The Florist's Daughter Read online

  Late October, and he has just come from meeting with the chairwoman of the annual St. Joseph Hospital Charity Ball. Every year it is a different chairwoman, but it is always the same complaint. This woman—she may as well be singular—has said, as the woman last year also said, and as the chairwoman next year will say, “Stan, I want to do something really original this year.”

  His frustration was wholly philosophical. He liked the woman, he loved the work. But he attacked the meat loaf, saying these people didn’t understand anything. What was the point of originality? What on earth did they think they were after? “Do they want me to put the tables upside down and hang the chairs from the ceiling?” he asked as my mother and brother and I shook our heads along with him.

  He waited all his life for the chairwomen of the world to admit that beauty had rules, was a unity and not a bunch of random gestures, and that elegance was a matter of classic, indisputable forms.

  STANISLAUS RUDOLF (the middle name for his mother’s favorite brother, shot in Bohemia for poaching on the noble’s estate, such a feudal crime)—Stan to his customers—didn’t even desire, I think, proximity to the glittering things that Fitzgerald’s Dexter Green with his floral name longed for. His own idea of heaven was the cabin he’d nailed together from greenhouse scrap lumber along a feeder river in the wild-rice fields of northern Minnesota. A guy could relax there, a guy could fish.

  Yet he provided these glittering things, devotedly, to several generations of St. Paul matrons. He wanted a certain kind of formal, purchased beauty to exist, and especially for this elegance to mean something—something good, something hopeful. It was important to him that all this be there—the big Crocus Hill houses with their well-thought-out gardens, their holiday parties festooned with out-of-season cut flowers, the stony façades of Summit Avenue mansions draped in Noble fir branches he expertly twisted around wires to make looping, beribboned garlands. This surface loveliness was the outward and visible sign, as the nuns taught us about the sacraments, of an inward and spiritual grace, the communion of civic good he believed in, the market economy as sacramental rite.

  Another indelible image of him, another framed memoryshot that seems to cancel that exasperated one with the charity-ball women. This time he’s not at home. He’s in the design room, just off the first greenhouse where all the shiny green plants are kept. He’s holding a knife, the pocketknife every florist has in his pocket at all times, the knife that is never loaned to anyone else.

  It must be a Sunday afternoon. The greenhouse is closed, the design room silent. He’s getting something ready, no doubt for a funeral or the early-Monday hospital delivery round. I’m sitting on the stool by the design table, as I always do, just watching.

  He emerges from the walk-in cooler with an armload of flowers—tangerine roses and purple lisianthis, streaked cymbidium orchids, brassy gerbera daisies and little white stephanotis, lemon leaf, trailing sprengeri fern, branches of this, stems of that. He tosses the whole business on the big table, and stands in front of what looks like a garbage heap. An empty vase is set in front of him. He appears to ignore it. He just stands there, his pocketknife in his hand, but not moving, and not appearing to be thinking. He doesn’t touch the mess of flowers, doesn’t sort them. He just stares for a long vacant minute. He’s forgotten I’m sitting there.

  Then, without warning, he turns into a whirlwind. Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he puts all the flowers into the vase, following some inner logic so that—as people always said of his work—it looks as if the flowers had met and agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be. He worked faster than anyone else in the shop, without apparent thought or planning. I could distinguish his arrangements—but they weren’t anything as artificial as an “arrangement”—from across the room from the dozens lined up on the delivery table for the truck drivers.

  He learned the basics of greenhouse work from the old European growers, people with names strangely apropos to the business: Herman Schoen, an elfin man who looked like a dwarf in Snow White but whose name, my father told me, meant “beautiful” in German. Also, the inseparable middle-aged growers, Fern and Rose, solid as farmhands with bright apple cheeks. Their husbands, we understood, occasionally beat them up. One or the other would come to work with a black eye or bruised arm from time to time. Rose’s husband came to the greenhouse in lederhosen, the moss-colored leather shorts and cheery folk embroidery seeming sinister and unsettling, given the blackened eyes of his wife. The elderly men growers were courtly with Fern and Rose. “No, no, no,” tiny Herman Schoen would cry when Fern, who was taller than he and considerably younger, tried to carry a flat of cuttings to her potting table.

  Flower arranging, however, my father learned from two Nisei women who came to Minnesota during the war. They had fled inland from California to avoid Japanese American internment, and my father hired them. For years afterwards they sent us handmade cards at Christmas. They enlisted him, apparently, in the aesthetic of organic form, following the line of the stem. Not for him displays of gladioli arrayed like stiff semaphores in papier-mâché baskets. He would sometimes produce a surprisingly seductive arrangement using only white flowers—by turns flimsy and then juicy, moving from the barest edge of peach to cream and then sheering off to the green of pooled water. The whole composition filled your eye with the unexpected ardor of that virginal color.

  He was caught in opposing values. On the one hand, he held the belief, amounting to a religious faith, that there is an underlying something—a law, a rule, an innate recognition of rightness—that exists within matter itself and is understood as elegance. It is not something we make but something we re-veal—or even acquiesce to when it is revealed to us. This is my father stabbing furiously at the meat loaf, inveighing against the voice of the world’s chairwomen demanding originality.

  On the other hand, he stands at the ready with his pocket-knife, just gazing at the welter of cut stems. Then slashing and cutting, jabbing in a perfectly wild, even dangerous way, taking whatever is at hand, finding a place for all of it. This is spontaneity; trust in the face of choice, buoyancy at the edge of chaos. Here, alone in the design room, he appears to be on the side of the demons of originality, not the angels of order.

  He was by nature a quiet man, victim of a youthful stutter he had inherited from his father, but had somehow trained into submission. Unlike Mother adrift in her airy nothings, he was happier outside of language—in a November duck blind, summers in a fishing boat, or on Lake Milles Lacs ice fishing, just sitting there. Or here in the greenhouse design room on a Sunday afternoon. He brought this silence, an aura of quiet, to the flowers he arranged.

  But he didn’t arrange them. It was himself he arranged, standing at the ready, sharp knife moving over his materials lightly, surely, like a Japanese ink brush.

  Chapter 5

  JUST LIKE DOWNTOWN. Aunt Lillian, Frankie’s shy, surviving twin sister, said this of anything so marvelous, so luxe that its descriptive requirements billowed beyond superlatives. Something really wonderful had to be awarded high-end real estate. My agoraphobic aunt who rarely left home gave us what became our family’s metaphor for the sublime. Just like downtown. A curious figure of speech for a woman terrified of leaving the house except in the company of her husband, the big, bluff Bill. But it was a good metaphor for the yearning of the provincial heart.

  The flower company’s retail shop at Fifth and St. Peter did exist in a zone of glamour, except it wasn’t just like downtown—it was downtown, a world away from the workaday greenhouse on Banfil near the immigrant houses and their cottage gardens.

  The store’s big window displays, changed by my father by the month or to suit the season, weren’t in St. Paul as we were in St. Paul and as the greenhouse was. The downtown store conveyed a fugitive air of New York—maybe even Paris—that had strayed somehow to the block of shops curving past the St. Paul Hotel. It was directly across the street from Bullard’s
Jewelers whose haughty display windows were small peepholes that enticed and yet kept you at a distance.

  Bullard’s was like church—hushed, mysterious, trafficking in jewels and sterling silver that were emblems of transcendence. You couldn’t imagine shopping at Bullard’s. But at least a person could buy a rose now and then. The flower shop, for all its élan, was not unapproachable like Bullard’s where every night the riches were squirreled away in vaults like money in a bank. At closing time the little squares of Bullard’s windows were emptied. The windows of the flower shop kept their displays through the night, floral sentries on the street of “fine shops.”

  Next door to Bullard’s was Gokey’s. Here Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway had ordered their bottes sauvages, the knee-high snakebite-resistant boots worn by knowing men of action. From here the likewise celebrated Gokey Indian Dressing was sent around the globe, as my mother said, to those wishing to protect their leather goods from the dryness of deserts or the rot of jungles. “Gokey’s is international,” she said with rare earnestness, indicating a step well beyond downtown.

  She never said anything was “just like downtown,” to her a moronic remark. She considered my aunt a silly woman, though a good cook. Well, that’s all she does, Leo the Lion pronounced. She never leaves the house. With all that time on my aunt’s hands, my mother couldn’t see why she didn’t read a book now and again. Your aunt’s not much of a reader, she said. For her, a severe judgment. And Lillian had not been reeled back into the Church, as my mother had managed with my father. “I live by the Golden Rule,” Lillian said. There was a department store downtown called the Golden Rule, across the street from one called the Emporium. A mystifying religion, I thought, but Lillian was definitely the best-dressed woman in the family, so who knew?

  The flower shop took up a broad swath of the south side of Fifth directly across from Bullard’s and Gokey’s. There it displayed itself like an exotic beauty propped between the luxurious bolsters of Frank Murphy (the best women’s clothes in the city where my mother wouldn’t think of going) and Field-Schlick (second best—with a lending library she sighed to join though she couldn’t justify the membership fee).

  People—women especially—paused before my father’s big window displays, gazing at the orchids and flowering ginger in cachepots, evidence of Hawaii and Costa Rica right there inside as they shivered on the January sidewalk. Their faces were wistful—who could afford all this? Much later, when I traveled to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, I recognized this same soft pang, a reverent longing on the faces of people in Prague who stood in front of sausage shops. The greenhouse, on the flats of West Seventh, was an indoor farm with none of this ritz. The growers wore overalls and clomped between the raised potting tables in rubber boots, splashing hoses around and muddying the ground beneath the vast mullioned-window roofs. The greenhouse design room was a charmless space off one wing, piled with cheap vases and spools of green wire for strengthening stems. A deep metal sink, ringed with calcium deposits, held tin buckets of mums and glads waiting their turn in the funereal papier-mâché baskets stacked on the floor.

  Though the greenhouse had something called a showroom, it was dim and pointless. A barely lit cooler ran along one wall; opposite, the windows gave onto the working-class neighborhood. Banfil, street of my birth, byway of first memories, frost stars on winter windows, iris beaten down by spring rain, Teta’s dried mushrooms, food of the fairytale woods. In no way was it just like downtown.

  It looked as if nobody had dusted the shelves in the greenhouse showroom in years. Probably nobody had. Why bother? Customers didn’t pause here. They went right to the glass houses and the arrays of flowering plants. The greenhouse showroom was always fighting a losing battle against becoming a storage area for overstock and a permanent resting place for dust-collecting cut-leaf philodendrons that never sold and never died. It sank into its half-light of dust, boxes of Christmas lights crammed in the corner during the spring planting season, stacks of Easter-bunny ceramic bowls crowded out of the way behind elephantine potted plants at Christmas.

  The downtown store showroom transcended this squalor. It was a stage set for the good life. The design area, where the cut-flower arrangements and corsages were made, was consigned to the basement near the garage as if to hide all evidence of effort. The business office was sequestered in a back warren like a shameful secret. Nothing—not the heaps of stems stripped of leaves tossed carelessly on the floor by the designers, not the careful filing of pale green charge slips by the somnolent office staff, none of it—was allowed to intrude on the front showroom’s tableau of luxury. It was an alternative, wonderfully unnecessary world, this sphere where my father spent his afternoons (mornings were for the greenhouse). Here he lavished his art, making the world over as it ought to be for people who, like him, loved loveliness.

  A candy shop ran along one side of the showroom, a display case filled with chocolates, caramels, and after-dinner mints in communion-wafer white and sublime pastels (these changed to deep red and a saturated forest green at Christmas). The flower shop sublet this slim space to Mamie Dexter Candies. Like the floral business, Dexter’s dated from the nineteenth century, and was still run in the fifties and sixties by Miss Alta, youngest maiden sister of the long-departed Mamie.

  Miss Alta was the last of the Dexter candy fortune. Ancient and grim, with the face of Ma Barker, she patrolled her corridor of sweets, a damp cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth. Ashes collected on the shelf-bosom of her black silk dress where they sometimes burned a pinpoint hole. The black silk was shiny as if Miss Alta had been tempered and left to cool into the pudding shape of the chocolates she purveyed to the St. Paul carriage trade. She had a gravel voice and never smiled. And she never gave away samples.

  Even my father gave her a wide berth as she plodded from her preserve against the wall to the elevator that led to the basement where her chocolate dippers sat around a wide marble table. These obese women wore white smocks and white hairnets, a bevy of ponderous chemists who appeared to have been dropped on their workbenches like fresh fondant. It was impossible to make friends with them. “Keep away,” Miss Alta said in her baleful voice. “They have to concentrate.” Two Dexter items, the Uptown and the Mint Sandie, were presented as shop exclusives so she had a point. A missionary in South Africa had a standing order for five pounds of Mint Sandies every Christmas.

  The smell of roses and chocolate had a narcotic effect when you entered from Fifth Street. The specialty stores that clustered on the block formed a retail ghetto of extravagance. This wasn’t where people like us shopped. But flowers and candy spoke of children and simple pleasures, and somehow made the flower shop all the more tempting, unlike Bullard’s, which was formidable to the point of threat, and snobby Frank Murphy with its couture coldness. Gordon Parks had his first job at Frank Murphy, my father said, photographing models for the formidable blue-haired Mrs. Murphy, arbiter of taste who traveled to New York and had known—was it possible?—Coco Chanel. Or had known someone who knew Coco Chanel very, very well. She obtained made-to-order Lilly Daché hats for some of the stylish St. Paul matrons who bought their flowers from my father.

  Aside from the public library, the downtown store and the little shops around it were the only Elsewhere of my disloyal, let-me-out-of-here Midwestern girlhood. They promised a Beyond. The flower shop was here and it was my father’s domain, but it was also marvelously other, this place heavy with the drowsy scent of velvet-petaled roses and Provençal freesias in the middle of winter, the damp-earth spring fragrance of just-watered azaleas and cyclamen all mixed up with the headachy smell of bitter chocolate. Waterford vases winked from glass shelves and broke light into rainbows in the late-fall afternoons while I waited, after a dentist appointment, for the shops of Fifth Street to close for the evening and my father to drive us home, asking me what I learned that day in school.

  One night, waiting for him to turn off the display lights, I stood by the big w
indow, and looked idly across the street to Bullard’s. The tiny door at the back of the Bullard’s display case opened, as if automatically, and a hand, seemingly detached, reached into the little box. It clawed up the diamond-and-sapphire necklace lying on the satin. The door snapped shut behind the withdrawn hand, and the starry strand receded into the fathoms of Bullard’s darkness for another lonely night.

  A spotlight dazzled the empty display window. A strange bitterness stung me as if I had been denied something essential. Not diamonds and not sapphires. The vacancy of the window was what hurt, oddly. Here was our cold and tidy town, here the narrow window displaying our self-satisfied abdication from all that glittered, here our vacancy that Bullard’s illuminated every night. And my father, coming to collect me, with his usual question: So what did you learn today?

  CHRISTMAS, AT LEAST, made up for every drear St. Paul habit. The downtown store was decked with Noble fir garlands done up with massive velvet bows, the edges stiffened on the back with thin wires to keep the ribbons from drooping. The walls were banked with Fraser firs, the only Christmas tree to have in my father’s view, though he had to accept the inexplicable preference for long-needled Norway pines that many of his otherwise tractable customers swore by.

  The best Christmas “item” was the collection of hand-carved German and Italian crèche scenes my father bought at the Chicago spring trade show. These Nativity sets were his stealth campaign against the bottom-line thinking of the store’s owner. “Who’s gonna buy that Italian manger, Stan? You have to mark it up triple with the tariff. You could maybe sell that downtown Minneapolis, but...”

  The owner’s downtown was not the stuff of my aunt’s transcendent metaphor but the small-minded marketplace of the provincial capital. Don’t start getting Minneapolis ideas in a St. Paul kind of town. There was also the problem of theft-people could nab a baby Jesus in nothing flat and be out the door before anyone noticed.