give me that. It’s enough.
She had even conscripted our own furniture for historical narrative purposes. During their yearlong engagement, sometime between leaning into each other under the cottonwood on the riverbank and the Scarlett O’Hara wedding day, they had bought the exquisitely uncomfortable pieces of Victorian dark wood and upholstery that we lived with our entire family life. The love seat, scrolled armrests set high, discouraged any form of affection. It looked like a purposely unforgiving settee used to keep hapless petitioners waiting, ramrod straight, before entering a chamber of power. She called it—and therefore we all called it—Napoleon. It’s French was her only explanation. Bring your aunt her old-fashioned. She’s sitting on Napoleon.
And the hideous, low-squatting little chair with the lion-faced armrests? That was Benito. It’s Italian.
Two little dictators, gloomily commanding the living room. Mr. Williams was also there, the red mohair chair named for the kindly man who had sold them Napoleon and Benito. He liked us, he knew we were setting up housekeeping. Mr. Williams was a widower, he was breaking up his own house. A very sweet man, but of course heartbroken. This we knew, had always known, though we never met Mr. Williams. His story was part of the chairs, part of our story. A figment of their romance. I’m not sure when it dawned on me that other people didn’t name their furniture.
Everything could be named, and, in naming, the world became permanent, eternal really. Because nothing changes here, nothing dies. Except flowers—that’s the point of them. My father of course considered artificial flowers an affront, though in time he had to stock them. People buy flowers because they die, he said. To toss money at fleeting beauty—this was the point of buying flowers. Not their beauty, but their transience.
So let everything remain a stage set. Let me enter my father’s lovely design, my father who believed the world was beautiful and made for more beauty, the creamy surface laid upon Justice that held up the world. Beauty was his job, my birthright. Oh Stan! the charity-ball ladies cried. And he smiled—a gentle indulgent servant’s smile, glad to have pleased.
SHE DEALT OUT his glittering rooms, the flash cards of mid-century moments, laid them on the table like a winning poker hand, her smoky voice describing his transient world, without too much socialist realism. Keep the cheating lawyer and the Barefoot Contessa out of it. Stick with his flowers and the flickering candle sconces. Sit on Napoleon, don’t forget to dust Benito’s claws.
I permitted her to transform our kitchen morning into the ballroom night she had filched from her place at a corner table by the dance floor, a watchful wren perched among the cockatoos. Brief captions below her sharp photographs were also allowed—hadn’t she said, Life is so sad, so sad? And didn’t I feel a thrill of strange recognition?
And by the way, none other than Harmon Hunter III asked her to dance, she reported. A little shrug. So what? No social climber, she. She was just as content to invite the conversation of a drunk who sidled up to us at Mickey’s Diner on Wabasha downtown where we stopped for milk shakes after the dentist.
Harmon Hunter sat at her table for a while, had a cigarette with her. Used a cigarette holder, clamped it with his smile, a jutting chin. Like FDR, though of course a damn Republican.
What a beautiful room your husband’s given us, he said gallantly. The room was full of roses and pine garlands, cedar and the blue of Noble fir, an unusual combination, as everyone said.
No one will forget this night, he told her.
Another drag on the Tareyton. She gazed off, smiling as she told this.
She was leading me to the room you enter entirely alone, where all the descriptions pile up, where there are no stories and no mistakes. Just pictures, cut like roses, at the height of perfection. Better to stay with the photograph of the scene, before the earthlings mess everything up.
Into this chamber of surface beauty she led me. Or my father led me.
No, it was she with her airy nothings who led the way, not he with the work itself. She with her seraphic smile, off a bit, not smiling at me, her brain-bomb ticking, reaching past us to some room beyond the one she was describing. Can’t you just see it, darling?
Chapter 3
YEARS AGO, when my parents still lived on Linwood, a writer from Boston came to visit me. She wanted to meet my mother. Tea in the little living room, the two of us sitting on Napoleon, Mother crouched on Benito. Talk about Boston (an Irish city, home of the one Catholic president, heart of American history). And would my friend like to see the Archive?
I stayed downstairs, clearing the dishes, while they went up to my former bedroom, now her office. She had prevailed on my father to build bookcases for her library holdings, the row of Irish history, the collection of biographies of women, the well-marked Flannery O’Connor (She had the most wonderful relationship with her mother—have you read The Letters?). My brother was there pictorially in all the stages of his life, serene baby to sweet-faced boy holding out a hot dog with radiant joy at a picnic. High school, college, his wedding, his children, the big fishing trip to Alaska he had arranged for our father.
The rest of the room was devoted to ... me. She had gathered everything from grade-school papers and birthday cards through book publication, reviews, and articles. Anything, anything. Each item labeled and cataloged.
When we were driving back to my house, my Boston friend looked at m
e searchingly. “She showed me the refrigerator notes,” she said with wonder.
“The refrigerator notes?”
“The Post-its you leave on the refrigerator if you stop over and nobody’s there and you say hi, I stopped by. She has them cataloged.”
A deep burn of shame, the hopelessness of escape.
“It’s a shrine,” the woman said. “Amazing.” A tone of dismay, a look of barely disguised pity. A terrible family secret she’d stumbled on. We said no more about it.
And now, still here, the spectral Cathedral spaceship out of the hospital window, dark night of her escaping soul. Still holding her hand, still writing her obituary that is also his obituary: when she goes, he’s finally gone. A work that will be published widely. Self-published, actually: I’ll pay for every word, the longest death notice in Pioneer Press memory. The only published page she won’t catalog for the Archive.
Even the young funeral director, who tries to steer me to the cherrywood casket with the ruched satin lining and offers the stationery option for the thank-you cards I’ll need, even he will be abashed. Just a day from now he’ll take the three pages from my hand in his faux-comfy office, and though it can’t be said that he reads it all, he sifts the pages, his eye reckoning the lines. He’s my literary agent for this deal—he’ll pass it along to the paper, it’s part of the service he provides. He looks up, worry in his eyes. Could you cut it down some? he suggests, an editor delicately nudging a chronic over-writer. It’s awful long. Gonna be awful spendy.
I need every word, I say coldly, and hand the pages back to him. His worried eyes turn to awe.
I know all this because, being the writer, I have no time/ space restrictions. I’m everywhere and of course I’m omniscient. Here at the margin of this last night, note-taking with the eternal yellow legal pad on my lap, stray bits of Celtic clairvoyance allow me to see tomorrow, not to mention a truckload of yesterdays. Magical realism isn’t all south of the border. The little people murmur and mutter in the cold. We believed a lot of crazy but true things here in old St. Paul.
We knew the Virgin Mother had appeared to the children at Fatima. At least one of the secrets she conveyed was so horrible that the Pope fainted when he read it. The end of the world was in there, probably. This was the Pope who died of hiccups, which was hysterical but also dead serious in case you started laughing out loud in class thinking of the Bishop of Rome, all in white and gold, hiccupping his way to heaven. It’s not funny, children. Let us pray for our Holy Father.
We knew the Virgin Mother had appeared to the children at Fatima. At least one of the secrets she conveyed was so horrible that the Pope fainted when he read it. The end of the world was in there, probably. This was the Pope who died of hiccups, which was hysterical but also dead serious in case you started laughing out loud in class thinking of the Bishop of Rome, all in white and gold, hiccupping his way to heaven. It’s not funny, children. Let us pray for our Holy Father.
We also knew our guardian angel was perched—right there—on our shoulder (left shoulder, heart side). And when you lost anything, you recited over and over:
St. Anthony, St. Anthony,
Please come round.
Something’s been lost
And must be found.
And guess what? You found it. Always. In this way everything lost was always found. Nothing was ever lost. Not in St. Paul. This is why you could never fall away from the Church, why you would always be faithful: St. Anthony would keep your stuff safe and sound. And you too. With him and your guardian angel riding shotgun, you’d never experience loss. You were faithful, a daughter of the Church, a toenail on the Mystical Body.
Even pain—physical, mental, you name it, all forms of anguish, misery, any plight or pity, all injustices, losses and humiliations, all the meanness you’re likely to encounter in this life (because don’t think life will be easy, girls and boys)—all of it has a purpose. Just offer it up, Mother would say, echoing the nuns. Offer it up.
She showered the confidence of eternal life on my brother and me, the best form of solidarity a mother could give a child, cool and impersonal but certain, like her hand holding mine as we walked past Birdie’s Market on Wabasha. Now, as an adult, I regard the child-rearing on display in restaurants, the fashionable, preternaturally patient mothers leaning down to their imperious three-year-olds. Do you want the California roll? No? Would you like the calamari? Sweetie, what would you like?
Give the kid the mac and cheese and tell him to offer it up. I have become my mother’s kind of mother without ever having children.
That’s how it is tonight, this night that goes backward (mostly) and forward. I do hope to go forward, but right now I must take this detour of memory. I must offer it up. If you can do that, you’re free. Free of what? Of sadness—so sad, so sad? Or free of her? I’m offering it up, here on the eternal ledger of the legal pad. It’s our kind of magical realism, angel snug on my shoulder, the Blessed Mother whispering from her bomb-brain because she knows I’m faithful. I’m the daughter of herself and of this place where we believed and believed. It was the way we lived. It wasn’t religion. It was poetry.
St. Paul had poetry running in the gutters. Its neighborhoods—Irvine Park, Crocus Hill, Mac Groveland, Ramsey Hill, West Seventh—were marked by the illogic of the city’s fierce begetting as a French and Indian fur-trading river town originally named by a half-blind whiskey runner: Pig’s Eye. Leo the Lion loved that—we started as a bar.
Numbered streets crossed each other fecklessly, as if city planners had used a scribble rather than a grid as a template.
Numbered streets crossed each other fecklessly, as if city planners had used a scribble rather than a grid as a template.
This was nothing like the tidy squaring of numbered avenues and alphabetical street names that Scandinavian Minneapolis laid like a crosshatched veil over the flat features of its city.
The St. Paul streetlights dissipated their glow rather than truly shed it on the crusted snowbanks. This was strangely beguiling—that light could be conscripted into the service of obscurity, a St. Paul trick. In November, the October blaze of elms and maples was finished, and the bleached, beseeching gray bones of the leafless trees were ranked the length of Summit Avenue, going from church to church, past the old mansions. A faint tea-dance violin floated over it all. Yes, one of the nuns at my convent school said, I danced with Scott at the cotillion...
The damp powder of speakeasy passions and forsaken gangster parties rose from the drenched lilacs in May, and in winter we walked to school through the monastic snow. One of the Irish great-aunts had lived in an apartment on Lexington near Summit for a while. When she moved out, Dillinger moved in. And, my mother delighted in saying, when Dillinger moved out, he moved out shooting. We were proud of our gangster past. Crooks and killers, hoodlums and bank robbers were airbrushed by time, made into lost movie stars from old St. Paul where the cops let them lie low as long as they behaved themselves here.
What a romantic city it was, full of believers, wrapped in pride and insecurity, those protons of provincial complacency. We pulled the blanket of winter around us, we clicked shut the wooden blinds of summer against the killing heat. But our drama was all just weather, the swatted mosquitoes of summer, the dripping ice dams of winter. Our lives were little, our weather big.
A provincial capital of a middling sort as I read with unhappy recognition in Gogol during my Russian period in high school. St. Paul was somehow Russian—I sensed that-minus the aristocrats. Or maybe we had those too. We had Summit Avenue, we had Scott Fitzgerald to draw the blood of class consciousness.
St. Paul was so baroquely Catholic that even Lutherans described themselves as being “non-Catholic.” St. Paul Jews, when giving their address, might say, if you didn’t recognize the street name, “You know, Sacred Heart,” indicating a parish boundary. No one thought this odd.
In some cities, the rare lyric ones, alley shadows and the golden clots cast from octagon
al streetlights convey light and shade like communiqués to be decoded, their meanings illusive but provocative. Such fragile civic mysteries hold a promise of things to come—though in St. Paul there was always the sense that everything was happening elsewhere. Or that everything had already happened. We were living in an aftermath.
But an aftermath of what? Maybe the great robber-baron age that branded Scott Fitzgerald, the brash age that had cast upon the bluffs of the city the beefy Victorian mansions of Summit Avenue. This was our primary proof of (former) greatness—the brooding piles of Summit Avenue from the age of James J. Hill. “The Empire Builder,” my father said, always adding this phrase like a royal title that must be accorded the railroad titan, our Carnegie, our Rockefeller.
But his admiration was tinged with regretful disapproval. As a young man in the thirties, he had been union shop steward at the greenhouse. He believed in the common good. He could never quite understand greed or ambition, not even raw entrepreneurial instinct. He preferred to think such things didn’t exist or existed only as imprecise abstractions, not pulsing within the human heart. Not in St. Paul. Not in his town, which was his world. Like all big-time qualities, they resided ... elsewhere. Not here in the blameless middle.
Never mind. The essential thing was that the world is beautiful—Look around you! he would cry, driving us to Lake Minnewashta on Sunday afternoons to go fishing. When he was an old man, he bought a dog, a springer spaniel, the aptly named Buddy, who followed him everywhere with a mournful look on his furrowed brow. They went for rides together in the Buick, the way we did in the Ford after Mass on Sundays.
But Buddy, for all his faithfulness, proved to be a disappointment. He jumped in the car with alacrity, but he immediately stretched out the length of the backseat and slumped his broody head beneath his paws as if he had a migraine and the light were painful to him. “Look at that,” my father would say, exasperated. “I take him for a ride—he doesn’t even sit up and look at the scenery. Buddy, Buddy—up, up!” My girlhood in the backseat rose before my eyes. Look, look!
The Florist's Daughter Page 4
