The Obituary Writer (18 page)
“I’m finished,” Claire said.
“You sure?”
“Yes,” she said, standing.
Her pregnant belly made it hard for her to squeeze past him. For an awkward moment they stood wedged half in and half out. Then the man angled his body, making room for Claire to leave.
Dr. Spirito and Peter stood in the hallway outside her mother-in-law’s room.
“I can’t be optimistic at this point,” the doctor was saying when Claire approached them.
“But she sat up,” Peter said, and the desperateness in his voice made Claire want to go to him and wrap him in her arms.
Peter looked at Claire and said, “She just asked for a cup of Darjeeling tea and some cinnamon toast.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Dr. Spirito said. “I wish I did. The damage to her heart is substantial.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire told the doctor.
Peter turned to her, his eyes hard. “Why are
you
sorry?”
“I just meant . . .” Claire began. But what did she mean?
“Look,” the doctor said, “why don’t you both just come upstairs, watch the inauguration. Then go home and rest up. See where we are tomorrow.”
“That’s a good idea,” Claire said. “We don’t want to miss his speech.”
“Fine,” Peter said.
He hesitated. “Is it all right to just leave her?”
“She’s a bit confused,” the doctor said. “Not really dementia, but more like temporary amnesia. The nurse will keep her company, try to get her back to 1961. She talked about some poor kid who died of the Spanish flu, and taking the train to Denver, and all sorts of things from the past.”
“Are you sure it’s temporary?” Claire asked.
“I’ve seen it go both ways with old folks.”
Amnesia, Claire thought. It didn’t sound like a bad thing to her.
Crowded into that hospital solarium, everyone’s eyes fixed on the television that hung in a corner of the room, Claire imagined Dot’s party. She could picture the couples squeezed onto the Colonial sofas and armchairs, so many that people probably perched on the armrests. Some men, polite, would stand, hands on their wives’ shoulders. Then she imagined all of the living rooms across the country, every citizen watching this very same moment, and imagining it, Claire shivered.
Peter rubbed her arm. “Cold?” he asked her.
She couldn’t think of how to describe this feeling overcoming her, this sense of unity, of hope. Hadn’t her mother described the years before the Great Depression this way?
There was hope then,
she’d said. Hope that made people fall in love and feel optimistic. Hope for a bright future.
Uncharacteristically, Peter wrapped his arms around her, and rested his chin lightly on the top of her head.
John Kennedy was raising his hand now. He was taking the oath of office.
“He’s not wearing his hat,” someone in the room said.
“There go hats,” another person said. “Out of style as of 12:52 p.m., January 20.”
Disappointed, Claire saw Jackie in a taupe wool dress with a matching coat. The coat had a sable fur collar and a matching muff, her hands tucked inside it. And that pillbox hat, tipped jauntily back on her head.
Taupe. No one would ever guess taupe.
When Kennedy began his inaugural speech, the solarium went still. Behind him, LBJ sat frowning, his oversized ears practically moving with the wind. Claire listened, trying to keep her mind from going to her lover, standing perhaps this very minute in Dot’s living room, his hands on his wife’s shoulders, listening to these very same words.
“So let us begin anew,” JFK was saying, “remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Claire felt Peter step away from her, ever so slightly. She resisted turning around to look up at him.
“Let both sides explore what problems unite us,” Kennedy continued, “instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.”
At this, Claire did turn to glimpse her husband, who stood with his jaw set hard, his hands shoved into his pockets.
She focused again on the new president’s speech, and when he finished, she applauded hard along with everyone else in the room.
“It’s truly a new beginning,” an elderly woman standing beside Claire said in an Eastern European accent. She said it as if she were speaking directly to Claire.
“It feels that way,” Claire said, wondering why she had this lump in her throat, why she felt so empty.
“No, no, it is. That boy, he’s going to change the world.” The woman pointed to the television. “You watch.”
“I hope so,” Claire said.
Nurses and doctors were pushing their way out now. The hallway outside the solarium came alive with calls over the PA for Doctor this and Doctor that.
The whole hospital had held its breath for this moment, Claire thought.
She touched Peter’s arm lightly. “I’m going to call Dot,” she said. “Then I’ll meet you downstairs?”
He nodded, and joined the stream of people exiting. Claire couldn’t read his expression. Was he unable to stop belaboring what had divided them? She left with the stragglers, wondering if she was able to stop.
Back in the phone booth, the operator connected her to Dot, reversing the charges.
“Taupe!” Claire said as soon as Dot accepted. “Can you believe it?”
“I picked cornflower blue,” Dot said. “Wouldn’t she have looked beautiful in cornflower blue and that black hair of hers?”
“I didn’t even hear who designed it.”
“Cassini,” Dot said. “And the hat was someone named Halston. Apparently he does hats for Bergdorf Goodman in New York.”
“I wish I was there with all of you,” Claire said.
“We missed you, darling. You did get to hear the speech, didn’t you?”
“Every word,” Claire said.
“Magnificent, wasn’t it?”
Claire could hear the voices of Dot’s guests raised in excitement. She strained, trying to hear one above them all. But they remained a blur.
“I should get back,” Claire said.
“I hope she doesn’t die today,” Dot said. “It’s not a day to die. Not at all.”
“Dot? I almost forgot to ask. Did anyone pick taupe?” Claire was already laughing at how ridiculous a question she’d asked.
“Yes!” Dot said.
“What? Taupe? Don’t tell me Trudy won?”
“Not Trudy, no. The wife with the appendix. Peggy. She actually guessed taupe. Not beige or camel or ecru. Taupe.”
“How could she?” Claire managed to say.
“She’s brilliant, that’s all,” Dot said. “Hurry home, you hear?”
Peggy. His wife’s name was Peggy. And she was brilliant.
The baby inside Claire kicked hard. Claire put one hand lightly on her stomach, feeling the little foot banging there, kicking, as if she were trying to get out.
VIVIEN, 1919
“T
ell me about Pamela,” Vivien said to Lotte.
Lotte looked at her with vacant eyes, eyes that made Vivien want to look away. She had seen eyes such as these before, of course. Many of the people who showed up on her doorstep asking her to write an obituary had this very look, as if the life had been extinguished from them. Lotte, like all the others, vacillated between this vacant dead stare and a wild, out-of-control one in which her eyes blazed and jumped around, only landing briefly on people and things as if they were searching for something they could not find.
“You know her,” Lotte said, her voice as flat as her gaze. “You know all about her.”
They sat together on the long sofa where Lotte had spent most of her time since the funeral two days earlier. Vivien had a stack of thick paper on her lap and held a fountain pen. The two women’s knees touched. Vivien couldn’t help but remember the afternoons they had sat close like this as girls, each lost in a book, the slight pressure of Lotte’s knee on hers the only reminder of the world outside the novel. Perhaps that was why Lotte had settled so close to Vivien now, to keep her centered, to remind her that there was a world outside the one of grief that she now inhabited.
Vivien laid her hand on Lotte’s leg. “Of course I do,” she said. “But I find that when I write a . . . a . . .”
She stopped. For some reason, she couldn’t say the word
obituary
. It was as if by saying it out loud, Pamela would be more dead somehow.
Lotte turned that awful gaze on Vivien.
“An obituary,” Lotte said without emotion. “Pamela’s obituary. Because she’s dead she needs an obituary.”
Vivien found she held her breath as Lotte spoke, afraid at any moment the other grieving mother would appear, the one that thrashed and scratched at herself, and wailed. Yesterday, Lotte had screamed,
I want to get out of my skin! I want it off!
She was wearing her grief, Vivien realized. If she could take off her skin, she might be able to inhabit the right one.
“The way I proceed,” Vivien began, hating the formality in her voice but unable to speak otherwise, “is to ask you to tell me about . . .”
Again she faltered.
She took a breath. “About Pamela,” she said, “and while you talk I write down the things that strike me.”
“Strike you how?” Lotte said.
Oh, Lotte,
Vivien thought as she looked into her friend’s flat eyes,
are you in there somewhere?
“I can’t explain it really,” Vivien said. “Something just clicks and I know what to write.”
Lotte nodded absently. Her fingers kept working the hem of her dress. It was the dress she’d worn to the funeral, and she refused to take it off.
I’ll wear it forever,
she’d yelled at Robert when he tried to unbutton it and replace it with a clean blue one.
I’ll wear it so I’ll never forget the day they put my baby in the ground.
“I should have taken her to the doctor sooner,” Lotte said. She said this a dozen times a day, maybe more.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Vivien said. It was what she always said in response.
Lotte nodded again.
“Did you think David would die that day?” she said softly.
“I don’t think he died, Lotte,” Vivien said.
“You think he’s in Denver,” Lotte said.
“Maybe.”
“Because you believe that if had died, you would know somehow. You would feel it.”
“Yes,” Vivien admitted.
“You see, that’s why I can’t believe Pamela died. I didn’t feel like she was sick enough to die. I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary.”
Lotte’s fingers worried her hem, twisting it and turning it over and over in her hands.
“Do the people who come to you know ahead of time? Do they have some kind of sign, some intuition that I lack?” she asked.
“No, no,” Vivien said.
“What kind of mother doesn’t realize her daughter is dying?” Lotte said, and now her eyes were filling with fear and confusion. Her hands worried that hem, and her body began to tremble.
“What kind of mother doesn’t know?” she said, her voice growing louder.
“No one knows these things,” Vivien said.
Bo’s head popped around the corner. He saw where his mother was going and he quickly disappeared again.
“A mother should know,” Lotte insisted. She was on her feet now, pacing.
She rubbed her arms vigorously. “I could jump out of my skin,” she said. “I want out. I want out of here.”
Vivien got up and tried to stop Lotte, but her friend pulled away from her.
“Take me with you,” Lotte said, turning abruptly to face Vivien. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shining.
“Where, darling?” Vivien asked.
“To Denver,” Lotte said, impatient.
“You can’t leave your children,” Vivien said. “Not now.”
Without warning, Lotte broke into a run. She ran out of the living room, past Bo and a neighbor boy at the kitchen table, and out the door. Vivien followed, trying to keep pace with her. Through the yard, across the vineyard, and beyond to the hill where the small family cemetery sat. There, on Pamela’s grave with the freshly dug earth, Lotte flung herself down. Like an animal, she clawed at the dirt, crying and calling Pamela’s name.
Out of breath, Vivien bent and tugged her friend upward. She wrapped Lotte in her arms, and led her out of the cemetery. Lotte resisted, but Vivien held firm. Dirt streaked Lotte’s worn face, and a small clump tangled in her hair. She smelled of sweat and earth. She smelled of heartbreak.
As they made their slow way back to the house, Lotte trying to break free every few feet, Vivien caught sight of Sebastian working in the field. Yesterday he had cornered her.
You will come back to me?
he’d asked.
Maybe,
Vivien had said.
“She was just a little girl,” Lotte told Vivien.
Hours had passed. Vivien had managed to finally bathe her friend, to comb the tangles from her hair and scrub the dirt off her hands and face. The sky was violet as dusk settled over the vineyard. The women sat at one of the long wooden tables outside, a salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers on a platter in front of them. Vivien opened a bottle of wine, and filled two glasses for them. Then she asked Lotte again:
Tell me about Pamela
.
“She was such a good rider for her age,” Lotte said, her gaze focused on some distant point beyond Vivien. “Bareback. Western.”
She continued, shaking her head. “I worried she’d have a fall, that she’d get hurt. How foolish of me. Instead some germ got her. Something I couldn’t even see.”
“I liked watching her ride that horse,” Vivien said. “The brown one with the white markings on his face.”
“Happy,” Lotte said. “She named him Happy.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their wine. Crickets chirped. Out in the fields, fireflies blinked on and off.
“She loved Robert Louis Stevenson,” Lotte said. “You were reading her
Treasure Island
just a few weeks ago.”
“Pamela did love books,” Vivien said.
“Adventure stories. She would get mad if the boys could do something that she couldn’t. Like climb that apple tree over there.”
Lotte kept talking, in fits and starts. Remembering how as a toddler Pamela would chase her brothers, put her hands on her hips, and order them to stop being boys. How if they were too rough with her and made her cry, Lotte would make them tell her they were sorry and Pamela would shout:
Sorry isn’t good enough
. Vivien listened, glad that Lotte was finally talking and eating a little. She would write the obituary later that night, and then she would try again to leave for Denver.
The obituary was already taking shape, the words to capture the little girl who wanted to have adventures, who dreamed of fighting pirates and racing horses.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Vivien thought. She remembered reading Pamela his
Child’s Garden of Verses
last summer. “The Land of Counterpane.”
When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day.
Pamela had said, “Auntie Viv, wouldn’t it be terrible to be so sick that you had to stay in bed all day every day?”
And Vivien had pointed out the last line of the poem, how the land of counterpane is called pleasant in it.
“Well, I don’t think it would be pleasant at all,” Pamela had said. “Imagine not being able to run outside?”
“I think Stevenson was a sick child himself,” Vivien explained. “But he grew up to be quite an adventurer.”
“What did he do?” Pamela demanded, unconvinced.
“He chartered a yacht named
Casco
and set sail from San Francisco.”
Vivien remembered when Stevenson set sail that summer day in 1888. The newspaper had covered his departure, and Vivien could still see the photograph of Stevenson with his wild long hair and bohemian clothes, standing at the prow of
Casco
.
“Where did he go, Auntie Viv?” Pamela asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
“For nearly three years he wandered the Pacific. Tahiti and Samoa and the Hawaiian Islands. He became a good friend of King Kala-kaua.”
Pamela’s eyes were shining with excitement. “A real-life king? That’s what I want to do, sail the Pacific and meet kings and savages.”
Vivien stroked Pamela’s soft blond hair. “I have no doubt you will do all that and more,” she’d said.
Vivien had never seen mountains before. When she stepped off the train in Denver later that week, the sight of them made her weak. The Rocky Mountains loomed above the city, topped with snow even in spring, and appearing almost purple in the early morning light.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” a woman standing beside her said.
Pretty wasn’t the adjective that Vivien would use. Magnificent. Majestic. But she nodded to be polite.
“I came West in 1900, from Boston,” the woman continued. “To teach school. And I still remember stepping off the train here and seeing the Rockies. How they took my breath away.”
“You live here then?” Vivien said. The woman had dark hair coming loose from beneath her wide hat, and a long horsey face.
“I don’t anymore,” she said. “I left ten years ago for Oregon. You ever been to Oregon?”
Vivien shook her head.
“Now that’s God’s country,” she said. “We’ve got mountains too. And Douglas fir and redwoods and the Pacific. God’s country for sure.”
“I need to find the hospital.”
The woman grinned. “But I’m going to the hospital myself. We can share a taxi?” the woman continued. She was one of those people who didn’t require responses, Vivien thought.
Vivien followed her off the platform and into Union Station. In front of it sleek black cars were lined up, waiting for passengers.
“The Mizpah Arch,” the woman said, pointing to the beautiful stone arch that welcomed people to Denver.
“I didn’t expect such a sophisticated city,” Vivien admitted as they got into a taxi.
“We hosted the Democratic National Convention in ’08,” the woman said.
Her face had taken on a sadness Vivien took for nostalgia.
“The Mint,” the woman said, pointing out the window. “The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.” She sighed and settled deeper into the seat.
“So many trees,” Vivien said.
“One hundred and ten thousand to be exact,” the woman said. “Mayor Speer had them planted in his City Beautiful movement. That’s Speer’s Civic Center,” she added as they passed a large park.
“It sounds like you love it here,” Vivien said.
The woman nodded absently.
Vivien wondered why the woman had moved from this city that clearly moved her so much, but she was too polite to ask. She had left San Francisco because it was too painful to stay. People had their private reasons.
They turned onto West Colfax, a paved street lined with beautiful buildings and well-dressed men and women. Vivien shook her head. She had been imagining cowboys and cattle.
“Do you teach school in Oregon too?” Vivien asked.
“I cook in a lumber camp there,” the woman said.
“You’re quite an adventurer,” Vivien said, her voice catching on the word. She thought of Pamela, poor Pamela.
“I lived a dull life in Boston until I was twenty-five years old. When no one seemed to want to marry us, my girlfriend and I decided to head West. The land of opportunity, we thought.”
“Was it?” Vivien said.
“Abby died here, in childbirth. The man I married drowned, and they never recovered his body. So . . .”
“How terrible,” Vivien said. “I’m sorry.”
To her surprise, the woman smiled.
“But that’s why I’ve come back,” she said. From her purse she pulled out a folded newspaper clipping and handed it to Vivien. “See?”
Vivien recognized it as soon as she unfolded it. The man with amnesia.
“I think it’s my Jeremiah,” the woman said. “The description sounds just like him.”
“But what about the hotel key?” Vivien asked, her throat dry.
The woman shrugged. “Ten years of wandering around, lost. Maybe he went to San Francisco. Maybe he stayed at that hotel.”
Carefully, Vivien refolded the clipping.
She could feel the woman’s eyes on her.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” the woman said.
“Yes.”
Their eyes met.
“Well,” the woman said finally. She put the clipping back in her purse and looked out the window.
For the rest of the ride to the hospital, neither of them spoke.
Vivien had not expected the sophisticated city of Denver, and she had not expected that she would be one of almost a dozen women who had come to identify the man with amnesia. But she found herself sitting in a waiting room off the lobby of the hospital with other women, all clutching that same newspaper clipping. They had come from Chicago and Wyoming and Ohio. One woman had come all the way from Philadelphia. There was a nervous energy in the room, the woman from Philadelphia’s leg jumping up and down, up and down, and one of the women from Chicago tapping on the table in a rapid pattern. No one spoke. What was there to say? Every one of them wanted that man to be their husband or son or father.
