Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (15 page)

Alicia and I spent all morning cleaning. I mowed the lawn, clipped the hedges, raked the leaves into bags, and put a bowl of water out for Gavin, who eyed me suspiciously. Alicia swept and dusted and cleaned off the tabletops, bought cut flowers and placed them in all the rooms. Late in the morning, as I was carrying a pumpkin from the kitchen to the front stoop, she followed me outside.

"Do you think it's strange?" she asked.

"To have an estate sale? People do this all the time."

"That's not what I'm asking. Do you think it's strange that I can love you so soon after Arthur?"

Her question took me aback. The thought had crossed my mind, but I'd been trying not to dwell on it. I put the pumpkin down.

"You don't have to say anything, Gordie. I know it's a little odd." Her hands were still caked with the batter of the zucchini bread she was baking. She had said earlier that estate sales didn't need to be somber; she had heard somewhere that the best way to sell anything is to bake three loaves of bread and put Vivaldi in the tape deck. "I adored my husband, but certain aspects of me he refused to understand." She rolled the dough off her fingers, pinching it into a ball. "You're not like that. You take things as they come."

Shortly before noon, when the estate sale was advertised to begin, Alicia slipped
Stabat Mater
into the cassette player, opened the front door to the house, and led me to the shower off the master bedroom, pressing her small high breasts against my dirty shirt.

I stripped, leaving my clothes in the half-open bathroom doorway.

She worked the soap into a lather in her hands and washed the grass and dirt I had brought in from the yard off my legs and arms, massaged her sweet-scented shampoo into my scalp, standing me under the running water so we were belly to belly.

Afterward, Alicia dried herself off and walked in a towel to her closet, where she dressed. My change of clothes was in the pink room. I'd have to cross the master bedroom to get there. Over the music, I couldn't tell if anyone had arrived.

I ducked my head and walked quickly through the hallway to the pink room, shutting the door behind me. At a glance I'd seen that the hallway was empty. Careless. But this was how it went with me and Alicia.

I dried my hair and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a white shirt, opening one of Alicia's boxes so I could hide the clothes I'd worn in the morning in case Margaret came looking around this room. The box was marked "Letters." Near the top was a stack of bound notebooks, and the first one, written in a scrawl that was unmistakably Alicia's, was labeled

JOURNAL
NO
. 23
MARCH
1988–
JANUARY
1989

I was tempted to open it, quickly read an entry or two, but I resisted. Instead, I moved my clothes into the "Sweaters" box nearby.

***

Alicia was in the living room showing a young couple the Victorian couch.

"So, what is it you do?" the man asked Alicia, now in blue jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was up in a bun with a pencil stuck through it. I wanted to stand beside her as she greeted people, put my arm over her shoulder, have her introduce me proprietarily, but instead I browsed the room as if I were just another buyer looking at the merchandise.

"I'm between jobs, actually," she said. "I had thought for a while about veterinary school, but five years is an awfully long time. Lately I'm interested in newspaper reporting."

"That's quite a switch," the man said. "How interesting."

"I don't want to go to school for it." Alicia leaned against the arm of the couch. "The best school of journalism is getting in there and doing it."

The words were exactly as I had spoken them to her.

"Good reporters have the luck of oil men," she said. "The story seems always to be just beneath their feet."

I was turning the bust of a headless Roman-looking figure around in my hands when Alicia called me over.

"This is a journalist friend of mine, Gordie Hatch. He works at the
St. Louis Independent
"

I shook hands with the couple.

"You might know a friend of mine, Marshall Holman," the man said. "I played football with him at Illinois."

"Sure, I know Marshall. He's one of our police reporters."

"Great guy. Damn funny guy." The man looked small to have played Division I football, with a neck no larger than mine. Maybe he was the kicker, I thought, or an overachieving walk-on.

"Marshall red-shirted his freshman year, then quit," he continued. "Strangest thing, because he was highly recruited." The man's wife smiled at him proudly. He obviously loved telling football stories. "He said he'd never be fast enough for the pro game, so he gave up his scholarship and started working for the Champaign paper."

Alicia had stepped away and now returned with two cups of coffee.

"What do you do at the
Independent
?" the man asked, taking a sip.

I looked at Alicia, with whom I'd not been entirely honest concerning the state of my career, and she smiled, a smile remarkably similar to that of the woman whose husband told his football story.

"I'm with the metro section. I do this and that, mostly general assignment work."

"You said your name is Hatch? I always read Metro. Best section in the paper, if you want my opinion."

So he wouldn't press me any further, I sat on the couch, bouncing on it a little. "Comfortable," I said. "How much for this piece?"

Alicia gave me a disappointed look. "He's so modest. He hates talking about himself. The truth is, Gordie's an investigative reporter, so you only see his articles a few times a year. But they're always blockbusters—five- and six-part series, the kind that get picked up nationally."

"Really?" the man said. "I love those investigative series. Which ones have you done?"

I named two recent series that the
Independent
had run, one about fraud surrounding the proposed riverboat casinos and the other, sanctioned ' y St. John, about a crack-addicted investment broker leading a double life.

"Oh yeah, I remember that second one," the football player said. "Tragic story, especially the part where his wife's giving birth and he's in the hospital bathroom getting loaded."

I shook my head, lifting the floor lamp to check its price tag. "Twenty-five dollars. That's a bargain," I said. "Can you set this one aside for me?"

As the living room filled with people, I left Alicia and the couple and went back to browsing.

Leaning against the wall were the paintings that before had been stacked next to the fireplace. There were five in all: the houses of parliament watercolor; a realistic still life of a bowl of fruit; a group of pelican-like birds, taken, I guessed, from an old zoological textbook; another watercolor of a wagon wheel in a field; plus a triptych that next to these others seemed incongruous: a reclining nude divided into three parts—head, torso, legs.

The first four paintings didn't interest me—I would have guessed that they were copies—but the nude was striking. Earlier in the day when Alicia had set it against the wall I had only glanced at it, noticing that it was larger in size and brighter than the rest. But now, something about the glassy, lifeless stare in the nude's eyes, her remarkably real flesh tones, the vibrant, almost pulsating fire-orange background, fascinated me.

"Do you think we could save this?" I asked Alicia on her way into the kitchen.

"Why that one?"

"I don't know. I like it," I said. "I can tell you it's worth a lot more than fifty dollars."

Alicia shrugged her shoulders. "If you want it, sure." She handed me three Sold stickers. I carried the painting in three trips to the pink room.

Margaret was outside on the patio. She must not have come through the house or I would have seen her.

"You're here," I said stupidly, because even though I had known she was coming, I was still unnerved.

She stood beside the fenced-in dog run. Joe was inside it, sitting on the packed dirt, nuzzling Gavin.

"Did you have to drive far?" I asked.

"I live less than a mile from here" was her curt reply.

I waved to Joe, and he nodded, stroking Gavin's face.

"Can I get you something to eat?" I asked Margaret. "I saw some zucchini bread and coffee in the kitchen."

"That would be nice." She was pulling dead blooms off the rhododendrons that grew alongside the dog run, stuffing them into her pocket. "Maybe a cup of coffee, black, and a piece of plain toast."

In the kitchen, Alicia was making a fresh pot.

"You can't be so shy with people," she said, rubbing my back. "You're an excellent reporter at one of the best papers in the country. Why diminish yourself?"

I put two pieces of bread in the toaster oven and took two cups off the shelf.

"Seriously, sweetheart. You have to get over this shyness."

"You're right," I said. "I'm just not used to telling people what I do."

The fact was, in the year since I'd moved to St. Louis I had met almost no one, had had no social life to speak of. My whole existence had been work and advancers.

"It's simple," she said. "You're an investigative reporter. Your articles come out only a few times a year. If they want to know more than that, you say, 'Sorry, I have to keep things quiet until we break the story.'"

With a quick glance over Alicia's shoulder toward the other room, I kissed her neck. "Thank you," I whispered.

"So tell me about this story you're writing on Arthur," Margaret said. I set her toast and coffee and a cloth napkin on the patio table and pulled up two chairs.

I repeated what I had told her at the funeral, that my feature stories tended to be community-oriented.

"What do you mean by community-oriented?" She unfolded her napkin, rubbed out the creases, laid the napkin neatly in her lap.

I told her there were hard-working people in the community who never got the recognition they deserved. "I've always wanted to be a promoter of unsung heroes," I explained.

She raised her eyebrows above her glasses, frowning, a look of doubt tinged with bemusement. "And how would you say Arthur was an unsung hero?"

In her gray dress, with her hollow, angular face and pale skin, she looked like someone who spent all day in artificial light. Her long arms and neck, her face in the bright sunshine, gave her an unsettling force.

"He was a man with high standards. He inspired great loyalty in his friends." I was able to think of only the most general praise.

She took small bites of her toast, holding it between her bony fingers.

Joe had found a dog brush and was combing Gavin's long brindle fur front to back, muttering to himself, paying no attention to our conversation.

The coffee tasted sour. I never drank it black, but for some reason I had wanted Margaret to think that we took our coffee the same way.

"There's something you're not telling me, Mr. Hatch." She crossed her arms over her chest. "If you're expecting honest answers, you should try to be direct."

"What do you mean?" I asked, stalling.

"I loved my brother very much, but he was not the kind of man anyone would bother to write a story about. He was a do-gooder, but for himself, not anything larger. He was an ordinary man." She put the coffee cup on the ground beside her. "You're not after
Arthur
's story, are you?" she asked.

I didn't know what to say. "I'm not sure." I hesitated, defensive.

"I think you have a pretty good idea," she said. "The story you're after is Alicia."

Margaret's dark eyes zeroed in on me, as if she were after my thoughts, and I decided the best move was to confess, not to everything, but at least to reveal a small truth. Something about her demanded a confession, a kind of omniscience that seemed to say,
There's little I don't know or can't find out.

So when she asked, "What are you really doing at this estate sale?" I broke down, first on Alicia's patio, then again and again in the weeks that would follow.

Without considering the implications, because, caught in a lie, I had to be honest about something, I said, "I'm not a reporter. I'm an obituary writer."

I told her how long I'd been on the desk and that I couldn't wait to break out, that I'd been looking for a good story to write and was frustrated until Alicia called.

"It was her idea to do the story on Arthur, not mine," I said. "I was curious, so I went along."

Had our conversation continued, I might have told her about the advancers or the ghouls or my mother's expectations. No telling how far I might have gone trying to explain, but behind me the screen door opened, and I turned around to see Alicia approaching our table.

"Hello, Margaret," she said in a flat, unfamiliar voice.

Margaret remained seated, holding her hands, palms together, in her lap.

Alicia pulled up a chair next to me, closer than I felt comfortable with. Aware of Margaret, I leaned away, resting my elbow on the chair arm.

Joe was standing up now, quietly closing the gate to the dog run, scratching Gavin's forehead through the chainlink fence. With a sidelong glance, he slunk into the house.

A cloud had drifted in front of the sun, bringing definition to Margaret's angular face. Her small mouth tensed, her eyes unblinking.

"Some of what you're selling today belonged to my mother," she said to Alicia.

Alicia looked away toward the dog run, where Gavin walked to a corner and lay down in the shade of a beech tree, resting his head on his extended paws. "I don't know why you feel that—" she began, before being interrupted by a loud crash inside the house.

We all jumped up to see what it was.

Joe Whiting stood next to the mantel over a broken Chinese vase. He was crying.

"What the hell's wrong with that guy?" one of the browsers asked, speaking to nobody in particular.

Joe was sobbing into his hands.

"No, Margaret. No. Don't be mad," he was saying.

"He just picked up that vase and threw it on the ground. Threw it! What the hell is wrong with that guy?"