WE DROVE THE ELM-SHADED streets of St. Paul Sunday mornings after Mass on a busman’s holiday to the Como Park Conservatory in the Ford, Mother and Father stationed in the classic leadership positions in the front, Peter and I enacting the turf wars of the backseat. A hermetic feeling pervaded the car, my father taking us on these trips that went, in fact, nowhere, presenting St. Paul as all the destination a person could possibly desire. I curled up in a surly corner of the backseat, a proto-Buddy, refusing to look at “the sights,” taking a book along and staring fixedly at it, proving I would travel as far away from the cocoon of ourselves as I could manage. I am windswept on the English moors, leave me alone.
As we approached Como Park, Mother pointed as usual to a spreading forest-green wood house with a gracious wraparound screen porch set back from the street on an even grander lawn on the grounds of the park, the lofty canopies of old elms casting the whole place in shade and solemnity.
This was the sheriff’s house, she said. A voice spiked with the Kilkenny acid. The house was the emblem of an abiding family political grief: my Irish grandfather, hotel barber and small-time Democratic Party ward heeler, had backed the wrong man for mayor in a key election, and—worse luck—”lost the position that was promised.”
What position? I would ask her when this story came up, as it always did when we drove to Como Park. The words “position” and “promised” shimmered in a sinister way, this life we almost possessed in the shady majesty of the city’s oldest park. A sheriff? I saw a horse, a ten-gallon hat, my plump Irish-barber grandfather improbably atop the horse, the cowboy hat atop his head. This was a sheriff. A gun in a holster. It was all unlikely, but vivid, this world we had lost. Just as we had missed the gaucho life and the spotted pony when my father hadn’t taken the job at the rhododendron ranch in Argentina. Only this was no choice, no lack of gumption. This was burn luck.
A we-wuz-robbed sensation pervaded the car, drifting from the front passenger seat where my mother sat, the sheriff’s dappled estate falling behind us. The house wasn’t far from the park conservatory, my father’s favorite place. He paid no attention to the sheriff’s house or even, probably, to the story of its loss. He always seemed filled with happiness as he took the turn off Lexington, up the rise into the park, where the conservatory’s Victorian glass dome rose like a silvery moon filled with palm trees and bromeliads.
But for this twist of unlucky fate, I understood, we would be living in the forest-green house. My father, instead of working just off West Seventh at the greenhouse, would somehow be in charge of the conservatory, the fern room and the palm house, the sunken pool garden that even in winter held a tropical paradise while outside the wind howled across the glazed snowfields of the park’s abandoned golf course.
But the interests had backed someone else for mayor. The interests decided everything. They were murky forces, unnamed, mighty in power, extensive in their reach, and Protestant. The English again, up to their mischief. My mother believed in the interests as her Irish grandmother had believed in the little people. But then, my mother believed in the little people too, and in all fierce and conniving forces. The graceful green house set in its shady splendor, this is where our mother would have—I understood should have—grown up, not as she actually did in the drab apartment on Marshall where she slept on the living-room sofa till the day she left to be married.
She seemed to accept this lost paradise of the green. This was just politics: doing certain things for a certain party, a person with prospects, being promised a position, a grand house that would change your life forever—or not, if through no fault of your own you’d backed the wrong man.
And what things did you need to do to be promised a position? What things had my barber grandfather done?
“Nothing bad,” she said vaguely.
What could a barber do? Cut the hair of the man who made the promises? For free? “Grandpa had a chair in the barbershop in the Ryan Hotel downtown. He knew a lot of people.” But it didn’t matter what you did, who you knew, if you didn’t have the luck to back the right man. And, apparently, you only got one chance for that sort of luck.
I sensed that my mother retained the pleasure of proximity to this other life. Or that, simply, she liked the story, liked being lifted out of the everyday into any story. She didn’t need the green house itself. She needed the possibility of it—and, even more, she required the loss of it. The loss was precious, an Irish legacy. A confirmation of the perverse, unbiddable nature of the forces running the world behind the delicate scrim of daily life that divided us from them. The interests. We were innocent of all that.
My barber grandfather’s brush with the big time was somehow attached in my mind with his mysterious death. He died before I was born, during the war, and his death was part of how he came to me as a personage, as a character in our family story. I knew him only as a dead man. As I knew Uncle Frankie on the Czech side. The dead were the most important. They made people cry, they made people fall silent.
My Irish grandfather had gone to the hospital for exploratory surgery—there was fear of cancer. It turned out he didn’t have cancer. No tumor of any kind. But once the dread word had been uttered—cancer—he refused to believe the good news. He was convinced the doctor was lying, refusing to tell him the awful truth. For the truth was bound to be awful. His wife couldn’t convince him, nor his two daughters. He refused to get out of bed. Turned his face to the wall, a perfectly healthy man, let his lungs fill up, and died of pneumonia in a week.
The willfulness of it took my breath away. I recognized it. My mother on the sidewalk in front of the downtown flower shop crying, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead. The fury at life for being mortal, painful, unimpeachable in its powers. A person should be able to rise above all this. Or, if not, then die, just die for the spite of it. Years later still, a Jewish friend, after a visit home with me, said, “Your mother’s so Irish, she’s almost Jewish.”
I understood dimly that for the Czechs there were no such choices as those my mother and her father, the Irish pillar, invoked, no such luck, shrewd and canny, no promises either fulfilled or broken, on the Czech side of our life the way the Irish side was ever vexed. No ghosts and ghouls, no dark interests. On West Seventh you stayed put. You worked. You were in it together. The imagination was not snagged by forest-green estates, not perversely comforted by bad luck and loss, didn’t want to die.
Paradoxically, the Czech world where religion was a cheat—priests are crooks—was more faithful than the dream-beset Irish with their accounting sheets of woes. The West Seventh faith was for itself, the huddle of family dinners, weekend fishing, picnics, the closed circuit of the Old World. It was the credo of family happiness: you can look back, but never look beyond.
The Irish lived the dangerous dreams of the imagination, toyed with the notion of rising and falling. And if politics failed them, religion never did—Mother Church with its swirling upward mobility of the spirit, a sturdy hierarchy, both earthly and spiritual that was eternal and infallible.
Not so on the Czech side where even heaven was suspect—those crooked priests—and life was earthbound, riveted to West Seventh realities. Life was not a dream on West Seventh. It was work (the brewery, the greenhouse), it was gardens and groceries (all the cooking and eating in those Mitteleuropa kitchens). And don’t forget death, Frankie lying three weeks in Anchor Hospital, knowing there was no hope. “My privates are gone,” he said to my father, his kid brother. “It’s over.”
“He knew,” my father said.
Warmth and safety, small pleasures, unspeakable wounds, concertina music, too much food, the talk at the lunch table of what would be served for dinner—this was the ever fulfilled promise of West Seventh. Nobody had anything. That was how to be happy. Have nothing.
My Czech grandmother even made a name for herself as housekeeper to “the Justice,” Pierce Butler, when he came home from Washington during the Supreme Court’s summer recess. They all swoo
ned for her Nothing Soup, so called because it was made from next to nothing. A smear of bacon grease in a cast-iron frying pan, toss in a chopped onion until the sugars burn along the edges, spoonful of flour, water, salt, grind of pepper, parsley from the kitchen garden. The fancy family begged for Nothing Soup as if for elixir. It was their favorite. Proof positive: people up the hill who could have anything longed for what we had—nothing.
THE IRISH SEEMED to die in rank order, old in their beds. And it was the Irish, higher on the hill, who were given to high hopes and intrigue and the score-keeping of religion and politics, the tending of old grudges and grievances. The color of hope was green, the nuns told us in school. And of envy.
The Irish also owned education. That’s where the you’re-going-to-college absolutism started—with the book-reading Irish. Great-aunt Aggie who had an education degree and had worked for the State of Minnesota inspecting country schools, traveling by sled in the winter, took it upon herself to question even the Church when it came to books. You could do that if you had an education. She let it be known she read books that had been put on the Index. What books? Vague about that, but she was not ashamed to be reading Doctor Zhivago as soon as it came out, though it was a known dirty book. I wanted to see for myself, she said, and there it was, bold as brass on her night table in the little apartment on Grand. Seeing for yourself was what college did for you. Trafficking in freedom.
She was also, amazingly, a divorcee. Husband came after her with a carving knife, and the priest said she had to divorce him. A priest counseling divorce! Of course she could never marry again. And don’t think there weren’t opportunities, Leo the Lion said knowingly. She broke a heart or two. This was better than love itself, breaking hearts.
The Irish side was soggy with spite—dashed hopes, missed turns, bad bets, rotten deals, deep sighs—given over finally to a swoon known as trust in the good Lord. Bile and treacle, sentimentality and bitter gall. My mother’s shudder when she, Minnesota born, would say “the English” as if she were huddled by a smoldering peat fire instead of sitting in an apartment a stone’s throw from the monster Cathedral that claimed the city for her kind, the Irish Catholics.
My father, on the other hand, was unable to muster outrage, incapable of grudge. “What did you do?” I asked him on one of our trips to the doctor when I mentioned the time he discovered the original owners of the flower business had been embezzling money right under his nose as their manager. Did I expect him to call the cops, turn them all in, initiate an endless legal ensnarement? Wear a wire? Inform? Did I expect him to quit? Just walk?
“I made a fist in my pocket,” he said.
But he didn’t say it that way. He said, “You make a fist in your pocket.”
He spoke not from the first person—what was a self but dust and forgetfulness making its predictable gestures out of deluded self-regard. He spoke from the intermediate second person, from the abyss of powerlessness to which we all are heir, the communion of inevitable suckerdom. He was dislocated from the grandiosity of personality and inner moral assurance. He did what any person—you—did when surprised by deception. Made a fist in your pocket.
His voice had the mournful discretion of one who honors peace above righteousness, who believes in the calm before and after the storm, not in the storm itself where human bad behavior rages. Realizing that “they were all in on it” was a shock. He admitted that. It cast him, spent, out of the tempest of his own good deeds, heaved up on the shore of lost illusions.
A bunch of crooks, all of them. His father, the Czech stutterer, rising up from within him. Crooks. But he said the word not in fury, just shaking his head at the wonder of it. His voice held in its calm the unshed tears of how things are. This recognition wasn’t a moment for the puny theatrics of personality, taking a stand, preening his own better character, getting out.
From this I came to see obliquely that my dreams of escape were delusions too. True, New York was more exciting, more—well, more. And Paris was out there somewhere. But what, as a girl, I wanted from the Great World Out There was not happiness or beauty. I was looking for trouble. The filth my mother wished to skirt as we passed Birdie’s Market. The world was so sad, so sad—I wanted to get where that misery-inducing action was. Not that I wanted to be unhappy, but I wanted proximity to danger, to significance, to something happening. I held to the deep Midwestern faith: that life is elsewhere. That’s where I wanted to be—elsewhere.
St. Paul’s surface was smooth and brittle. It cracked like black ice beneath us here in the land of lakes. Keep the friends of your youth. Stay with your family. People like us don’t divorce, he said with resignation, astonishing me another time in the truth-mobile of the Buick after a particularly furious harangue from my mother that left him, as usual, more dismayed than angry.
Add nothing, go nowhere, keep the same job, the same once-sweet, now-bitter wife, keep the same faith. He even said, more than once, Why go to Minneapolis? Everything you sought—danger, beauty, trouble enough—will come of its own accord. It will be all the more harrowing for happening here in the transcendent Nowheresville where it is least expected. The middle, the safety zone where he and my mother thought they lived. Elsewhere, it turns out, is right here. It’ll come and get you, you with your fist in your pocket.
Thus in all disappointments he turned back, bruised, to the radiant origins of his belief in people and the essential rightness of the world. Justice, writ in gilt on the Cathedral dome, held existence aloft. Maybe this belief, the refusal to rage or rail, is the spiral of wonder and wounds that accounts for the bravery of supposedly ordinary people in allegedly ordinary lives.
Him, for example. My mild father holding his baggie of meds, who will shamble into the clinic where he is admired for his smile, his uncomplaining graciousness. One of the living obits who, “after a long courageous battle”—dot dot dot.
This courage isn’t new to him. Death and dying are just the current theater of this plot in which the ingenue (him this time—I’m the mordant observer now, an ingenue emerita) never turns to sardonic stone. He has been, all these years, a gentleman in training to those he served with roses and Christmas trees, Fraser fir garlands, spring gardens and summer window boxes, the fantasy decor of beautiful party rooms. He wouldn’t think of complaining.
But as we drive to his doctor, in the mobile confessional, he’s been caught harboring a dark and disloyal thought. I thought I’d be, you know ... on my own.
Still, he’s mystified about where she has gone. Where is she, the pretty girl with the high cheekbones who walked into a classroom at Mechanic Arts High School in 1934 and saw him surrounded by the fast set? Fastened on him. The girl with her shy smile and dazzled, short-sighted baby blues. The girl he allowed, in time, to adore him. Who, unbelievably, went on to become what she is now: quite a handful.
ON THIS DAY, the last of the doctor visits I’m able to dredge up from memory, I pull the Buick into the dark cave of the parking garage of Midway Medical. I steer my father along the carpeted hallway to Internal Medicine, get him seated, check him in, remember to get the parking ticket stamped, sit down and pick up a tattered copy of Real Simple. My father thumbs through Field and Stream. In half an hour, an hour, who knows—his name will be called and we’ll jump, as if it were a surprise to be seeing the doctor, as if we’d only come here to page through old magazines. There is a sign on the front desk:
PLEASE INFORM US
IF YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING
MORE THAN 15 MINUTES.
But we never inform them. I get caught up in Real Simple. He snoozes. Time passes. We live in eternity.
I’m irked when I hear his name called. I was coasting along, deep in an article offering ingenious tips about cleaning-product storage I want to finish. But my father is already up, toddling uncertainly toward the nurse, galvanized as usual by social responsibility, radiating his gentle smile. I’m just fine, and how are you?
He teeters slightly on the scale. He’s
lost weight—again. A joke: the one good thing about this, don’t have to worry about my weight. Grins. The nurse laughs—that’s a good one. Oh, Stan! The way the Summit Avenue matrons used to cry in appreciation.
Then we’re alone in the examining room, me wedged in the corner chair, him perched on the examining table. Neither of us has a magazine in here. We just sit. My father looks at his hands as if they might have information.
Do you have anything you want to ask the doctor? I say in my day-care-provider voice.
Nope.
What about the itching?
He shrugs.
A tap on the door and the doctor bustles in. Ah, you’re here again—good, he says, seeing me in the corner.
He helps my father take his shirt off. The birdie rib cage is exposed, the frail withers of his back, the flaccid taffy of his upper arms. My strong father in this weakling’s body. The doctor taps, listens, moves around the body, tapping and listening. Then his hand on a swollen ankle, looking at the second hand on the wall clock, counting.
Then it’s time to hand over the baggie of meds. The doctor lines up the little plastic containers on the desk. Stares at them, frowns, checks them against what he has written on the chart. I wait for him to say, “I have some more tricks up my sleeve, Stan.”
But he looks up—at me. And then turns to my father. “We can get you on hospice now, Stan,” he says as if he’s offering to upgrade him to business class.
My father has been looking down and he doesn’t look up. Doesn’t search for a face—the doctor’s, mine—where he might cast his fear or disappointment. He keeps looking at his hands as if they were two little fellow faces he carries around for companionship.
The Florist's Daughter Page 13
