The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

  We lived directly across the street from the rink, and I was able to keep tabs on the status of the ice by turning out the hallway light and standing at the landing window in the dark, spying across as Skip unlocked the warming house for early-morning hockey practice, which ruined the afternoon ice, chopped up by the sticks—I had complained to Skip about this several times. “The boys have to practice,” he said. “They got games.” Said with the urgency of a man commanding men. My point: it wasn’t fair to the figure skaters. That is, the girls. I got nowhere. But it was a first feminist moment.

  Around dinnertime, Skip flooded the rink for the big Friday-night crowd. Show night, date night, be-there-or-be-square night. I stood at my post on the landing. My brother called from his room, his voice tight with expectation, “They flooding yet?”

  We raced across the street, the first ones on the rink, stepped out and made the virgin blade strokes on the perfect surface, our marks incised on the gray gloss of ice, a pearl-dull mirror keen with a frail layer of just-flooded water. The ice, so new, made a particular sound when you first cut it, and this sound—not a squeak, not a hiss, but a cello note like heavy silk slowly, intentionally ripped—grasped the heart and made you insanely happy to be alive.

  There were some adults who skated, but not, thank God, our parents. They stayed away. The ice was our world, and their old black leather long-blade skates stayed on a peg in the garage, evidence that they were no longer in the game. We alone flew through the air with the greatest of ease. They had skated once, but that was long ago, in the same lost age when they stood under the cottonwood by the river, leaning into each other.

  Skip had mounted a loudspeaker on the warming-house roof and played music that ricocheted off the brick wall of the sweetshop at the end of the rink, creating a bowl of syrupy pop music—”Lady of Spain,” and anything by Perry Como, his favorite. He had a no–Elvis Presley policy. Sometimes he played Rudolf Friml waltzes, which we protested strenuously.

  The ice was best early in the evening, my brother surprisingly graceful, skating into the wind, pretending he had a stick in his hands, faking to the left, faking to the right. I skated fast too, taking the whole oval as my orbit, nobody in my way, cutting the ice backward, twirling in a dizzy spin, coming out of the spin in a daredevil loop. My skates sheered the ice, and the fizzy sound of the blades said solo, solo, solo.

  IT’S LONG GONE, of course, the Olympic. But it would be closed by this time of year anyway. April, the nothing time, between skating and tennis. A perfect time to sit and wait.

  All the waiting over these years. The hospital beds, the late nights careening to the ER, logy afternoons in doctors’ offices, hauling laundry back and forth from rehab units and care centers. No wonder, even though I’ve been told you understand ... this is it, I feel unalarmed. We’ll just sit here, the way we always do.

  Pneumonia, eye surgeries, broken bones, pneumonia again—and yet again. Her various maladies were punctuated from time to time like the clang of a church bell by Stan’s relentless cardiac condition, the only thing wrong with him.

  One year she stumbled off a low curb—broken kneecap, hideous pain, surgery, her leg never right after that, walking with a cane she used to jaunty effect. The knee was actually worse than breast cancer—she had that too. Dad and I stood on either side of her bed when she woke. She clawed at her bandaged chest. They took it, Mary, he said softly, hand on her shoulder, they had to take it. She moaned and fell back asleep. She never looked in my direction, perhaps wasn’t aware I was there too.

  But, ever the teller of tales, she recast the story into a fond mother-daughter tableau: And Patricia was right there. She never left my side. She’s the one who had to tell me.

  As if I ever told her anything.

  So cancer didn’t get her. And she didn’t stop smoking (Well, it wasn’t lung cancer). She would have nothing to do with the hospital social worker who wanted her to join a Reach for Recovery support group. A bunch of one-breasted women? Get that woman out of here. But then, at home, calling me to help her out of the bath, saying fearfully, “Have you seen it? The ... wound?”

  “Oh yes,” I said airily as I opened the bathroom door. “I saw it in the hospital before you were aware of anything. I’m used to it.”

  She wasn’t the only one who could fake the truth for the desired effect. I’d never seen her without the dressing since the surgery. I looked with inward horror and outer bluff as I helped her from the tub, the great gouge of her chest close-up, curving all the way under her arm. It looked like a quarter of her upper torso had been stripped away. It was one of the old-style mastectomies from the seventies, sheaths of muscle lifted away with the lymph glands and breast tissue, and then—whistle in the dark, hope for the best. For years after that she wore a bra with a spongy prosthesis stuffed in one cup. Where’s my breast? Anybody seen my breast? Then finally she let that go too, going one-breasted into old age like the Amazon she was.

  Sometime after the mastectomy she got serious about travel. She had but one destination, of course. She flew to Shannon with a girlfriend from high school, and later with a Catholic tour group, later still with a woman from church. She added Rome one time too. Only it wasn’t “Rome.” It was “the Vatican.” She even convinced my father to go to Ireland once. It was okay, he said. A lot of time on the bus.

  An experience he didn’t care to repeat when she lobbied for a return trip. I’ve seen it, he said. Patricia, you go. I asked him if he’d like to go to Prague.

  Nope.

  Holland to see the tulip market?

  Uh-uh.

  By this time I’d gone to Czechoslovakia—to his bafflement (Not much fun over there, is it?), and to her dismay (Why don’t you go to Ireland? They’re the writers).

  Some atavistic sense of duty—offer it up— urged me forward. Okay, I told my father, I’ll go.

  The idea of traveling with her, being with her, filled me with dread. The same adolescent revulsion I’d felt whenever she dared to touch me in high school. Even a pat on the shoulder—Stay away! As if she were leaching out the life force instead of giving it.

  But this was duty, perhaps the last duty. I seemed always to be undertaking final moments that turned out to be not final at all, just another two-step in death’s wily dance. You’ll never be sorry you’re doing this, people said with unctuous approval when they heard I was going to Ireland with her, offering their own stories of last good deeds done, self-regarding vignettes of sacrifices made, efforts expended for parents no longer on the planet. You’ll never be sorry.

  They didn’t understand that she was never going to die. She was just going to keep almost dying. The illogic of this thought refused to budge from my brain. I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, she’d howled on the sidewalk in front of the flower shop—years ago. But wishing doesn’t get you there. She would hang by her fingernails from the ledge of life.

  Just like her own aunt Mamie, little bit of a thing who’d been born in a stagecoach going west from Minnesota to Oregon—and of course, being us, had scuttled back again to God’s country when there proved to be no gold and no decent farmland in Oregon. Ancient Mamie sat on Mr. Williams in our living room, tapping her foot, saying, I believe I’ll have another piece of the lemon angel pie. She lived forever. When she finally went to “a home,” my mother visited her every week, even when she no longer recognized anyone, when she probably no longer knew she was a person and not just a bit of lost being curled on a mattress.

  My mother would become Aunt Mamie and I would become my mother. It was written. Somewhere.

  You seem depressed, a friend said. How do you see your future?

  I’ll take care of my father till he goes. Then my mother. Then my husband. Then I’ll go.

  Good God, she said. You should see someone.

  But of course I “saw” no one, “talked” to no one. Kept slogging along. My idea of “dealing with” the situation was to snap at my husband over nothing. Then we got to make up.
That felt good.

  It was precisely because I could not imagine her being dead-and-gone, that two weeks alone with her were such an eternity to contemplate, driving on the wrong side of the road from one boggy B and B to another, sharing a room as she snored the ripping snore of a great beast, not the tiny thing she was, waging her tedious battles against the English, and—this especially—greedily exultant to have me all to herself every single second of every day for two whole weeks in God’s green land where she could discuss some refinements she was thinking about for the Archive.

  Offer it up—the only thing to do.

  And then my complete comeuppance: she was the best travel companion of my life. Easy, thoughtful, absolutely without fuss or fear, a natural with strangers, patient with changes of plan and annoying delays. She could not be disappointed, could not be jostled from her good humor, her quiet happiness.

  She urged me not to worry about a thing. Never worry about money—never worry about anything, apparently. And she knew the history—all those biographies and histories had been refined into brief narratives she could toss off as we passed a church, went by a marker. She made it all come alive. History, her subject.

  Her manner with hotelkeepers was assured and simple. She radiated a gracious and—impossible!—worldly self. People wanted to do things for her, offer extras. Waiters and clerks in stores relaxed around her, the way we had settled in with the sophisticated customers at the flower shop, the people who knew what was what. The spenders. Except she wasn’t a spender. Sensible about money always, her little cache of traveler’s checks covering her needs, shocked at the treats I imposed, the restaurants I chose, the nights at the Cork estate with the two-star restaurant. But holding her own there too. I believe I’ll have the salmon, smiling, assured.

  My daughter’s so good to me.

  Her minions beamed upon me.

  Her trim leatherette suitcase with its Eire stickers from earlier trips, the size 6 petite no-iron blouses and skirts tucked neatly on one side, her cartons of Merit 100 Lites and her toiletry case (brush, comb, toothbrush, Crest, Merle Norman foundation and powder, Revlon lipstick, the bottles of Dilantin and phenobarbital) snug against her pumps. Little notebook, each day’s events tallied, a list of addresses for postcards to be sent home.

  I told her she was a great traveler, a much better traveler than I.

  It’s a wonderful life, she said. Travel.

  I suddenly wished for her, as if it would have had no bearing on me, that she had married a diplomat, had gone here, gone there. Traveled. She was that rare kind of person: at home in the world. How had I missed that? Too busy fleeing her reach, dodging the librarian who was stuffing me into the Archive still alive and kicking.

  She wasn’t at home at home, wasn’t domesticated somehow. I always liked living in an apartment. Less to think about. She, not my father, belonged to the Great World. He was the householder, the maker of homemade soup, the urger-on of home improvements. It was she who brought the foreign outlaws, Napoleon and Benito, into the house. She would have managed in Argentina, on the pampas, overseeing the vast herd of rhododendrons. Or anywhere.

  We had our regime, big breakfast in the morning (See what I mean about an Irish breakfast—people say an English breakfast, but it’s an Irish breakfast). Then in the little car (There is nothing to be afraid of about driving on the left. You just have to watch when you make a turn), down the pretty roads with their sculptural stone walls I kept remarking on (I’m glad you appreciate the fences, nothing like that in Prague, I bet), maybe choosing a destination (You should know this monastery), maybe not (Let’s get lost today), then lunch somewhere sweet with a view if possible (You spoil me!), a meander to the next B and B (Not another of those estate jobs—I like to stay with the regular people. Just give me a mean poke if I snore).

  Day after day of perfect travel.

  I worried about her unsteadiness when we walked in the hummocky greens outside Kilkenny where the owner of the B and B put her in heaven by asking, “Do you want an egg, my dear? They’re my eggs. I only eat my own eggs.”

  At the sea edge at Cork, even on sidewalks in the towns and finally Dublin, our last stop, I clapped her arm in mine, as if I were wearing her like a falcon on my sleeve. It seemed safest and came to feel natural, as if something were missing if she wasn’t right there, a light drag on my right arm.

  The highlight of the trip, she said, was The Book of Kells. From the start she treated it as our ultimate destination, and saved Trinity College for last. You understand it’s not the Catholic university. But never mind. She’d visited The Book of Kells on all her previous trips. They turn two pages every so often, she said, one to show a page of text, another to display an illuminated page. She figured she had seen twelve pages so far.

  It’s just a Bible, isn’t it? I said. She stopped in her tracks and gave me a withering look. For an educated person you’re not so smart.

  Once we were in the museum-dark room, a sanctuary, she broke away from me and bustled up to the glass vitrine, fending her way through a tangle of people with her cane. She looked around impatiently for me. Get over here.

  She had opened a space and presented, as if it were her own, the jeweled book. “This is the beginning of literature,” she said. Where she got this idea wasn’t clear, but the triumphant look on her face made it impossible to question. “This you had to see. People died to preserve this book.”

  And then, daily dessert hound, she wanted tea and cake.

  We flew home from Shannon. Nothing bad had happened—I couldn’t believe it. Better than that. Ireland had been a revelation. She had been a revelation. I realized, dumbfounded, the last time I actually paid attention to her was when we were in the kitchen together, she smoking and unfurling her descriptions of the charity ball of the night before, I imagining my way into the scene. Can’t you just see it, darling?

  The rest had been feinting and lunging, the daughterly duel of distance. In fact, had any of us listened to her? Nights at the dinner table, Dad asking what we had learned, but everyone cutting in on top of anything Mother said. One dinner, in the silence of just eating, she suddenly said in an arch dinner-party voice, “Well, Mary, what a lovely meal. You made it yourself?”

  “Yes, I did,” she replied staring at us with frigid courtesy. “Yes, I did, and I’m so glad someone is enjoying it. So good of you to say something.”

  No one laughed. And no one replied. She was left to talk her airy nothings to herself.

  We walked off the plane together, arm in arm, each of us holding a small carry-on bag. At the end of the jetway stood our men, each with a bouquet, smiling in the light. I dropped her arm, the first time I’d done that in days, and ran to my husband, let my little bag fall to the ground and threw my arms around him. Dad stood to the side waiting for Mother who came tottering along, as joyous as I, rushing toward him.

  Then, half blind from the bungled cataract operation and blinking in the light, she tripped over my bag, and fell to the ground. And broke her knee all over again.

  She left the airport in an ambulance.

  My father turned on me in helpless fury. Why did you let go of her? It’s all your fault. You can’t let go of her.

  Chapter 8

  ONCE HE WAS ABLE TO afford them, my father bought Buicks, big Dad-cars. A Honda, a Toyota, a VW? Foreign cars weren’t on his map, and he seemed never to have coveted a Cadillac, but he was gratified to leave behind the middling world of the Ford and Chevy, the cars of my girlhood. He bought his Buicks from the same dealership on University Avenue where he bought the forest-green trucks for the greenhouse. He believed he was a valued customer, he who valued his own customers. He believed they gave him a deal on his own car because he bought the company trucks there. It was the sort of thing he believed, without any particular evidence but with certainty. Good faith was repaid. A firm handshake, a sincere smile. He practiced these things.

  On the day I’m thinking of—often think of now, especially to
night when he’s come to be with me by her bedside as if we were sitting together in the boat, waiting for a nibble on Lake Minnewashta—I was driving the next-to-last Buick. Each Buick seemed bigger than the one before, though this wasn’t the case. He just kept getting smaller. He stood straight as he always had, upright as a military man, which he never was. But he was shrinking. Still handsome, more elegant even than during his gleaming Valentino years. A refined husk of his earlier self, an inviting calm on his still-unlined face.

  It was late May, the lilacs were rusting. I was driving the Buick because, without discussing it, that was how it had come to be: I did the driving, taking him to his weekly appointments with his cardiologist who micromanaged his congestive heart disease like a junk-bond trader, moving the numbers, dumping and acquiring meds in a frantic shell game, always playing the edge. The first heart attack came in his fifties, soon after he made the romantic leap and bought the flower company from the last family owners who were only too glad to unload it.

  After that there were two open-heart surgeries, then a pacemaker installed like an internal military medal high on his chest, followed by episodes of fluid on the heart, breathlessness—the works. But still pumping. Past eighty and still going to the greenhouse to play 500 on coffee break, still doing his oil paintings, even keeping up the violin, scratching away for hours till he got Dvorak’s Humoresque pretty well wrestled down to the mat. It seemed that between his heart attacks and my mother’s various maladies, much of the nation’s upward-spiraling cost of health care could be located.

  We pulled out of the driveway of the condo building overlooking the Mississippi where he and my mother had moved only six months earlier. They lived forty-nine years in the bungalow on Linwood they called 1071 as if the number were a Christian name: 1071 was the house they meant when they said “home.” When they spoke of returning to where they lived, they didn’t say they were going home. They said “back to the condo.”