What surprised me when my father asked me to sit down
at his desk in the basement office
was that I wasn't surprised, not really.
Even before he explained, I saw it all.
He was so patently phony, my best customer.
So absolutely not an officer in the Navy or anything
remotely military.
The jacket was a joke.
It came in sharp focus as my father pointed to the orders
on the desk.
The cuffs were frayed, the wool of the jacket was pilled,
not even quite clean.
The man's hair was too long.
His blue wool tie strangled his reddish neck in a tight knob.
And that salute as he left, it was ridiculous.
The hat's cheap, shiny visor had been cracked, gray cardboard
showing in the little split.
It was a costume and not even a very good one.
And his shoes-- I hadn't even looked at his shoes.
I stayed with his face, the smile and the commanding face.
The Robert Mitchum sexiness.
Why was it all so evident now?
Why was I so easily hoodwinked at the time?
I sat at my father's desk and looked
at his face, which really was severe,
not the mock sternness of the Navy officer
broadly play-acting a big man.
My father brought out a letter.
It was from the man's mother, or rather, it
was a letter from a lawyer representing the mother.
Her address was the Bayard address where
the roses, and the chartreuse orchids, and the wreath,
and the Christmas tree have been delivered.
The letter included a copy of a public notice
the woman had placed in the classifieds at the St. Paul
Pioneer Press several years earlier
notifying anyone who cared to know that she, Mrs. Thomas
So-and-so of whatever number on Bayard Avenue,
hereby disavowed all responsibility for any debts
or encumbrances incurred by her son, Thomas
Jr., same last name, no known address, under any name
or alias he might use from this day forward.
"Will she pay?"
I asked in horror.
"No," my father said, looking down at the orders.
"We can't ask her to pay."
The Navy officer-- I couldn't think of him as anything else--
had skipped town.
Fresno, I thought.
As for the FTD order for the three dozen roses,
"We'll have to eat that, too," my father
said, a rare weariness in his voice.
I'd been incredibly stupid, yet he
didn't scold, didn't admonish.
There was no punishment, no demand or suggestion
that I pay it all back out of my own wages.
No sermon.
I went back upstairs to the showroom chastened,
but apparently I wasn't in any trouble.
All this would be swept under the rug of invoices
and receipts, taken on the winds of remittances and debits
that gusted through the business office in the basement.
It would all just go away, somehow.
But did I understand then or is it only possible now,
in the middle of the night of the last day of my mother's
life, as I sit holding her hand in the hospital,
to see in the great framed panels of memory
how my father struggled.
How trapped he was as he explained the situation to me.
There he is sitting miserably at his desk with the lavish orders
before him.
I've been an idiot, naive, so easily taken in.
But he can say none of that.
He, the great believer in the teaching moment,
can use this experience to teach me nothing.
That was his real misery, not the hundreds of dollars
I had given away so easily.
I wasn't Ollie or Mrs. Butler.
I wasn't an employee who had made a terrible mistake
and must be wised up.
I was his girl.
The girl he'd brought up to be-- to remain always--
an innocent, an eternal ingenue without guile or mistrust
or even too many useful skills.
No waitressing, no typing.
Something better and freer and more beautiful
was waiting for me, though he couldn't quite
imagine what it was.
Nothing bad could happen to me there in the store
where he himself worked.
I was free to trust everyone and everything.
He didn't realize that the trust he bred in me,
the trust he demanded, dragged in its communion-white
innocence the deep shadow of its own adulthood
where, eventually, I'd have to learn the score like everybody
else.
But admit it.
I was already on my way to being an ex-innocent.
Worse, I was becoming a phony innocent, a pretend naive.
I'd seen it all, but I knew I wasn't supposed to see it.
So I un-saw it.
Didn't see the fakery.
Didn't see the scam.
Saw only the charm and happiness of the moment, the possibility
of making someone happy, of someone else making
someone else happy.
All those roses to the coast of the country.
The handsome man with his fabulous smile and a desire
to give lavish gifts.
It was what my father trained up in me,
Miss Muffet on my flowery tuffet.
I was never to approach the world with narrowed eyes, not
I. Never to be the one to get the better of anybody.
I won't be a file clerk like Leo the Lion.
And I won't sit in a corner, as she
does, nursing her Celtic grudges,
keeping tabs on people.
Unlike her, I'll never morph from the romantic lead leaning
with sweet dependence against his shoulder
under a cottonwood tree along the trees of the Mississippi
in the picture that stood on the piano
where I practiced my Chopin every day.
How often he still comes back to me, my Navy officer.
He appears at odd moments.
He's here right now as I hold my mother's dying hand.
Face shining at me on the big screen of the hospital window
with his Robert Mitchum wink.
I keep thinking about him when I should be thinking of her,
or thinking of dad, or thinking of someone,
but not him, whoever he was.
But he comes out of the cold from Fifth Street on Christmas
Eve, striding across the showroom,
the last customer of the holiday and my best customer ever.
The laughable costume, the lavish smile,
his final jaunty salute.
Was that ever his lucky day.
I was waiting for him.
I wanted to help.
He didn't even need to do much acting because I made him
up all on my own.
Even as he swept the orders from his desk like a bad poker hand,
my father said nothing.
I wasn't in trouble.
I couldn't be scolded.
I was what he wanted me to be, his daughter,
a truster in the lovely surface of things, a believer.
His girl.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]