The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  When everyone else was talking about hitting the bars, I was rushing to catch my ride at the dentistry building where my brother introduced me as a peacenik to his lab-coated fellow students who stared at this interplanetary visitor from the humanities.

  I gazed back in a louche manner. For the first time in my life, I was an outsider. It felt terrific. A tincture of danger glinted in the dark eyes I inherited from my father and the priest-hating Czech side. Yes, I’m against the war. I’m going out with a guy who turned in his draft card. Women’s lib—you bet. Marijuana—sure. Believe in God?—I’m still thinking about that one.

  Below his buzzed crew cut, my brother’s china-blue Irish eyes looked at me, aghast. I was finally getting somewhere.

  DREAMS OF ESCAPE. Plots and ambitions. But think again. Is that where it started, at the University? I was supposed to go to the Catholic girls’ college. It’s come to our attention that you’ve applied to the University, Sister Mary Helen said. She’d called me into her office at the end of my senior year. You’ll lose your faith over there.

  My heart leapt like a fawn.

  I was right after all. What I wanted was over there. Not just what I wanted, but what I wanted to ditch. Everything they had worked so hard to give me. How I wanted to unload it—and them too. The parental embrace, the suffocating tentacles of love. When I first heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the ballad “She’s Leaving Home,” I gasped. John Lennon had plagiarized my life.

  I’m running on empty here, this is an endless night—all these nights have been endless. Her hand, so cool, is not dead, and her voice is still alive, if this strange breathing, deep and rhythmic, can be called her voice. Exhaustion is a high, the sparks of clairvoyance snap and ignite connections you never made before.

  I’m glad to have this yellow legal pad, notes I’ll use to make something. Are you working? What’s it about? I’m lucky to be a believer in the little cult of note-taking. Crazy, how lucky you feel holding a dying woman’s hand in the dead of the night (great phrase—it’s earned its right to be a cliché, too bad it can’t be used).

  So, pivot the building. Turn away from the Cathedral and the History Center. Face the river. Where the city started, where your father took you to see the floods. This is where life begins, creatures making their way, slithering out of mud into air, moving from water to land, from image to story, the evolution of life. That’s where all the poetry started, Dad. Where we went together in springtime.

  Just don’t go down to the river. My mother was speaking sharply as we headed out the back door, Dad and I, for our Sunday ride in the Ford. She stayed home fixing dinner, roast pork, a brittle-skinned baked chicken, some meal demanding no attention, allowing her to sit and read. We go on adventures.

  The Mississippi had surged over the St. Paul levee, achieving, as the papers loved to say, “historic levels.” These were the floods that ruined yet again—but this time for the last time—the little houses of the Italian families who for generations had settled on the floodplain, trusting to luck.

  It was understood, no doubt by my mother too, that the levee was exactly where we would go, that the river was our only possible destination that day. Her hand-wringing ratified the value of witnessing devastation and ruin. Damage drew us to the river, the illicit festival provided by conflagrations, inundations, whatever depredations come near enough—but not too near—to become “sights.” Our mind-numbingly ordinary St. Paul world was now illuminated. It was framed by significance. Not simply ruined, but dignified by disaster. The levee was no longer a blear background. It mattered. Was worth a look. Thrilling because engulfed.

  About this time, Sister Mary Louise, gentle piano teacher with bulging misty eyes, had me laboring over a watery Debussy piece—La Cathédrale engloutie, the engulfed cathedral. Strange title, as if water were rising over our own Cathedral, supposedly safe on high ground, up the hill. Something about that title wasn’t just weird—it was accurate to our life in a way impossible to explain. I recognized it, submerged for weeks in the murky piano piece I practiced for my lesson. Poetry and music could grasp an accuracy so intimate, it was beyond what you could say to anyone. Buried truth was seized up in metaphors and melody. Engulfed, drowned, suffocating—St. Paul, us. But unspoken, almost unthought.

  Only poems and music, it seemed, could express the real things, which were the unsayable things. That was odd—that the unsayable things could be expressed and required expression more than anything because they were inexpressible. Music, poems could do this. They went beyond “communication.” A spreading comfort rippled from this fact, and something of terror too. Poetry and music weren’t “stories,” weren’t social as fiction was social. They came up behind you, grabbed you, made you part of what they said. It was uncanny and captivating.

  In Vincent Hall we read Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry. “If I read a book,” she said in a letter, “and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

  You were a poet, she was saying, not just if you wrote a poem but if you could really read one—the words of a true poem were that exact, that completely in register with the whole experience of existence, they belonged to the one who responded to them. I understood what an engulfed cathedral meant. I had played the notes, I took in the mysterious words. Harboring them in this way, I seemed to have written them. They were mine. That was poetry. And everybody harbored this knowledge. That was why poetry was the most important thing in the world.

  My father, sitting next to me, driving the car along the floodwaters, was even more exact. He understood this deluge was different from previous floods. Its ferocity would call down federal mandates and earnest city planners with newly devised safeguards, rules, and regulations. More than an event, this flood would be seen as a condition. It would take an essential part of his hometown geography and erase it. Maybe he drove down to the sodden levee not far from the greenhouse on that vacant, gray Sunday in a private salute to his own domestic past—the immigrant Czech neighborhood not far from the Italians along the river.

  Such snug urban enclaves were just then eroding. The children of these tight, tender old neighborhoods were taking to the urban margins, to what, years later, we would call sprawl. Not that he ever left. He stuck with the city. The Italians were departing in this drastically biblical way, flooded out, but the effect was the same, if swifter: the disappearance of his world. The Corps of Engineers had already ruled that the little houses must be cleared away. The humans had to go. No federal or state money for rebuilding. The Italians were shooed to the new suburbs, punished finally for foolishly hugging the side of the river all these years.

  Think of the pianos! my mother had cried that morning, looking up from the dismaying front-page pictures of drowned houses, the suddenly Venetian streets where boats with outboard motors idled obediently at submerged stop signs. Women on the levee sang opera music as they hung out the wash, my mother said. Every house down there had a piano! As if this cultural refinement should have saved them. From this remark I saw cartoon grand pianos with warped veneers of walnut and spruce, their tops propped up like heavy sails as they bobbed down the swollen river, women warbling arias from the tops of doomed houses.

  It was the last neighborhood along our part of the river. For years after that, the rest of my girlhood and beyond, the levee was given over to a scrap-metal yard where smashed and flattened cars lay stacked like cords of firewood for a colossal bonfire that was never lit. From time to time bands of homeless people set up temporary camps along the river-banks in the warm months—and were eventually hounded out. The river became the disdained territory of throwaways, used-up objects, discarded people.

  Yet now the city has announced it intends to “do something” with the river. Backhoes mound up a steeper levee: a developer has gained rights to build “housing
units,” luxury condos in the very place where, that spring Sunday, my father somehow convinced a cop in a patrol car that he had business past the police line and needed to “investigate.” He used the word—my mild father—with grave command as if he were in charge here. The cop waved us through.

  We drove in, water rising to the Ford’s hubcaps. Instinctively, I pulled my feet up from the floorboards, my arms around my raised legs on the gray upholstered seat. My father didn’t speak, didn’t seem to notice me huddled next to him. We might have been in his little aluminum boat, up north, waiting for a nibble. Dad ... Dad, I said.

  No reply. He drove slowly, so slowly I had the sensation we might be sinking, going down, not forward. Engulfed. He leaned over the steering wheel, staring intently out the windshield. The water made soft slipping sounds against the car. These waves were worrisome, but his face was calm. He did seem to be investigating, as he had told the patrolman.

  He was framing his pictures, I think. Making his album, in effect writing his poems. What was that dangerous snatching of last pictures on the floodplain but the desperate reach of photographic memory, logging his world as it disappeared? Snapshot by snapshot, still after still.

  Once, when I was in college, the highway up to his cabin by the Indian cemetery was barricaded by AIM. The Indians were demonstrating for their hunting rights or maybe against the development of domesticated wild-rice paddies. He couldn’t get up to the lake that weekend and was uncharacteristically angry.

  I knew nothing about it, but of course I was on the side of protest. Any protest. They have to fight, I told him archly from my broad English-major view of things. They’re being forced to give up their culture.

  That’s what you do, he said grimly. I had to give up my culture too. He spoke with the biting voice of Leo the Lion, her growl of impacted fury. Not a fury I associated with him. But there it was—the white ethnic bitterness smoldering just below the surface of his modest upward mobility. You don’t protest, don’t complain. But there it is under the amber waves of grain.

  He impressed on his dark eyes the devastation that appeared before us that spring Sunday as we slid past images of ruin, which, strangely, were not unbeautiful, no matter how sad they were, sunk in the muck of that ghostly neighborhood, lost finally in wordlessness. Engloutie.

  He loved the river, was drawn to it. We trailed along it, out of town on day trips to hamlets well off any main road, places that betrayed a tendency toward tatter and resignation. Bitter coffee and Grain Belt, burgers and fries, catfish breaded stiff as hardtack, and a pool table in the back—Put some rosin on your cue, Patricia. Smiling at his girl who could call a bank shot to the corner pocket. And in these places, the faces of people who smoke, who will always smoke, who are not in a rush because they are calm but because they are becalmed. Maybe chronically unemployed.

  These were the smallest river towns, the ones that don’t even see themselves as towns, just a bar, maybe a marina off the main channel, bait shop. Two bars, make that three, Tombstone pizzas they can nuke for you.

  The Midwest. The flyover, where even the towns have fled to the margins, groceries warehoused in Wal-Marts hugging the freeways, the red barns of family farms sagging, dismantled and sold as “distressed” wood for McMansion kitchens, the feedlots of agribusiness crouched low to the prairie ground. Of all the American regions, the Midwest remains the most imaginary, ahistorical but fiercely emblematic. It’s Nowheresville. But it’s also the Heartland. That weight again: the innocent middle. Though it isn’t innocent. It’s where the American imagination has decided to archive innocence.

  The American story line moves from east to west. To end a book with the protagonist standing at the Pacific’s edge is, for an American, to achieve narrative metaphor. Whether transcendence or collapse hardly matters—the edge is not just the end. It’s the ending. A point much considered in “Narrative Modes of the American Novel” in Vincent Hall.

  But we followed the earlier American experience of arrival, of seeking and finding and taking north to south, the coureurs de bois and their Indian guides staking our river. “If things had gone a little differently,” Leo the Lion, history buff, liked to say, “you’d be speaking French, kid.”

  Our little drives along the river were dream trips, my father silent as his fisher-self in a boat. We were islands adrift in a mysterious, largely submerged water land called the Upper Midwest, passing by unreal places with mysterious names known mostly to towboat pilots, landings and sloughs without road access or populations, places erased by the Corps of Engineers or never settled, abandoned now except by the agate type used to inscribe their names on river charts—Winters Landing, Coon Middle Daymark, Ferry Ruby Light, Bad Axe Island, Betsey Slough and Millstone Landing, Canton Chute, Winfield Access, Shady Creek, Point No Point.

  The automatic elegy of words that name former islands, the poetry of sandy riverbanks, stands of cottonwood and willow, habitations and landmarks long gone, even from memory. This is where he took me, silent Stan, where stories fell silent and opinions lapsed into the river muck, and you were just supposed to look. Take it in—the beautiful, disappearing world.

  He liked to look across the river, watch Canada geese rising in formation over the great flyway. He appreciated a muddle of pastel light and mist across wide water. Just look at that, he would say to me or to Buddy, to anyone with eyes to see.

  But that flood-time morning as I sat curled up beside him, terrified of the rising water, frightened that we might be swept away with the imaginary pianos and the very real houses, he was on a mission. He was making sure his world, though lost, would not disappear. He would see it. Like Leo the Lion, he was taking things in. But for him there was no descriptive dash, no yakety-yak. I was not his audience in the floating Ford as I was hers at the breakfast table. His sense of notation was different. You wrote for yourself alone, just to get it down, not to charm, not to enthrall. Lean over the steering wheel, take your silent pictures, don’t respond to the child’s alarmed voice—Dad ... Dad...

  Let the kid be scared witless. Forget her, forget everything. Don’t say a thing, don’t explain, don’t comfort, don’t reach out. For once, ditch your responsibilities.

  Give over to the heavy lifting of the real freight of your soul. Take your pictures. Just for yourself, take them. That’s how everything turns to silence, how history passes through your heart, how the world reverts to poetry.

  Chapter 7

  FOR ALL MY GIFT OF GAB, I had my silences too, often infuriated, slamming the door behind them all. I was misunderstood—needless to say. I hated them all, my brother who read my diary and laughed—him especially. Strange, how snappish he and I both were, how inwardly furious. Not angry about anything. The fury was like sap rising, trying to get out. You’re my only friend, I sobbed aloud—speaking to my room with the slanted roof as to a person, a trusted confidant. A sign on the door: LEAVE ME ALONE—THAT MEANS YOU!

  Ours wasn’t the aggrieved story of the misunderstood or mistreated. We were spoiled with devotion.

  Leo the Lion would say, You’re independent as a hog on ice. So much for my attempts to be alone, to be free. It was all ridiculous. Brooding was better than raging. You vant to be alone, she would say—not unsympathetically.

  There were many ways to be alone in that small house.

  Leo the Lion led the way in this department. She said the Rosary, holding the beads tight in her pocket, a good reason not to be interrupted. She listened to the Twins on ‘CCO in the dark, another underdog to grieve over.

  But reading was the great escape. I hardly understood I was following her lead, summers, the two of us sitting on the screen porch, each with a book, she in Ireland, I on the English moors.

  In winter, skating was even better, the whole body thrown into orbit. Ice-skating was my sport, the only athletic passion of my piano-playing, book-reading, indoor girlhood. A northern pleasure, a cold-weather art form. But more than that: skating was urban. Unlike skiing or ice fishing
, skating did not belong to the landscape. It did not partake of the wilderness. Nor did it offer the illusion of being at one with nature, the false claim of touching the wild.

  The best skating was frankly domesticated—a rink tended and groomed like a Zen sand garden. A rink’s severe rectitude was translated into ice laid down in immaculate arrays of water lofted by a solitary man wielding the gray snake of a fire hose under a city arc lamp. There were no Zambonis tooling around the rink sweeping sprays of water onto a perfect surface. Our rink was kept in glass-flat perfection by a man moving from left to right under the arc lamp alone in slow, tai chi movements, the fan of water falling, forming a fresh membrane of ice every night and again every morning.

  The city had public rinks, but our neighborhood rink was a club you joined. The Olympic, it was called, as if gliding on its flawless surface raised you nearer to the gods. And though it was private, the winter membership fee was so low it seemed everyone could—and did—join the Olympic Skating Club. Something that could not be said of the summer tennis membership that we, at least, could not afford. The orange clay tennis courts of summer with their white-painted lines meant nothing to us. In the fall, I counted the days till the last sinewy tennis players gave up, and the air hardened. Then it was safe to flood it all over and make the summer game go away, the spongy tennis courts sunk beneath our austere ice.

  The Olympic—oblong rink and grotty warming house—was owned by one of those benign older men who never succeed in leaving boyhood behind and who manage, from purity of heart and hopeless inability to do anything else, to make a living from the games of childhood. His name was Skip. He sold skates and hot chocolate in the warming house, and kept strict rules, though I can’t remember what the rules were. But he had no discipline problem. You didn’t mess with Skip. It was Skip’s ice.