The Cathedral was her family parish, the Irish lighting candles before the altar of the Virgin Mother. He had no parish. His father, the Czech immigrant, growled through his stutter, Priests are c-c-rooks. But the Irish grandfather was an usher at Sunday Mass, a pillar of the church as the Irish great-aunts said.
On the arm of her father, the pillar, on the last day of August 1940, my mother came down the yawning center aisle of the bombastic nave whose immensity made even a nice crowd of family and friends look skimpy. A hired photographer documented all this. Big eight-by-ten glossies in a leatherette album fastened in place by black tabs, pictures so primal they’re glued in mind more powerfully than memory itself, as if the twentieth century gave everybody an extra kit bag of memories, your own flimsy, inexact ones, and the incontrovertible evidence of photo albums, image upon un-sorted image documenting your life before you existed. I knew you before you were born, the shirttail Irish relatives would say when they met me.
She was dressed in a chalk-white gown, the skirt formed by rows of lace flounces, the bodice topped with a mandarin collar and sprouting gossamer cap sleeves. She held no bouquet. She preferred to carry a book, as if she already divined her years as a library file clerk that lay ahead. The white kid-leather prayer book trailed satin streamers punctuated by stephanotis blossoms that her florist bridegroom had ingeniously wired to the ribbons. The dress was a knockoff of the one Vivien Leigh wears in the opening scene of Gone With the Wind. It had been mass produced for the brides of 1940. She was one of many Scarlett O’Haras that year.
Later, the dress, folded in sky-blue tissue paper, lived in a large waxed cardboard box pushed to the back of a closet where, over the course of my girlhood, it grayed into a strange yellow like an old bruise. It wasn’t just a dress but something hallowed and creepy—a relic, the bleached bone of a saint. When I learned in school about the Shroud of Turin, the disintegrating gown sprang to mind, dreadful in the dark of the airless closet, lying in its waxed box the size of a child’s casket.
THESE APPARENTLY ORDINARY people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives, and believing themselves to be ordinary, why do I persist in thinking—knowing—they weren’t ordinary at all?
What’s back there? Back there, I say, as if the past were a location, geographic rather than temporal, lost in the recesses of old St. Paul. And how did it become “old St. Paul,” the way I habitually think of it now, as if in my lifetime the provincial Midwestern capital had lifted off the planet and become a figment of history, and from there had ceased to exist except as an invention of memory. And all the more potent for that, the way our lives become imaginary when we try most strenuously to make sense of them.
It was a world, old St. Paul. And now it’s gone. But I still live in it.
Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn’t belong to the desiccated sins of the soul—pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory.
Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty—also a sin when misapplied, as it so often is. But it’s the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people.
Another old–St. Paul way of thinking: Mother talking about her people, meaning not the nation, but the clutch of family streaming back to illiterate Kilkenny, her Irish grandfather who wouldn’t take up a gun during the Traverse des Sioux “Indian Uprising” (I couldn’t shoot. I played with those boys), her mother one of “the seven beautiful Smith girls, tall as men,” and their one lone brother, feebleminded, wandering the street with a small tin drum. And he the handsomest of them all. Pity, pity.
Or she would say my folks, that mild Midwestern descriptor. My people, my folks, Mother and Dad—M & D in the private patois of the fervent journals I’ve kept all these years as if I were doing research for a historical novel forever incomplete because the research keeps proliferating. Until now. Now the research is almost done.
All these scattered bits I’ve collected that wait patiently, perfectly willing to be ignored, this being St. Paul, this being my folks.
But there’s no ignoring it all now. No more clinging to duty in the old world with its humid kitchens and gossipy neighborhoods, its impacted furies and proud silences. Time’s up, the wages of daughterhood are almost over.
But I’m still stuck, gazing at their faces that peer back, mute and demanding, from the wedding album, from the piano where I only seemed to be practicing Chopin, gazing back at their mysterious faces that should have been the most familiar faces in the world to me.
Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life.
I’VE DONE THE RESEARCH. I’ve got the evidence. Pick any of the notebooks off the shelf—each one turning to dust as old books and old dresses do. Moments, episodes, frustrations, exquisitely rendered injustices, scalpel-sharp character studies that draw a bead of blood along the line of a paragraph—they’re packed away in old journals, left in my own airless closet as if swathed in blue tissue paper.
This one from April 1981 will do. She and I are walking past the flower shop downtown. Maybe we were going to stop by to say hello to Dad. I can’t remember that and didn’t record it. We’d been to lunch at the River Room in Dayton’s department store.
I’m already past thirty, but we’ve been going to the River Room since I was six when she advised, Order the Russian salad, darling. The Russian salad had two anchovies laid across it in a limp, salty X. You should know what an anchovy is. She too had an instinct for the Great World where anchovies might be encountered from time to time. In spite of indenturing me (...a daughter’s a daughter...), she didn’t expect I’d be stranded in this proud Catholic town of fish sticks and “Friday menus” posted at the Grand Avenue restaurants. Without Minneapolis, we read with humiliation, what would we be? A cold Omaha.
But by 1981 even St. Paul had entered the new world order of quiche and croissants. The Russian salad of the Joe McCarthy years was off the menu, taking with it the risky glamour of pinko food. The new Frenchy cuisine had no such illicit allure. St. Paul took to it overnight. Glass of wine, too, another nouvelle touch. “Take your mother to lunch,” my father said about that time. “She gets lonely.” Both of them were starting to “doctor,” as Mother said, the beginning of their long endings.
Maybe it was the glass of wine she’d had. Well, two. Maybe her new frailty. Suddenly she was on the sidewalk, had fallen somehow. Just collapsed. She howled in pain, clasped her arm. It was broken. Many bones would break before the end.
In my notebook I reported to myself: Then she started sobbing, “I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead” right there on the sidewalk. People walked around us. Later, when he came to St. Joe’s Hospital where I took her, D looked down and rubbed his bruised knuckle. He hurt it when he’d moved a wedding palm at the greenhouse. I wanted to sob—that he rubbed his knuckle. For her I felt—what did I feel? Nothing, just nothing. That can’t be right, to feel nothing when she’s crying she wants to die. No, I did feel something, I thought: she’s lying, she doesn’t want to die. A cold feeling, as if she ought to mean it.
An ordinary middle-class Midwestern family, in other words. A cozy setting for heartlessness.
Such people, modest to a fault, assume they’re unremarkable even in their passion, even as they go down in licks of flame. They think they’re leaving themselves to silence and forgetting. That’s okay, they don’t mind. Isn’t that what death is, anyway? And isn’t that what an ordinary, decent life is?
They expect to be forgotten.
But they aren’t forgotten. They’re less gone now than they were in their prime. Now that he’s gone and she
barely lingers, they’re everywhere, bits of mica glinting off the Cathedral granite.
From time to time someone asks where I live. “In the shadow of the Cathedral,” I say automatically, as if to say “near the Cathedral” wouldn’t give the exact location. In the shadow of the Cathedral, the shadow of their long lives.
Six bells, tall as persons, are housed in the massive belfry. They bang out the quarter hour. On the hour they make a bigger commotion. Living a block away, it’s impossible to forget the Cathedral. It’s always remarking on itself.
Inside people light candles, mostly by the Blessed Mother’s altar. Weekday afternoons, an organ student sometimes gets permission to practice in the choir loft. You can feel the bass notes in your body. Much Bach, some Buxtehude, dogged repetition of difficult phrasing, the complications of a fugue abandoned, a folding chair scraping the stone floor.
Occasionally someone will set up an easel, trying to get on canvas the rose window or the complex perspective of the place. I’ve seen people settled into the pews as if on a davenport at home, reading novels—Judith Krantz, Elmore Leonard. Here and there, scattered figures kneel, fingers skimming their beads. A few homeless people catnap in prudently chosen side pews.
But in these off-hours most people just stroll through, heads thrown back to take in the astonishing vault of the dome. It’s riveted at the compass points with the four principal virtues, spelled out in massive gilt letters as if they held up the entire enterprise: fortitude, tolerance, prudence, justice. Midwestern virtues, especially the first three. The fourth is what we like to believe we’re capable of. The real believers, like my father, think Justice is what life is poised upon, the impenetrable primer coat on existence that protects life from the rust and decay of uncaring, from cynicism and greed.
A bronze commemorative plaque is affixed to a pew just below the raised pulpit. In this pew, it reads, sat John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America, when he attended the eleven o’clock Mass, October 7, 1962. Some of the front center pews still carry small metal nameplates. These are even older, left over from the age of pew rental, my Irish grandfather’s era, the pillar who wore in his buttonhole a white carnation that gave off the sharp scent of clove, as he moved up the aisle with the red velvet–lined collection plate on its long wooden handle.
“Of course we couldn’t give that kind of money,” my mother said. “We never had a nameplate.” Always eager to assure me of our modesty, our middling safety in the middle of the continent in the middle of the century. “You were born after the war, you’re a peace baby,” she would say, securing my well-being not only in life but in history. She even wanted me to understand that, according to my third-grade teacher, I was neither brilliant nor stupid. “You’re in the middle,” she said with obvious relief. The best place to be: the middle. No harm done there. That’s us: smart enough, middle-class, Midwestern, midcentury—middle everything. Safe, safe.
The preferred pews of the upper classes belong to nobody now. Except to memory—if tarnished metal bearing a name that no longer brings anyone to mind is memory.
Both of them bequeathed their modesty—they thought—to the adored child. Yet they made sure to educate me out of silence, past the sweet safe middle they clung to and urged upon me. Reach for the stars, sweetie—and stay, stay right here.
I’d long been acquainted with the alien anchovy and I was already jaded when she was hurrying to introduce me to the croissant during its debut at the River Room.
It was the beginning of trying to get the story straight, the day she admitted she wished she were dead, the day she revealed to me my cold heart.
Chapter 2
SHE LINED US UP after dinner in the living room by the Magnavox to pray the family Rosary, but Leo the Lion was no simple believer. Her credo was a litany of tart judgments delivered from the observer’s margin. In a way that was decisive for me, she modeled what it meant to be a writer without actually writing anything. But wait a sec (as she would say)—don’t forget those letters to the St. Paul Pioneer Press “Mailbag.”
She possessed natural distance, an acute eye, the willingness to size things up. She could stir the soup of detail to a narrative froth. There was even a touch of Irish magical realism: Never speak ill of the little people, she would say severely, my grandmother spoke with them often. Fairies, mild instances of clairvoyance, a flair for coincidence that Dickens would have blushed to employ—she claimed them all.
The Czech aunts, my father’s older sisters, regarded her with mistrust, her nose always in a book, a look of exquisite boredom she didn’t disguise as they swapped recipes for sweet rolls. Food, she said with withering scorn as the aunts launched into plans for dinner while they were serving lunch. I was pulled in both directions, drawn irresistibly to the rising sweet dough of the Czech side where good times were to be had, then back to the arch misgivings of my Irish mother and the abstract world of words she dished out.
My father’s floral work cracked open a door to glamour, to sparkle and wonder. At the breakfast table at home, mornings after one of the big holiday parties he decorated at the St. Paul Hotel or the James J. Hill mansion, she and I would sit almost till noon as she reconstructed the previous evening, an operative being debriefed by her handler.
His association with St. Paul society ladies who spent their days planning dinner parties and charity balls gave us a peephole into the indulgences of the rich. “The rich” belonged to a world beyond us, yet my father consorted with them, knew their ways, was easy in their company. It was the age before $10 buckets of roses in the grocery store, before people casually tossed a cellophane bundle of $4 daisies in their shopping carts. Flowers belonged to the world of death and delight—funerals and weddings and holidays. Only the grandees of our town ordered flowers as an everyday thing.
May I help you was what you said to a customer. My father helped people. People whose flower bills mounted marvelously into the hundreds every month. We spoke with wonder of the rare $10,000 wedding, meaning the flowers came to that. This was a marriage to take seriously.
I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table, face cupped in my hands as my mother talked. She had a superb reading voice, free of melodrama, embodying the sangfroid of a story’s ups and downs, conveying the remorseless inevitability of fiction. Her speaking voice, as she told her own stories, had this same reportorial authority. The dry voice looped on, constructing the party scene meticulously until the previous night was propped before us on our chipped red-and-white enamel kitchen table, a maquette made of nothing but words.
“You know what Shakespeare called words?” she said, still gleaning happily from the stubble fields of her high-school English classes (there had been no college for either of them). “Airy nothings!”
But what Shakespeare really meant, what she believed too, was that words were everything. They could go anywhere, be anything. They got you to the Great World without a ticket. I told her, sometime after she read me Charlotte’s Web, not stopping as I keened, reading through my heartbreak over the tragic ending, that I was going to be a writer. Yes, she said thoughtfully in response to this, you’ve got the gift of gab.
Trusting no one, she saw literature not simply as art but as a way of getting the last word, a subset of self-righteousness, a consolation prize for the defeated. And therefore a worthy use of a person’s energies. For my father, who trusted everyone and saw art in the service of beauty, literature was not the higher court she took it to be. He saw language as a form of manners, an aspect of behavior. And manners, it went without saying, were an art form too, the art of daily life. When, late in life, an eye surgeon bungled my mother’s cataract surgery, leaving her blind in one eye and the other failing, my father wanted to pay the bill—out of regard for the man’s feelings. “We all make mistakes, Mary,” he said.
She tore up the bill and sent the pieces back in an envelope with a rich letter worthy of the Pioneer Press “Mailbag.” Some years later we heard the doctor had los
t his license and was selling real estate. Neither of my parents would ever have considered a lawsuit.
“You two still sitting there?” my father would say incredulously, passing by the kitchen table on the way to some project he had going in his workroom in the basement. A man of many projects and few airy nothings.
SHE WAS EVEN THE CARETAKER of stories from the Czech side, including the one it seems I always knew, the one so embedded it wasn’t really a story but a string of genetic code. It had a scary beginning, but it too veered off into our middling safety. A nothing-happened narrative, our kind of story.
Aunt Lillian, one of my father’s older sisters, had been attacked one night. Right at the side of their house near West Seventh. Attacked and almost raped. Almost, but saved in the nick of time. No harm done. My grandmother, the Czech peasant, came charging out of the house and stopped it before the worst could happen.
Lillian, ninety-five pounds and pretty, a dresser who finished high school because her twin brother, Frankie (who had dropped out to try his luck as a boxer), told her he’d buy her a diamond ring if she stayed on and graduated. I lost that ring, she would always say fretfully. That was her story, the loss of a ring, not how she almost was raped. That she never mentioned.
Mother told that one. Lillian had been to a dance downtown and came home on the streetcar, walking along the little cement divide between their house and the Korlats’, the dark passageway to the back door (I knew it well). Someone jumped out from the dark and gagged her. Chloroformed her.
What’s that?
Drugged her. A soaked rag over her face. It knocks you out.
What happened?
Nana saved her.
What happened to ... him?
Oh, nothing. He was the son of a neighbor. They hushed it up. Lillian didn’t remember anything.
The Florist's Daughter Page 2