The Florist's Daughter Read online

  But in the end, I suppose it is accurate to say our father got his way: the lawyers said that there wasn’t enough money to pursue the matter. He died with the balance of the money owed him never paid back, the ingrates and phonies gone their merry or regretful ways, thinking Stan was a good man with a vicious wife and unkind children. Poor Stan, they could say.

  And poor us—they could say that, too. Here was a decent working man, trying to meet a payroll, misunderstood by his greedy, overeducated kids. They didn’t understand anything. Just goes to show you.

  AUNT LILLIAN WAS DEAD, and her protective husband, Bill, was gone, too. My favorite aunt. She once said with unembarrassed simplicity—I hadn’t asked, she just came out with it—Bill and I tried sex a couple times, but we decided we didn’t like it. We just hug.

  Their careful lives were dismantled by the older nieces, the duplex on Jefferson sold. Lillian, fearful and watchful, who had so narrowly been saved from disaster, was gone, a lifetime after her twin, the magical Frankie, had been lost to her.

  Something always uncertain in her eyes, a faint alarm or watchfulness in the tidiness of her overorganized closets, the massive use of Saran Wrap. A lot of loss in that life, I decided, or a lot of absence—no children, no sex, no diamond ring as a souvenir of her other half. But at the center of her life was that saving grace: how she had been plucked from disaster by her peasant mother, who ran out of the house in the nick of time, grabbed the chloroform rag from her face, and chased the rapist away before the worst could happen.

  Wasn’t it amazing, I remarked to my brother, how lucky that was—Nana saving Aunt Lillian from the rapist. Of course being almost raped had to be scary too.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “How Aunt Lill was almost raped. Didn’t you know?”

  “Who told you that? She wasn’t almost raped. She was raped. Some guy in the neighborhood.”

  The fantasias of the kitchen table, rococo descriptions festooning a life. The duplicitous double accounting, keeping two books—one story for the boy (he can take the truth), one for the girl (she must be protected).

  The tumbler jigged in the lock, the heavy safe clicked open, my brother’s truthful blue eyes that don’t lie looking at me.

  Our fearful aunt, checking the gas stove, her manicured finger touching each of the knobs to be sure the fire was off, off, off, counting her shoe boxes. We decided we didn’t like it. We just hug.

  I asked my brother who it was. The rapist.

  Some guy in the neighborhood. They knew him, knew his family. That’s why they didn’t do anything about it. They were funny that way—they were all in it together. Peter shook his head. He’s a forensic dentist, identifies the bad guys who do terrible things, the ones who leave bite marks. Another Justice man. They covered it up. They were all together down there.

  But wasn’t that when everything was right, when everybody was together? Nobody had anything. That meant everyone was equal, everyone was happy. The Supreme Court Justice came home from Washington and wanted what we had. Our Nothing Soup.

  Another fiction unspooling at the kitchen table from the tight coil of the well-told tale.

  THE GREENHOUSE CAME shattering down, and the land was sold to the city. Eminent domain. A freeway and “affordable housing” were built under the Summit Avenue bluffs where, for more than a century, the glass houses had run up the side of a hill to catch the slant of northern sun to best advantage.

  It could even be said that my mother got a bit of what she treasured most—an abiding grudge against the villains and cheats of the world. And evidence that, in the end, her two children, the stolid boy and the headstrong girl, were united in the Irish grudge culture. She fondled this knowledge like a jewel in a velvet box while my father lived and even after he died, until her mind was taken from her.

  Then she entered her final phase, the beatific dementia. All was forgiven in the obscuring fog of what was once her mind. The sharp corners of her grudges smoothed, softened. They disappeared like melted ice in springtime.

  Before that, when we went to Ireland together, in Kilkenny, her ancestral town, I’d asked her what, as a girl, she’d wanted to be when she grew up. It was assumed that neither she nor my father had been allowed to choose their fate, their future. A sense of renunciation abraded their lives, the lives of their family and even most of their friends—cheerful renunciation. The Depression had decided everything.

  Yet their deep absorption in their work, their gratitude for decent jobs, the palpable satisfaction, made it hard to remember that they had had dreams of something other. For him—the doctor, the architect. For her—a librarian, I assumed, a real one, not a file clerk at a library.

  I carried the stiff inner pride of being the family rebel all my adult life. I’d gone against her, chosen my own way, sat in the street against the war, lived with the scruffy draft-resister boyfriend, got myself the arty life. Maybe I didn’t get out of St. Paul, but I’d followed my dream, become a writer, the very thing I knew she thought would spell doom. Wouldn’t you rather be a librarian?

  But in the little room in the Kilkenny B and B, when I asked her what she’d wanted to be as a girl, she looked at me from her twin bed, tucked up in her cotton jammies, and said in disbelief, “You don’t know?”

  “No, what did you want to do?”

  “Be a writer, of course. I always wanted to be a writer.”

  So there is no escape. Choice is an illusion, rebellion is a mad dash on a long leash. She smiled at me, a funny, wry smile. Showed her hand at last.

  And I’d thought I was his girl.

  You can’t tell, sometimes for years and years, the English majors in Vincent Hall were told, who the great artists are. You think it’s a celebrated someone, and then years later it turns out to be a writer who never even published—think of Emily Dickinson. You just never know who the true artist is in your own time, they told us. History decides.

  The vast skeins of description she used to roll into a ball at the kitchen table unraveled eventually, returned to wooly fluff, to nothing at all. She became mine to take care of, she who masqueraded as the archivist, who turned out to be the writer. And like the real artists that History chooses, after her strokes and seizures and after Stan was gone, she entered at last the world that had been his, the supreme fiction where Justice and Mercy kiss, where the lion lies down with the lamb.

  Chapter 11

  LIKE EVERYONE, I became a busy person, especially after my father died and my mother’s care fell to me. I frequently told people how busy I was, I e-mailed to several continents on the subject: I’m swamped, stressed, I’m at wits’ end. It was my main message. But then it seemed to be everyone else’s message too.

  I toiled under the weight of tottering piles of paper, burdened by the unanswered correspondence of dusty decades, crushed by dumb domestic details, waking panicked in the unforgiving night, the dread of my sins of omission (mainly—I didn’t have time for sins of commission) stabbing at my heart. Above all, I was laid low the past five years—make that closer to ten—by the nineteenth-century duties of middle-aged postmodern daughterhood invoked these days by the oily social-work term primary caregiver.

  My typical salutation became the apology—I’m late, I’m behind. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Much hand-wringing. There was grandiosity to it, as if everyone were waiting for me. Yet I couldn’t stop the racing pulse, the clutch of the heart.

  How did this happen to me, a person who never took an Incomplete in college, who was never late for the orthodontist in high school? I throw myself on the mercy of six or seven people daily. I am just terribly, terribly sorry much of the time.

  On my birthday the first year after my father’s death, I received as a gift a cookbook called The Cake Bible. I didn’t waste a minute with it. Who has time to bake a cake? I put it on a shelf in the kitchen beside my other cookbooks with the intention that someday I would bake a cake, a truly beautiful cake.

  This, in fact,
was the purpose of The Cake Bible in my life as it has been the core use of all the cookbooks I have collected over the years. They are the Edenic beacons of the Someday of perfection and possibility. Their recipes are the scripture of a faith uniting Platonic form and chaotic human appetite in a transcendent communion I believe in passionately though there is no proof of its existence. These texts, fat and reassuring, roll with the authoritative impersonality of reference books.

  Someday. All this will happen someday, when the deadlines have been met, the to-do lists checked off, when the piles of correspondence have been answered, when—this especially—my tiny, almost-blind mother, who has drifted these five years after my father’s death in the ether of a (more or less) benign dementia, when all this has passed and little Mary is released to the heaven to which she claims to aspire.

  Then, let there be cake.

  She lived for almost a year at the condo after he died. Then to an “assisted living” building where I tried to sustain her “independence,” but simply bought her deeper isolation in the faux “apartment” where the stove was never used, the second bedroom was a pretend office for the computer she had been so proud to command. The You’ve Got Mail ding still delivered ten or twelve Viagra ads a day. She thrilled to the sound of the bell, thinking people were writing her letters. “What’s all this about a penis?” she said, baffled. “Is this smut?” Smut, filth, how did it manage to invade her world? She stopped going into that room.

  Then came the day the manager of the condo said I had to “do something” about my mother who was swanning around the hallways in her nightie at two am announcing to anyone who intercepted her that she was fine, thank you, just waiting for her daughter to pick her up for Mass at St. Peter’s. Finally, another couple of falls and a broken hip later, the stage set of the assisted-living apartment was struck, and she was off to the Marian Center, a frank nursing home where, afternoons, I wheeled her outside for a cigarette.

  But on a glorious day in May her last full year, I stopped between coffee and work, and picked The Cake Bible off the kitchen bookshelf. Maybe the attractive blasphemy of the title lured me or maybe it was the author’s introduction, a severe science-y lecture on the chemistry of emulsion. But in truth, I think it was the pictures, an album of formal studio portraits of perfect cakes, each more impressive than the last. There, modest and without architectural ambition, claiming only half a page but all the more alluring for its apparent modesty, was a cake frosted the color of antique wedding satin. The butter cream was laid on like fresh stucco to a restored Hapsburg villa in old Austro-Hungary. The cake was named Lilac Nostalgia.

  And here it was—lilac time. And lilacs my favorite of all flowers. Actually, a florist father would seem to work against a passion for lilacs. For lilacs, being practically wild, abundant, and free, are dismal failures as a retail commodity. But at this time of year, St. Paul, finally unfrozen, is always lilac-town. The lilac is our consolation prize, a post-winter badge of honor. The scent lies heavy in the mid-May air, it follows you home, it overcomes, for a scant week, the incense of ages in the musty Cathedral down the block where, a lifetime ago, Mary walked with her little white book down the aisle toward Stan who had decorated it with stephanotis. In mid-May lilac even overpowers the rank garbage cans along the narrow alleys of the Crocus Hill neighborhood where, it seems, the oldest, most profuse lilac canes flourish.

  In The Cake Bible dozens of individual lilac blossoms had been painstakingly separated into distinct flowerets, and frozen in sparkling sugar, as if in deathless frost, each one affixed to the old-yellow walls of the Lilac Nostalgia cake like lavender stars caught up in the creamiest swath of the Milky Way.

  The cake bore the straight-sided martial bearing that a slouching civilian cake of the sort I have always produced (slope-shouldered, its thin icing puddling on the cake plate) could never hope to achieve. The Lilac Nostalgia stood at attention, its lavender medallions fastened like so many medals for valor on its soldier chest. A cake in dress uniform, in service to a sweetness worth fighting for.

  I COULDN’T GET IT out of my head—the antique yellow of the cake, the pale pink raspberry mousseline lying against the layered bosom of the cake like a silk chemise, creating, as the recipe put it, “a harmony of color and flavor.” I kept thinking of the perfection of it all. Of the glistering lilacs. Of the words “lilac” and “nostalgia” together. I took to heart the advice of The Cake Bible‘s author who said that while keeping commercial crystallized lilacs on hand was “nice” (the arch off-handedness of her damning), they could not hope to compare with the admittedly time-consuming but “dazzling” results of the hand-crystallized lilac.

  And so I found myself at a strip mall of a distant northern suburb, in a cake-decorating store, buying a box of superfine sugar, a minute paintbrush, and a box of parchment paper, along with a big jar of powdered egg whites. Rose Levy Beranbaum, the author of The Cake Bible had said nothing of powdered egg whites. “This will last you,” the clerk, a woman weighing something like 250 pounds, told me, holding out the jar. In the well-stocked aisles of the strangely medicinal-looking cake store, I listened raptly as she told me how to mix up the powdered egg whites with water. “You don’t want real egg whites,” she said, taking me firmly in hand, “you want to avoid any threat of salmonella.”

  “Baking,” she said, “can be dangerous ... It’s all chemistry.”

  “Like love,” I said, idiotically.

  She was having none of this soft-mindedness. “There are some here who don’t think much of The Cake Bible,” she said darkly.

  Back home, I set up my chem experiment in the kitchen. Past noon already, and the lovely spring weather had turned. It was no longer a cake-baking day. Barometric pressure way down to pancake-flattening numbers. Thunder cracked perilously near, comic-book lightning stabbed the sky. The big splashes of rain that precede a real soaker came down in languid strokes, marking the sidewalk in dark dashes.

  I ran outside with my father’s old florist knife with his name—STAN—etched in his own hand on the bone handle. I flicked it open like a switchblade, and made for the alley where lilacs lolled over a brick wall in heavy grapelike clusters. I hacked down armloads, and still the bushes looked untouched, so full of flowers were they, attesting to the bountiful nature of the lilac. The storm blew in as I worked. By the time I got inside again, the giant bouquet was drenched, the lilacs were intensely fragrant, and the leaves which, as Whitman noted, are heart-shaped, were shining as if they had been washed with egg white and only awaited a rain of sugar to memorialize them fully.

  I put the lilacs in vases, first clubbing the bottom of the branches with a hammer as my father taught me so the water could be drawn up the opened capillaries of the woody canes. Then I settled into the kitchen in the strange early-afternoon dark, deeply content, first pulling the lavender flowerets apart, then painting dry egg white (though now wet—you add water and whisk, and the powder does froth, just as the no-nonsense woman in the cake store said it would) onto the little star blossoms, one by one, as the storm pounded down outside.

  Time, somewhere between the blossom separating and the egg-white painting, ceased to exist. The mind went empty too, absent of urge or impediment, just dip, stroke, sugar, dip, stroke, sugar, the blessedly brainless cycle of coating the flowers with the tiny brush, petal by eternal petal. The rain rained down outside, the superfine sugar cascaded on the dampened blossoms, the hours guttered away. I had no responsibilities, no ambition. I wasn’t a writer, not even a poet, and nobody’s daughter. I was alone with the lilacs, gilding them with glistening sugar in the drafty scriptorium of my kitchen.

  I had all the time in the world.

  BUT TIME, big mosquito with its sharp needle, comes zoning in again for blood. Back to the real world of the late-afternoon visit to the Marian Center, back to the life of contrition, the life of badly or barely honored love or duty—whatever this is that requires me to be there, be there.

  I have my routine:
grab the wineglass, the bottle of Chardonnay, check to be sure the Merit 100s and the Bic lighter are stowed in my purse. On the way over, I stop at the Greek restaurant where I have ordered a salmon Nicoise salad. Her favorite. I sometimes bring her this meal (or a BLT on toast—her other choice) instead of sitting with her in the dining room where the old women stare and clutch their baby dolls, amid the moaners and droolers of the third-floor Alzheimer’s/dementia unit. Though, truth be told, I no longer feel alien in the dining room. Still, I am grateful that she is not a drooler, not a moaner. She’s a floater, a vivacious chatterer. Good company, a favorite of the nurses and health aides. Of this, grasping at straws, I am proud.

  It would not be quite accurate to say I like the place. But I feel at home there. I cannot explain this. I fought her move from the merely addled on the second floor to the in-orbit third floor. Before that, I fought the move from her assisted-living apartment to the nursing home. And before that from the condo to assisted living. And before that—well, there have been many stops on the downward spiral. Treat her like a sixteen-year-old who’s just crashed on her boyfriend’s motorcycle.

  I squirmed and I quivered her first few days on third floor. I wept. Stan would have hated this, he wouldn’t have let it happen.

  It occurred to me he should have let it happen. It occurred to me that caring for her had done him in. I thought I’d be, you know ... on my own. For a couple of last, sweet years, oil painting, violin playing.

  But now, my kit of treats in my straw bag, I swing through the lobby, past the aviary with its bright songbirds, and up to third floor where not only my mother but, I sense, her people are to be found. I have with me, besides the wine, the salmon salad and the cigs, the requisite Chocolate Decadence brownie that I myself am unable to eat. It makes my eyes ache, but my mother crams them down every time with a delight so thorough I have to wipe off her messy little paws with a wet napkin afterward.