One night waiting for him to turn off the display lights,
I stood by the big window and looked idly across the street
to Bullard's.
The tiny door at the back of the Bullard's display case
opened, and a hand, seemingly detached,
reached into the little box and clawed up the diamond necklace
lying on the satin.
The door snapped shut behind the withdrawn hand,
and the starry strand receded into the fathoms
of Bullard darkness for another lonely night.
A spotlight dazzled the empty satin, and an odd sensation,
it dazzled me.
A strange bitterness, disloyal and furious,
possessed me is if I were seeing that I
have been denied something essential,
not diamonds, not sapphires.
The vacancy spoke to me.
The pristine satin betrayed the complacency
of a closed mind, the St. Paul mind.
Here was our cold and tidy town, here
the narrow window displaying our self-satisfied abdication
from all that glittered from the great world, here our vacancy
that Bullard's illuminated every night.
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 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 creche 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 going to buy that manger, Stan?
You've got to mark 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.
My father, I understood, was on the side of beauty,
obviously the only side to be on.
His loyalty was to workmanship, another word for art.
"A lot of people can't tell the difference
between the German creche," he would
say, holding up a well-turned camel
sporting a saddle blanket painted in royal blue
and finished in gold scrollwork scattered with gold stars
and crescent moons, bearing all the mysterious East
on its back.
"But I can tell.
You put it out there, they'll begin
to see the difference from the plastic.
Over time, they'll begin to see the difference."
He had resilient faith in the educative powers
of just looking, as he invited the dopey springer spaniel
Buddy into the car and cried, "Buddy, up, up.
Look out the window," furious at him
for not enjoying the scenery.
He was determined to bring people up.
My mother felt compelled to point out
that certain people saw the difference between the imported
creches and the plastic sets all too well.
"Admit it," she said.
"Once they've lifted the baby Jesus,
how are you going to expect to sell that set?"
He shrugged, but later, he had to mark down
the childless manger scenes for the after-Christmas sale.
"I tell Ollie and Mrs. Butler," he said with frustration,
naming the two widow ladies who were the downtown store's
chief clerks.
"I tell them watch those sets, but it gets busy.
People can be quick if they want to be."
He denied the possibility of evil afoot
until the evidence was in, and then
he still couldn't quite bring himself to blame anyone
and saw the disappearance of the best pieces as bum luck.
And you really couldn't get away from bum luck, so what's
a guy to do?
Being on the side of beauty put you
at this sort of disadvantage, but once having
pledged your allegiance, there was no going back.
Or perhaps there was no going forward,
because the forces of modernity were part of the problem.
Beauty had existed from the dawn of human marking and making.
Beauty wasn't simply loveliness for my father.
It was the highest token of reality.
But now this confirmation of reality
was being chipped away, little by little,
by the forces of mass production and plastic.
Modern art didn't help either, splashing
paint around like that, nothing looking like anything
in particular, confusing people, not bringing them up
at all, though he admitted that there was some kind of idea
at work there, though damned if he could figure it out.
Plastic-- plastic was the real culprit,
plastic as a proliferating form of mischief and almost
sentient force, nicking away not only at beauty
but at workmanship and craft that
had been the immemorial proof that beauty
was the essential business of the human world.
There was nothing a guy could do.
You could only keep putting the better
things in front of people and hoping, hoping they'd see.
Leo the Lion settled into a job at the college library,
glorying in her proximity to books.
"You really ought to think of library science,"
she told me when I confessed I wanted to be a writer.
In spite of their mutual reverence for education that
amounted to a cult-- my father was asking me what I had
learned today long after I was out of graduate school--
working holidays at the flower shop,
they both agreed, was a good thing.
It would not be a good thing to be a waitress, nor would it
be a good thing to learn typing in high school,
as far as my father was concerned.
These activities could lead to unfortunate results,
rudeness and fanny-pinching-- waitressing-- or a desk job--
typing.
For typing was the road to office servitude
for unfortunate girls whose fathers were not
watchful enough to direct them to a real education that
in turn would lead them to a non-desk job,
though he was vague about what a non-desk job might be.
"He doesn't want you to end up a file clerk in an office,"
my mother said, "like me."