Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (7 page)

It was a school holiday. I had every reason to be wandering around downtown, but as the officer's face darkened and I realized that he didn't believe me, I grew quiet. He asked if I knew what the word "truant" meant, said I better not have any pals up the street hoping to make a fool of a police officer. "Did you ever wonder what it's like to spend the night in jail?" he asked.

When it was over, when he had sat me down at his black metal desk and called my mother, sending her into hysterics, when he had humiliated me in front of his grinning cop friends, I promised myself never again would I assume that anyone else knew good from bad, right from wrong, virtue from corruption. He had had Patty Hearst within his grasp—and had let her go. I knew. From now on, that would have to be enough.

I sat at my desk, the lead-removing fan clattering away, surrounding me in white noise. I crumpled up the Davis obituary and hit the speed-dial button for AP Chicago. In a few minutes the AP artide appeared on my screen. The length had not changed—still twenty-four inches. I called Layout to say we were running a correction on text but that the picture and the page layout would not be affected. I called the copy desk to promise them a new version just as soon as I had it, and I read through the AP obit word by word, struggling to concentrate.

AP's obituary was a mere catalogue of Bette Davis films and a few quotes from critics and old-timers that did nothing to capture the world-weariness and wisdom of the great actress. None of her good lines was mentioned—"I'd like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair." And the article dwelt more on her mannerisms—the batting eyes, the sweeping gestures—than it did on her role in Hollywood history.

Above the obit, as I had done countless times before, I typed,
Reprinted courtesy of the Associated Press.

Later, around five-thirty, after avoiding Greg DePaul in the composing room, where I checked and double-checked that the AP obit, not mine, would be running in the first and all subsequent editions, I stopped by St. John's office.

I had planned to leave a note, but he was there. His diversity meeting must have ended early.

"I've moved the Davis obit from AP," I said. "The length is the same, and it looks fine on the page."

St. John had a so-you've-learned-your-lesson smirk on his face.

"Good, Hatch," he said. "Good."

"Do you need me to stay around? It's my day off," I reminded him.

"Nope," he said with a bottom-lip smile and a backhand motion toward the door.

I walked out, turning left for the elevators, and made my way home, counting off the names in my head, like a passenger list from an airline disaster, of seventy-nine advancers that would never make it to print.

SUNDAY NIGHT
and all day Monday I waited for Alicia to call. I checked the machine from work, then the switchboard from home every hour, my mood shifting between angry and resigned. One minute I'd feel determined to prove St. John wrong; the next I'd wonder whether I'd blown my career.

My mother often talked about one of my father's early trials. He was posted in Dallas in the winter of '64, still working for the
Kansan
but beginning to outgrow the small paper. His editor in Wichita, out of jealousy or in a misbegotten attempt to try to hold on to him, kept reining him in, killing any material that lacked a clear, identifiable source. My father had befriended a Dallas police captain who was feeding him stories about Oswald's connections with the Communists and his links to Jack Ruby days ahead of any of the other papers, but the Wichita editor held fast to a policy that no stories would appear that didn't name names.

"Today such a policy would be preposterous," my mother would say. "What if Ben Bradlee had told Woodward and Bernstein that he wouldn't run the Watergate stories until Woodward revealed the identity of Deep Throat? Your father wasn't about to break the most sacred law of journalism and betray a source."

My parents had argued over what to do. My mother encouraged my father to leave the
Kansan,
but my father had been born and raised in Wichita and felt a strong loyalty to his hometown paper, particularly since he had put its name on the journalistic map. But in the end, my mother convinced him to take the Dallas bureau job with the
Chicago Tribune,
which had been coveting him for months.

Compared to my father's, my own troubles seemed insignificant.

By late Monday night, Alicia still hadn't called. I busied myself with making dinner—shredded wheat doused in blueberry yogurt—and cleaning the apartment. I swept the floor and wiped down the kitchen counter, gathered up the Sunday newspaper and put it in the closet along with the others. Finally I turned the scanner on low and listened awhile. Someone had run his car off I-64 and firefighters were cutting him out. A row house had caught fire in Dogtown but apparently no one had been home. In between images of mayhem, pictures of Alicia kept appearing in my mind, her slimness, the way she covered her mouth when she laughed, the sound of her bangles sliding down her arms, clinking together as she combed back her hair.

I turned on the news and watched street scenes from Czechoslovakia—swarms of students in Wenceslas Square demonstrating peacefully. I called the switchboard at work one last time, left a message for Ritger that something had come up and I wouldn't be in until the afternoon, then fell asleep on the couch with the lights still on.

On Tuesday morning, I checked Arthur Whiting's death notice for the location of his funeral. Just as I was leaving the apartment for the funeral home, the phone rang.

"Is that you, Gordie?"

I needed a second to recognize the voice.

"I got the number from your mom." It was Thea, sounding far away. "I know you hate to be bothered at work, so I called here."

"Oh, it's fine, I'm always happy to hear from you," I said, my voice pulling back in a way that must have let her know that I was headed out the door. "So how have you been?"

"Is this a bad time?" she asked.

"No. No. It's perfectly okay."

I heard an echo over the phone, footsteps and voices, the open sounds of a public place. I guessed she was calling from a pay phone at the bottom of a stairwell.

"So, your mom told me you're an investigative reporter," she said.

"Did she?" And in that instant I wanted to tell Thea that my mother was wrong, that I'd been lying to her.
Nothing's going right,
I wanted to say.
Two days ago everything I worked for blew up in my face.

I wanted to tell her about St. John and Ritger and their brand of mean-spirited journalism. I wanted to go back to the summer of 1985, when I could tell her my secrets, and start over from there. But a moment later, I felt foolish for having allowed such thoughts into my head.

"Tomorrow I start a long rotation at the hospital," she said. "I wanted to know if you'll have dinner with me tonight."

The invitation took me by surprise, so without thinking I said yes, sure, that would be fine.

"Eight o'clock at Arcobasso's?" she asked. "It's in Soulard."

"I know Arcobasso's." The restaurant was only a couple of blocks from my apartment. "It'll be good to see you."

It had been four years.

I made a mental note of it, hung up the phone, and rushed out the door, late for the funeral.

Crawley's Funeral Home was a converted rambler next to a Dunkin' Donuts near one of the older neighborhoods in suburban St. Charles. Its structure was made of smooth brick in various shades of tan and brown. A matching pair of windowless additions, covered in white siding, arched back from the main building, running parallel on either side. From behind, where I pulled around to park, the place looked like a giant magnet.

I cut the engine and waited for the Gremlin's shudders to subside. A silver hearse was parked out back, and a man in a gray pinstriped suit leaned against it smoking a cigarette. He looked at his watch, took a long drag from his cigarette, and with a smokeless exhale flicked the ashes to the ground, rolling the filter into a handkerchief. Straightening his fat-knotted tie, he walked in the back entrance under a green awning with the words
RICHARD P. CRAWLEY AND SON, FUNERALS OF QUIET DIGNITY.

Despite my occupation, I had never been inside a funeral home. When my father was dying, we were living in Chicago, and I was sent away to Greencastle, Indiana, my mother's hometown, to stay with my aunt's family. Uncle Keith, my mother's brother-in-law, arrived the day my father went into the hospital, packed me a duffel bag of summer and fall clothes, and brought me down from the city on a rush-hour train. The one memory that sticks in my mind from that summer was that the neighbors had an above-ground pool and I panicked when they tried to teach me to swim. I stayed a month with my cousins, who were in high school then and didn't have much time for me, a five-year-old then. When I returned to Chicago, my father had died, and three weeks later I was shuttled back on the train, in a daze, this time to Columbia, Missouri, and to a new life in the college town where my parents had first met.

Why my mother had sent me away that summer was not an easy subject to talk about, so mostly we didn't. But it came up early one morning, my first year of high school, on what would have been my father's forty-fifth birthday. It was as though she suddenly felt compelled to say something, and I suppose she took a gamble that I'd now be mature enough to understand. She sat on the edge of my bed and, pressing out the wrinkles in the cover, explained that the doctors had told her he could live another three weeks or three months with this kind of cancer.

"I wasn't going to let you watch that," she said. "I wanted you to remember him the way he was: strong and tall and clear-eyed."

I told her I understood, which wasn't entirely true.

I had been to church funerals—for my uncle and my grandmother in Wichita, for the dean of the journalism school, for Mary Ellen of Mary Ellen's Beauty Shop, who did my mother's hair, and for a boy in my class who once put mashed potatoes in my milk and whose rope swing broke over rocks along the Gasconade.

In the sporadic car rides to Greencastle and Wichita to visit my family and up to Wisconsin where I went to camp one summer, I came to understand that the town is directly ahead when you see the graveyard and that the oldest, most beautiful house is always the funeral home.

It surprised me, then, since she had seemed like a woman of particular taste, that Alicia would have chosen this place to honor her husband—this house of mismatched parts at the edge of an outdated strip mall.

The funeral director, who had been smoking behind the building, greeted me at the front entrance. He had crust under his eyes, age spots along the sides of his face, a sore like dried preserves on his upper lip.

"Gunther or Whiting?" he asked, squinting from the brightness of the open door.

"Whiting," I said.

"Come with me." He took my elbow, leading me down a dark hallway. "Whiting is in the West Annex."

We stopped under a gold-veined mirror. He handed me a pen and pointed to an open guest book surrounded by peach gladioli.

"Please sign your name before entering the receiving room. The service will begin in fifteen minutes," he said, retreating.

For some reason, I hesitated about writing my own name, worried it might be traced back to me, so instead I signed my father's, "Charlie Hatch," near the bottom of the page.

When I opened the door and stepped inside the receiving room, I realized that the Dunkin' Donuts and the aluminum siding and the funeral director with the sore on his lip had all been there for good reason—to give this sanctuary at the end of the dark hallway the advantage of surprise.

Everywhere I looked there were white roses: white roses on the altar, a white rose on every chair, sprays of white roses in crystal vases, fans of white roses tied with purple ribbons on each of the velvet-draped tables.

I stood behind two middle-aged women who appeared to know each other. The one in front of me pulled some tissues from her purse and slipped them into her jacket, then turned around, handing me a program from the table beside her. Her friend, so large she obscured my view of the left side of the room, was speaking in a whisper to someone I couldn't see. I opened the program, glanced over it, and as another mourner came up behind me to take his place in line, I lifted my head—and there was Alicia.

She wore a navy crepe dress and a black cloche pulled low over her forehead, half of her face in shadow. Her lips were slightly parted, the flesh around her eyes soft with crying. She looked off toward the altar, in the center of which sat a mahogany cremation box.

The sight of her under the hat with her faraway expression in that bright, quiet room, which she had so artfully transformed, moved me to do the most curious thing: I kissed her hand.

I've never been a courtly person, have always found courtliness to be contrived, but I actually took her hand and pressed my lips to her fingers.

I have no idea what got into me, but there I was, at the funeral of a man I had never met, holding the hand of his wife, a woman I hardly knew, looking at her as if the world should step aside and leave us alone.

And she went straight along, as if kissing her hand were the most natural gesture for me to have made. She tilted her head and held my eyes for a moment. "I'm so glad you came." She sounded genuinely relieved.

"Of course," I said.

Standing next to her, the top of its head level with her elbow and baring its teeth, was the largest dog I had ever seen.

He had a rough, brindle coat, a long body, and a deep chest. His narrow face had wiry hairs that came together like extra fangs, and his small, high-set ears were drawn back against his neck.

"Gavin!" Alicia scolded, pointing a finger at the growling wolfhound, who immediately sank to the floor.

She took my hand again. "He gets jealous," she whispered apologetically.

A cello was playing as Alicia introduced me to Joe Whiting, a tall bald man with a thin mustache, and Margaret, Arthur's sister, a rigid-looking woman with wire-rimmed glasses.