Blue Heart Blessed

by Susan Meissner

  The grieving sister thinks being whimsical is akin to being hopelessly unrealistic.

  What do you think?

  I watched the first half of Gone With the Wind tonight. It irks me to no end that we only see half of Scarlett’s wedding dress when she marries Charles. Half! Would it have been that much trouble to give us one long shot showing the whole dress? It’s not like they didn’t spend a mint already on the rest of her wardrobe. What did Vivien Leigh wear below that lovely bodice when they shot that scene? Jeans? Would it have killed the costumers to make a whole dress?

  Dear Daisy:

  Scarlett surely wore a big white skirt over a big white hoop. Anyone can tell you that.

  Romantic people are most assuredly more whimsical than the commonsense crowd. So what? Isn’t that what you’d expect?

  And shame on you for expecting a grieving woman to barter with you over the price of her dead sister’s wedding dress. You should have offered her at least $500.

  Harriet

  Six

  Some people say spring in Minnesota takes its time in arriving. Winter—that lovely white season that never wants to let go—can hang around until after Easter. It can leave and then come back. There was many a time growing up when I wore a wool cap to church on Easter Sunday instead of a bonnet. I’ve played soccer with mittens on my hands. I’ve sat before a fireplace on May Day. I’ve put blankets on newly planted window boxes when frost was predicted. There are years when it seems like you live a mere stone’s throw from the North Pole.

  And just about the time you think you’ll go mad, you see your first robin and that’s all anyone talks about, because they’ve all just seen their first robin, too. The last of the snow—truly disgusting stuff that is more brown than white—finally melts away and the heads of tulips erupt from the ground like little green noses. May can begin with a lovely set of days that tease you into thinking you can put away your coat and gloves but halfway through the month an arctic-like wind will have you shivering at softball games, track meets and outdoor graduation parties.

  Then one day, maybe it’s Memorial Day or the first of June, a lever will be thrown somewhere in heaven, and the climate will make an abrupt shift that has you fiddling with your heater one day and your air conditioner the next. That to me is not spring taking its time. That is winter taking its time. Taking its time leaving. Spring arrives in one day in Minnesota. And leaves the next.

  It is abrupt, not sluggish.

  The weather will be cold and blustery one day and then the next, warm and muggy. It can happen that fast.

  Your world can change that fast.

  If had been told when I graduated from college that in less than a decade I’d not only be in business with my mother but that I’d be living in the same building with her, I would have laughed heartily and said something like, “Better polish that crystal ball of yours.”

  It’s not that I don’t love my mother. I do. And it’s not that I mind being in business with her. I don’t mind it.

  But my mother is not a businesswoman. She’s a retired kindergarten teacher. And most new college graduates don’t want to hear a prognosticator telling them that in eight years’ time they will move in with their mother.

  That we are in business together at all is the result of the peculiar and mysterious hand of God.

  Sometimes I forget to thank him for Something Blue. The place tortures me sometimes. But most of the time, it is like balm to me.

  Something Blue is really just the ground floor of an old hotel called The Finland. Most people here in Uptown still call it that, even though it hasn’t been called The Finland Hotel in sixty-some years. The Finland was built around the turn of the previous century by two Finnish brothers whose first names I can never remember. I’ve seen pictures of what the place was like when they ran it. The lobby and first floor restaurant, which now jointly comprise the square footage of Something Blue, were paneled in rich, chocolate brown oak and boasted punched-tin ceilings and the widest crown molding I’ve ever seen. The floor was tiled in alternating blue and white tiles. Those tiles are still there. How nice for me that the Finnish flag is blue and white. It’s perfect for a bridal shop called Something Blue, don’t you think? I shudder to imagine what my floor would be like if the brothers had been from Germany.

  The Finland wasn’t the largest hotel in this part of Minneapolis—only thirty rooms—but it was lovely in a quaint kind of way. The brothers were excellent cooks and their little restaurant was known all over the area as the only place to get Karelian pies and pasha. Just so you know, pasha is a Finnish dessert made with rahka cheese, sour cream, sugar, eggs and flavored with almonds and raisins. It is usually served with Arctic cloudberry preserves. I always get hungry when I describe pasha, even though I’ve never had it. People who remember The Finland Hotel have told me what pasha is like and their faces always look dreamy when they describe it. Whimsical, even.

  The Finland was also the only hotel in uptown that had a chapel for its guests. Tradition has it that the brothers were devout members of the Orthodox church and they wanted a quiet place to pray on busy weekends when they couldn’t get to church. The chapel they built is a lovely little place. No one messed with it, thank God, when the hotel was remodeled to become retail space and apartments. The chapel is still at the back of what had been the lobby and is now Something Blue. Its door looks like it might lead to a cleaning closet or a bathroom. But I’ve left the little bronze sign the brothers made a century earlier that simply reads kappeli. Chapel. There are only six pews inside, one wrought iron candelabra and one hexagonal stained-glass window. There used to be a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus but it was sold years ago. So actually, I guess the room is rather empty. But it’s still the most peaceful room in the entire world, in my opinion. I love to escape there.

  The Finnish brothers never married so when they died, one in 1942 and the other in 1946, the sole heir was a sister who still lived in Finland and who decided to put the building up for sale. It sat empty and unsold for a couple years and then a couple from Wisconsin named Marvin and Delores Cheek bought it. They combined their names and christened the hotel The MarDel Inn and the place began its second life. I understand it was a happy life, but there was no more pasha and as hotel chains began to spring up around the Twin Cities, there was no longer a need for hotels with tiny parking lots on busy Uptown streets. The hotel fell into disrepair after the Cheeks sold it and none of the subsequent owners put any money into its upkeep. The lobby and restaurant were converted into retail space and the hotel rooms became those seedy kinds of places haunted by down-and-outers and cheating spouses. Architecturally, the place still oozed charm however, and as artistic and entrepreneurial people returned to reclaim Uptown, The Finland began to attract attention. Especially when it came back on the market after a twelve-year absence. It was sold last year to a developer named Reuben Tarter.

  Now here’s where it gets really interesting.

  Reuben Tarter once asked my mother to marry him.

  This was before she and L’Raine went off to college together and met my dad and his brother. It was the summer before Mom’s freshman year at St. Olaf. Reuben, who was already in college at the University of Minnesota, met her at a wedding. No kidding. Mom was a bridesmaid and Reuben was the groom’s best man. He took a liking to her and asked her out the following week. And the next and the next and the next. By the end of the summer, Reuben was head over heels in love with my mother. She was only eighteen and he was only twenty, but he asked her to marry him anyway.

  When my mother tells this story, she always has a hard time describing what it was like to turn poor Reuben down, and if L’Raine’s around, she’ll start to cry, of course. Because the awful truth is, my mother broke his heart. She wasn’t in love with Reuben. She liked him. She liked him a lot. But it wasn’t love.

  She told him they should let their relationship mature and see where time took it, which is a pretty wise answer for an e
ighteen-year-old. But Mom never did fall in love with Reuben Tarter. She fell in love with Owen Murien. That first year of college, while Reuben waited patiently to see if my mother would change her mind, she met my dad. Four years later, just after graduation, my parents were married in a double ceremony with L’Raine and my dad’s twin brother, Warren. They were each other’s maid of honor and best man. My mom and L’Raine are the only people I know who wore wedding dresses as maids of honor.

  By that time, Reuben had resigned himself to marrying someone else, which he did, and he moved away with his second-place bride to New York and became quite wealthy. My mom and Reuben exchanged Christmas cards through the years and my parents even had Reuben and his wife over for dinner once when the Tarters were in Minneapolis visiting family. I was three and I don’t remember it.

  In my mind, I didn’t actually meet Reuben until five years ago when my father had a massive heart attack and died. Reuben and his wife came to the funeral, much to my mother’s surprise. He seemed like a nice guy. A nervous blinker. A little paunchy. Kind, though. And very rich. Then, a year later Reuben’s wife passed away.

  Mom didn’t go to the funeral.

  Reuben has been to Minneapolis several times in the last four years and he has always made a point to visit my mom. L’Raine, who was widowed two years after my mother, has told her on more than one occasion to just let Reuben woo her, for pity’s sake. To enjoy the rest of her earthly days with a man who clearly loves her. But Mom has told L’Raine—every time—the same thing she had said fifty years before. You can’t marry someone you aren’t in love with.

  She’s right, of course. Yet every time I think of that phrase I want to break a dish or slam a door or kick over a trash can.

  So Reuben bought The Finland, He transformed the thirty hotel rooms into ten stylish apartments, and the old lobby and restaurant were remodeled to attract an avant garde-kind of retailer. As providence would have it, three weeks after Daniel called off our wedding, Reuben called my mom and asked if she knew anyone who could manage the apartments and the retail space. He had someone lined up for the job, but they had quit without giving notice. He was in a bind.

  And so was I.

  Mom told him I was looking for a new job. She didn’t mention that I was dying to get out of the building where Daniel still worked. She told him that I had a marketing degree, that I was business-savvy and that I’d be perfect. He told her to tell me if I wanted the job I could have it.

  Then my mom and L’Raine, who’d both heard me lament over what I should do with my wedding dress, and how there should be a store for people to sell used wedding gowns and how dresses that beautiful should be worn more than once, came to me in tandem and told me I should open a boutique just like that.

  “No one knows more about wedding dresses than you,” L’Raine had said. “You’ve been drawing pictures of wedding gowns for as long as I’ve known you.”

  I had cocked my head and said, “L’Raine you’ve always known me.”

  “Just my point.”

  And that’s how Something Blue was born.

  And that’s how I’m being reborn.

  This is my life after Daniel.

  After the death of dreams.

  Seven

  Some days, when I’m in the mood to torture myself, I’ll read the from the year that I met Daniel, the year we dated and the year we were engaged, while consuming a whole box of Wheat Thins, which I slather in peanut butter and stud with raisins.

  I am continually amazed at how different I sound to myself as I describe what Daniel was like, how he asked me out for our first date, how taken I was by his impeccable taste and social prowess. I sound so naïve. That’s what still gets me, a year later. Not the ache of being rejected, that is mercifully beginning to wane, thank God. But I still feel so foolish. Ashamed. Like I should’ve seen it coming. Only a naïve girl could’ve been as bamboozled as I was. For example:

  Dear Daisy,

  Keep your head. Don’t go falling into a place where you can’t see the bottom. Keep your hand on the rail at all times…

  And this one:

  Dear Daisy,

  What’s not to like? You are who you are. That’s who Daniel likes. Don’t try to be someone they’ll approve of. You don’t know them; you don’t know what they like. You are you. That’s who they must like…

  And this one:

  Dear Daisy,

  It’s never about the movie…

  And yet another:

  Dear Daisy,

  Who says I can’t see? Stop waving that thing in front of my face. You’re blinding me… Congratulations, my girl. Can I be a bridesmaid?

  There are more entries like these. Lots more. They are nauseating to me now. Seeing them truly makes me ill. I suppose the quantity of embellished Wheat Thins I usually consume in the reading of them might have something to do with that. Who knows?

  On days when I’m in the mood to torture myself, I re-read the entries from those horrible first few days when I had to come to terms with being disengaged. Jilted.

  Unwanted.

  Thank goodness today is not one of those days.

  Rosalina Gallardo, who lives with her husband Mario in one of the apartments above Something Blue, is singing in Spanish as she opens a seam on a dress that’s too tight. The girl who wants this dress is nowhere near a size six. She must think Rosalina is a worker of miracles. I’ll be amazed if the gal will ever be able to squeeze her body into it. Rosalina is unfazed, however, by the task at hand. I’m sure that’s why she sings as she alters. I’ve no idea what Rosalina is saying as she snips the tiny white threads but it sounds like she is calling out to someone to come away with her. Or to come back to her.

  Mario and Rosalina are originally from Ecuador, though they’ve lived in Minnesota the last twenty-five years. I’ve known them all my life. They lived across the street from me when my parents and I lived in Apple Valley—a Twin Cities suburb. Rosalina does all the alterations for Something Blue and Mario is in charge of everything mechanical in the entire building. And I mean everything. Oh, and spiders, too.

  Rosalina and I are in the alterations room at the moment, which is one of the apartments above the store that I don’t lease out. Rosalina’s twelve-year-old niece, Maria Andréa, who’s spending the summer with them, is sitting on the floor next to her aunt, taking seed pearls off a very old lace wedding dress. The dress has yellowed over the years to a lovely shade of champagne. But the pearls have gone battleship gray and must come off. Andréa sits with the gown in her lap, happily removing the blackened beads with a seam-ripper. Next to her and leaning against the wall is Liam Laurent, the eleven-year-old grandson of Father Laurent, the retired Episcopal priest who also lives in one of the apartments above Something Blue. Father Laurent is my angel of God who blesses the little blue hearts before Rosalina sews them in my dresses. Liam is visiting his grandfather today. The boy has a worried look on his face.

  I’m sure it’s because his grandpa is holding in his care-worn hands a blue satin heart, slightly padded and about the size of a quarter, and he is whispering.

  “Bless and keep the young woman who will wear this gown. Keep her from harm and heartache. Keep her safe from complacency and bitterness and indifference. Envelope her with the love you have for each one of us. May she always know that love. May she always seek to give that kind of love. May she receive it from the man she will marry. For every day of their married life, for as long as they both shall live. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  Liam watches as Father Laurent hands the little heart back to me. I place it in a tiny Ziploc bag and pin it to a frothy white gown hanging on a metal rack. The dress had belonged to a woman who divorced her husband after twenty years of marriage. They had gotten bored with each other.

  I turn back to Father Laurent. He has the kindest eyes of any man I’ve ever met, next to my dad. Father Laurent reminds me quite a bid of my dad, actually. He’s av
erage in height and build, with cotton-white hair and wrinkles on his face from all the times in his life he has smiled.

  “I think Liam thinks this is nuts,” I whisper to him.

  Father Laurent grins. His voice is low as he leans in to me. “It only matters what you think. And what the lady who’ll wear that dress thinks.” This is why Father Laurent is practically my business partner though I would never say such a thing to him. He understands what that little blue heart means. It is a tiny emblem of hope. Wounded people need those or we’ll go mad. He winks and turns to his grandson. “Well, Liam. Shall we go to the zoo?”

  Liam’s worried look dissolves and is replaced by one of relief.

  Father Laurent waves goodbye to Rosalina and Maria Andréa and starts to walk away.

  “Goodbye, Father!” Rosalina’s accent decorates her words like ribbons on a gift.

  Liam follows his grandfather out of the alterations room. “What were you doing?” The boy made a polite effort to ask quietly. But I heard him, of course. Rosalina did, too. She laughs without making a sound.

  “Blessing a dress.” Father Laurent’s voice is genial.

  “Why?”

  “Because the dress will be worn by someone. And everyone needs God’s blessing.”

  Their footsteps take them to the staircase that leads to the first floor and their voices fade away.

  I turn back to my next project. Assessing a collection of bridesmaids’ dresses that were sent from Dallas on approval.

  Max, another tenant, bursts into the room with a deck of cards in his hands. “I want to try this new trick out on you!”

  He is breathless and looks like he just got up.

  Max always looks like he just got up.

  Max.

  There is really only one reason why my old friend Max is renting one of the apartments above Something Blue.