The Florist's Daughter Read online

  A name I remember, another speck of West Seventh dust, another of their generation.

  “Your mother wasn’t there. You mother, maybe she wasn’t well. I don’t know. Your mother wasn’t always well. Your father was there. He came by himself. So handsome, as always. Always dressed so nice, wore a tie. So many don’t wear a tie anymore.”

  I can tell she is looking for a way out, that she has launched herself into deep water and is grasping for a life ring. She looks at me for an instant as if I might help her out of this. All of this is palpable, but the movie keeps rolling.

  “We walked out of the funeral parlor together, your father and I,” she says. “He said something and we were laughing. Jokey and friendly. I don’t remember what it was about.” She seems troubled about this lapse, as if it might explain something.

  “And he was walking me to my car, we were walking and my car was ahead a couple of rows, and I asked him how your mother was,” she says. “I was telling him about my husband’s heart attack and that he was better. And then I asked about your mother. I always asked about your mother.”

  She stops dead. I bend my head nearer.

  Why did I do that? I probably urged her over the edge.

  “And your father said, he just said right there, he said, You’re the one I should have married.”

  She looked at me in horror, the yellow fleece of her hair an alarm around her face, eyebrows perched in dismay. Who knows how I looked to her. It felt as if our faces were almost touching.

  “I just ran. I ran and ran as fast as I could to my car. I didn’t turn around till I got to my car. I was just shaking.”

  At the far end of the table Herm Vacek was slapping the back of a man with a huge beer belly, as big as his own, two great Czech beer barrels by the table groaning with food.

  Chapter 10

  HE SHOULD NEVER have bought the business. I think we all knew that. Eventually even he admitted it (“I should have been ten years younger...”). But to pass up the chance of making it his own would have been like not marrying the girl of your youthful dreams even if she came to you too late, broken-down and haggard. Your girl’s your girl. Another Scott Fitzgerald sentiment.

  The company had been established in the robber-baron days of the late nineteenth century by two Swedish immigrants who had strayed from Minneapolis over to St. Paul. The second and third generations of these family owners were in charge of the business during my girlhood. This was a lengthy pedigree in the Midwest—a company with its centenary within sight.

  This heritage meant that my father, as manager of both the greenhouse and the downtown store, was part of history, the third aspect of the Trinity I held sacred—beauty, the idea of elsewhere, and the holy ghost of history. Even my mother, house historian who held no brief for the flower trade, grudgingly allowed that the firm was indeed “historical.” It had always been the florist to the carriage trade, she said. We used that term—carriage trade—as if it still meant something. In old St. Paul it did. Not until the freeways cut their gashes across St. Paul and Minneapolis in the late sixties was the stiff back of the little provincial city broken. And maybe not even then. Maybe not now.

  The greenhouse strayed over a city block in the Czech neighborhood where I was born and where some of the growers lived. The small houses of the neighborhood were etched at the narrow sides and cubed backyards with fastidious gardens. All summer long there was much pickling and “putting up” of vegetables and fruits. In the fall, when it was time to change from screens to storm windows, people laid a screen or two on bricks on the back porch to dry the mushrooms they had gathered in the woods by the river. These were people who really would have felt better if they could keep their own chickens.

  The greenhouse was cut up into dozens of linked houses. There was, as well, a separate barn where Christmas trees were stacked, and during the unfortunate fifties and sixties, were flocked pink or blue. A bulb cellar was cut into the earth below the cement walkway connecting the houses. A dim lightbulb on a string at the top of narrow stairs led the way down, down to this netherworld. When I read of the catacombs in school, the bulb cellar sprang so powerfully to mind that I felt an eerie shiver of time travel. I had experienced the licking fires of hell at the open door of the boiler room, and my nostrils quivered with the dank molder of martyrs amid the buried tulips.

  Each house was dedicated for parts of the year to a different range of plants, a broad array of indoor and outdoor varieties. The geranium house in spring became, by December, the first poinsettia house. The poinsettias were secretly growing much of the summer, unnoticed and unwanted, in a back house, the same house that took in the geranium cuttings in their off-season.

  There was even a house for special customers to leave their plants to “winter over” while they themselves were wintering over in Florida or Arizona. Shaggy aspidistras and leggy geraniums, woody tree roses with name tags—Mrs. Ordway, Mrs. Schultz—were lined up like elderly boarders in the first greenhouse, near the design tables where cut-flower arrangements and corsages were made up.

  The palm house, with an especially high glass roof, had big dusty palms that lived for decades like old circus elephants, rented out for weddings and charity balls and the theater and opera productions that came through town from New York and Chicago. The orchids were kept in harem seclusion behind a trellis with passion vines trained up one side in little-visited house 11, up the steep hillside.

  Charity balls, weddings, debutante parties, the private conservatories that became a sudden fashion in the seventies—there was much of set design to the business. One Easter Saturday my father worked through the night, jamming cut lilies into chicken wire formed in the shape of a massive cross fastened to the soaring wall of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church. On Easter morning the astonished Lutherans were greeted by this unearthly oeuvre, the gigantic risen cross of blossoms floating before them, bearing the overpowering scent of ripe lilies. The Pioneer Press put it on the front page.

  The greenhouse itself may have encouraged my father’s Cecil B. DeMille tendencies. It was the kind of glass greenhouse rarely found anymore, not stocked with a single crop like the massive cost-efficient warehouses now in favor but spilling over in many glass rooms with a little of this, a little of that, a single row of pineapple geraniums, a flat of mixed freesias, a low trailing bundle of damp mosses and maidenhair fern for shade gardens, a sudden riot of rock garden moss roses.

  During “spring rush,” when everyone was garden-crazed, this house was crowded with celery-and-white and port-streaked caladium, expensive annuals favored for shade gardens of Crocus Hill. For several years, a canny robin made its nest in the house just off the design room. The growers moved around gingerly in this area. They finally transferred all the plants to another house, so the mother wouldn’t be nervous. During this period the greenhouse cats were sequestered in the lunchroom, howling at the injustice. But the growers kept the door firmly shut. Even in paradise the peaceable kingdom needed policing.

  IN THE END—or too near the end—he bought the company. It was not what is called a wise business decision. The company had been skidding along on its antique carriage-trade reputation for decades, and for a long time hadn’t been a healthy venture. Before the first generation had passed, feuding had become a company tradition. Complicated buyouts of distant family members weighted the annual balance sheets, and there was much bad blood.

  The best years for the business, my father said, had been the war years, before my time. All the GIs sending flowers to their girls—their girls and their mothers. Nothing else to spend money on.

  The first owners, known by their initials—A.B. and O.L.—had adjoining desks in the greenhouse office, and managed for something over thirty years never to speak to each other. They wrote notes or used their sons or employees for communication purposes. This is to note that half a gross of roses from Florida ... I hope someone will convey to O.L. the information that the Holland tulip market...

  Their pic
ture was on the wall of the greenhouse showroom, two portly men dressed in pre–Great War fussbudget attire, uncannily alike, a Tweedledee and Tweedledum of floristry, one on either side of a horse that was tethered to a boxy wagon with the company logo scrolled across it, big wicker baskets of flowers wedged between great cubes of ice flecked with sawdust. The two men stared ahead. The horse too stared ahead, a diplomatic beast keeping the peace. During the Depression, after my father came to work in the greenhouse just out of high school, A.B. began “doctoring.” He even went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He came back from Mayo, briefly, and went through the greenhouse, shaking hands with every grower and worker, including my father who was then low in the pecking order, mixing manure into soil in the back garage area.

  A.B. was going back to Mayo, he said, for an operation, something called a lobotomy. He’d come to say good-bye. “When it’s over, I won’t be myself anymore,” he said.

  When he came back from the operation, he wandered through the greenhouse, my father said, and it was true he wasn’t himself. He wasn’t anybody at all.

  The middle generation, ten or fifteen years older than my father, carried on the chilly partnership during my girlhood. These were the owners I knew, the one I saw as a playboy, the other a cold fish, both of them having the wary looks of Mafia dons who watch their backs.

  With his unerring weakness for a gallant Fitzgerald hero, my father sided with the playboy with the heart of gold who came from the weaker side of the partnership. I would have picked him too. Rolf wasn’t blond—he was golden. He gleamed with good spirit.

  Unlike my father, Rolf’s association with the Summit Avenue world was not wholly one of service: he belonged to the same clubs, was seen at the same restaurants, owned a cabin on the right lake, lived in a big house a block off Summit.

  His blue eyes widened with gladness to see you. He would say, “Ice cream?” as a greeting, and rush to the freezer where he kept his stash. He shared my father’s joie de vivre, except for him it was a birthright, easy and natural, not the responsibility of a faithful servant assigned to be master of revels.

  He treated my father well. He was the first person, my father said, to treat him “like a gentleman.” Whatever that meant. But it did mean something to him; it was the gold standard of his measure of a man. Rolf was his beau ideal. He would do anything for Rolf.

  Leo the Lion shook her head: a drinker was her verdict, speaking from her Irish authority, though Rolf could charm her too, given a chance—Mary, darlin’, aren’t you something tonight!

  My father covered up any number of Rolf’s high jinks and troubles, his late appearances, his complete absence. He even tried to take over his bookwork, going back to the greenhouse late at night to see if he could get things on track. “What does Rolf do down there, anyway?” my mother asked. She claimed he was walking around with gin in his coffee mug at ten in the morning.

  I never told them what Rolf’s daughter said. Celeste, a string bean with a fall of golden hair that looked like a stream of honey from a jar. We were together at their lake place, the two of us contentedly pouring salt from a Morton’s box over leeches we’d caught and laid on the dock, one of those contemplative cruelties of childhood, the inky bloodsuckers writhing without a sound. “My father owns your car,” she said out of nowhere. “And your house. My father owns everything you have.”

  This was not the remark of a gentleman. I knew that. I kept pouring salt, the shiny black creatures curling and withering under the blizzard I hurled from on high. What are you doing? my father said, frowning, reaching to take the Morton’s box.

  Nothing, Rolf’s daughter said sulkily, and grabbed the salt away before he could take it. She went on pouring.

  Eventually it was impossible to protect Rolf. He cried when he called my father into his knotty-pine office off the main showroom. He had to sell his share of the business to “the other side,” he said. The big house a block off Summit—gone. He was moving to Florida where he was getting a job with a big rose-growing outfit. “These wholesale places are the future, Stan.”

  Rolf with a job? Rolf wasn’t an ordinary person who got a job—he had a place. And of course there was the matter of Florida—Florida was Siberia with high temps, Mars, another universe. Even for me, always sniffing for the escape hatch, it sounded grim. Wholesale was dark, forbidding, all business. We were in retail where the people were, the sparkling spenders.

  Rolf was gone forever.

  A lot of the fun went out of the greenhouse when Rolf left, taking his glamour, blue eyes, and his afternoon ice cream to the Gulf Coast where he did not prosper. My father continued to worry about him, and years later he covertly sent him a check now and again “just to tide him over.”

  Leo the Lion shrugged.

  My father was left in the employ of Harold, son of the other founding family, who seemed a soul-soured bottom-liner with no apparent love of flowers. This troubled my father, but Harold let him run the greenhouse and the shop. Let him. That was how we saw it—my father was allowed to run the show, keep things going in the downtown showroom and the Banfil Street greenhouse, maintaining the ever changing storefront window displays, keeping the customers charmed and cosseted.

  We didn’t think of this arrangement, where Harold didn’t “interfere” and where my father did all the real work, as a matter of exploitation, so persuaded were we by his own love affair with the greenhouse. Harold rolled in at eleven, in time for lunch downtown at the Athletic Club, then turned up again around three to check the day’s receipts, and then it was out for drinks at the Lowry before five. He had a desk somewhere, and sometimes sat at it, calling his broker, speaking low into the receiver. He always seemed distracted. You got the feeling he was a little startled to see all these flowers around, as if he leapt over the irritating intermediate steps of the business to the essential point of it all: the money.

  Also a drinker, according to my mother. He seemed narrow, without curiosity, and you didn’t really know if he was pickled much of the time. He started talking about moving to California. The business was changing—grocery stores were selling bunches of flowers in plastic pails for a couple of bucks! And people were buying them!

  He wanted out. The company was bleeding. They offered it to my father, the aged and broken beauty he had loved all his life.

  He didn’t hesitate. They left to him, along with the old greenhouse and the shop downtown, various ancient encumbrances, and rumors of financial irregularities.

  Then, finally in possession of his beloved, my father turned the other cheek, and several years later was embroiled all over again in problems with his new business partner. The taxman came to the door, that boogeyman of imperiled small businesses. The heart attacks started.

  When it became patently evident that his younger partner preferred investing in more profitable land outside of town rather than tending the greenhouse and store as my father thought he should, and my father lay in United Hospital, wheezing while the cardiologist managed, once again and for a while longer, to drain fluid from his congested heart, his only fury—a brief but bitter rage—was at my brother and me when he discovered we had hired a lawyer to pursue his rights. A guy has to do the right thing, no matter what the other guy is doing...

  It turned out we weren’t living in a Fitzgerald novel after all. This was Dickens, complete with threatening letters on legal letterhead, the gallant dying hero betrayed by advantage-taking villains, generations of cynical venality twisting the plot, and even our very own Uriah Heap who, after all, was a good guy. Nice smile, same Catholic schools, up the hard way. This was the sort of reasoning our father had given us as business acumen.

  The heart attacks made retirement necessary not long after, and at first it seemed everything was going to be all right. No more second mortgages on the house to cover the winter heating bill at the greenhouse, no more tax inspectors coming to the house, and a regular check from Uriah Heap every month plus Social Security. Not bad. For a while.r />
  Then we learned (from Leo the Lion) that our father, supposedly retired and out of the company, was taking out a second mortgage on their house and loaning the money to tide the business over, explaining that this made sense, that his partner needed a little boost. This seemed to work for a while, every winter a loan, and then as the spring planting season kicked in, he was repaid. But then, one winter, my father’s voice on the telephone, low and embarrassed—their checking account was down to eleven dollars.

  His partner wasn’t able to keep up. He meant no harm—his point, the point my father urged on me too. The partner felt it needed to be explained to me. Patricia, if you only knew what the flower business is like now. It’s not like it used to be....I stood in the greenhouse and stared at him with the dead eyes of Leo the Lion.

  There were ingrates and phonies, wrongs to be righted, money owed that should be decently paid, and so forth. My brother and I—naturally—were on the side of the good, the true, the beautiful. Our father.

  Who wanted no part of our crusade. “You don’t do this,” he wheezed from his hospital bed, trailing his oxygen, horrified that his partner had received a letter from a lawyer, thanks to us. He acted as if we were endangering peace on earth. I suppose we were.

  His allegiance was not to the truth, not even to fair play, not even to Justice when it came to his own just claims. His loyalty went to the invisible silken net of human relations webbed with let-it-go shrugs that, every day, keeps the universe from clawing itself to death.

  You behave a certain way, no matter what the other guy does, as all his life he mildly called those who did not abide by his form of rectitude. From his lard-eating, we-had-nothing boyhood on the wrong side of the tracks, from his half century of winters stoking the eternal springtime of the greenhouse, he had somehow fashioned an ethic befitting the Dalai Lama. No blame, no blame.

  But you’re being cheated, my all-business oral-surgeon brother said, to which I, bully with poetic righteousness, chimed along. My mother, her Irish heart always glad of a fight, encouraged us to pursue our Bleak House plots.