The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  But the attention my father demanded was a world away from the note-taking watchfulness of my mother in the corners of charity balls. She was tracking. He was filled with wonder. St. Paul provided all the beauty a person needed—St. Paul and an occasional trip into the glory of the Minnesota lake country. Leo the Lion plotted guided trips to Ireland that he argued were a waste of time and money. The Thoreau of St. Paul, he said Europe could wait, he hadn’t seen all of Minnesota yet.

  The world—that is, St. Paul—was filled with wonders. For him, son of Czech immigrants, graduate of Mechanic Arts High School, and lifelong mourner for the college education he never had, as well as lifelong employee (and finally, well into middle age, joint owner) of the city’s best greenhouse, florists to the St. Paul carriage trade over generations from the nineteenth century—for this man, the world was demonstrably a field of good waiting to emerge under the steady care of its watchful tender: himself.

  Didn’t the world renew itself in annual continuity, sleeping in winter, rising refreshed in spring? Consider the Easter lilies of house number 9. They may neither toil nor spin, but my father toils for them, fostering them under glass and blacklight tarps. The greenhouse, where he spent his days, was an enchanting working replica displaying the world’s fundamental mechanics of renewal and reliable cyclical rebirth. Here, at root level, Justice conveyed the inevitable return of life, the security of the organic cycle.

  In a way, I was a farm kid, hanging out at the greenhouse, watching wet baby rabbits slither out of their mother’s fur in the dank bulb cellar, or running through the glass houses to the barn where the Christmas trees were stacked, waiting for Charlie, a red-haired giant, to cream them with his flocking gun. Sometimes Charlie gave me jobs: You go deadhead all those geraniums. I could keep all the flowers. But my father shook his head—I could keep three or five (always an odd number, odd numbers look better).

  I was willing to be enchanted. In spring, I trailed my hand in the black water of the big tank in the far greenhouse, near the barn, where water lilies were kept to stock summer pools. Torpid goldfish, some of them orange, others freakishly spotted like Guernsey cows, all of them immense, lumbered through the dark water, too sinister to be pets. I put my head down low and blew on the water’s surface. Nothing disturbed these beasts. Charlie passed by. “They eat them in China,” he said, looking down at the fish as he galumphed along in his Wellingtons. An exotic alarm charged my heart.

  The greenhouse workforce was composed of older growers who had been immigrants from Central Europe, and younger homeboys who drank beer and belonged to a bowling league. They bought numbers from a bookie for the Saturday Gopher football game. They played 500 for nickels at coffee break. My father smiled indulgently when they swore, and then they apologized to me, blushing to have uttered the S word in the presence of a girl. The F word—there was no F word in the greenhouse. “Clean it up, boys,” Charlie would say, when Rose and Fern, the only female growers, came into the lunchroom from house 10 for coffee.

  I don’t make up the names. They were Rose and Fern, one from Germany, the other a St. Paul girl bearing the last name of Treewiler as if she descended from a family of climbing vines. Bill Vero, who had trained in Austria, said grace over his meat-loaf sandwich in the lunchroom. His son was a missionary in Madagascar, wherever that was. Chester read the dictionary during lunch break. An odd duck. He complained that the newspaper crossword was too easy. Insulting to a man’s intelligence. He belonged to Mensa. Do you know the meaning of circumnavigation, Patricia? Can you spell it? Ask me any word, ask me how to spell it.

  Everything changed in the design room. This was no farm. Here, where the floral arrangements and corsages and all the funeral and wedding flowers were made up, the demographics and social life moved into the world of decor, the lab for the theatrics of party-giving. Some of the male designers, young and slim, wore pastel angora sweaters. They told me, as I sat on a high stool watching them work, that my father was the handsomest man. They came, they went, but always, during the late fifties and sixties of my girlhood, the cloudy angora sweaters abounded, a blush of color at the cheekbone, the flutter of mascara at the lash. They called me honey, not an endearment the silent growers in the greenhouse ever used at their solitary benches, potting seedlings.

  Occasionally my father would ask someone to cut back on the eye shadow. But in general, it was understood: these were people of talent, more talent than the average person could hope to possess. Artists. You want something really nice, this is where you go. This is the person you want for your daughter’s wedding, for your father’s casket spray. “Make it special, won’t you, Dickie?” the Crocus Hill ladies cooed, claiming personal privilege with a top designer.

  It was known that the designers held crazy parties. They got drunk and cried. Once I heard my father say “cocaine” with a deep frown. It was the early sixties and the word suggested jazz rather than addiction like other words of indulgence—sauna, massage, martini. I coveted the angora sweaters and awaited the breathless semi-confidences I was sometimes awarded just for sitting there, watching a corsage come into existence from deft fingers twirling green florist tape, pinkie ring flashing.

  Sometimes there were sighs over slights and injustices of the weekend before. Black eyes and crashing headaches in the design room. “What a night! My head!” Dickie would say, hinting at much, offering little in the way of detail. “Honey, be a doll, go down to the machine and get me a Coke? I need a Coke. God.” Such tribulations were clear indicators of the artistic temperament. I scurried off to the lunchroom Coke machine to do what I could in the way of stress relief.

  THE BOILER ROOM was a place apart. Strange—the boiler room refuses to locate itself exactly in my mental blueprint of the greenhouse. But somewhere near the garage area where the delivery trucks were kept, I see my father opening a door. I follow him. We are standing on a metal grating. Below us—for the whole of the room exists in a sudden drop under this metal gallery—the big vault of the enclosure is taken up with a massive seething boiler. Down there, on a folding chair propped against the far wall at an angle, sits a man wearing suspenders over a ribbed undershirt. I know who he is: the night watchman, a term fraught with alarm. It is he who sometimes calls in the middle of the night to say the boiler has gone out. In winter this is the Worst Thing that can happen. The boiler is a raging god. Its raging must never stop.

  At the sight of my father, the man snaps his chair back in place. He has been sleeping. There is a bottle of Grain Belt next to the chair. He is supposed to be awake. The Grain Belt is wrong, too. We go down the steep metal steps to the dirt floor where the watchman is now standing. The roar of the boiler is so loud my father has to shout. The night watchman shouts, too. Yet they are not angry at each other. They’re conferring, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. The heat pulses from the giant jelly roll of the boiler. The watchman opens the little door. He and my father bend down to look. The heat surges hungrily forward, groaning. Hell is in there. Hell is red but also white. I must not let on how scary it is or my father won’t bring me back. That’s strange: it’s awful yet it would be more awful not to be able to return here. I’m consumed by contradiction. It’s wonderful, this terrible place.

  When we leave, I’m shocked that we’re leaving the night watchman behind. It isn’t safe in that room with the heat panting. I ask my father why we’re leaving him there. “It’s his job,” he says. “He has to stay.”

  All of this—my father’s world and therefore mine—is inevitable, the only way things can be. The alien goldfish move in black water in their tin tank somewhere near the geranium house. Do they sleep? Do they swim as they sleep? Terrible oddities abrade our peaceful world. We are not exempt. I was born here, a block from the greenhouse on Banfil, street of Czech immigrants. Big kitchen gardens, much canning of tomatoes in summer. In the fall people laid out damp mushrooms to dry on window screens set across sawhorses. They knew which ones you could eat, which would kill you.
The lore of forests. We called our landlady “Teta”—Auntie. Everyone seemed related. It took me a while to sort out who the real aunts were from the honorary ones.

  Though we have moved away from Banfil, up to Linwood, this is my place, the dark apartment on Banfil where Teta still lives (she works holidays at the greenhouse). We’ve moved “up the hill.” We’ve bought a house, a bungalow where Napoleon and Benito sit along with mild Mr. Williams. “I just know we can make the monthly, Mary,” my eager father says to my frowning mother who has always lived in an apartment, and until she married never had a bedroom.

  Home ownership, she felt, was overrated. But necessary—the children apparently had to have a house. Child-rearing was a mystery, years deferring to my father whose oldest sister eloped at sixteen and was widowed at twenty, coming home with three small children. He was an uncle at nine, all of them living in the house near the brewery. Your father knew about babies, he knew what to do.

  Whereas she had slept on the davenport in the living room of the Marshall Street apartment, next to the Irish grandmother who could neither read nor write but spoke to the little people. The grandmother died of cancer of the nose, an awful little pink pineapple emerging from a nostril, and then she was dead. It would be better to be the Pope and die of hiccups, better than dying of a tiny pineapple in your nose.

  I understood that the little house on Linwood was a move up. St. Paul with its hierarchical topography underscored the point: below on the flats were the poor, the newly arrived; above on the bluff the rich and the rising. I understood we were rising, a bit anyway. I was not glad. I didn’t understand why we had left Banfil, left Teta and the wizening mushrooms that Teta says are delicious and my mother won’t let us eat. Say thank you. Flush them down the toilet.

  Banfil is the old world, as my Czech grandmother speaks of Bohemia, where she came from. She doesn’t write English. That’s shameful but we pretend it doesn’t matter. She worked as housekeeper for a Supreme Court Justice. Yes! The United States Supreme Court. The Justice came home in the summer because he wanted her soup. He said that. Nothing Soup, it was called. She’s a great cook. She thinks my mother and I read too much (bad for the eyes, bad).

  We have emigrated the little but decisive vertical distance from Banfil to Linwood. My father wants this. He will not allow my mother an herb garden. We’ll have roses, he says, and geraniums and impatiens in the shaded window boxes. Vegetables and herbs were for West Seventh, down there. It was as if he thought a kitchen garden wasn’t allowed “up the hill.”

  Yet he never really left, never quite made the leap that was somehow more unbridgeable than the ocean the Czech grandmother and grandfather crossed. They jumped to the New World and never looked back.

  But he goes back every day to the greenhouse, and we buy our groceries at Johnson and Johnson Market on West Seventh. Why is it called Johnson and Johnson when it’s owned by Mr. Schoner and Mr. Goldman? Where are the Johnsons?

  There are no Johnsons. Mr. Schoner and Mr. Goldman are Jewish, so they call it Johnson and Johnson.

  Why do they do that?

  It’s better for business.

  Oh.

  Mr. Goldman says I’m a chatterbox and he likes a talker. He hands me a Hershey bar. I’m stabbed with regret: I have to say no, it’s Lent. We don’t eat candy in Lent. I’ll save it for you, he says, smiling, taking it back. I feel the little bumps of almond under the wrapper as the bar leaves my hand. But Mr. Goldman forgets. He never offers it again. I have the gift of gab and a silent ache for sugar.

  We belong to this.

  My father stayed at the greenhouse, near the little houses with the kitchen gardens, working on the flats where the greenhouses were built sometime late in the nineteenth century, about the time his own mother and father arrived from Bohemia. He never strayed far from the Gothic towers of Schmidt Brewery where his brother, Frankie, was scalded to death in the Depression, a freak industrial accident.

  We leave the hellish boiler room. We step into the dry ice of winter. Orion’s big X, the winter constellation, marks the north. We go to the car—a Ford Fairlane. That’s another step up, fins and owly headlights, two-tone white and green, the same green as the greenhouse trucks, the rich green of healthy foliage. My father unlocks my door first, the passenger side, a winter courtesy, then goes around to his door.

  In spite of the paradisal work of summer he is consigned to do, winter is his true home, a place both real and imaginary. Just as the terror I bring from the boiler room’s edge of hell is real and yet it’s also something I’ve made up to scare myself. Lucky my guardian angel’s there, barest weight on my left shoulder, looking out for me.

  The hellish boiler room fires the cool blossoms in the glass houses, the winter sky wheels above us when we step outside and are smacked with cold. It’s all inevitable, marvelous—Beautiful, my father says crossing to the driver’s side of the Fairlane, taking in a deep draft of our coldness, head cocked up to the navy sky, Just look at those stars.

  HE ADORED WINTER, and referred to the god-awful Minnesota cold as “a change of season.” He wore a London Fog when it was twenty below zero, and felt sorry for Southern Californians, people limited to a year-round Mediterranean climate. On a rare visit to Los Angeles he ordered a fruit salad, and was served a bowl of syrupy cubed peaches and wan grapes from a can. “We get their fresh fruit,” he said, as if California were best understood as a supply colony for Minnesota.

  Even more wonderful than the renewal of life that the refreshing Minnesota change of seasons bestowed on us was the urban farm of the greenhouse where he seduced and betrayed the calendar and the clock and of course the climate, timing blossoms as if with a stopwatch for the holidays, Christmas poinsettias and Easter lilies hoodwinked and hustled, duped and drugged, depending on their growth cycles, so they all bloomed for his customers exactly on the dot. The white clappers of lilies, still closed on Palm Sunday, opened promptly on Easter morning from their bladelike stems, glistening with well-timed resurrection.

  There we are on the great church holidays—Mother, Father, Peter, me—in the oak pews of St. Luke’s, admiring the stage set of the sanctuary, always lushly over-the-top thanks to my father, grander than the altar decorations at St. Mark’s or Holy Spirit. He donated and arranged it all under the massive frieze portrait of Jesus that dominated the sanctuary. Our Jesus was dark and Byzantine, beckoning East. He bestowed on us a slight Giaconda proto-smile of the sort art historians puzzle over. He reclined against a bright blue–fringed bolster, spangled with bewitching gold stars, the sort of bedchamber pillow the French Orientalists used to outfit their fantasias of the seraglio.

  This was not the crucified Christ, though his open hands displayed tidy, decorative stigmata. Ours was the Jesus who suffered instead the perfumed oils of the Magdalene, a large-hearted Lord lingering at table with his friends, the holy man who chose, for his first miracle, to make more wine. A generous host with no time for church bean counters fretting that too many flowers in the sanctuary sent the wrong message when, from the pulpit, the priest announced a second collection for the heating fund.

  During one benighted period, St. Luke’s had a timorous pastor who told my father he’d better cut back on the Christmas decorations. The masses of poinsettias and the clumps of Fraser firs my father had sketched on his master plan as backdrop for the manger scene were ... well, too much.

  Too much? What on earth could that mean? What about John, chapter 12? Then Mary brought a pound of very costly perfume, pure oil of nard, and anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair, till the house was filled with the fragrance. It was Judas, we recalled, who protested against this indulgence.

  Nor did we take kindly to the dreary “memorials preferred” directive, tacked at the end of small-minded death notices in the Pioneer Press. “In lieu of flowers!” my father would exclaim as he read the paper at the breakfast table.

  He appealed to my brother and me, asking us to consider our funeral wishes. �
�Wouldn’t you rather have a beautiful display of flowers?” he asked, looking for confirmation of the right values of the world. We nodded loyally over our oat-meal—definitely, we’d take the flowers over the check for cancer research.

  “I mean, cancer research, sure,” he would say magnanimously, willing to meet medical science halfway, “but you have to have flowers.” Love and flowers, death and flowers. But flowers, flowers, always flowers, the insignia of death, the hope of resurrection.

  YET HE WAS NOT wholly content. Unlike the older growers, men who had been trained in the conservatories of Austria and Germany in the late nineteenth century, and then, via the seignorial gardens of Cuba and Argentina, had made their improbable way to the modest but secure potting benches of the Banfil Street greenhouse in St. Paul where they worked with monastic absorption, my father had a bright Summit Avenue eye.

  He may have been born on West Seventh, beneath the shadow of the Schmidt Brewery where his prizefighter older brother, the glamorous Frankie, died his horrible death before he was thirty. And he may have worked at the greenhouse “down there” all his life, but he looked up, up. The backsides of the Summit Avenue mansions crowned the bluff directly above the greenhouse. It was to these back doors that he tended.

  He looked up, but not out. Yet one feverish season—I must have been ten—there was wild talk over the dinner table about moving to a rhododendron ranch in Argentina. We would leave St. Paul—imagine! My alluring father, with his sweep of dark hair and aquiline nose, would wear chaps and ride herd over the rhododendrons. A floral gaucho in a silver-studded weskit and a ten-gallon hat. I would have a spotted pony. Great World, here we come.