The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  My father, I understood, was on the side of beauty, obviously the only side to be on. His loyalty was to workmanship—another word for art. “A lot of people can’t tell the difference in this German crèche,” he would say holding up a well-turned camel sporting a saddle blanket painted in royal blue and finished in gold scrollwork scattered with minute gold stars and crescent moons, bearing all the mysterious East on its back. “But I can tell. You put it out there, they’ll begin to see the difference from the plastic. Over time.” He had resilient faith in the educative powers of just looking, as the dopey springer spaniel Buddy and I learned when he took us for car rides. He was determined to “bring people up.”

  My mother felt compelled to point out that certain people saw the difference between the imported crèches and the plastic sets all too well. “Admit it,” she said. “Once they’ve lifted the baby Jesus, how do you expect that set to sell?” He shrugged. But later, as Leo the Lion predicted, he had to mark down the childless manger scenes for the after-Christmas sale, and sell the pieces separately, like spare parts.

  “I tell Ollie and Mrs. Butler,” he said, naming the two widows who were the downtown store’s main clerks, “I tell them to watch those sets. But it gets busy. People can be quick, if they want to be.” He denied the possibility of evil afoot until the evidence was in, and then he still couldn’t quite bring himself to blame anyone, and saw the disappearance of the best pieces as burn luck. And you really couldn’t get away from that, so what could a guy do?

  Being on the side of beauty put you at this sort of disadvantage, but once having pledged your allegiance, there was no going back—or perhaps there was no going forward. Because the forces of modernity were part of the problem. Beauty had existed from the dawn of human marking and making. Beauty wasn’t simply loveliness for my father. It was the highest token of reality. But now this confirmation of reality was being chipped away, little by little, by the forces of mass production and plastic.

  Modern art didn’t help either, splashing paint around, nothing looking like anything in particular, confusing people, not bringing them up at all—though he admitted there was some kind of idea at work there, though damned if he could figure it out. Plastic was the real culprit, plastic as a proliferating form of mischief, an almost sentient force, nicking away not only at beauty but at workmanship and craft that had been the immemorial proof that beauty was the essential business of the human world.

  There was nothing a guy could do. You could only keep putting the better things in front of people. And hope they’d see.

  LEO THE LION SETTLED into her job at a college library, glorying in her proximity to books. “You really ought to think of library science,” she kept saying whenever I made my claim about wanting to be a writer. In spite of their mutual reverence for education that amounted to a cult (my father was asking me what I had learned today long after I was out of graduate school), working holidays at the flower shop, they agreed, was a Good Thing.

  It would not be a Good Thing to be a waitress, nor would my father allow me to take typing in high school. These activities could lead to unfortunate results—rudeness and fanny-pinching (waitressing) or “a desk job” (typing). For typing was the road to office servitude for unfortunate girls without fathers watchful enough to direct them to a real education that in turn would lead to a non-desk job, though he was vague about what non-desk job he had in mind.

  “He doesn’t want you to end up a file clerk in an office,” my mother said. “Like me.”

  During school breaks and summer vacations my brother was assigned to work with the growers at the greenhouse or on the delivery routes. My father expected me to know the names of plants and to get a sense of the horticultural side of things, but it was understood I was meant for the downtown store, “in retail” where the clerks dressed in gowns they bought on fantastic markdowns from tips passed them by their clerk pals at Frank Murphy and Field-Schlick.

  Doctors and lawyers from nearby offices came into the showroom on their lunch hour to order flowers for their wives. Usually their wives. A dozen long-stemmed American Beauties, off-season, in a box with a card in a sealed envelope, paid for in cash, delivery to some apartment on Randolph, not the man’s Lincoln Avenue address—you figure it out.

  “Never ask if they want to put it on their charge,” Ollie told me. “Sometimes they’ll want to pay cash. Never ask why it’s going where it’s going.” She put a well-manicured finger to her lips, the silent gesture of complicity, initiating me into the conspiracy of love now that I was old enough to work at the downtown store. This sort of duplicity was not a greenhouse thing. The illicit ways of desire belonged to the world of surface and illusion. It proved that the beautiful big room full of exotic flowers and expensive candy was, as my fearful, stay-at-home aunt said, just like downtown.

  THE WORK WAS HARD, I suppose, on our feet all day, running around, lifting heavy plants, contending with the prima donna tendencies of the customers. But the place had such drama during the holiday rush when I worked there that the sheer pace of the day, filled with the customers’ demanding subplots, made me happy—more than happy. I felt important. Or I felt I was doing something important. Which came to the same thing.

  A demand for violets might come in. “Violets! Is that woman nuts?” Mrs. Butler would say. But then she would somehow suss out violets from a supplier in Minneapolis by way of Chicago or New York, reaching by degrees all the way to an Amsterdam clearing house with a Parma connection, so that, finally, little drenched purple bundles tied with foreign twine, costing a fortune, made someone on Kenwood Parkway happy.

  People came in from the cold, stamping their snowy feet vehemently on the carpet. They rushed up to the marble tables where the clerks awaited as at a battement. Some customers came in looking wild-eyed, holding out their shopping lists like desperate ransom notes. Can you get a poinsettia to Butte by tomorrow?

  We could. We could send flowers and candy just about anywhere you wanted. We had it in our power.

  Ollie and Mrs. Butler, elderly but slim and elegant, worked with the self-possession of head nurses in a triage unit. At the end of the day Ollie took the sheaf of telegraph delivery orders and made her calls, speaking low into the receiver of the telephone by her order desk. Los Angeles? This is an FTD order from St. Paul...

  The Great World was so far away, but Ollie spoke nonchalantly every afternoon to the coasts. Let me spell that for you ... And would you kindly repeat for verification? Yes, that’s Love L-o-v-e comma Bobby B-o-b-b-y. Yes, “y” as in yardstick. No, he doesn’t spell it that way. Just the “y.”

  You couldn’t make any sense out of the ones in Alabama or Georgia, places like that, she would say off the line, they talk so funny. The occasional orders to Europe were sent in the dead of night by telegraph, which was too bad, Mrs. Butler said. If we called them in ourselves, she said, they’d let me try my French...Paree? Ici St. Paul...

  Like Ollie and Mrs. Butler, I came to respect the customers who knew what they wanted, the doctors and lawyers and their worldly wives who had accounts, for whom buying flowers was a regular part of life. Spenders.

  People with taste, Ollie said. She had no time for the once-a-year poinsettia buyers who fussed around, wanting you to pick the very best one. She tended them with frozen rectitude, barely polite. Mrs. Butler, though also favoring those “with distinction,” had a soft spot for a shy person who came in blinking at the orchids, clutching a ten.

  But how could you not admire the people who knew, who had poise and a bead on what was what? They were our people. The showroom was for them. The greenhouse had the purity and frank dirt of a farm, but the downtown store was awash in illusion. It belonged to the winners and takers who lived in a zone of carelessness that won our admiration. The best customers often picked up a fistful of trimmed azaleas from the display tables and brought them to the marble delivery tables like employees themselves. As if they owned the place. “Send these off to the people on my list,
will you, Mrs. B?”

  “How would you like them signed, Dr. Dailey?”

  “Oh, Merry Christmas is fine. You can sign for me. Love on the one to my wife.”

  Dr. Rea came bounding in from the Lowry Medical Arts building, humming an aria (big opera buff, had tickets for every performance of the Metropolitan Opera when it came on tour in May). He bellowed for Ollie as he approached the marble table. “Can you round up a herd of poinsettias? Send to everybody I sent to last year. They’re all still alive, aren’t they, Ollie?”

  They would laugh, Ollie and her best customer. They would agree that everybody was still alive.

  He handed her a square envelope with a little bulge meaning a couple of bills were folded inside, a Christmas tip. Ollie and Mrs. Butler never opened these envelopes at the store, never spoke of them though Mrs. Butler once said, “They help.” My father was ashamed of what the owners paid them. The office staff, he said, was even worse. “I don’t know how Justine manages to eat.”

  “How do we manage?” my mother said, looking up from her book, always ready with a drop of acid. My father shrugged his shrug. “That company,” my mother said, dumping it as usual into the dustbin of her disdain.

  The floor staff and the office staff had worked there for decades. They all lived in apartments, widows and “single ladies” who made up the workforce at the downtown store. There wasn’t a married woman in the bunch except for gossipy Rosette who worked the PBX machine and whose husband ground lenses around the corner at Williams Optical. She retired early with arthritis. Served her right. She flirted with my father and I was glad to see her go. All of them took the bus to work, and had two weeks’ vacation, which they spent at home “getting caught up,” as Mrs. Butler put it. No one went anywhere.

  Alone among them, stylish Ollie somehow contrived to take her lunch (cup of soup, egg salad on white, trim the crusts, please) at Moudry’s counter across from Frank Murphy where, after lunch, she cruised daily for any couture crumbs that might have dropped to a sale table. Everyone else brought a sandwich from home and ate in the basement lunchroom by the design room near the candy dippers where a game of cribbage was always on. Even Ollie brought a thermos. “Coffee adds up,” they reminded newcomers hired for the holiday rush who would squander a good part of an hour’s wage, morning and afternoon break, on burnt coffee from Moudry’s.

  BUT LET’S GET SPECIFIC. The history of innocence would be incomplete without this moment. Christmas Eve, the final mad dash of the holiday and we could count on some of our favorites showing up. These were men racing in from a quick stop at Frank Murphy, carrying shiny black boxes with big pink bows, the Murphy insignia. Ours was the silky powder-pink box with the firm’s name cast across it in gold script like a line from the Declaration of Independence.

  These last customers of the holiday were classicists, men who bought cashmere cardigans at Frank Murphy and roses and chocolates from us. They came slouching in with their camel-hair coats open. They could leave their shopping to the last minute because their wives had already bought everything for the holiday. All these husbands had to do was make a lavish gesture for the wives. We awaited them at the big marble clerks’ table with our pale green order books and our utter exhaustion. Latecomers. They were the easy ones. They’d take anything.

  And in he walked, fifteen minutes before closing, an officer of the navy, shoulders squared, a commanding face already slightly impatient. I’d never seen him before. Being in uniform he was certainly from out of town, but he headed straight for our table as if he knew his way around, a man with a mission. My kind of customer. I dipped past the table and made for him before anyone else could claim him.

  I didn’t often get a chance like this. The clerks didn’t work on commission, but none of the big customers, the happy spenders, came to me. If Ollie and Mrs. Butler were busy, their good customers waited for them, wandering around, idly turning over Hummel figurines to check the prices, inspecting the candy counter, putting their faces down to a gardenia’s matte petals. Then Ollie or Mrs. B would race over, apologizing for the wait. Sometimes, if a regular customer was in a hurry, he might turn to me standing at the table in my blue-and-white serge convent school uniform, and say, not bothering to disguise his disappointment, “I suppose you could take care of this.”

  But for the most part I spent my time with the one-poinsettia, cash-and-carry crowd who streamed anonymously in and out during the holiday. My father had told me to “treat everyone the same.” He knew the arch manner of Ollie and Mrs. Butler and he didn’t try to change them. Maybe he didn’t want to: the graciously run households of Crocus Hill and Summit Avenue were our essential clientele.

  I adopted Ollie’s hauteur, taking a mean-spirited satisfaction in grabbing the first plant I saw on the floor when the low-end amateurs wheedled around, asking me to pick out the very best one. In the lunchroom at coffee break we disposed of this entreaty with withering contempt—Mrs. B, would you be sure to pick out the very best doughnut for me over there in the box Vick brought in? And Mrs. Butler would pantomime an exaggerated inspection of the doughnuts in the half-sheet bakery box on the sink counter. She paused, shook her head, gazed intently, an expert’s discerning frown on her brow as her hand dipped and rose, dipped and rose over the glazed zeroes before her until finally, finally—“Ah, here it is!” she cried, lifting the very best one aloft.

  No such fool, this navy officer who strode toward me now. I could see that. He was handsome, in a craggy, can-hold-his-alcohol way, modern somehow, not a man with the smooth matinee-idol looks of my earnest father. He’d been around, you felt, had seen the world. Been marked. It was part of the handsomeness. He came forward resolutely, a man with better things to do with his time, ready to hand over his gift list, ready to trust me with the details.

  I approached him without my order pad—Ollie and Mrs. Butler greeted their good customers like friends for whom a purchase was somehow a given and yet also secondary.

  “How may I help you?” Another Ollie touch—don’t say May I help you? Claim the next step—How may I help you?

  “I’m looking for a lot of roses,” he said.

  I didn’t blink. “Red?” I asked professionally.

  He looked at me—took me in for the first time I think—as if I might be a tricky one. But this passed instantly. He smiled, a surprise and a charm, that radiant smile coming from that stern face. “Yes,” he said, right into my eyes, “Red. For Christmas.” We had a small laugh over this meeting of minds—at this season what other color could a rose possibly be?

  I led him to the display cooler which wasn’t the real cooler (that was in the basement), but the one meant to tempt people with possibilities. Slim pickings. Long-stemmed red roses stood upright, as if at attention, two dozen in a galvanized metal bucket. There wasn’t much else left in the cooler, a few buckets of lemon leaf and winter greens, holly and cedar, and several branches of chartreuse cymbidium orchids slashed at the throat with maroon that would require the rare customer with daring taste.

  “Those,” he said, pointing to the roses with the resolve I expected of him.

  Then he surprised me again. “Do you have any more?” he asked.

  I could look downstairs.

  “Do that,” he said.

  But downstairs the designers wouldn’t let me touch what was left in the big walk-in cooler. There’s still funerals to think of, they said with the annoyance of people who have to remain at their posts no matter what crazy illusion the rest of the world is off to. Christmas or no Christmas, you had to keep some stock back for death, our bread and butter. And you can forget about the greenhouse, they said as I went to the telephone. They’ve been out since yesterday.

  “Then I’ll take the orchids too,” the officer said when I went back upstairs. He checked his watch and looked toward the door. I told him it would only take a little longer while I wrote up the orders. While I was downstairs he’d picked out two vases, a big Waterford for the roses, a narrow one
for the orchids.

  He wanted everything sent to an address on Bayard, two separate packages, same name on each one, a woman’s. I had to tell him there would be a delivery charge because it was so late. He shrugged—fine.

  I knew he wouldn’t care.

  But he was just getting started. A Noble fir wreath and a tree, for heaven’s sake, to the same address. I had to call the greenhouse about the tree. I explained to Charlie it was for an officer in the navy who had just come home and was shopping late. Charlie, weary but willing, said he guessed so. I can hear his tired voice saying, Just under the wire.

  Then the officer said he also had an FTD order. He fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a crumpled paper. It was a California address, a woman’s name he had to spell for me because it was Spanish. An officer in the navy would naturally have someone with a foreign name waiting in a port city—was Fresno on the coast? Again, he wanted roses, three dozen if possible, loose in a box, no “arrangement.” I understood perfectly. Arrangements were somehow domestic, but the instruction “loose in a box” was romantic and—I didn’t have this word at the time—erotic. People sent arrangements on Mother’s Day. They sent roses “loose in a box” on Valentine’s.

  And the enclosure cards?

  Sign them all Tom. Love on everything.

  We stood together by the big marble table while I wrote out the orders. As I copied the addresses from the order forms to the delivery slips, I asked him, out of politeness, what his rank was. He was checking his watch and looked up sharply. He didn’t answer right away.

  “In the navy,” I said, confused. Maybe “rank” was the word in the army. Maybe the navy had a different word. Maybe it was impolite to inquire.

  “Oh,” he said. “Captain.”

  “Nice to be home for Christmas,” I offered, “on leave.” The lavish spenders liked to make small talk.