During school vacations and summer time,
my brother was assigned to work with the growers
in the greenhouse and sometimes on the delivery routes.
My father expected me to know the names of plants
and to get a sense of the horticultural side
of the business, too.
But it was understood I was meant for the downtown store.
In retail, where the clerks dressed in gowns
they bought on fantastic markdowns
from tips passed on to them by their clerk pals
at Frank Murphy's and Field-Schlick.
Doctors and lawyers from nearby offices
came into the showroom on their lunch hour
to order flowers for their wives, usually their wives.
A dozen long-stemmed American beauties off season
in a box with a card and a sealed envelope paid
for cash, delivery to some apartment on Randolph,
not the man's Lincoln Avenue address.
You figure it out.
"Never ask if they want to put it on their charge,"
Ollie told me.
"Sometimes they'll want to pay cash never
ask why it's going where it's going
and why it's going where it's going."
She put a well-manicured finger to her lips.
The silent gesture of complicity,
initiating me into the conspiracy of love
now that I was old enough to work at the downtown store.
This sort of duplicity was not a greenhouse sort of thing.
The illicit ways of desire belong to the world
of surface and illusion.
It proved that the beautiful big room
of full of exotic flowers and expensive candy
was, as my fearful agoraphobic aunt would
say, "Just like downtown."
The work was hard, I suppose.
On our feet all day, running around, lifting heavy plants,
contending with the primadonna tendencies of the customers,
but the place had such drama.
During the holiday rush when I worked there,
that the sheer pace of the day filled
with the customers demanding subplots made me happy.
More than happy.
I felt important.
I felt I was doing something important.
Well, it came to the same thing.
A demand for violets might come in.
"Violets?
Is that woman nuts?"
Mrs. Butler would say, but then she would somehow
suss out violets from a supplier in Minneapolis
by way of Chicago or New York, reaching by degrees all the way
to an Amsterdam clearing house with a Parma connection
so that finally little drenched purple bundles, tied
with foreign twine, costing a fortune made someone
in Kenwood Parkway happy.
People came in from the cold, stamping their snowy feet
vehemently on the carpet.
They rushed up to the marble tables
where the clerks awaited as at a battlement.
Some customers came in looking wild-eyed, holding out
their shopping lists like desperate ransom notes.
"Can you get a poinsettia to Butte, Montana by tomorrow?"
We could.
We could send flowers and candy just about anywhere you wanted.
We had it in our power.
Ollie and Mrs. Butler, elderly but slim and elegant,
worked with the self-possession of head nurses
in a triage unit.
At the end of the day, Ollie took
the sheaf of telegraph delivery orders and made her calls,
speaking low into the receiver of the telephone
by her order desk.
"Los Angeles.
This is an FTD order from St Paul."
The great world was so far away, but Ollie spoke nonchalantly
every afternoon to the coast.
"Let me spell that for you and would you
kindly repeat for verification.
Yes.
That's love, l-o-v-e comma Bobby, b-o-b-b-y.
Yes, Bobby as in yardstick.
No he doesn't spell it that way, just the y."
"You couldn't make any sense other ones in Alabama, Georgia
places like that," she would say off the line.
"They talked so funny down there."
The occasional orders to Europe were sent in the dead of night
by telegraph which was too bad Mrs. Butler said,
because if we called them in ourselves,
they'd let try my French.
Paree?
Ici St. Paul.
Like Ollie and Mrs. Butler, I came
to respect the customers who knew what they wanted.
The doctors and lawyers and their worldly wives,
who had accounts, for whom buying flowers
was a regular part of life.
Spenders.
People with taste, Ollie said.
She had no time for the once a year poinsettia buyers
who fussed around, wanting you to pick out the best one.
She tended them with a frozen rectitude, barely polite.
Mrs. Butler, though, also favoring those with distinction
as she said, had a soft spot for a shy
person who came in blinking at the orchids, clutching a ten.
And how could you not admire the people who knew?
Who had poise and a bead on what was what?
They were our people.
The whole stage set of the showroom was for them.
The greenhouse had the purity and frank dirt of a farm,
but the downtown store was awash in illusion.
It belonged to the winners and takers
who lived in the zone of carelessness
that won our admiration.
The best customers often picked up a fistful of trimmed azaleas
from the display tables and brought them
to the marble delivery tables like employees themselves,
as if they owned the place.
"Send these off to the people on my list, will ya Mrs. B?"
"How would you like them signed, Dr. Daley?"
"Oh, Merry Christmas is fine.
You can sign for me.
Love on the one to my wife."
Dr. Ray came bounding in from the Lowry Medical Arts,
humming an aria.
Big opera fan, he was.
And then bellowed for Ollie as he approached the marble table.
"Can you round up a herd of poinsettias?
Send them to everybody I sent to last year.
They're all still alive, aren't they Ollie?"
and they would laugh.
Ollie and her best customer.
They'd laugh and agree that everybody was probably
still alive.
He handed her a square envelope with a little bulge,
meaning a couple of bills were folded inside.
The Christmas tip.
Ollie and Mrs. Butler never opened these envelopes
at the store.
Never spoke of them, though Mrs. Butler once said, "They help."
My father was ashamed of what the owners paid them.
"The office staff," he said, "was even worse.
I don't know how Justine manages to eat."
"How do we manage?" my mother said.
Leo the lion, looking up from her book, always
ready with her drop of acid.
My father shrugged his shrug.
"That company," my mother said, dumping
it as usual in the dustbin of her disgust.
The floor staff and the office staff
had worked there for decades.
They all lived in apartments, widows and single ladies,
who made up the workforce at the downtown store.
There wasn't a married woman in the bunch,
except for gossipy Rosette, who worked the PBX
machine and whose husband ground lenses around the corner
at Williams Optical.
She retired early with arthritis.
Served her right.
She flirted with my father.
I was glad to see her go.
All of them took the bus to work and had two weeks vacation,
which they spent at home getting caught up,
as Mrs. Butler put it.
No one went anywhere.
Ever.
Alone among them, stylish Ollie somehow
contrived to take her lunch, cup of soup, egg salad on white,
trim the crust, please, at the Moudry
Counter across from Frank Murphy's where after lunch she
cruised daily for any couture crumbs that might
have dropped to a sale table.
Everyone else brought a sandwich from home
and ate in the basement lunchroom
by the design room near the candy dippers
where a game of cribbage was always on.
Even Ollie brought a thermos.
Coffee adds up, they reminded newcomers hired for the holiday
rush who would squander a good part of an hour's wage,
morning and afternoon break, on the burnt coffee at Moudry's