The Florist's Daughter Read online

  “Hospice,” he says, trying it out. Then, looking up, he turns to me and says firmly, “I’d rather buy a Buick.”

  We gather up his meds in the baggie. We drive straight from Midway Medical to the Walser dealership on University. He holds the big glossy Le Sabre brochure he picked up on an earlier visit.

  He’s not going to get silver-gray this time, he says. Try something different. This one, he says, pointing to the color sample. Why not go for the gold-dust?

  Chapter 9

  HE DIED THE LAST DAY of November, the week after Thanksgiving. The gold Buick was barely six months old. The dealership was decent (a Stan word) about taking it back.

  Toward the end, the social worker from the clinic found a live-in hospice with a free bed in a western suburb. But Leo the Lion was barely out of the “care facility” herself after one of her episodes—was it a stroke or a seizure? A stray fact I’ve lost over time, swirling somewhere in the downward spiral of all their medical episodes.

  It was impossible to think of ferrying her back and forth to the suburb where the hospice was located. Her inner clock was smashed and she would want to be there at all hours. Her querulous voice insisting just in order to insist, to impose authority, an evicted chatelaine claiming sovereignty over her lost estate. There’s a great deal to do on the Archive.

  I resisted taking him to a suburb whose name meant nothing, one of the mushrooms that had emerged, as if overnight, like flimsy fairy rings around the city, places that used to be wetlands, good waterfowl habitat, mallards, teals, good for fishing sunnies. Eagan, Woodbury, Burnsville, wherever they were, exits off the swooping freeways he never got used to. This used to be a nice town. Before they cut it up.

  It wasn’t exactly that I wanted him to die at home. He didn’t think of the condo as home anyway even though Napoleon and Benito had followed them there, looking like ousted strongmen from another regime in forced exile in the modern building. Besides, he’d come to the edge so many times in any number of hospital rooms, in ERs, once on a trip to Iowa, in a medical helicopter thwacking its way back to St. Paul from Des Moines. But I didn’t want him to die on the edge of the urban nowhere, the anonymous sprawl, he who had lived in the middle of St. Paul all his life and had only strayed across the bridge the last year of his life, to the condo in an old bluff area called Lilydale, as if he’d chosen for his last residence a deeper floral precinct.

  So I managed to keep him at home—not “home,” but at the condo. Round-the-clock nursing aide, hospice nurse every day, people in and out. Mother holding his hand. Peter came too, in from the West Coast at the end, saying firmly, It’s okay, Dad, you can let go now. And my alarm—Don’t say that!

  He was past words. But he’d never been a big talker. Let him just stay here. Stay. Don’t say it’s okay to let go. He might get better. People get better. Amazing turnarounds. You read about it. Look at Mother.

  All right, don’t look at Mother. The big watery blind eye, the flyaway hair, desire whittled down to cigs and Chardonnay, the beatific smile flickering on and off. But holding his hand, not letting go.

  The absolute unreality of the situation. Grief not as sadness but as a form of disorientation.

  We sat around eating popcorn, waiting. The nursing aide was a large doughy woman who radiated goodness and was paid minimum wage, no health insurance—I couldn’t afford somebody like me if it was my turn. She loved popcorn, and suddenly it was all I wanted to eat. The white food of my furious skinny teenage years. She called him Stany and sang as she sponged him down, the water sluicing over his collapsed flanks. Okay, Stany, we’re going to turn you now, my boy. Patricia, you take that side. One, two, three, alley-oop!

  Then, a Monday morning a couple of weeks into this, and the hospice nurse suggested I should go to the drugstore to get something called a scopolamine patch to put behind his ear. It would make his breathing easier, she said.

  My brother shrugged. Sure, go get it if you want to, he said.

  Later he told me the patch made no difference to Dad. They do it for the family, so you don’t have to hear the wet breathing.

  Wet breathing?

  The death rattle, he said.

  A term I associated with the Irish, all the wakes we’d gone to, the cakey faces on satin, the replay of end-scenes—It was peaceful. Or sometimes, alarmingly, the opposite—She didn’t want to go. She fought. They had the priest, but she was fighting.

  But thinking it would ease his pain, pain he no longer had, it turned out, I tore out the door to get the patch. On the way back to the condo, just as I was on the bridge over the Mississippi, my cell phone rang. My brother: Get back here fast.

  Not fast enough. As I opened the door, Peter said, he took his last breath. You missed it. Sorry, you missed it.

  I walked into the little bare bedroom with the rented hospital bed, and mother turned, still holding his hand, her big bleary eyes behind her thick glasses searching for my face. It was a privilege, she said without drama, the voice of a seer.

  I didn’t understand if she meant that being with him at the end was a privilege, or if she was trying to say their whole life together, or simply he himself, had been the immense honor that gave her voice that regal authority.

  For days I had been urgently murmuring I love you, I love you into his ear. A charm against letting go.

  But she got it right. Sat and held his hand, no airy nothings, just that final benediction, a perfect elegy.

  And Peter, who’d been all those years on the West Coast, who didn’t have the gift of gab—he got it right too. Stood at the side of the bed and said with almost military formality, Thanks, Dad. Thanks.

  The Commandment isn’t to love them. It’s to honor them. Thanks, Dad, thanks.

  And then, Peter said, he just went.

  Out the bedroom window you could see the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers, brown and blue. A chevron of Canada geese was headed south, honking, a basso note floating over the flyway. Two men sat in a boat directly below the window, faced away from each other, silent, their lines in the water, waiting for a nibble.

  He was buried in weirdly warm weather. Minnesota, December third, and temps in the 60s, as if the growing season were extending its condolences. None of the flowers froze at the grave site. A sign, I said to Leo the Lion, using her language, pointing to the roses.

  She shook her head impatiently. The little people were off duty. Signs were no comfort. What was I thinking of?

  IN THE SPRING, I went to the Czech hall on West Seventh for a reception in honor of Vaclav Havel who was visiting a local college, giving a talk about building a civil society. The local Czech Sokol club managed to claim him for an hour to visit the old brick hall where my grandparents had courted, where Saturday nights they had danced and played cards. Their world was the nineteenth century, and they kept it going in that hall and in their lives past the middle of the twentieth.

  And even beyond that, beyond them. The local Czech Americans showed up in force for the evening, some of them tricked out in bright nineteenth-century peasant gear, speaking a Czech so antique that linguists on Fulbright exchanges now come over from Prague and Olomouc to study it.

  The building was next door to St. Stanislaus Church where I was baptized, not far from the greenhouse, just up from the brewery, along the route of Frankie’s funeral procession where all the workers had lined up on West Seventh as the cortege passed on the way to St. Stan’s.

  The main part of the hall held an auditorium with a proscenium-arch stage. A theatrical backdrop, painted sometime in the 1920s, was unfurled on the stage: Prague and the Vltava in a foreshortened perspective, the Hradcany slightly a-kilter. The place was crammed—a children’s dance group, an adult dance group, and the eager and curious just wanting a glimpse of the great man. The program included country dances and Czech folk songs. Havel, onetime hipster, looked on neutrally. He bowed gravely and smiled shyly when one of the peasant girls handed him a bouquet.

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p; He was bundled off to his next event, but the party went on. People crowded toward the kitchen area for beer and coffee, sausages and kolaches. My grandparents’ generation were long gone, my father’s going. He and my mother hadn’t come for dances. All this was the past and I thought how distant I was from it, in the end.

  I was about to leave, but as I turned to the stairway, I heard my name called. A woman, advancing across the creaking wood-plank floor, held her arms wide open. She rushed toward me in her bright red and black embroidered costume, a figure I vaguely registered from a distant childscape. She wasn’t a long-lost relative, not an old neighbor, but I recognized her in the way I seemed to recognize everybody in the room, not by name or face but as resistant nubbins of the worn immigrant fabric of this low-rent neighborhood by the brewery (now an ethanol plant) where I was born.

  She swept toward me, weighty mascara and boldface brows writ with a firm hand above the snapping dark eyes. She had to be eighty at least, but her floss of blond hair was still in the game, the smocked blouse open to a wink of cleavage.

  So, she wasn’t from my life but from my father’s, his generation. And thinking this—his generation—it came to me that he had once taken her to a dance. Once. He mentioned this whenever (rarely) we encountered her, the dance offered as a winner’s trophy to my mother: once was enough with that one—his soft grin, her smoky ha-ha!

  And hearing this, my brother and I would bask, without comprehending the vastness of our comfort, in the billowing luxury of this union we understood never would, never could be put asunder, the marriage of our high-school-sweetheart parents trailing clouds of fidelity. A lock. And we the treasure secure within its stronghold.

  We were so secure, it was suffocating. I used to wish idly that they would divorce. Not because they fought. Because I was looking for an out. Divorce, the rhododendron ranch in Argentina, a walk-up in Greenwich Village, Paree where the FTD orders went in the dead of the night. Anything, anything. Somewhere, anywhere.

  The woman’s name refused to surface, but she knew mine and sang it out, first in English and then, ratcheting up our ethnic intimacy, cooed my name in stagy Czech, Vlasticko, Vlasticko! Then she had me, the wattled hammocks of her upper arms fastening me for a fond moment, pinned against the coffee-and-cake table while the crowd surged around us.

  She was saying, as she held me, how sorry she was to hear of my father’s death. She was out of town at the time—a cruise. This improbable word here on West Seventh—cruise—hovered between us for a prideful instant. She would have come to the funeral except for the cruise. She mentions Frankie’s funeral, which she did attend.

  In St. Paul, this remark does not strike either of us as strange. Nor do I feel foolish thanking her for having come to my uncle’s 1936 funeral, long before I was born and baptized at St. Stan’s, same church he was buried from, next door to the Czech hall where we now stand in this timeless embrace.

  This woman, onetime date of my father, belongs to all that, the St. Paul that erases the suburbs and the sprawl, the bully river town that was hypnotized by other people’s wealth, their exhilarating rise (the Empire Builder!), and in yet deeper solidarity to hardship and the bracing memories of their own hardscrabble lives (We put lard on our bread!), as well as baffled wonder at the thought of how both the grandeur and misery had disappeared as if they had never been, lost now in the muddle of a middle-class pension that allows even this elderly child of West Seventh to go on a winter cruise in the Caribbean.

  She had never moved away. “I’m always here,” she said. It wasn’t clear if she meant she was always at the Czech hall or that she had remained in the old neighborhood. Still here, still enduring the sting of peroxide for the greater civic good. Still a girl I cannot imagine my father ... dating. Though even now, lost in space as she is, it’s easy to see my mother lifting an unpainted eyebrow at this Old World goose girl: What a getup, who does she think she’s kidding?

  The whole neighborhood, she tells me, attended Frankie’s funeral, the men with their hats off, lined up the length of West Seventh as the cortege left St. Stan’s. Mr. Bremer, owner of the brewery, wept right there on the public street. “Your grandfather,” she says, lowering her voice as if confiding an indecency, “kept asking why Frankie, why not him. He wanted to die.” Another one wanting to die—Mother, the Czech grandfather, the Irish grandfather actually accomplishing the deed, turning to the wall.

  She has released me, but keeps my hand captive in both of hers that flash with rings and bright polish. “He sobbed and sobbed at Kessler’s,” she says, naming the neighborhood funeral home. “He wanted to die.”

  She hands this over, a relic she’s been keeping in the vault of memory like a faithful retainer who can now pass on the family silver to its rightful heir. I’ve heard this story all my life—from my grandmother, my aunts and older cousins, though my father never indulged in these recitations, these jags of sentiment about my uncle and my sobbing grandfather, the stuttering concertina player.

  Out of some strange mixture of embarrassment and courtesy, I manage to look surprised for the benefit of this Czech Mae West. I pretend my grandfather’s depth of grief is news to me. She pats my arm.

  “And how is your mother doing?”

  A canny look passes over the woman’s bright face. And how is your mother doing? At first I think she knows—but how?—the litany of my mother’s woes, the strokes and seizures, the frets and furies, the midnight prowlings in her bathrobe along the corridors of the condo building. The condo manager who says I must “do something” about her. “She frightens the others.” Ah yes, the others, all the white heads in the decorous no-pets building who wonder which of them will be next, patrolling the insomniac halls, the coiled strands of their long careful lives suddenly unspooling madly. Like hers.

  But this woman regarding me from under the sticky lattice of her lashes has no such clairvoyant bead on my mother in spite of her searching look. She’s just asking how my mother is handling the death of my father only a few months ago. The death she missed because of her cruise to the islands.

  I tell her it’s hard (of course) but she’s managing (of course). This is the right answer, if not quite the true one, and she nods, the blond floss dipping in assent.

  “Was he buried out of St. Stan’s?” she asks.

  Here I cannot please her. “St. Luke’s,” I say, naming the parish of the solidly middle class to which we had ascended, up the hill, away from the brewery and the greenhouse, a breach of loyalty to West Seventh (I’m always here). She nods, allows it. “You moved up the hill, didn’t you?” she says as of a region beyond a mountain range of which she has heard rumor. “Your mother was from up there, wasn’t she?”

  My mother often elicited this slight annoyance—from my aunts, my cousins. My mother who, even now, would roll her china-blue eyes at the flossy peasant girl who holds my hand. Do they take her for a snob? For I sense in this disapproval a wounded response to a more resistant disapproval that my mother radiates, has always radiated, to the polka dancers, the wearers of flouncy dresses, the peroxiders and mascara-appliers of the world. She will stay home and reread the Letters of Flannery O’Connor, thank you very much.

  “She was from the Cathedral,” I say, using the old St. Paul geographical shorthand.

  “Did he die at home?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, and hear the pride in my voice that I managed this. But I don’t say that home was not the house of fifty years “up there,” but a condo they moved to barely a year before across the river, not even in the city limits. I let her think he died “up there.” I seem to be protecting her, as if this second remove away from West Seventh would be a greater betrayal. Of what?

  But now she is saying my father was such a handsome man. I’m used to this. He had that allure for the women of his generation, even into old age. I grew up hearing my mother’s girlfriends murmur admiration. “We all thought he was so handsome,” she says again.

  But she has glimp
sed someone in the crowd and drops my hand, calling out, “Herm, Herm—over here!” And Herman Vacek, onetime city councilman from West Seventh during the sixties, bounds over (What a gasbag, Leo the Lion always said in her take-no-prisoners way whenever we ran into him). Still a man to work a room, he kisses Evelyn. “Ain’t she something?” he asks no one in particular and Evelyn, on cue, tosses her blond head and laughs. A woman still glad of admiration, which I notice does make her appear younger.

  I like her, I can’t help it. I like the mascara and the dyed hair. She’s having fun. Why not? Leo the Lion never dyed her hair, went gray, then yellowy white. Who am I trying to kid?

  Then Herm Vacek is on to me, his eye uncertain at first, but then focused, slowing down to kindliness. “Stan’s daughter?” he asks, and takes my hand as Evelyn did, in both of his, a gesture of condolence. “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” he says. “What a gentleman.”

  My hand jerks away from the big gentle mitts, against my will. I’m startled at the dart of disdain I feel toward this man, this gasbag (stop it, Mother), standing here in arrogant good health, commenting on my father’s character, his beer belly lolling over his belt buckle, an affront to trim, and finally frail, Stan. He’s the one who should have heart problems. The refreshments area is filling up with people, and Herm doesn’t seem to notice my rudeness. I’ve been unfair, and I feel ashamed. But no harm done, apparently. He’s off to another group across the room, glad-handing as if he were still up for reelection.

  But Evelyn noticed. She has drawn closer to me again, some urgency in her face. There are people crowding around us, toward the table with all the food. But even before she speaks, as if my mother’s spooky Irish clairvoyance had invaded me, I sense an intensity, a wire binding us, separate from everything around us in the hall.

  “I don’t know,” she says. And hesitates. But then goes on in a rush. “The last time I saw your father, it must have been five years ago. Mrs. Jindra’s wake.”