The Florist's Daughter Read online

  Mother was in the hospital, tubes everywhere. She’d had a terrible seizure, what looked like a strenuous seizure, her stick arms thrust out like rods from her churning body and grim, clenched face. “Leave her alone, let her stay in bed. She’ll never be right,” my father said, turning away. All this after a stroke only five months earlier, just after they had moved into the condo. To everyone’s amazement, Leo the Lion fought back from the stroke. She was home three months—and then the seizure hit her, a vicious aftershock, worse than the original earthquake of the stroke.

  This seizure, we felt sure, was the end. It was more damaging than the stroke. But on the morning we were driving to his doctor’s appointment we had just been told that, unbelievably, she was going to make it again. Time in a “care center,” another round of physical therapy. Trach tube out, breathing on her own. Feeding tube still in, but out pretty soon, and she’d be eating on her own, gloppy messes and slugs of Ensure. A course of occupational therapy that we’d learned had nothing to do with job training; it was about trying to keep dementia at bay. But she’ll come home. Eventually.

  Heart attacks for him, brain attacks for her. It wasn’t clear who was going to reach the finish line first. For a while she had seemed to pull ahead of him.

  On that soft May morning, on the way to the doctor, he sat patiently, buoyed up by the Buick’s pillowy leather seat. He seemed to have lost his old habit of spasmodically depressing an imaginary brake pedal when I was driving. He just sat, looked out the window at the spring green.

  He had his pills—many little root-beer-colored plastic containers—in a ziplock baggie. The doctor would look at them, copy dosages onto his chart, a document now inches thick, limp and frayed at the edges like a sacred text much thumbed. “I still have some tricks up my sleeve, Stan,” he said last time, working his numbers, writing new scripts to take to Bober’s Drug on Grand. He would say something like that again.

  My father would probably ask once again, as if it were a matter of no personal interest, just a disinterested inquiry, if it might be possible to do anything about the itching. Last time the doctor shook his head, mentioned his wife’s terrible itching during a troubled pregnancy, how he could do nothing for that either. Stressed kidneys, he said. “Did she get over it?” my father asked, raising his slightly yellowed eyes to the doctor’s face for the first time with interest. Oh yes, the doctor said. My father nodded, faint ghost of a smile as his head lowered again.

  Impossible to tell what he did with this information, whether he took it as potential good news for his situation or counted himself out, given the pregnancy aspect of the other case. “We’re all so impressed with your father,” the doctor had told me. “He bears his suffering without complaint. Always a smile for everyone. A real gentleman.” This unaccountably annoyed me.

  Whereas my supposedly invalid mother, in the hospital, has kicked an attendant in the backside. “Get away from me, you fatty!” she screamed from her wheelchair. I ran around doing damage control, the florist’s daughter bringing in long-stemmed roses to mollify the offended party who looked neutrally at the flowers and said, “You don’t have to do this. We’re used to it.” But underneath my groveling, I’m not dismayed. Kicking makes sense. It’s my father’s gentle smile, the absence of complaint that grind my heart.

  In addition to the baggie full of his meds, he holds a small bundle of envelopes bound with a rubber band, all stamped, ready for the mailbox. Bills he will have paid on the dot, the Stan-and-Mary way. He has taken over that task, as he has taken over grocery shopping, cooking, and just about everything else. My mother does almost nothing.

  She sits, she stews.

  She smokes.

  Mother, don’t you think all this smoke is bad for Dad’s heart? I mean with the house closed up in winter?

  Oh, piffle.

  She pretends to read, but reading is now almost beyond her. She’s more than half blind (the botched cataract operation) and though we don’t say it, there is brain damage. Just as we never said she had epilepsy. When I come upon her, sitting on Napoleon, sitting in profile like a blind person (well, she is a blind person really—another thing we pretend is not so), she strikes a pose like Whistler’s mother, only not serene, not a peaceful granny. Ours was never a family given to talk therapy, to the comforts, whatever they are, of “talking things out.” She got precious little sympathy as she lost one power after another.

  A small printed return-address label is fixed to the upper-left corner of the top envelope in the little stack of paid bills my father holds. I glance over to see if he’s remembered to order new labels with the condo address. Yes, there’s the new address. But the first line of the label reads “Stan R. Hampl.” No Mr. and Mrs. No Stan R. and Mary T.

  Mary T. is gone.

  Idly, I mention this—You forgot to put Mother’s name on the address label—pointing to the envelopes in his hand. He flushes, a guilty husband found out. “Well, I didn’t think she’d ... you know ... I thought I’d be, you know ... on my own.” His hand presses into the stack of envelopes, squeezing them out of nervousness, the way he used to press his foot on his secret brake when I was driving.

  I’ve caught him, and I’m sorry. Of course he was hoping to be on his own. Released finally, and not by his own death.

  That’s when he spills the beans: Your mother’s quite a handful. He’s baffled. She was so sweet, he says, she used to want to do everything I wanted to do.

  I keep my gaze trained straight ahead. Our faces are in profile. He isn’t really speaking to me anyway. He’s in the confessional of the Buick, the secure box where he can murmur his sin of exasperation, of exhaustion. The trademark Stan-wonder fills his dismayed voice, grieved by the desperate disappointment she represents, the betrayal of his expectations that has kicked him in the heart.

  He seemed mystified that her bridal docility has disappeared, lost in whatever acid elixir she sips as she sits, half blind by the window, medicated for decades along every nerve-inch of her tiny body, white wine in hand, cigs at the ready, her magnifying glass poised over yet another volume proving the abused lot of the Irish. All that sweetness gone bitter.

  Why had she changed? Why should anything ever change? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, his high-school French had taught him to say, a phrase he loved to repeat—didn’t that mean that the more everything changes, the more it all stays the same? It’s supposed to.

  She was so sweet, he repeats, shaking his head slightly, still perplexed by this switcheroo, this assault on his worldview.

  She’s in the photograph over the piano, I want to tell him. In her jodhpurs, barely insinuating her wandlike body against yours. You’re there too, grinning and abashed. She’s back there. Things do change, Dad. Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die.

  Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. The fortunate fall, as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited? Then it can’t rise to the edifying abstraction of “experience.” Can’t become “material”—the way writers tame every gut punch and misery life doles out.

  The rare innocence of my father never hardens into experience, into knowing what’s what. He never achieves irony, the consolation prize for losing innocence and gaining experience. He remains one of the strenuously innocent. It would be comic except that innocence is never comic when it’s an article of faith.

  There’s more: he expects this innocence of me too, at all ages. Flash on the oil painting of Patricia’s Garden again. Miss Muffet reading on her tuffet. The beflowered poetess. It’s the opposite ambition of my mother’s attempt to turn me into the observer, the notetaker, the smart cookie unconvinced of surfaces, unpersuaded by good intentions, preternaturally watchful. The cold-hearted girl writer on the go she can lodge in the Archive.

  My father absorbs the betrayal of his illusions not with bitterness but with disbelief. Every time h
e’s “let down” by someone (his mild term for treachery), he doesn’t get angry. He turns back, bruised, to the radiant origins of his belief in people and the essential rightness of the world. The great weight of the Cardinal Virtues written in gold around the Cathedral dome is inscribed also in his heart: Fortitude, Tolerance, Prudence, Justice.

  He remains cheerful, just as he knew he must be when Frankie, the family hero, lay dying for three weeks in the hospital after he was scalded horribly at the brewery. My father has sustained his quiet cheerfulness, a kind of courtly grace, until he reaches this latest Buick that is conducting him to the man in charge of his dying, who will compliment him on his good attitude.

  But here, in the mobile confessional, he’s been caught, finally, and by me of all people. Caught harboring a dark and disloyal thought. I thought I’d be, you know ... on my own.

  IT’S NOT TRUE that I found complete solace in the role of the observer, that I reached out for nothing else against the blanket of devotion they tucked around me. Remember that time, one moody season years ago, when I took up my artillery position, trying to sort out what the wise woman I paid by the hour called “my choices.” That is, men. We should also look at your Family of Origin, she said. Mother, father, older brother. This would shed light on my choices.

  My parents, already old and unwell, but not yet on the final long lap of their illnesses, came obediently to the little office with the shiny green plants and the Kleenex box on the coffee table. They sat, my father smiling bashfully, my mother glowering. Why do you go talking to that woman, that stranger? Why don’t you come and talk to me?

  My father mentioned the good health of the green plants in the office, an attempt to break the ice with a professional compliment. Mother offered as her conversational gambit her acid silence and dead stare. The therapist, wrapped in nubby earth tones, waited them out with her goddess-calm.

  Strange that I have no recollection of what we said, what was asked, why I felt compelled to haul them in there. I see my mother’s fury, my father’s trustfulness, both of them struggling awkwardly at the end of the hour to fight their way out of the low-set chairs. All that’s left to memory is the mixture of my self-righteousness (about what? gone, gone) and guilty misery (occasioned by my choices or maybe the Family of Origin) as I watched them struggle to rise in that alien, hygienic room.

  What I do remember: after our “session,” they left together, down a narrow flight of steps. I was staying behind to “process” the session.

  “We thought we’d go across the street to pick up some vacuum cleaner bags,” my father said apologetically, as if domestic detail were a betrayal of whatever high-stakes meaning I was after from them.

  I watched as they made their way across the busy street, through the parking lot, to the big white building where, two little stick figures arm in arm, they disappeared, as if supplying the answer to their mystery after all, spelling it out for me as they entered beneath the department store’s huge logo: POWERS.

  Before I imposed that midlife urgency of self-definition on them, ours was a family too earnestly unconscious, too profoundly fixed in the constellation of St. Paul’s ethnic and socioeconomic indicators to imagine that “psychology” was a word that might apply to us. Therapy was something you sought if your knee went out.

  My brother’s occasional jags of rage drowned in the flotsam and jetsam of routine. My mother’s evenings blurred and slurred when her meds and her white wine fuddled her. Never mentioned. And her vigilant secrecy about her epilepsy (Never tell anyone. Never!) meant that the family door was bolted against any mention of mental health, nerves, the very fact of psychology. It was all nonsense anyway.

  As for me—I should eat more. I only ate white things—mashed potatoes, glasses of milk. You’ll get blown over in a strong wind. She stood at the door in the morning with a mug of Campbell’s chicken rice soup: I know you don’t like breakfast, but you used to like chicken rice...

  We were pieces of a bigger puzzle. We fit snugly into the design where life had pitched us. Old St. Paul was wrapped in history and money, riveted to the mid-century moment of our mid-continent midsize city, the time-place where my father’s decency was a fragile assurance, my mother’s growing ferocity and evening befuddlement were a terrible claim, my brother’s dark frustrations and my own inchoate ambitions were barely perceptible fissures in the smooth surface.

  We glided across the ice rink of family life, trusting we left no gashes as we went round and round the tended circuit of days. We had faith—in everything. Faith was a form of stasis, not transcendence. We didn’t live in a movie, the narrative building to climax. We lived in photographs, as nostalgics do, a sweet moment snapped and set on the mantel by the piano where it keeps time at bay, covertly aging in full sight. We believed in love and happiness and small domestic pleasures, duty, and work. Work especially. Work, of course, included school. Education was the height of work.

  We didn’t talk about ourselves as if we were projects, works under construction. Nobody had a “self.” That all started when I went to the University. Only then did it seem that you—you yourself—were detachable from the tableau of family and especially of this family in this city in sublimely static Minnesota, situated at the nosebleed north of the country.

  Our life was boring (my point—let me out of here). Or it was beautiful (my father’s fervent belief, a man who began the day by humming “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”). Mother didn’t enter into these constructions. Cigarette in hand, she followed the heartbreaker Twins on the radio, read her histories and political biographies that proved to her satisfaction the victim status of the Irish, giving over to a furious sense of the world’s essential unfairness.

  My brother kept his own counsel, speaking only to his collie on long solitary walks in the leafy neighborhood, as if he were planning his getaway to the West Coast long before he left. Even in winter he and Champ padded along the white streets. You could see his lips moving as he came up the stairs, the dog’s narrow head tilted toward him, attending closely. Mother, always alert to any aggrieved heart, warded me off. Don’t tease him. He needs to talk to somebody.

  The Upper Midwest, our place, seemed to have transcended the regular Midwest, and our Siberian ascendancy gave us an almost imaginary existence amid the boreal forests of dark winters and silent stars. Ours was pre-freeway St. Paul, a time-place where it was possible to spend an entire lifetime without straying over the Minneapolis line where the Scandinavians went about their Lutheran business. Our social status was unspoken but somehow deeply etched, smack in the blameless middle, looking up without greed and down in solidarity.

  And religion? Pre–Vatican II Catholic, what else? Confession in the little boxes on Saturday night before the movies, whispering humdrum sins into the bored ears of Father Kennedy or Father Slattery, avoiding the eternity of Hail Marys doled out by punitive Monsignor Cullinan.

  The dual (and dueling) ethnicities of our Czech father and Irish mother were all the psychological typing we had. They divided the world between them. A case in point: The year before they moved from 1071, the bungalow that was home for almost fifty years, a neighbor my mother had her bead on (drugs over there, I’m telling you) had come home late and missed his own driveway, plowing into a fence my father had put up to obscure the garbage cans and had faced with flower boxes spilling over with petunias.

  The next morning, Dan, their favorite neighbor, an artist with a young family, who had become practically an adopted son, came over to survey the damage with my father. They were deciding how to proceed with the repair. My mother shot out the back door. “Aren’t you going to do something?” she cried in fury at my father.

  The two men looked up at her, mystified. “We’re measuring,” Dad said. “We’ll fix it.”

  She gave him her withering scowl. “I have to do everything,” she said, and stormed past him to chew out the drug addict next door. The fence, the petunias—who cared? The point was not to fix what was broke
n. The point was to take on the forces of evil. Set the miscreants straight. She bustled over and rapped smartly on the door.

  My father turned to Dan and said mildly, “I’m Czech. She wants me to be Irish.”

  The Czechs down by the greenhouse were the world of food and kitchen gardens, a serious interest in prizefights and much music (my grandfather’s concertina, giving him vibrant voice, covering his desperate stutter). This was the work hard, play hard Eden of childhood truths and treats. Run out in the rain, my Czech grandmother would say urgently, run quick! I flew out the back door, naked, screeching with demented joy, to stand under the drainpipe, rainwater sluicing down my tadpole body.

  Impossible to imagine such libertine body-delight up the hill in the cabbage-scented halls of my mother’s Irish side. There aunts and cousins clustered in rental units within walking distance of one another. They all lived near the monstrous Cathedral. And, as if acknowledging their feudal relation, they were minions of Catholic orthodoxy, and of rule-keeping of all kinds.

  The Czech grandmother hated to see me reading—bad for the eyes. Whereas the Irish asked if you had done your homework. They gave books for Christmas and expected not only thanks but book reports in return. They drank skimpy fingers of whiskey, not the rollicking bottles of beer of the Czech side.

  Unlike the Czechs, the Irish didn’t own their homes. Yet somehow it was understood that my mother had married down. It was the telltale broken English of the Czech side that made the difference, as the Irish said either regretfully (the nice ones) or disdainfully (the snobs). But this was overlooked, given my father’s handsomeness, legendary and sighed over by several generations. He had inherited his father’s stammer, but he made his way around it. And he too had music to cover the language problem—the violin. But polkas and all that knee-slapping? The Irish in their cramped apartments on the ridge by the Cathedral still looked down on the Czech householders drinking beer below the hill.