Flowers on the Wall

1981 Fiction Contest 1st Place Winner

Edie found a small frame house on one of the avenues near the clinic. Its sun-baked boards, soot-stained shingles, varnished floors, and dollhouse windows put on a brave show of independence among its brick and stuccoed neighbors, and Edie liked that. Besides, it was cheap. There was a minuscule yard with a lawn, an ancient lilac bush, and a venerable yellow rosebush imprisoned in a huge cast-iron pot. The rooms were Lilliputian, but Bruce and Edie were newlyweds not much encumbered by worldly goods. In the safari of life they were backpackers.

Edie, after surveying the much-calcimined walls of the bedroom, went downtown and bought at bargain prices some prepasted flowered wallpaper.

“It was discontinued,” she announced brightly.

“I can see why it was discontinued,” observed Bruce. “Where’re my sunglasses?”

“Colorful, isn’t it?” agreed a laughing Edie. “Like an explosion in Aunt LaPreal’s flower garden.”

While Bruce immersed the scissored lengths in the bathtub and carried them dripping to the scene of action, Edie pasted them fearlessly to the ceiling and walls while standing on a bentwood chair. When all came to a steamy halt, Bruce pronounced it a floral triumph.

This house of the garden of flowers became their fastness, their retreat. Edie would come home after her shift at the supermarket, and Bruce would tell her about the curious items received in the mail, or about his favorite among the letters to the editor, and Edie would in turn describe the people and happenings that had garnished her day. Then they would address themselves like antic parliamentarians to the not-so-sober business of supper in the kitchen alcove.

Every week there was the trip to the clinic, just three blocks away—pioneer measure. Three leagues it seemed to Bruce. Edie would help him shuffle over for his appointments. Red-faced and resolute, she would pull the entrance doors open and keep them open wide with a no-nonsense dorsal maneuver while Bruce lurched through.

After Bruce had gone up on the elevator to the doctor’s office, Edie would slip out to the little park in front of the clinic. Surrounding an immense block of native granite were vines and a copse of young aspen. Sparrows and starlings strutted on the lawn. Yellows and oranges, columbines and tiger lilies, signaled demurely out of the verdure. Not twenty feet away the traffic whined and rumbled by. It was not a quiet place, but the cool recesses of elegant greenness and the proclamations of serenity from the flowers always flowed over Edie’s spirit like cataracts of soothing waters.

Once Edie had dreamed improbable dreams. After she met Bruce at Aunt LaPreal’s she revised her life’s scenario. She struck a master lode of empathy that astonished her family and flattered Bruce. In a three-week period he experienced successive states of exalted renunciation, amused self-evaluation, curiosity over female motives and tactics, acceptance of Edie as Edie, and finally a fierce and protective love of Edie past, present, and future.

They were married one stormy winter day in the serene and timeless chambers of the Temple Manti. Edie was radiant, and Bruce impersonated a spry old gentleman. They were the atypical couple that day at the temple, and being young they rather gloried in it.

When they attended their first meetings in their new ward, young Bishop Spendlove perceived that they were indeed an unusual couple. “I hope they’re accepted,” he brooded, and knew in his heart that they would—and would not be.

Bruce discovered that in the wedding notices in the Salt Lake papers the groom always “fulfilled” a mission: “Mr. Argenbright fulfilled a mission. …” Bruce always bled just a bit at this. He had gone home early from his mission in North Dakota because of his impending physical dissolution. The spirit was willing but the body couldn’t get the message delivered to the Lutherans, Hutterites, and Catholics.

In my case, ruminated Bruce, I filled a mission. Argenbright fulfilled his. Some of my friends unfilled theirs. The three kinds of missions, therefore: fulfilled, filled, and unfilled?

If a friend of Bruce’s asked him what he loved best, other than Edie, family, and Church, he might have replied in earnest that he loved words. He strung words together in essays, articles, stories, homilies, parables, anecdotes, poems, and musings. English verbs and nouns were his meat and drink. But most of his writing was unpublished, and much of his writing was in his head, where none but he could get at it.

People sometimes asked him why he wrote. Privately they wondered why he wasn’t interested in something more useful like merchandising or insurance. Look at the rewards! Bruce’s rewards were like a soldier’s medals: encouraging words from Miss Dolbeer at Owyhee High, congratulations tendered by relatives and friends, the glowing approval of Edie, and deep down in him the feeling that he could not not write.

Sometimes in the night he would wake up and think of the goodness and richness of life, and his eyes would fill with happiness. Edie was surely at the heart of this feeling. No man ever wrote poems or symphonies or painted wondrous symbols of life on canvases for himself, he reasoned. Always there was something bigger and greater. Sometimes there was a woman like Edie. And about this time the foreboding would burst upon his consciousness like a sonic boom: how much time do I have?

Usually when Bruce was asleep, Edie would wake up. She would worry in the immemorial manner of women about Bruce’s next visit to the clinic, about her job at the supermarket, about her rightness for Bruce, about her unborn children, about her Young Women calling. Unlike the bishop, she never worried about their being accepted.

Bruce savored the word wherefore. He had faith in an idea like wherefore. Wherefore is a great and powerful word, thought Bruce. It is a word a prophet uses. You wouldn’t expect a mechanic or a real estate man to give it much currency. Politicians are wary of such a word. Lawyers use it only to bridge their ruminations. Farmers expect no good at all to come out of a mere word like that. But wherefore, to Bruce, was a ringing prelude, full of promise. It was like trying to guess when the soloist would make his entry in a concerto, if you were listening on records. See, there it is! Right there! Wherefore was certitude, it was like life itself.

The night in the city was a warm exhalation after a fiery day. Bruce and Edie had gone to bed. The plastic fan blades stirred up a miniature whirlwind at their feet. The ceiling light was out, but the room was illumined by the reflections from sky and street. On the record player Abravanel was again leading the Utah Symphony in a loving evocation of the Mahler Fourth. Edie fell asleep during the third movement. (She always does, worried Bruce, but tonight I think she was crying.) After the soprano had sung the children’s “Life in Heaven,” the music died away, and Bruce was left to his reveries.

The doctor really opened up today. He admitted the enemy is a total stranger. He admitted that he hates to fight in the dark. Somehow, he seemed more dejected than the patient. I felt sorry for him. A real nice guy, that doctor. Edie doesn’t know about it yet, but I believe she suspects something.

Bruce looked slowly and wonderingly at the papered walls. Strangely at peace with himself, he smiled in the pale light. Those mindless, discontinued posies! All of them together wouldn’t begin to make the bouquet I want for that special girl of mine. This crazy, beautiful garden of flowers, never sleeping, never frowning, never fading, never doubting.

Outside the stars shone, and the city’s rustle and roar were muted. Edie lay like a damp and slightly transfigured wraith in the moonlight. The green and yellow and white and orange flowers danced and exulted in the stillness of the room.

Wherefore, mused Bruce, we live and love. Here and now. Edie and I. Forever. The two of us believing.

Let’s Talk about It

After reading “Flowers on the Wall” individually or as a family, you may wish to discuss some of the following questions during a family discussion period:

1. In what ways do the flowers Edie puts on the wall of her and Bruce’s home symbolize their attitudes toward life and toward Bruce’s impending death? How do the flowers reveal their love for each other?

2. If the character in this story were not Bruce but you, how would you respond to learning that you only had a short time to live? How would you cope with the knowledge? What would be your feelings about life? about those you love? about death?

3. What message does this story have in view of Doctrine and Covenants 42:45–47? [D&C 42:45–47] In what ways is death made sweet or bitter by the quality of our relationships with others and with the Lord?

4. Both Paul and Mormon tell us that faith, hope, and charity are essential to obtaining eternal life (see 1 Cor. 13; Moro. 7). How can these attributes make this life meaningful? How does this story illustrate Mormon’s discussion of faith, hope, and charity?