The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  Soon after this flurry of excitement, he bought the full World Book encyclopedia from a neighbor who had been lobbying him to sign up for a set. My brother had been given a pocketknife for his birthday and was irresistibly drawn to this woman’s garden hose and methodically cut through the green rubber in tidy six-inch intervals, like the meticulous surgeon he would later become. The least we could do was cave in and buy the World Book from her at last.

  For years at night before bed my father took a volume off the shelf, reading at random about far-flung places and moments in history, scientific discoveries, and wild beasts. Fiji and Bhutan, Napoleon on Elba, Einstein and Freud, the gar fish, the hundred-year aloe. It’s how he ended his day, roaming the world. But the World stayed in its Book. And we stayed in St. Paul, playing the geographic card we’d been dealt.

  THE DEPRESSION, unlike dreams of escape, remained a destination of another sort in our postwar household, a stillpotent explanation for just about every life choice, every disappointment or lack. Because of the Depression, my father had not gone to college (I was forty before it occurred to me that some people had gone to college during the Depression). Because of the Depression he had not become a doctor or an architect (his two alternate lives). Because of the Depression he had stayed at the greenhouse, glad of the job.

  And because of the Depression he worked like a dog—but this was Leo the Lion talking, looking up from her two-inch-thick history of the Irish, shaking her head over her husband, happiest of workaholics. “I’ve never had to worry about another woman,” she would say. “That greenhouse is his mistress.” And back she would go to her true love, the endless pages demonstrating the egregious humiliations the English had inflicted over centuries upon the Irish. In her ancestral mind, she was always crouched in a hedgerow school in Kilkenny, the peat fires smoldering. Compared to the Famine and the Troubles, the Depression was amateur night in the annals of anguish.

  My father was incapable of her Irish grudges. For him, history’s darkness belonged to the Depression, and he held on to it. He even suggested that because of the Depression, Frankie had been killed, Frankie who was still hoping to make it big on the welter-weight circuit. He had lost a good black-smithing job to the Depression and had only been doing pickup work at the brewery on that terrible day in early May. “The tulips had just opened,” he would say thoughtfully, as if even then he clocked all events of import in floral time.

  But—and here was the paradoxical kicker to it all—also “because of the Depression” people had lived together in an enchanted circle, happy. “Nobody had anything,” he would say, his voice rising in crescendo when he spoke of his youth and the early years of his marriage. When nobody had anything, my brother and I were led to believe, universal harmony had prevailed on earth.

  Unlike Dexter Green, Scott Fitzgerald’s hero in “Winter Dreams,” a St. Paul story, who did not just want “association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves,” my father did not aspire to wealth. He did not crave “the glittering things themselves.” His mother, like Dexter’s, “was a Bohemian of the peasant class” and she too “talked broken English to the end of her days.” But my father didn’t try for a Summit Avenue heart-breaker the way Dexter chose—and lost—Judy Jones. He married his high-school girl and stuck with her. He never abandoned the friends or habits of his working-class youth, he didn’t become rich, and money didn’t seem to be the engine stoking his winter dreams.

  He was not what is called a good businessman. It wasn’t that he was careless or wasteful or gambled unwisely—except for the rash act of eventually buying the greenhouse from those who had left it sagging with the debt of ages. It was a three-generation family business, moving inexorably down the hereditary chain from the grim hardworking founders, to the two-martini-lunch middle generation until it foundered finally in the vain trust-fund expectations of the smooth-talking third generation. My father served them all in turn from youth deep into middle age.

  He wasn’t shrewd. His business talents were those of a faithful retainer, fatally steadfast, dedicated, a believer in surfaces, a truster of the good word of others. And as my mother maintained from her elevated perch of Irish mistrust, he admired the rich. A Fitzgeraldian fault that perhaps came with the Summit Avenue territory.

  The greenhouse was his love. There was something dangerous in loving your work too much. Such passion betrayed the ruinous appetite of an artist. And weren’t the lives of artists cautionary rather than exemplary tales? Stay away from all that.

  But he never thought of himself as an artist.

  Too bad. It might have helped, in the end, had he allowed himself that small, saving vanity.

  Chapter 4

  IT’S TIME TO LOOK at the picture. Not a photograph. Later we’ll look at more photographs, the way every family does, making much of the frozen moments, the icons of ancestry, the dead laughing right in your face, or just staring that noncommittal historical gaze. And before this is over I’ll have to pick a photograph of Leo the Lion for her obit in the Pioneer Press. I have one in mind. But that can wait.

  It’s the oil painting I’m hauling out in the dark of her last room, propping it up in my mind. The painting I have at home. I can’t say, “The one hanging on the wall at home.” It’s in a closet, faced to the back wall.

  My father took up painting when he retired. In spite of his passion for his work, in spite of the lifelong habit of it, he did retire. Heart attacks and money worries, cheats and bad luck—I’ll get to that. But he had to quit. That’s when he took up the violin. And he started painting. No surprise, his subject was usually floral, meticulously articulated African violets, seven-foot-tall iris and alstroemeria on panels for a display at the State Fair. But we don’t need to look at those. The one in the closet is the only one I need to drag out tonight, the only one to consider.

  It has a title: Patricia’s Garden. He had a little brass label made and engraved with these words. Small round-head rivets attach the brass to the picture frame. The painting hung on their living-room wall till he died. Then my mother said I should have it. Which is when it went into the closet. I told her I was waiting to find the perfect place for it. But I had found the perfect place. It’s possible she understood that.

  A sweet picture, comic in a way, and I should get a kick out of it, make a joke, be done with it. But a burn rises when I look at the smear of pastel that is me and my alleged garden. A wall in the background is mossed over, climbing with vines and dabs of flowers the color of fondant. The garden my father provides me with is a convent garden. I recognize the look—didn’t they send me to a girls’ school to be taught by cloistered nuns? A bench is angled in the foreground, a big tub of cabbage roses at one end. Pretty, pretty.

  On this bench sits Miss Muffet, the me-myself of my father’s fond illusion, small feet shod in ballet slippers, neatly crossed at the ankle, barely peeking out from the long dress. A white dress—ohmygod, now that I’m actually considering it, I see it’s none other than the Scarlett O’Hara wedding dress, the choker collar, the flounces on the skirt. I’m wearing a big straw hat too, a garland of flowers weighing it down low on my demure brow, ribbon streamers down the back. And in my hand? A wee book I regard mildly, must be a book of poesy. Or my mother’s bridal prayer book fragrant with flowers.

  So what’s the problem? Why is the painting stuffed in the closet? Who am I afraid I am? Not Leo the Lion (the shaded face belongs to no one), not Scarlett O’Hara, in spite of the dress. If only I could say I have been a Scarlett O’Hara.

  The problem, doctor, is that this person sitting on her tuffet in her bower of flowery bliss, bound in her virginal dress, gazing at her teeny-tiny poems—this girl’s never going to escape. She’s going nowhere. She’s her father’s angel, her mother’s dutiful daughter. She’s staying till it’s over. An indentured innocent. Everything is contrived—the vines and blossoms, the wall high as a monastic enclosure, the constricting obscuring dres
s, and the gaze trained on the itty-bitty bookette—it’s the hex of love.

  The Great World, the world of filth, the high jinks of the arty outlaw life—it’s never going to happen to you, girlfriend. Just look at yourself. Take a good long look during this last night of your life as a daughter, your time as their girl. Beneath the feminist posturing, the difficult boyfriends, the lefty politics, the gallant travels “behind the Iron Curtain” (the boldest destination I could think of, imprisoned land of the Czech side of the family), behind the poetry writing, I was the virgin daughter attending to her ailing parents.

  No wonder I adored all those nineteenth-century novels—I was living one.

  MY FATHER WISHED UPON ME a virginity whose innocence was only dimly related to sex. It went deeper and flooded the whole reservoir of the soul with freshets of trust, pools of willing dependence. He wished me to be ethereal, untouched by the world and its dingy habits, its money-mind.

  “Do you know if we’re rich or poor?” he asked abruptly one day when I was in high school. We were in the green-and-white finned Ford sedan. He was taking me to school in the morning, a private Catholic school beyond our means, the one extravagance of their lives: the education of my brother and me.

  “No,” I said truthfully. I didn’t know the difference between $2,000 and $200,000.

  But the question was unsettling.

  “Good,” he said, his priestly face steady on the road, not looking at me. Just checking. Glad things were in order, my ignorance safely intact as if it were my honor. And his.

  Do we live paycheck to paycheck? I asked my mother a while later. It was a phrase I had heard at school, and I could not think what was on the other side of that equation.

  Of course, she said to this mad question.

  Are we poor? I asked searchingly, sensing that paychecks had to do with the question my father did not want me to be able to answer.

  No, she said.

  Are we rich?

  No!—this delivered with emphatic pride, as if to be poor might be bad luck, but being rich was disreputable.

  Never worry about money, she said with fine disdain, an Irish heiress bankrolled by pride alone.

  It was about the time he decided to take up the offer the owners were making to risk everything and buy the flower business. Never worry about money. We both knew, Mother and I, that he worried about just that.

  ONE OF THE FEW TIMES he lashed out at me was the day I came home from the University and in answer to his usual question—what had I learned today—I told him that in Economics the lecture had been on planned obsolescence. My brother was in dentistry school, preparing to do something useful. But I was an English major, sitting around reading poetry and novels and picking up fancy ideas. Dad was beginning to see me as a sort of human World Book, a trove of random info—didn’t I spend the day studying this and that, one term taking Early Kievan Russian History, the next careening over to Cultural Anthropology.

  I explained that manufacturers arranged for their goods—cars, nylon stockings—to break down. Leo the Lion was nodding—made sense to her. The point, I explained, was that people have to buy and buy, in a continuing cycle, thus keeping the whole market economy aloft on the wings of prearranged need. A plot, really.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, putting down his fork, “that all the money the floral industry has spent on research to hybridize a poinsettia that will last the whole Christmas season—and beyond, well beyond into spring so that some people wish they would die—that we’re trying to make the flowers wither so people will buy more?” He looked affronted. “It’s a lie.” He glared at me as if I had tarnished his reputation.

  I couldn’t talk him down from the good intentions of the floral industry back to the guile of the free market concepts I was absorbing from the big Samuelson text I lugged back and forth to the University. He was personally offended by the concept of planned obsolescence, betrayed by this University education he was providing his hard-hearted daughter.

  The sharpness that apparently came with a University education, the cold satisfactions of the intellectual hunt—he hadn’t counted on this. The University wasn’t, after all, like paging through the World Book after a long day at the greenhouse, the exhausting weight of labor lightened by one illuminating and uplifting fact after another. Getting an education was something else altogether—darker. And unkind.

  MY MOTHER, with her remorseless Irish eye, had a point: my father was an innocent (a polite word for fool). He did “admire the rich.” The word gentleman carried a sacred charge for him. He wasn’t a snob, he was (the Fitzgeraldian flaw again) a believer. He admired the rococo taste of the dowagers of Summit Avenue and Crocus Hill. They maintained a grandeur he approved of. They were doing their bit, keeping up appearances. And appearance, for him, was not a superficial matter. Decor was not, for him, “decorative,” nothing of that insulting diminishment attended it.

  The matrons of Summit, the “real ones,” the wives and daughters of men whose names meant something in St. Paul—railroad heiresses and other grandees like the founders of 3M—they too believed in the look of things. It was for them he toiled. Or for the idea they held in common. The idea of loveliness. Together they made possible the improbable but necessary presence of exotic, tropical flowers in our killer northland. For we didn’t just live in the Midwest—ours was the Upper Midwest, as if we had bypassed the regular Midwest and achieved a Siberian ascendancy that gave us a transcendent existence amid the boreal forests and silent stars.

  His lady customers, usually older, often widows, invited him for tea in the late afternoon to discuss their garden plans. Rarely, but memorably, there would be a younger hungry one like the Barefoot Contessa who offered a martini and the information that her husband was out of town on business. He reported these incidents at the dinner table as a joke, a modest boast on the edge of it. Out of town on monkey business, he’d say, and we would laugh, even Mother who seemed to relinquish the power of good looks to him. Such women were “characters,” not to be taken seriously. Rich and crazy and spoiled. You had to laugh at them. Pick up your clipboard and start measuring the perennial border. As my mother confidently said, he already had a mistress.

  He advised all these ladies on the next growing season, the next party, walking around their property with his clipboard, counting out arbor vitae hedges, warning against swimming pools (people get the strangest ideas, he said at home after talking someone on Kenwood Parkway down from a swimming pool), counting up the number of rental tables a wedding dinner would require, the height of the centerpieces, the advisability of garlanding the sconces, the wisdom of candles versus votive lights, the possibility of velvet roping.

  One of his favorite Summit Avenue customers, something of a recluse, had a whole seventeenth-century mirrored room from a Loire castle crated up, and installed on her second floor. “It looks okay,” he said laconically. He usually frowned on extremism. He once refused, on ethical grounds, or perhaps aesthetic ones, to flock a Christmas tree black for a customer too stylish for his own good. In the seventies, he did not allow the greenhouse to sell Mylar balloons. “What adult wants a balloon with a bouquet?” he said, though the younger designers tried to explain that balloons were big. There was something almost political about his attempt to foster the best: art (and we had no doubt his work was art) was life’s underdog. It needed someone to stand up for it against the bully forces of uncaring and plastic.

  The ladies of the little curving streets of leafy Crocus Hill could trust him to follow them in their decorative plots and plans. They called on him to supply the palette of their spring gardens, planted every fall, and then furiously dug up and discarded to be replaced with annuals every summer for a few short months until the whole business had to be rooted out and the process started again. He was impatient with the parsimonious blooming habits of perennials. He used them as a backdrop for the big pop and splash of annuals. His prodigal use of impatiens, in particular, betrayed him as a
Fauve, boldly casting purple and orange, shocker pink and violet in wild jots in the shade gardens of Lincoln and St. Clair.

  The company’s forest-green trucks trolled the streets of the city, doling out the company’s narrow powder-pink boxes with the gold logo. Inside, blood-dark long-stem roses, wrapped in waxy green florist paper, lay in grave repose, a severe insignia of Eros.

  There were square corsage boxes for evening parties, double-wrapped gift plants, and tiered centerpieces trailing ivy and damask roses, arriving just before the dinner guests, the driver rushing up to the front door, wearing the jacket and cap of the greenhouse, the same logo scrolled over his heart as upon the box he delivered.

  Before holidays, the workforce tripled. The whole family—my brother and I, our aunts and cousins—spent long hours in the greenhouse or the downtown shop. Only Leo the Lion steered clear. She’d found a job as a file clerk at a college library, never trusting the illusions of the flower industry, putting her faith in the other dream industry of books.

  The extra women employees were set up at a table to “trim” the plants before they were sent out. The clay pot of every poinsettia and azalea, every gloxinia and lily had to be wrapped in stretchy paper, affixed with two straight pins (we had pins sticking out of our mouths but we managed to keep talking with a James Cagney droop to the lip). Then we lavished a bright bow to a wooden stake and drove the stake into the damp earth of the pot so the plant appeared to be wearing a floppy bow tie at its rippled paper collar. We were firm believers in gilding the lily.

  Occasionally there was trouble with a customer, but this was usually with the younger matrons, earnest chairwomen of various St. Paul charity events. My father reported on them at the dining-room table, stabbing his fork into the meat loaf as he inveighed against the forces of bad taste.