Everlasting Read online

  Piet set down the last box. “I’m Dutch,” he said as if answering a question. “I’m the Vandervelds’ nephew.” He was panting slightly. “I help them, sometimes here, sometimes from Amsterdam.”

  “Oh,” Catherine said, embarrassed but caught in her intoxication. She wanted only to stand staring, even sniffing, like an animal trying to place a scent. Finally her old school manners saved her. “This is all just so new,” she said as if that would explain why she was staring, dumbfounded. “This is my first day. I have a lot to learn.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do well,” he said, smiling. His teeth were very white and even.

  “Catherine? Dear? Have you started the coffee?” Mrs. Vanderveld called from the front.

  “Oh! I’m doing it right now!” Catherine called back.

  She moved quickly to the hot plate. But she was spellbound, and for a few minutes more she could only stand, watching the rings turn from dull black to glowing red as heat rushed through the coils.

  * * *

  The afternoon rushed by. Catherine brought Mrs. Vanderveld her coffee and drank a cup herself as she filled out the employment forms. She held the door for Piet as he carried arrangements to be delivered out to the van. She didn’t see Mr. Vanderveld again that day. She promised Mrs. Vanderveld she’d be at work at nine on the dot the next morning.

  Stepping out onto the street that evening, she felt buoyant. It was still light, and the June sun gleamed off taxi bumpers, store windows, and doorknobs like golden blasts from heavenly trumpets. It had come to her! She had a job; she had a home; she had a future. She was starving. Stopping by a bakery, she bought a sandwich and, in her glee, an apple pie for herself and Mrs. Venito.

  Back at the apartment, she ate ravenously. She wrote Leslie, words racing from her pen as fast as her hand would go. Before she went to bed, she spent an hour deciding just what to wear the next day. The linen sheath she had worn today now had to be dry-cleaned, and she knew she’d never save any of her salary if it all went to cleaners’ bills.

  * * *

  The next morning, dressed in a washable blue-and-white-checked cotton shirtwaist dress, Catherine arrived at Vanderveld Flowers exactly at nine o’clock.

  Already the shop was in chaos. Catherine was shocked, almost offended. All her hard work!

  Mr. Vanderveld was working with robot speed at the long work table, stabbing a mixture of flowers into small round clear glass bowls that were already filled with green pittosporum, or pit as Mr. V called it. Flash, flash! in went two white carnations, two yellow daisies, two day lilies, and in the middle, two tight-budded yellow daffodils. Flash, flash! Mr. V slid the bowl aside and did another one. Sloshed water, discarded leaves, and sliced stems flew over the table to the floor.

  Without preamble, without so much as a “good morning,” Mr. Vanderveld barked at Catherine: “Take these. Five flats, twenty-four bowls on each flat, they slide into the van. You know where the Gold Room is on Fifth Avenue? Go to the service entrance in the alley. Take them in, collect the other bowls. Be sure they have all one hundred twenty. They owe me if they break a bowl. They always try to cheat me.”

  Catherine did as instructed. Driver’s ed at Miss Brill’s had not prepared her for maneuvering a wide van through the city’s narrow back alleys, but after a few days she became expert and enjoyed the driving. She found it especially fun to carry in the trays of cheery bobbing spring flowers.

  The return trip, however, was not fun. She was presented with five flats of twenty-four stinking, streaked, disgusting glass bowls full of dead flowers and decaying leaves. When she had parked back in the alley, Mrs. V quickly told her what to do, then hurried back to the front, leaving Catherine to work alone.

  Catherine had to empty the fetid refuse into the huge green metal dumpster in the alley. People had put cigarettes out in the bowls; had stuck gum inside. Clumps of stubborn slime stuck to the bottom and sides. She had no choice but to stick her hand in—a tight squeeze—and scrape or scoop out the stuff. The smell was rank. Overwhelming odors of garbage from the restaurant two stores down floated by with its accompanying swarm of flies. She slapped the flies away from her face, getting green gunk in her hair.

  Then she had to carry the flats of bowls down the creaking, sagging, wooden steps into the basement, where two huge soapstone sinks stood waiting. She hated the basement on sight. It was cement and brick and cracked stone, with bare light bulbs that hung from pull chains barely illuminating the dim, low-ceilinged room. Shelves of containers and tools lined one wall. Enormous sacks of potting soil, moss, and clay sagged against the walls like drunken men who might at any time begin to move toward her. A rusty water heater burped, a circulating fan pumped dully from the ceiling, and a dehumidifier gurgled. It was like being in the engine room of a sluggish boat on the river Styx, Catherine thought.

  She had been told to scrub out the glass bowls with hot water and ammonia. It was essential, both the V’s stressed, that the bowls be perfectly clean, for any slight residue of dead flowers would hold with it bacteria that would cause the new flowers in the bowl to rot quickly. For hours Catherine scrubbed. When she emerged from the basement, hot and sweaty, her dress spotted where the putrid greens had splashed, Mr. V growled, “Why did that take you so long? You must work faster. We don’t have all day.”

  For a split second Catherine thought she would quit. It would have been so easy simply to walk out the door. She had never intended to spend her life scrubbing bowls in a basement.

  But Mr. V’s, “Here. Prep these. Pound the stems on the lilacs. Slice the roses diagonally,” made her think again.

  Mr. Vanderveld steered her to the table where buckets of flowers fresh from the flower market stood awaiting her preparation. The sweet fragrance from the masses of lilacs and roses, so many roses, hundreds of long-stemmed roses in pink and red and buttery yellow, drifted up around her like a spell. She prepared the flowers. This she could do well and fast, for she had learned to do this for her grandmother at Everly. When she was through, Mr. V raised one eyebrow and nodded brusquely. “That’s gut,” he said.

  She went home that second day with her hands stained and her clothing dappled green. The next day on her lunch hour she bought a long-sleeved smock and comfortable flat shoes. From that day on, only when she was sent off delivering or asked to take charge of the front for a while when Mrs. V had errands did she remove her smock and put on dress shoes or comb her hair and freshen her lipstick.

  Clearly in this job her appearance was not of primary importance. Still, as the weeks went by, Catherine worried about her hands. Even though she had learned to protect her clothing, her hands still got stained. The skin under and around her nails was rimmed with green. Her hands were in water so much of the time that the natural oils were washed away, and her skin became chapped and brittle. Holly or boxwood or thorned flowers sliced at her hands, and she developed an allergy to the sappy film from the eucalyptus. At night she constantly washed her hands with Lestoil and Borax, then coated them with Vaseline.

  For the first time in her life, Catherine was busy. All day long she worked hard, and by evening she was tired. Tired, and yet not settled, not finished. By late August she’d come to realize how imprecisely she understood some of the phrases Mr. Vanderveld tossed at her with urgent carelessness. What was the difference between art deco and Louis Quinze? Between teak and walnut? Between a wedding for two young people and for two widowers? She studied catalogs from the various colleges and trade schools, and that fall she began to take evening courses in interior design and art history.

  She kept up with the activities of her old Miss Brill’s classmates—who were in college, going to dances, skiing, traveling to Europe, getting engaged. Catherine might deliver corsages to the homes of friends for dances or help set up floral displays for their parents’ holiday parties, but she handed the corsages to the maids who answered the door and worked with the families’ secretaries or housekeepers, and so she seldom saw her friends. That d
idn’t matter. None of the past seemed to matter. She was engrossed in her current life. There was so much she wanted to learn. Suddenly there were never enough hours in the day.

  Perhaps, she thought, she had caught some of her passion for work from the Vandervelds. Certainly they were an energetic, even frenzied pair. Mr. V was always in a hurry, always late, always frantic, and clearly he considered his work of crucial significance in the world. With his red suspenders, red bow tie, and flushed face, his nose and cheeks bouquets of broken capillaries, he resembled a cardinal, twittering, fluttering, thrashing through his life. Mrs. V was the perfect cardinal’s wife. She hopped around the shop, bustling and chirping, pecking at her receipts and bills, rustling things into shape. When Catherine was in the shop with the Vandervelds, she felt intense, alive, and dramatic.

  In contrast, Piet Vanderveld contained a quality of stillness that both attracted and frightened Catherine. The older Vandervelds hustled and flurried. Their nephew moved calmly, wasting not one movement. They babbled. He listened, nodded, acted. As the months passed, Mrs. Vanderveld told Catherine about her past, about her early life in Amsterdam, meeting Mr. V, starting the store, their desire for children, their sorrow at having none, the success of the store burgeoning beyond their early dreams. Piet told Catherine nothing about himself. Sometimes women phoned him, but he never confided his interest in them by so much as a smile. He didn’t ask Catherine about herself. He didn’t flirt with her.

  But he was darkly and sensually attractive. He was like a coiled snake sunning on a rock, so still, yet so beautiful, that Catherine longed to reach out to him. Piet was magnetic. She always felt his pull. As time passed he began to fill her dreams, and in defense, during the days, she avoided him as much as possible.

  She continued to live in Leslie’s apartment and in time came to think of it as her apartment. It was within walking distance to Vanderveld Flowers, to her parents’ apartment to visit her brother and sister, an easy subway ride to her evening courses. The shops, the parks, even some of the neighbors’ and doormen’s faces and names, became as familiar to her as the faculty and students at Miss Brill’s. She was beginning to feel at home.

  Leslie’s father came to the apartment about twice a year. Ceremoniously, he took Catherine to dinner at the current fashionable restaurant, pleased to have an elegant and attractive dinner companion who could understand his tales of discoveries in the Orient. Except for the two or three nights a year when Catherine went to dinner with him, she knew she didn’t impinge upon Mr. Dunham’s life at all, not even when he was in his apartment.

  Leslie wrote her often from Paris about her escapades in art and conquests in love. Her letters ended with the same advice: “Get out and live a little! Your life sounds so dull!” Catherine would smile. She’d fold the letter, put it in the paisley box where she kept all her letters, muse on the pleasure of Leslie’s friendship for a while … then turn back to her book on dried flower arrangements, or houseplants, or primitive and contemporary religious symbols and ornaments.

  Her holiday and vacation time she spent at Everly. Kathryn was fascinated by Catherine’s work. She quizzed her granddaughter about every detail, now and then mumbling to herself when something Mr. Vanderveld did sounded particularly brilliant or foolish. She never praised Catherine for choosing this work; Kathryn was not the kind to praise. But her attention to Catherine, her interest, her enjoyment and obvious curiosity, were all the accolade Catherine needed. The days she spent at Everly flew by with the same happy speed as her days working in the flower shop.

  It was different the few times she visited her parents, on Easter or Ann’s or Shelly’s birthday. Catherine knew she would always have to maintain a delicate balance when she saw her father and mother. She had to be pleasant in the face of their scorn—to them, she’d become working class. She didn’t attend any of the right balls or coming-out parties or dances; she hadn’t chosen to attend the right college; she didn’t date the right people—as far as they were concerned, she was doing nothing right, and they had no interest in her. She was a disgrace. Worse, she was boring.

  Catherine remained stoically pleasant in the face of their disapproval because she wanted to see her brother and sister. Shelly was bright, but too bold. At thirteen he had been suspended from boarding school for smoking in his dorm room. At fourteen he was expelled from his school for drinking whiskey and vomiting in the library. Drew considered his son’s escapades amusing and promptly found a new school for him. When Shelly wanted to, he could make A’s and charm his teachers. He was a great jock, a good-natured guy; people liked being around him. But he got bored easily, especially when Catherine tried to talk to him seriously.

  As if in reparation for her older sister’s desertion and her brother’s troublemaking, Ann was busy being the perfect child. At ten, eleven, and twelve, she spent more time with her mother than with her own friends. Not yet at boarding school, she was free to spend her afternoons with Marjorie. Pattering after her mother in her black patent-leather shoes and white socks, her white-gloved hands holding her little handbag, Ann followed her mother everywhere. “That dress looks divine on you, Mother!” she said.

  “Call me Marjorie,” her mother told her one day. “It sounds better.”

  Catherine watched and listened, grateful at least to see her brother and sister growing up, though she could hardly influence the direction their lives took. She pitied them. Whenever she left her parents’ home, she felt like a prisoner escaping. Their life was so superficial. She wanted to rescue Ann and Shelly but didn’t know how. But she at least had won her own freedom, and there was never a day in her life when she worked at the shop that she doubted her choice.

  The flower business had overcome her. She was possessed by her love for her work. She was lost in it. She was found.

  Chapter 3

  France and New York

  June 1964

  Catherine had a hard, sensible plan that she now and then let soften into a buoyant fantasy. While her friends hoped for Prince Charmings and engagement rings, Catherine played with numbers in a small black account book. In June of 1964 she’d been working at Vanderveld Flowers for three years. By now even cranky old Mr. Vanderveld had come to trust her and, more important, to rely on her. Every year the Vandervelds had given her a raise, and since she didn’t have to pay rent to the Dunhams, she was able to save a large portion of her paycheck. Someday, she hoped, she’d be able to buy into the Vandervelds’ business. Become a partner. Have a voice in the future of the shop.

  Someday, perhaps, but not soon. No matter how much she scrimped on clothes and food, she still seemed to be accumulating so little money, so slowly. She was toying with the thought of asking her parents for a loan. Every time she envisioned asking them, her stomach cramped, but really she could think of no other way to get enough money to buy part of the shop before she was old and gray.

  Kathryn had given Catherine a substantial check for Christmas, which Catherine had eagerly added to her savings account. Then she received the invitation to Kimberly Weyland’s wedding. Kimberly, one of Catherine’s and Leslie’s best friends at Miss Brill’s, was marrying Philippe Croce, the son of one of France’s wealthiest financiers, and the wedding was to be held at the Croces’ country estate outside Paris.

  “You have to come!” Leslie wrote. “I’ll die if you don’t!”

  It would be a treat to see Leslie, Catherine thought, and in an odd way didn’t she owe it to Leslie, since Leslie was giving her a free place to live? Also, this particular wedding party would be crammed with wealthy people, especially young people her age, planning more weddings. It would be a great way to make contacts for the flower shop.

  And besides, Catherine wanted to go. She’d been working hard for a long time, and the thought of staying in a château in the French countryside was too tempting to resist. Catherine took her grandmother’s Christmas money from her savings account and bought a roundtrip ticket to Paris.

  Catherine had as
ked for so little over the past three years that the Vandervelds couldn’t refuse her the time off even during the busy month of June. Piet surprised her by offering to drive her to the airport in the delivery van. She accepted, partly because she wanted him to see her transformed by her pale green silk suit, gold jewelry, and high heels and partly to save the cab fare. It was delicious to dress up, as if slipping into a new, resplendent self, and as she stepped out into the bright June evening, she wondered if Piet would be moved to compliment her. If he did, she thought, it would mean that a new chapter of her life was opening. At the very moment she had the thought, she knew it was foolish, yet it was so sweet to indulge in such illusions!

  But she might as well have been a pig in an apron for all Piet noticed. He talked shop talk all the way to the airport.

  Then he surprised her. At the terminal Piet handed her bags to the porter, then fixed Catherine in his gaze.

  “You look beautiful, Catherine. Be sure to come home.”

  Without warning he kissed her on her cheek, close to her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Have a safe trip,” he said.

  Piet was the one to turn away first. Catherine stood wavering in her high heels, transfixed, until he got into the van. Behind her, the porter cleared his throat. Stunned, jubilant, Catherine trotted to the airline counter and then to the gate. It had been only a kindness, she told herself, to send her on her way full of self-confidence. Still, she smiled.