The Obituary Writer (2 page)

“That was nice,” she whispered in his ear once his breathing had evened.

Peter kissed her, right on the lips the way she liked, the way she wished he kissed her more often. But usually she only got these kisses afterwards. She kissed him back anyway. Why was it that as soon as he finished, she began to feel stirrings? Even now, too hot and too sweaty, she held him tight, her mouth opening, something in her tingling.

“Whoa,” he chuckled. “I just finished.”

“I know,” Claire said. “I just . . .”

She just what?

“I just love you,” she said, though that wasn’t what she meant at all.

He rolled off her and lit a cigarette.

“Want one?” he asked.

“All right,” Claire said.

Peter handed her that one, and lit another for himself. She always liked when he did that.

The 45 started up again.

“I can’t tell if Peggy’s just fallen in or out of love,” Claire said. “She’s playing that record so much, it must be something.”

She inhaled and closed her eyes. An image from that afternoon floated across her mind.

“Peter,” she said. “When I saw the boys this afternoon—”

“Boys?”

“Dougie Daniels and the others. There was a white car driving around the neighborhood. A car I didn’t recognize.”

“Are you sure?”

“I thought he was lost.”

“So you saw the driver?” Peter asked her. He was sitting up now, and pulling the phone onto his lap.

“I don’t know,” Claire said, straining to remember.

“You said you thought
he
was lost,” Peter said as he dialed the Danielses’ number.

All of the neighborhood’s phone numbers and emergency numbers were right there on the phone, neatly typed and alphabetical.

“I just meant the driver came by a couple of times, real slow.”

“Joe,” Peter said into the receiver. “Sorry to call so late but Claire just remembered that when she saw Dougie this afternoon she also saw a white car—”

Peter glanced at Claire.

“A Valiant maybe?” she said, shrugging. “Or a Fury?”

“Really?” Peter said into the phone. “Well, I’ll be damned. Call us if we can be of any help.”

“The boys reported it too,” he said after he hung up. “They all noticed that car. D.C. plates apparently.”

He kissed the top of her head and turned off the light.

“Did someone take Dougie?” Claire said into the darkness.

“I’m afraid that might be what happened,” Peter said. “Joe said the cops were leaning in that direction.”

“Someone kidnapped Dougie?” she said. Her heart beat too fast. She could hear it.

“Don’t think about it,” Peter said sleepily.

But that was when it all began.

That Saturday night was the dinner party at Trudy’s when she first met Miles Sullivan. By then, her world had already started to shift. Peter looked different to Claire. Rather than comforting her, the similarity of her days made her edgy. She kept thinking back to that afternoon, to the tops of the boys’ heads, their new summer buzz cuts, the white car circling them. Circling the neighborhood.

The heat grew worse. The air felt like pea soup. And still the police could not find Dougie Daniels. The boys had given a description of the driver to the police. A short olive-skinned man with close-cropped curly hair and a plaid short-sleeved shirt. He had slowed down, they reported, and looked right at them, taking in the sight of each of them before driving past.

Claire sent a pan of lasagna to the Danielses’ house. The next week she sent an angel food cake. No one knew what else to do, and the food piled up on the Danielses’ kitchen table and refrigerator shelves and in their freezer. At night when Peter reached for her, despite the now-installed window fan, Claire squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to think about how much she wanted it to be over. When he kissed her afterwards, she did not hold him tight and kiss him back.

Two weeks after Dougie disappeared, Trudy had a cookout and Claire drank too much sangria. She felt sloppy and silly, and when Roberta’s husband accidentally brushed against her as he walked past her in the hall, it seemed as if he had electrocuted her. She studied him drunkenly. Claire had never found him attractive before. She had never considered his looks at all. But suddenly he seemed not only attractive, but desirable. Such a different type than her tall, angular husband. Ted was beefy and ruddy-faced, with unnervingly light blue eyes. She smiled at him.

“We are all so drunk,” he said.

Back at home, in bed, the room spinning slightly, Peter reached for her.

“Kiss me right on the mouth,” she whispered, and when he did as she asked a need in Claire seemed to make itself known. Dougie Daniels had been kidnapped and possibly even murdered. Nothing in the world made sense anymore, and Claire felt like an idiot for having lived so safely, for having believed that this was what she wanted: this man, this house, this life.

That night, when he finally moved on top of her, Claire’s hips met his thrusts. Her fingernails dug into his back. Something was happening to her. Something, finally, unexpected. It wasn’t Peter who let out that predictable groan, but Claire. More a yelp really, as waves seemed to grab hold of her and not let go.

In the morning, hungover, Claire felt embarrassed about what had happened. She could not meet her husband’s eyes. Instead, she scrambled his eggs, made his toast, squeezed oranges for juice, all the time wondering what in the world was she going to do next.

Of course all the mothers of Honeysuckle Hills watched their children more closely after Dougie Daniels went missing. They stood on street corners and front steps, making sure their own sons and daughters arrived wherever they were going and then back home, safely. They made casseroles and cakes for the Danielses, but they didn’t linger when they delivered them. To see Gladys Daniels, her hair unwashed, her eyes wild with grief, made them nervous, the way they had been before Dr. Salk calmed them down with the polio vaccine. If Dougie Daniels, an ordinary boy, a B student and average second baseman in Little League, could be kidnapped, then anyone could.

“It’s not contagious,” Claire said one afternoon to Roberta and Trudy. “We should go and sit with her.”

They were standing vigil as their own kids ran under the sprinkler in Roberta’s backyard. It had been a month since Dougie disappeared, and there was no sign of him being found.

“She just kind of scares me,” Roberta said, her eyes never leaving her Sandy and Ricky, not once.

“I think she could wash her hair,” Trudy said primly. “They said she didn’t even bother to wash it when the newspeople went over there.”

“I think we should sit with her,” Claire said again. “I’m going to make calls for Kennedy tomorrow night, but I could go in the morning.”

“And bring our kids?” Roberta said. “That would just make her sad, to see our kids safe and sound while Dougie is . . . gone.”

Dougie Daniels was an only child. Gladys had had a hysterectomy at a very young age. Or so the women thought.

“What would we possibly say to her?” Trudy asked.

“I made her a Jell-O salad,” Roberta said. “With canned pears and walnuts.”

“That’s always nice on a hot day like today,” Trudy added.

And that was the end of that.

The next night, Claire walked into an empty law office and sat beside Miles Sullivan, the man who would change everything. When Dougie Daniels’ body was found in the C & O Canal over Labor Day weekend, she wished she had gone that morning to visit with Gladys. But wasn’t it too late now? Wasn’t a dead child—a murdered child—even harder to talk about than one who had simply vanished? If kidnapping seemed possibly contagious, no one wanted to think about this even worse thing.

Claire sent flowers and a fruit basket. She signed up for the neighborhood meal rotation, leaving a casserole on the Danielses’ front steps every Thursday. The curtains were never opened, the blinds always drawn. It was as if all life had been removed from the house. One afternoon, when she dropped off a pan of chicken divan, she saw a catcher’s mitt and a bat on the front lawn. The sight of them made goosebumps climb up her arms. Had they been there all this time? Claire hesitated at the door. But then she laid the casserole, wrapped in a blue-and-white-checked dish towel, on the stairs and hurried off, avoiding the sight of Dougie’s Little League gear as she walked back to her car.

By October, when the leaves on the trees in Honeysuckle Hills had turned scarlet and gold, the Danielses had moved away. At first, no one bought their house—Who would? Roberta had wondered aloud, and all the women had nodded, understanding that a house where a murdered child had lived was of course undesirable—but two weeks before Christmas a new family moved in. The wife was pregnant with twins and on bedrest, but the husband was friendly. He could be spotted shoveling snow, or hanging Christmas decorations. He always waved when someone went past.

If Dougie Daniels had not gone missing, kidnapped practically right in front of Claire’s eyes, she thought it was possible that she would still be moving through her life as she had been, in a pleasant, mind-numbing routine. But Dougie did get kidnapped. And after that afternoon, nothing felt the same to Claire. Nothing felt right anymore. Until Miles had looked at her in that way. Then something shifted. Not into place, but rather completely off-center. Claire had recognized it, and jumped in.

2

The Obituary Writer

VIVIEN, 1919

T
he obituary writer, Vivien Lowe, usually did not know her clients. They came from Silverado and Calistoga; from Point Reyes Station and Sacramento; from San Francisco and Oakland. She had even had clients come from as far away as Ashland, Oregon, and, once, Los Angeles. They read about her gift for bringing the dead to life, and they came to her clutching their tearstained handkerchiefs, their crumpled notes, their photographs of their deceased loved ones.

They were all very much like Mrs. Marjorie Benton, who sat across from her now on the small deep purple velvet loveseat. It was a rainy March afternoon in the town of Napa, California, in 1919. Outside the window, the leaves on the oak trees were wet and green. The office looked like a sitting room, with its Victorian furniture salvaged from the old apartment in San Francisco, the loveseat and chairs and ornate, beaded lamps. The obituary writer lived above her office, in one large room that looked down on Napa’s main street. On the rare occasions when she parted the draperies that hung on the windows upstairs, she could watch small-town life unfold before her. The farmers with their wagons of fruit; the vintners with their hands stained purple from Mission grapes; women clutching children’s hands. But she preferred to keep the draperies closed. Downstairs, however, in her office, she let the light in; she believed sunlight had healing properties.

Mrs. Benton was crying softly. Her cup of tea, which sat on the small table between them, had grown cold.

Even though they did not know it, Vivien knew that grieving people needed food and something to quench their thirst. She believed in the powers of clear broth and toast, of sustenance. So she always put out a small plate of cheese and crackers, or cookies, or fruit. She always offered her clients a drink. Cool water, hot tea, even a glass of wine from her friend Lotte’s family vineyard up Highway 29. Mrs. Benton had asked for tea when Vivien offered her a drink. Long ago, in another lifetime, she had learned about tea from David’s law partner, Duncan, who had spent his childhood in India. Duncan liked to pontificate about everything from tea to séances to the mating habits of tigers.
I only trust about ten percent of what he says,
David used to say.
But he is entertaining.

Vivien kept many varieties of tea on hand. Mrs. Benton had chosen Earl Grey. It sat now, amber in its china cup, forgotten.

“My Frank,” Mrs. Benton was saying, “graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1899.”

Vivien did some fast math. Frank Benton was only a man in his early forties. Not much older than Vivien herself; she was thirty-seven. Mr. Benton had died after having a tooth pulled.

“His degree was in mathematics,” Mrs. Benton added. She frowned. “Aren’t you going to write any of this down, Miss Lowe?”

Vivien shook her head. “That isn’t how I work,” she explained.

She didn’t tell Mrs. Benton that these facts—degrees and numbers and jobs and affiliations—were not what made a life. Everyone who came here to her small office in Napa answered her request of: “Tell me about your loved one” with facts. Vivien let them tell her about places of birth and accomplishments, number of grandchildren and siblings. Then, when they were finished, she would say again, “Tell me about your loved one.” That was when the person began to come to life.

“We were married on June 17, aught four,” Mrs. Benton continued. “Lost everything in aught six.”

Vivien felt that lump in her throat, the one that seemed to appear at the mere suggestion of the earthquake.
Lost everything,
Mrs. Benton said matter-of-factly, and Vivien nodded, willing herself to be calm. It had been thirteen years and she was getting better at holding her own grief at bay.

“That scared the bejesus out of us,” Mrs. Benton said, “so we moved up to Monticello.”

Vivien waited. With a sigh, Mrs. Benton went on. “Three children. Owen, fourteen. Maxwell, twelve. June, ten.” She frowned again.

She was a plump woman with saggy skin that made Vivien think of elephants. Of course, Vivien had never actually seen an elephant, except in books and magazines at the library, which was where she spent her free time. There and at Lotte’s place. And here, of course. Alone.

Even in her grief Mrs. Benton had applied red lipstick and too much face powder. Out of habit, no doubt. Grieving people operated by rote. They went through the motions of living, pulling their hair from their faces or pinning on a brooch without thinking.

“Are you going to write
that
down?” Mrs. Benton said.

“No, no, I have it. Owen. Maxwell. June,” Vivien said.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Benton said, shaking her head and sending her folds of skin into a tremble. “I came because of what you did when Elliott Mann died. Do you remember that obituary you wrote? Why, people went up to his wife for weeks afterwards saying that after reading it, they felt they knew him better than when he was alive. Why, no one at all knew that he had rescued those boys from drowning way back.”

She waited for Vivien to say something. When she didn’t, Mrs. Benton said, “You put in that poem by Emily Dickinson. Remember?”

“Of course,” Vivien lied. In truth, after she wrote an obituary, she pushed that person’s name, that life, out of her mind. It was too much of a burden to keep so many deaths so close.

“I liked that poem,” Mrs. Benton said. “Maybe you’ll use it for my Frank?”

“Perhaps,” Vivien said.

The women sat across from each other in silence. Vivien was very aware of the grandfather clock’s loud ticking. She wondered if Mrs. Benton heard it too.

Finally Vivien said, “Tell me about Frank.”

Mrs. Benton’s overly powdered face seemed to fall in on itself. “When I think of him, it’s always with his birds, you know?”

“Birds?”

Mrs. Benton nodded, no longer trying to control her tears. “He raised songbirds. What will become of them all now? Cages and cages of songbirds. He could exactly imitate each of their songs. Couldn’t carry the tune of a regular song, mind you. But the man could chirp.”

Yonder stands a lonely tree, There I live and mourn for thee,
Vivien thought. Would Mrs. Benton be satisfied with Blake instead of Dickinson?

“I used to accuse him of loving those birds more than he loved me. I didn’t really think that. If you had seen him, Miss Lowe, when I was sick with consumption a few years back. How tenderly he cared for me. How gently he brushed my hair and laid cool cloths on my forehead. He was a gentle man, my Frank. And to think something as simple as a tooth . . .” She shook her head, unbelieving.

Vivien thought again of “The Birds,” when the voice of the woman asks:
Dost thou truly long for me? And am I thus sweet to thee?
Yes, Blake was exactly right for Frank Benton’s obituary.

“It had to come out, didn’t it?” Mrs. Benton asked suddenly, her eyes wild. “It was infected. You know the pain an infected tooth can cause. I told him to go and have Doc Trevor take it out. I told him that. But it had to come out, didn’t it?”

“Of course, darling,” Vivien said, reaching for Marjorie Benton’s doughy white hands. “Of course.”

Grief made people guilty. Guilty for being five minutes late, for taking the wrong streetcar, for ignoring a cough or sleeping too soundly. Guilt and grief went hand in hand. Vivien knew that. The morning of April 18, 1906, threatened to creep into her mind. She saw it there at the edges of her thoughts, her younger self in their bed with the bedclothes they had bought in Italy crumpled around her. The room was still dark, and Caruso’s voice still rang in her ears.

David bent to kiss her goodbye. “Last night,” he said. “It was musical.”

She smiled, even in her drowsiness. This was a game they played. “It was delicious,” she said, remembering the lamb chops, the potatoes dauphinoise, the baby peas.

“Intoxicating,” he whispered.

“That was mine!” she said, swatting his arm.

“Sexy,” he whispered.

“Go,” she laughed.

“Not until you say one.”

Vivien sighed. “Too short,” she said finally. “Last night was too short.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Damn Duncan for insisting we meet so early. It’s not even light yet.”

“Ah! So you’re leaving me to meet someone else,” Vivien teased. She ran her fingers up his arm, enjoying the goosebumps that rose beneath them. David and his partner in the law firm were opposites: Duncan flamboyant, loud, flashy. He drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost all around town, and wore a white suit. He had grown up in India, and threw huge parties where he served curry so hot he provided linen handkerchiefs to all the guests so they could wipe the sweat from their faces.

“Everything’s an emergency with Duncan,” David said. He caught her fingers in his hand, and raised them to his mouth, kissing each one.

“You will put out yet another fire Duncan started,” Vivien said.

“I hope so. It’s difficult to deal with Duncan on three hours’ sleep,” he added, laughing.

“You will,” she said, stifling a yawn. “You are heroic. You can do anything.” She was teasing him, but Vivien did believe it. She had watched him in court, the way he argued cases, the way he saved men’s lives.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said, kissing her again.

Vivien listened to his footsteps move away from her. She imagined him downstairs eating bread and jam, drinking a cup of espresso he had made from the temperamental machine he used. Finally, the door opened on its hinges that needed oiling, and closed shut.

She snuggled deeper under the blankets, and closed her eyes, knowing that in a few hours Fu Jing would arrive noisily, banging doors and shaking dishes. Fu Jing would appear in the doorway with her breakfast tray, muttering in Chinese about Vivien’s laziness. And about her immorality. Vivien wondered which of the angry Chinese words Fu Jing muttered meant mistress or whore? Which meant homewrecker, kept woman? She didn’t care. If she did, she wouldn’t be here in this lavish apartment that her lover paid for while his wife woke alone across town in their house in Pacific Heights.

Vivien closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. Less than an hour later, she woke not to Fu Jing rattling about and cursing, but to the entire house shaking and rolling as if it were riding waves across the ocean. Vivien sat up with great difficulty, and clutched the sides of the bed. The clock, the one that chimed so beautifully on the hour, the half, and the quarter, with whimsical paintings across its face of all the astrological signs, said 5:12. Outside, people had begun to shout and things had begun to fall—streetlamps and stairways and windows. The noises grew louder and more frantic. The light grew brighter outside her window. But all Vivien could do was sit holding on to her bed, as if it were a life raft keeping her safe.

The clock chimed and Mrs. Benton shifted in her chair. Vivien pushed away the memories. And that small illogical part of her rose, the part that believed, ridiculously, that perhaps David was still alive somewhere. Perhaps he had hit his head during the earthquake. Hadn’t entire walls and columns and roofs fallen that day? Wasn’t it possible that he had hit his head and had amnesia? She had spent hours in the library researching that condition. The word came from the Greek,
amnestia
. Not remembered. She knew it was, in simple terms, the loss of memory, and that it came from a head injury or psychological trauma. She knew too, that it was possible that David suffered one or both of those that terrible day of the earthquake.

It sounded foolish, Vivien realized that. But she clipped articles from newspapers and journals about amnesia, about people who suffered from it, and people who had recovered. She clipped these articles and pasted them in a large leather book and kept it by her bed. There was hope in those stories. One of them discussed a different kind of amnesia, one in which a person has the inability to imagine the future. Funny, Vivien had thought when she read that, how she and David were perhaps both suffering from amnesia. His, the more common type, and hers this other one. The inability to imagine the future.

Mrs. Benton sighed. She glanced toward the window and touched her own powdered cheek as if to prove that she was still alive.

“People always say how nice his feet are,” she said softly. “Isn’t that the craziest thing? A man’s feet? Once we were on Stimson Beach and a man came up to us and asked Frank if he could take a photograph of his feet. The man said he was a photographer and that he was certain that Frank could be a foot model for catalogues. Do you know that I think for a minute Frank considered it?” She blinked and then narrowed her eyes at Vivien. “Listen to me go on about nonsense,” Marjorie said. “But they were beautiful, my Frank’s feet.”

It was dusk. The sky was turning violet and the lamps on the street were lit.

“I think I have enough,” Vivien told her.

Already a person was taking shape. Mrs. Benton had arrived an hour and a half ago, her hair and coat wet with rain, and she had brought with her a dead man, a blank thing without breath or life. But she had left behind a living man who could perfectly imitate a bird’s unique song.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Benton said, surprising Vivien by pulling her into a suffocating hug.

Mrs. Benton smelled sour. Vivien guessed that since her husband had had that tooth pulled two days ago, and come home looking ill and feeling, as Mrs. Benton said, “not quite right,” and gone to bed where he had died by suppertime, Marjorie Benton had not washed. She had cried and screamed and pulled her frightened children close to her. She had applied powder and lipstick without thinking because that was what a woman did when she went into town.

Now, she held Vivien close, pressed to her, for a long while. Vivien felt the sobs rising in Mrs. Benton’s chest, felt her shuddering. Finally, Vivien was released. She stepped back and took a deep breath, letting the soothing smell of lavender fill her. She kept dried lavender in small dishes placed all around the office. Lavender was known to calm and comfort. The people who came to her needed that. Vivien needed it too.