The Florist's Daughter Read online

  Today, as every day, she is astonished to see me. Where have I been? She, it proves, has been to Chicago where she was under arrest, though for nothing serious: I needn’t worry. My father, dead these five final years of my daughterhood, has been difficult, she confides. She hopes I will go to him: he will listen to me, she says, magnanimously acquiescing to my greater powers.

  Besides, there are other problems she must attend to. Her own mother, dead more than fifty years, simply will not speak to her. “Mother is very bad,” she says with sorrow. This happens to old people, she reminds me. She shrugs. “There are a lot of people here who are not right,” she says, lowering her voice out of courtesy, touching lightly the side of her head.

  The way she touched it when I asked her if there was any advance warning of her seizures. There’s a ticking. “It’s sad,” she says now of the people who are not right. Her age-old message: life is so sad, so sad. Again the philosophical shrug. And then she beams me her beatific, free-as-a-bird smile.

  This is a new smile, not the smile of her previous self, not a merely happy smile. It is a cosmic smile of vast dimension and knowing, and I’m beginning to think it may be the reason I cannot stay away.

  People tell me I must get over my Catholic guilt—this is why I’m so determined to come here regularly, they say, though her own clock and calendar have been blown to smithereens and she doesn’t track the regularity of my visits. You don’t need to go every day, she doesn’t remember if you’re there or not, they tell me. Letting me off the hook.

  She’s glad of the picnic dinner. My original plan was to wheel her over in her chair to the park across the street, Indian Mounds Park overlooking the Mississippi, sacred ground. Some of the mounds have been fenced off in recent years, acknowledged at last for what they are: a cemetery.

  But the rain ended that plan. I tell her we’ll go to the coffee shop downstairs for dinner. There is no coffee shop, but I’ve fallen into the same fictional habits she has now: the lobby with a couple of small tables is “the coffee shop,” the sidewalk entryway is “the terrace.” I’m not aware of these fictions between us until I hear myself say them in front of one of the nurses who looks at me strangely.

  I feed her like a bird so she doesn’t have to hunt blindly around her plate for the morsels of salmon. She doesn’t need to be fed, but she smiles. “I like to be spoiled,” she says. She opens her beak wide, helpfully. “It’s good,” she says of the poached salmon, “it’s wet.” She can reach for her wineglass herself, and she drains it with real thirst, like water.

  “I love wine,” she tells me, “but you don’t need to worry, I won’t get into drinking trouble.” She who was in just that trouble for twenty years and beyond. The slurred evenings of bourbon and later “just a glass of white wine for me,” laced with the phenobarb and Dilantin, the round-the-clock cocktail of all those years. My father saying, “We don’t have to drink, Mary. Let’s not drink. I don’t care.”

  Good luck on that one, Dad. The beady eye glaring, the half gallon of Gallo in the fridge where the milk used to be.

  Finally, my brother went behind her back (her bitter phrase) and got her doctor to reorder her meds. The doctor had been prescribing enough phenobarb and Dilantin for a Vikings linebacker, Peter said. He got no points for saving her life. I was a Goody Two-shoes, he was a meddler.

  And yet, also: I’m proud of you. Neither one of you ever gave us a minute’s trouble.

  Not something I was able to take pride in.

  Then, after the wine, the brownie, a two-handed operation. She wants to take it herself. She eats it all in a trice, licks her fingers. Then the cleanup, holding her small hands out for the wet towel I get from the bathroom, her wedding rings swiveling on her bony fingers.

  Then outside, “on the terrace,” because smoking is forbidden indoors. The rain has stopped and the air is buoyant, rinsed of the dark heaviness of the afternoon. Cake-baking weather again. “How about a smoke?” she says. I guide the Merit 100 into her blind hand that claws the distance between us for it. She puts it to her mouth and I snap the Bic lighter. She’s good at this, a lifetime performing this gesture: pulling the drag deep into her soul, holding the sweetness there, and then, just when it seems it must have made its way past the curve of her bent spine and that even her toes are inhaling, she releases the sigh of smoke, almost mewing with relish.

  “Are you tired?” I ask.

  She is, she says. “I lead an exciting life,” she says, “but all this traveling is tiring.”

  Then she beckons with a crooked finger. She has a secret. She needs to tell me something. “Sometimes the children don’t approve,” she says. She’s been waiting all day on pins and needles to see what I’ll say. Am I ready for a big surprise?

  “Shoot,” I say.

  “I married Don today,” she says. Naughty girl—waiting for the Goody Two-shoes daughter to be scandalized.

  “Who’s Don?” I ask.

  She regards me with pity. “He’s the owner of this ship,” she says, once again astonished by this thick daughter. Then fretful, worried. “Do you mind? The children are often upset.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say.

  Then one of the little people inhabits me and I hear myself saying, “Is he rich—Don?”

  She looks at me with disdain. “No! Not rich!” she cries in revulsion. We’re in the middle, don’t I understand that? Not rich, not poor, just right. Whatever you do, never worry about money. Don’t pay attention to it.

  “Well, is he nice?”

  “Oh, very nice,” she says, purring at the comforting thought of her new husband.

  But the little people can’t resist. “As nice as Dad?” I ask.

  She looks at me with her withering eyes, the big blank blind one and the wavering half-seeing one. She fastens me with a dart of outrage. “We don’t compare anyone to Stan,” she says.

  I wanted her to say that.

  I wheel her back to the elevator, up to third. Then I remember the lilacs in the tinfoil package I’ve brought. They’re good, according to The Cake Bible, “almost indefinitely.” So I don’t wheel her back to her room where Marie, her roommate, always cries out to me, “Sister, Sister, what do I owe?”

  “It’s all paid up, Marie,” I say with authority each time. “You’re all paid up.”

  “Oh am I? Am I? I’m so glad, I’m so glad.” And curls up, an ancient shard tucked in with a bright-colored afghan and sleeps, her mouth in a great O.

  Mother and I go to the little lounge at the end of the corridor. We make a stop at our usual place by the aquarium.

  Nursing homes, care centers—all these final places seem to have aviaries and aquariums, where the walkers and wheelchairs are directed as if to the pleasures of a garden, the vacant eyes encouraged to gaze at another species and its floating world. Not the goldfish of golden age in the luscious pictures of Matisse and the dreamy East. This is the dark oversize fish tank of eternity, gloomy beings ghosting their way through the murk. My mother looks intently with her one good eye that isn’t very good but provides her the one slice of visual reality she still has.

  “Fish are calm,” she pronounces slowly, with approval. All her remarks now are sibylline, occult. “Birds,” she gestures over her shoulder, referring to the aviary on the first floor, “birds are flighty ... skittery.”

  I think this is all, but no. After a long thoughtful moment, in an evenhanded tone, “Of course, they get a great deal more done. Birds.”

  Like Stan, she believed in work. It was what they gave to us, more than Catholicism, more than faith in the middle road—work. That’s where salvation lay. And the truest love—it was in work that you found passion. I’ve never had to worry about another woman. That greenhouse is his mistress. And books were her love, at the library where she worked for minimum wage, and at home snug with a two-pounder in her corner chair, dead to the world, lost in the furies and unfairness of history, her subject. Novels are okay, but give me a biography any day.<
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  Work was what mattered, what didn’t let you down. Everyone has a vocation. Listen to your guardian angel—you’ll know what your work is meant to be.

  One night she wheeled herself out to the nursing station on third at two AM, and said, “Put me to work. I have to get a job.” Beautiful Rita, working the night shift, understood. She set her up next to her at the big open desk and handed her the St. Paul telephone directory. “See if these are in order, will you, Mary?” She kept the job till the end. “I’m helping the nurses get things organized,” she said. “Earn my keep.”

  “What’s that?” she says now, pointing.

  Fish in the aquarium, I tell her.

  “Fish are fat,” she said with some disgust. “And lazy.” Great disapproval from the queen worker bee.

  When I reach to hold her hand, she pulls away as if stung. “Don’t touch me,” she says, her owly eyes narrowing on me with fright or fury. “I mean it! Don’t touch me!”

  Another of her long pauses.

  Then, more quietly but with her piercing Cassandra look, “Don’t touch me or ... or you’ll lose your charm.”

  I find it impossible to disbelieve these remarks.

  I wheel her past the fish tank to a more distant lounge. A good place that is almost always empty. There, we settle in by the big picture window. I show her the little packet of sugared lilacs. I describe the Lilac Nostalgia cake. The Cake Bible recommends it as a perfect Mother’s Day cake. “Cake?” she asks, suddenly alert, eager.

  I explain I couldn’t manage the cake. I only got the crystallized lilac part done. They took the whole day, just the lilacs. She shrugs. Holds out her hand the institutionalized way she does for her pills when the nursing aide comes around with the meds cart, obedient now to routine.

  She crunches one lilac down with a curious, inward look. “Pepper,” she says. I feel a surge of pride: the accuracy of her still-avid palate. Still naming things, still fastening the labels of meaning, accuracy still alive in there somewhere.

  We sit together by the big window, above the trees here on third. Puffy gray-and-white cloud-duvets blanket the big sky. The lilacs, I realize, don’t smell anymore, once you embalm them. Sugar kills the scent. They’re just the idea of lilac now, barely the look of lilac. You have to supply the rest. But here on third, that’s fine. It’s become obvious that the imagination is the last thing to go.

  Then little Mary, all ninety pounds humped up in her wheelchair covered with her multicolored crocheted lap rug, her child feet barely touching the floor, turns from the big rolling sky, her face bright with a question she is forming.

  “Tell me,” she says, “do you think we’ll be nearing land soon?” She lays a hand lightly on my arm, the way a stranger might inquire of the passenger reclining in the next deck chair.

  It’s been quite some time since I’ve corrected her, since I tried to reel her back—back down as I’ve come to think of this plane where the rest of us conduct our operations, our plateau of surfaces and certainty. She doesn’t require an answer. I take the little blotched paw (how easily she bruises now, the skin the barest membrane, hardly protecting her from anything anymore). She turns contentedly back to the sea view. The clouds are magnificent, clearing the sky of threat.

  “I like to sit,” she says, not turning to face me, staying with the sea and the blue blue sky with its sketchy covering of white. “I like to sit and talk. About—about everything and nothing.” She has found her meaning, what she wishes to impart to the companionable stranger in the adjoining deck chair.

  We stay like this a long while. The evening moaners have started up down a far corridor. “You’re a busy person,” my mother tells me. “You’re in your prime.” One day she says, “Poor you.” She’s sorry she’s so much trouble. “You’ll do no time in Purgatory, not you,” she says. “I wouldn’t do all you do.”

  Oh yes you would, I say. I remind her that she did—her own mother lingering for years after a stroke. But I’ve forgotten that her mother is on the fourth floor, and though difficult, still managing.

  She’s right. These years I’m too busy and it’s a waste. I get nothing done and I race around all the time and then I sit here doing nothing, staring with her into the bleak aquarium.

  I waste my life. I want to. It’s the thing to do with a life. We were wrong about work—it isn’t the best thing, no matter how much you love it. Wasting time is better.

  I sit with my mother, as has been destined since time began because a daughter is a daughter all her life. We stay like this, hand in hand. We have all the time in the world—world without end, amen. Words we recite by heart when she asks me to say the Rosary with her, the last phrase of the Gloria, the little prayer at the end that puts to rest all the Hail Marys.

  Chapter 12

  I WAS THINKING I’d lie down on the cot for a moment, not because I was sleepy (I knew I wasn’t sleepy) but because my back ached from sitting and the awkwardness of reaching out my hand to hold hers in the raised hospital bed.

  I let go of her hand and let the yellow legal pad drop to the floor between us. I stretched out on the cot for a quick moment. I wouldn’t drift off—the cot was uncomfortable, and her breathing was loud. And she was dying—my mother. You don’t fall asleep at this moment.

  Then the nurse, the one who didn’t like me anymore because of my cold-blooded obituary-writing, laid the weight of her hand on my shoulder. Someone else was in the room too, standing by the bed. She was talking to someone, the disapproving night nurse.

  She’s gone, she was saying.

  I shot up like the risen dead from the cot, upsetting its fragile balance so that I was pitched off the side onto the floor.

  “That’s not possible,” I say furiously as if the woman had murdered her. “I’ve been sitting here holding her hand.” My mother’s outrage in my voice. I’m on my high horse, the one she rode. The nurse says nothing. Clearly I’m holding no one’s hand.

  “Shall I call O’Halloran’s?” she asks gently, naming the funeral parlor I listed on the form when my mother was admitted three days ago.

  “No,” I say. “Not till it’s light.”

  She doesn’t argue with me. I think I’m offered coffee. I say I’ll sit here. “All right, then,” the nurse says, that laconic Minnesota singsong. “Okay, then.”

  She had just stopped, given it up, sighed her last sigh, Mary Catherine Ann Teresa Eleanor. Like Dad, she waited until I wasn’t there. Tiptoed out. Spare the child.

  She died in the aptly named dead of night, and some primitive instinct would not allow me to leave or allow her to be taken away until the night was truly gone and it felt safe to set her adrift and to venture forth myself into the daylight. I would sit with her in this small calm room these first hours of death as I had stayed with her the last days of life.

  I didn’t touch her—not ever again. I sat and looked at her face. I took it in. The way my father instructed when we went for drives up north, along the river, around the city—look, look. And this room, the last one, how would she describe it? Tell what the room was like, Ma. Describe the room. Start at the beginning. No pearliness in the gray light of the hospital walls, none of the luster she always concocted for her rooms. The walls here have the matte sheen of rolled paint. The green plants in the waiting room, the family lounge—all plastic, a fuzz of dust on the leaves. There are no flowers here. People don’t send flowers to the dying. Just to the dead. The flowers will start up again tomorrow.

  Somewhere down the corridor the white noise of the hospital whirs. Oddly comforting, that institutional whir. Or maybe the comfort is in writing it down, noting it. The familiar embrace of the yellow legal pad. Her kind of comfort. Words, her airy nothings.

  Are you working? Are you on a deadline?

  Uh-huh.

  What’s it about?

  Oh, this and that.

  The only thing to describe in the room was her little bent body turned now upward, not facing me anymore. The night nurse must hav
e repositioned her. After. Before she woke me.

  Never a bedsore on my people, she’d said, massaging the china spine earlier in the evening. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, she sang low and sweet at her work, unknowingly accurate as she dribbled the sponge over the old parchment of the back that had fractured once, the hip that had broken too, the airy nothings the old bones had become.

  AND THEN THE LIGHT did come back, revealing the old wing of the hospital where she gave birth to Peter, first child. She was twenty-five, married two years. Then, beyond the dark red brick of the old hospital, the dome of the Cathedral emerged clearly, the church where Scarlett O’Hara married the handsomest boy, two Depression-era sweethearts, summer of 1940, thinking there would be no war, not for them, not for America. All that was Over There. They were safe in the middle with Napoleon and Benito and mild Mr. Williams. Button up your overcoat ... You belong to me.

  And off to the side, a slice of the History Center built ten years ago atop old Miller Hospital where I, second child, her last, only daughter, was born. She liked that detail: the cornerstone of the old hospital had been set in the middle of the History Center—History not wanting to obscure history even as it razed the old building and plunged it into memory or oblivion. You’re history—how that means you’re gone, you’re forgotten. The opposite of what it should mean. You’re history. Bye-bye.

  So, daylight, then. So, okay, then.

  I let them take her. Called the night nurse from the room who called O’Halloran’s. A man in an Eisenhower jacket came with his shining gurney in what felt like a twinkling, as if he were a little person waiting just down the hall for his cosmic cue. He wheeled her away, covered, down the white corridor, in her white gown. Shroud, I suppose it was then.

  I called a taxi from the nurse’s station. This felt like a solemn thing to do. Took the elevator down to the ER waiting room. I considered walking home after all. Our house is barely a block from the Cathedral and I hadn’t had much fresh air in days. Or I could call home. My husband would want to come for me. Had wanted to be with me. It was I who insisted on this solo finale, had said no, go home, get some sleep.