"Lilies" (Marvel Tales, Winter 1934)

“Lilies” opens with a picture of urban life in Depression-era Milwaukee as seen by an adolescent who lives in the Colorado Apartments—a “substantial building”—with his mother and a community of people living in among to each other. The first one-third of the story contains close observations of the adults in this young person’s world. The rest focuses on one of his neighbors, the elderly Mrs. Hahn. She has trouble walking and rarely leaves her apartment except for Saturdays when her adult son takes her for a car ride out into the country. Every time when she returns, she brings flowers for the narrator’s mother. One Saturday, she does not bring the flowers at the accustomed time. Much later in the evening, the doorbell finally rings. Mrs. Hahn presents the flowers but is strangely evasive about their origin. And they are not the usual wildflowers; instead, they are lilies. A short while later, the mother and son see from their window a hearse arrive at the Colorado Apartments and then overhear Mrs. Hahn’s son talking about the lilies he left with his deceased mother earlier in the day. Somehow, the late Mrs. Hahn was able to deliver Saturday flowers to her neighbors one final time.

​
This story came about at the end of Bloch’s high school years, just as he was about to enter the vast unknown of adulthood. It contains a portrait of neighborhood life in Milwaukee closely observed. There are particulars that make the writing sparkle: “They would visit one another perhaps, were it not for the unseen barrier of an apartment, the alien sense of espionage that is implied in the phrase ‘across the hall.’” The story is sentimental but is it also contains the current of the supernatural Bloch would swim in for years to come. The surprise at the end—although not a huge surprise given the story’s details to that point—shows a very young Bloch becoming who he was going to become. He sent it to a tiny magazine in Pennsylvania, and it became his first published story, although Bloch said that “showing copies of these crudely printed around would scarcely serve to establish my credentials as a ‘published’ writer” (Bloch Once 68).