The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl

Author:Patricia Hampl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

SO HOW DID I “become a writer,” vocation approved of by Leo the Lion, wondered over by silent Stan? My brother was the first in the family to go to college. He signed up for the straight and narrow, barely eighteen and on his way to becoming a dentist, as serious as if he too had come up out of the Depression. Just four years later, and I was a different generation: the sixties and watch out, a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

I started as a music major at the University. My career plan was actually fairly decorous too, if stagier than dentistry: I wanted to crash away on a huge Mason & Hamlin before rapt crowds who leapt to their feet, shouting thunderous approval. Flowers are tossed on the stage. Travel whisks me from hall to hall, continent to continent. I bow in my black velvet with the plunging neckline.

When this future laughed me out of the five-hour practice sessions my freshman year—legato, legato, Patricia, can’t you hear it?—I found my way to the English Department, haven of dashed hopes, which shared the morose corridors of Vincent Hall with Mortuary Science. There I settled in. No bowing from the stage in black velvet. But hadn’t I chosen the wordy life long ago and just hadn’t realized it? Think of those girlhood summers lying like an invalid on the front porch, reading reference-book-heavy nineteenth-century novels so weighty they made my arms ache more than practicing the piano ever did.

It was bliss to discover that my work from now on, apparently, was to read a lot of novels and poems in the upper reaches of Vincent Hall while, somewhere below us, the Mortuary Science undergrads did whatever they had to do. I screwed up my nerve and applied for a job writing articles and reviews for the student newspaper and magazine. I acquired a byline.

My first reviewing assignment was a performance by Rudolf Nureyev. A free ticket and a notebook in my lap. A professional. In my review I allowed that Nureyev’s jumps were “quite deft.”

I felt pretty deft myself. Not only had I never used the word “deft” before, I’d never before seen a ballet. I brooded a bit that I should have said his jumps were “nimble.” But even this proved I must be a writer: Wasn’t that the job—worrying about whether to use “deft” or “nimble”? And there I was next morning, name in boldface under the headline, giving his nibs a critical pat on the back. Dance on!

Thus began my double life—girl reporter and cultural know-it-all by day, dutiful St. Paul daughter by night. The University was my Manhattan, locus of art and romance and lovely trouble, dirt and filth, glamour and blessed foreignness. And St. Paul was ... well, still St. Paul, the cinder hearth to which my arty Cinderella must scurry back before the stroke of midnight.

I fled in the morning in a carpool with my brother and two of his dentist buddies who discussed

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