Yes, he said, great to be home on leave.
I asked where his ship was. At this he didn’t pause. San Diego, he said. San Diego. He said it twice. Then, “I’m kind of in a rush.” He was sorry to have to rush me, he said, but he had people waiting for him. He looked toward the door again. “The holiday, you know,” he said smiling. That wonderful smile. The holidays are crazy, I said. We smiled into each other’s faces, almost friends.
And how would you like to pay?
He gave the usual formula. “Put it on our account,” he said. “You have the address right there,” he pointed helpfully, reaching over to the local delivery slips, grazing my hand with his own. “Mrs. Thomas,” he said, pointing to the last name, and the address on Bayard. Ah, the wife. I smiled a sophisticated Ollie smile, thinking of the woman with the Spanish name in Fresno who was getting three dozen roses loose in a box to the wife’s two arranged in a vase. Well, the wife was also getting the orchids. And the Waterford vase. Score even.
And if California is out of roses? I asked at the last minute.
Something nice, he said vaguely, the way all the best customers talked, trusting everything to us. He was already headed to the door. People were waiting for him.
I thanked him. I added “sir.” This apparently pleased him because halfway to the door, he turned as he pulled on his officer’s hat, and gave me a little salute and a final Robert Mitchum smile.
The store was empty, the Dexter candy clerks had shrouded the long glass case, and turned off the display lights. Ollie and Mrs. B were putting on their overshoes at their order desks behind the counter. Ollie called to me to lock the front door.
My navy officer, I saw, had gone across the street to Bullard’s. He was peering in the door. He pounded on the glass. But I could see that the Bullard’s cream satin windows were already vacant. He wouldn’t get in under the wire at Bullard’s as he had so luckily with us. Probably he was looking for diamonds—whether for the wife on Bayard or the Spanish woman on the coast, it was impossible to know.
WHAT SURPRISED ME when my father asked me to sit down at his desk in the basement office two weeks later was that I wasn’t surprised. Not really. Even before he explained, I saw it all.
He was so patently phony, my best customer, so absolutely not an officer in the navy or anything remotely military. The jacket was a joke—it came in sharp focus as my father pointed to the orders on his desk. The cuffs were frayed. The wool of the jacket was pilled, not even quite clean. The man’s hair was too long. His blue wool tie strangled his reddish neck in a tight knob. And that salute as he left—ridiculous.
The hat’s shiny visor was cracked, gray cardboard showing in the little split. It was a costume, not even a good one. And his shoes? I hadn’t looked at his shoes. I stayed with his face. The commanding smile. The Robert Mitchum sexiness.
Why was all this so evident now, why was I so easily hoodwinked at the time? I sat at my father’s desk and looked at his face that was really severe, not the mock-sternness of the navy officer broadly playacting a big man.
My father brought out a letter. It was from the man’s mother. Or rather it was a letter from a lawyer representing the mother. Her address was the Bayard address where the roses and the chartreuse orchids and the wreath and the Christmas tree had been delivered. The letter included a copy of a public notice the woman had placed in the classifieds of the St. Paul Pioneer Press several years earlier notifying anyone who cared to know that she, Mrs. Thomas So-and-so of whatever number on Bayard Avenue, hereby disavowed all responsibility for any debts or encumbrances incurred by her son, Thomas Jr., same last name, No Known Address, under any name or alias he might use from this day forward.
Will she pay? I asked in horror.
“No,” my father said, looking down at the orders, “we can’t ask her to pay.”
The navy officer—I couldn’t think of him as anything else—had skipped town, he said.
Fresno, I thought. As for the FTD order for the three dozen roses—”We’ll have to eat that, too,” my father said, a rare weariness in his voice.
I’d been incredibly stupid. Yet he didn’t scold, didn’t admonish. There was no punishment, no demand or suggestion that I pay it all back out of my own wages. No sermon. I went upstairs to the showroom chastened, but apparently I wasn’t in any trouble. All this would be swept under the rug of invoices and receipts, taken on the winds of remittances and debits that gusted through the business office in the basement. It would all just go away.
But did I understand then or is it only possible now, in the middle of the night of the last day of this life, to see in the great framed panels of memory how my father struggled, how trapped he was as he explained the situation to me? There he is, sitting miserably at his desk with the lavish orders before him. I’ve been an idiot, naïve, so easily taken in. But he can say none of that. He, the great believer in the teaching moment, can use this experience to teach me nothing.
That was his real misery, not the hundreds of dollars I had given away so easily. I wasn’t Ollie or Mrs. Butler, I wasn’t an employee who had made a terrible mistake and must be wised up.
I was his girl, the girl he’d brought up to be—to remain always—an innocent, an eternal ingenue without guile or mistrust or even too many useful skills. No waitressing, no typing. Something better and more beautiful was awaiting me. Nothing bad could happen to me there in the store where he presided. I was free to trust everyone, everything. He didn’t realize that the trust he bred in me, the trust he demanded, dragged in its communion-white innocence the deep shadow of adulthood where, eventually, I’d have to learn the score like everybody else.
But admit it, I was already well on my way to being an ex-innocent. Worse: I was becoming a phony innocent, a pretend naïf. I’d seen it all, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to see it. So I un-saw it. Didn’t see the fakery. Didn’t see the scam. Saw only the charm and happiness of the moment, the handsome man with the fabulous smile and a desire to give lavish gifts. It was what my father trained up in me, Miss Muffet on my flowery tuffet with a wee book of poesy.
I was never to approach the world with narrowed eyes, never to be the one to get the better of anybody. I won’t be a file clerk like Leo the Lion, and I won’t sit in a corner nursing Celtic grudges, keeping tabs on people. The romantic photograph—the one propped above the piano where I practiced under their lazy erotic gaze—is only a still shot. In the movie—our actual life—their faces are different, or hers is. And not just because they’re older. She learned to level the world with a strangely knowing mistrust, an ice chip of irony on her slouched shoulder.
But my father wants me to stay as she was, caught in the romance of innocence. I’m never to morph from the romantic lead who leans with sweet dependence against him under a cottonwood tree along the Mississippi.
Even as he swept the orders from his desk like a bad poker hand, my father said nothing. I wasn’t in trouble, I couldn’t be scolded. I was what he wanted me to be, his daughter, a truster in the lovely surface of things, another believer. His girl.
How often he still comes back to me, my navy officer. He appears at odd moments—he’s here right now, another snapshot I took without knowing it, his face shining at me on the big screen of the night-black hospital window, winking his Robert Mitchum wink.
He comes out of the cold from Fifth Street on Christmas Eve, striding across the showroom, the last customer of the holiday, my best customer ever. The laughable costume, the lavish smile, his final jaunty salute.
Was that ever his lucky day. I was waiting for him. How may I help you? He didn’t even need to do much acting. I made him up all on my own.
Chapter 6
“YOU’RE A POET,” my father said one day out of the blue. Said thoughtfully, and echoing tonight as if he were still waiting for a response. I’d published two books of poems by then, so this wasn’t news. But he said it as if acknowledging an unlikely concept. We were in his car, going to a doctor’s
appointment.
Tonight as he repeats this remark in the dark by her bedside I understand for the first time—how did I miss this before?—that he wasn’t making a statement of fact. He was framing a conundrum. He was wondering how this came to be.
Good question, Dad.
You either believe in ghosts or you don’t. The stray fragments of old conversations, the voices of the dead—you’re a person they talk to, mumbling in your head, or they don’t, the little people who invade the mind-heart or whatever this engine of self is.
I struggled, like any mid-century daughter worth her feminist salt, fighting to the death (which is where we are right now), not to become my mother. But still they keep talking, the little people of her Irish mind, insinuating themselves—herself—into the crevices of my supposed self. Even my father seems to have become one of them, murmuring vatic remarks in my inner ear, my down-to-earth Stan making a cameo appearance, becoming a bit of poetry, the way a detail turns into an emblem.
A summer night. He and I were standing on the front porch, one of those wild midsummer Midwestern thunderstorms. We were always drawn to the jags of lightning and the ionized air. Mother and Peter didn’t join us. They stayed inside, waited for it to clear. But Dad and I always gravitated to the screen porch in a big summer storm.
Peter, his future as an oral surgeon rising in his broody passion for small, sane moves, sat at the dining-room table, holding a tweezer, poised to attach a decal to the wing of the balsa-wood airplane he was finishing. Mother was in her history book, a wreath of cigarette smoke rising around her. Parnell is dead, dead. The lightning flashed madly down the black asphalt of Linwood. Somewhere nearby a tree cracked with a terrible contorted basso screech. “Somebody’s going to lose a tree over on St. Clair or Lombard,” my father said quietly, not really to me. The air was gorgeous, fresh, completely alive.
His hand rested on my shoulder with its lyric weight. Scary storm, but not scary for us. We’re okay over here on Linwood, a block away, a world away from St. Clair and Lombard, and safe.
HE COULD ACCEPT the notion of my being “a poet” better than my mother’s idea that I was “a writer.” Poets are innocents, they belong to the ether and the earth. They don’t narrow their eyes and tell tales as “writers” do, proving in their mean-spirited way that the earthlings are filled with greed and envy, that the world is a spiral of small-minded gestures. Poets, at least, don’t tell tales on other people. They celebrate beauty. They make much of little. Flowers, birds, the names of things are important to them. So being a poet was all right, though hopeless.
There was, even in “tragic” poetry, a note of optimism, of hope, the lyric lilt of meaning and significance. And he was determined to be cheerful all his life. A long faithfulness to seeing the sunny side—from the Czech neighborhood down by Schmidt Brewery where Frankie died that awful death, scalded horribly in a giant vat he was repairing. Someone, not knowing he was in the copper chamber, turned on the boiling water. He lived three weeks. Stan was left, the only brother amid a bevy of sisters. Important to buck everybody up. He was cheerful all the way through his two unbroken marriages—to my mother and to the greenhouse.
Only when we went up north, the two of us sitting for hours in the little boat waiting for a nibble on the glassy lake, only then he wasn’t cheerful. He pointed out the Indian burial grounds on the side of the river once. They leave food there, he said. It’s their religion.
But for the most part he was silent, absolutely without affect. Finally let down his guard. I would chatter, ask him things. I got nothing—nothing—back. He just sat there, staring. Natter, natter, natter, my voice doing all the cheerfulness, his voice fallen silent as the midsummer fronds of wild rice made low hissing sounds in the wind. His real being, bleached to virtual absence by sun and water, descended to the soundless fish world where you didn’t need to say a thing.
Something about silence, something of silence was at the resistant core of poetry. Silence had to do with honesty. Just sit in the boat and stare at the lake’s untroubled surface. No opinions, no judgments. No Leo the Lion—she almost never went out in the boat. Not just because she preferred to sit reading her book by the diamond-shaped mullioned windows he’d salvaged from the greenhouse. I have that fine Irish skin, she would say. She could not bear the sun, and on those rare occasions when she did go for a boat ride (she never “went fishing”), she covered up to her fingertips, and wore a vast mushroom of a hat as broad as her shoulders, a blob of white sunscreen on her pale face under its straw eave.
He went hatless, shirt open to the sun, his dark skin bronzing, never burning. Your father looks like an Indian. Said with admiration. A real man. But alone in the boat, he and I, all conversation fell like a lead sinker. What’s there to say? What you want with your line in the water is down there somewhere. Don’t say a word. Don’t do a thing. Wait for a nibble from the danky deep. Something will catch. That’s poetry.
Still, sometimes he would come out with something—not when the two of us were alone in the middle of the lake’s stillness. There silence was supreme. He chose the confessional of the car for his brief revelations. Not long after he said You’re a poet, as we drove to yet another doctor’s appointment, he said out of nowhere, Your mother’s become quite a handful.
He was referring to the pretty girl with the high cheekbones barely leaning her wandlike body against his under the cottonwood tree. The same girl who walked into World History at Mechanic Arts High School in 1934 and saw him surrounded by the fast set. The girl with a shy smile and dazzled blue eyes. The girl he allowed, in time, to adore him. Who, unbelievably, had become quite a handful.
Strange that their courtship story was always hers—but then, all stories were: The room was on the second floor. I thought I was late for class. I was running down this long corridor that was dark. There were lockers on both sides. I was out of breath when I opened the door. The room was bright and it hurt my eyes. I saw him right away. He was sitting by the big windows on the far side of the room, sunlight was pouring in, and I thought: That’s the best-looking boy I ever saw. He was saying something and everybody was laughing.
His own version of their meeting, laconic latecomer to love, adored brother of his three big sisters, best-looking boy who never wanted for a girl, had none of her atmospheric shimmer: We were standing in line for graduation, and this girl—I sort of knew her, she was a friend of Charlotte, the girl I was going out with—was standing behind me. “I suppose they’re having a party for you at home tonight,” I said to her. Just for something to say. But they couldn’t give her a party at home she said—her grandmother was dying. “Want to go out, then?” I said. And that was that.
SO HOW DID I “become a writer,” vocation approved of by Leo the Lion, wondered over by silent Stan? My brother was the first in the family to go to college. He signed up for the straight and narrow, barely eighteen and on his way to becoming a dentist, as serious as if he too had come up out of the Depression. Just four years later, and I was a different generation: the sixties and watch out, a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
I started as a music major at the University. My career plan was actually fairly decorous too, if stagier than dentistry: I wanted to crash away on a huge Mason & Hamlin before rapt crowds who leapt to their feet, shouting thunderous approval. Flowers are tossed on the stage. Travel whisks me from hall to hall, continent to continent. I bow in my black velvet with the plunging neckline.
When this future laughed me out of the five-hour practice sessions my freshman year—legato, legato, Patricia, can’t you hear it?—I found my way to the English Department, haven of dashed hopes, which shared the morose corridors of Vincent Hall with Mortuary Science. There I settled in. No bowing from the stage in black velvet. But hadn’t I chosen the wordy life long ago and just hadn’t realized it? Think of those girlhood summers lying like an invalid on the front porch, reading reference-book-heavy nineteenth-century novels so weighty they made my arms ache more tha
n practicing the piano ever did.
It was bliss to discover that my work from now on, apparently, was to read a lot of novels and poems in the upper reaches of Vincent Hall while, somewhere below us, the Mortuary Science undergrads did whatever they had to do. I screwed up my nerve and applied for a job writing articles and reviews for the student newspaper and magazine. I acquired a byline.
My first reviewing assignment was a performance by Rudolf Nureyev. A free ticket and a notebook in my lap. A professional. In my review I allowed that Nureyev’s jumps were “quite deft.”
I felt pretty deft myself. Not only had I never used the word “deft” before, I’d never before seen a ballet. I brooded a bit that I should have said his jumps were “nimble.” But even this proved I must be a writer: Wasn’t that the job—worrying about whether to use “deft” or “nimble”? And there I was next morning, name in boldface under the headline, giving his nibs a critical pat on the back. Dance on!
Thus began my double life—girl reporter and cultural know-it-all by day, dutiful St. Paul daughter by night. The University was my Manhattan, locus of art and romance and lovely trouble, dirt and filth, glamour and blessed foreignness. And St. Paul was ... well, still St. Paul, the cinder hearth to which my arty Cinderella must scurry back before the stroke of midnight.
I fled in the morning in a carpool with my brother and two of his dentist buddies who discussed suctioning and gummy mixtures for dental impressions as we drove down Summit and dipped along River Road, the Mississippi deep in a crevasse below the bluffs, until we reached the campus. I’m not walking on the same side of the street with you if you’re against the war, my brother said furiously one morning after one of my lashings of the Johnson Administration.
He walked south to the bombastic new medical complex, I turned north where the arts and humanities crouched in the phony classical buildings hugging the Mall. I stayed on campus as late as I could, working on the magazine with my smart new friends who lived in impressively dumpy apartments and had to report in to no one. I tried to keep the fact that I lived at home a secret, but it was impossible to cover this shameful truth. I still went to Mass on Sundays, another humiliating bit of my bio.
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