The Obituary Writer (4 page)

3

Super Constellation

CLAIRE, 1961

T
hey called her mother-in-law Birdy. Everyone did. Even Peter called her Birdy instead of Mom or Mother. Claire never liked it. To her, birds were small, delicate things with hearts beating fast in their chests and lovely feathers and songs. This Birdy was tall and big-boned. No bright plumage. No catchy songs.
Think pelicans,
Peter teased.
Think flamingos
. Still, the nickname always caught in her throat.
It’s what my father always called her,
Peter had explained.
But she’s so un-bird-like,
Claire insisted.

Claire glanced out the window at the snow falling steadily. In her hand she held the invitation, a formal one on heavy paper with green embossed leaves climbing up one side and the words:

Come Celebrate Birdy’s 80th Birthday

January 19, 1961

8 p.m.

THE HOPE CLUB PROVIDENCE

The truth was, she didn’t want to go her mother-in-law’s—to
Birdy’s
—birthday party. What she wanted was to stay right here and go to her neighbor Dot’s inauguration brunch tomorrow morning. The entire neighborhood would be there, and they would watch John F. Kennedy take the oath of office. All of the women were guessing what color Jackie would wear, and the winner got a daiquiri party. Pink, Claire had guessed, and she felt certain she would win. She could picture Jackie in pink. That dark hair against pale pink, against the winter sky. Now she wasn’t even sure if she’d get to watch the inauguration at all. Would Birdy want to sit around and wait to hear what Kennedy had to say? Or what Jackie wore? Claire had considered using her condition to stay home, and let Peter go off to Rhode Island alone. But she owed him. She knew that.

Still, with him out of the house, Claire thought she might be able to breathe, to think straight. Because the truth was she had not really thought straight since Dougie Daniels went missing. The baby inside her rolled lazily, and Claire put her hand on her stomach as if to say good morning. Outside the window, the snow was accumulating fast. This storm was supposed to move all the way to New England, and they would be right in it. They should have left last night, Claire thought. They should stay home.

At the corner, their big green Chevy station wagon turned, inching along the slippery road. Peter, always prepared, an Eagle Scout still at thirty-two, had gone to fill the gas tank and check the oil and tires.

“Romper!” Kathy was saying. “Romper! Romper!”

“You’re right, Kitty Kat,” Claire said, lifting her daughter from the high chair. “It is time for
Romper Room
.”

She carried Kathy, clutching her stuffed rabbit Mimi, into the den and turned on
Romper Room
. Miss Bonnie was already looking through her Magic Mirror.

“And I see Debbie, and I see Wendy,” Miss Bonnie said.

“See Kathy!” Kathy shouted at the television. “See Mimi!”

Claire went back into the kitchen and stood at the window again, staring out at the snow, her husband’s headlights moving straight for her. She didn’t love him. Every time she had that thought, she felt like she was strangling. Literally, she gasped for breath. She didn’t love her husband and she was pregnant with a baby that she didn’t think was his. Just six months ago, she would never have believed that she would be a woman standing by a window in a situation like this. But here she was.

“Reach for stars!” Kathy sang from the living room.

Claire leaned forward, barely able to lean across the expanse of her belly and press her head against the cold pane of the window.

She heard the car stopping, its engine dying. She heard the car door open and then shut, her husband stomping across the snow.

Gulping for air, she tried to shut out her thoughts. A woman in 1961, who did not love her husband, had nowhere to go. A woman who’d had an affair and been caught, had no choice but to hope her husband forgave her and would let her stay. So then why did Claire want neither of these things to happen, not forgiveness, not to stay? What was wrong with her?

The kitchen door opened.

Miss Bonnie sang, “There goes Jupiter, here comes Mars . . .”

“Claire?” Peter said.

She swallowed as much air as she could take in.

Her husband was walking across the gold-speckled linoleum floor toward her. She could see his wingtips covered in rubber galoshes.

“Honey?” he was saying. “Are you okay?”

She lifted her head and gave him a weak smile. “Just dizzy,” she said, her hands floating above her belly as evidence.

“Come sit,” he said.

He put his hands on her shoulders and guided her to the chair at the head of the table, the one called the captain’s chair. Their eyes met briefly. Claire was the first to look away.

“Water?” he asked, already moving to the sink.

But Claire shook her head.

Peter stood in the middle of their kitchen, looking lost.

“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked him. “To drive all that way in this?”

His jaw tightened. “Jesus, Claire. It’s her eightieth birthday. We can’t miss that.”

Claire waited, hoping he would say the next thing on his own.
You stay, Claire.

But instead he said, “The car’s in tip-top shape. You packed?”

She nodded. The kitchen table was strewn with the remains of a roll of wrapping paper, dark red and white, and threads of silver ribbon. Claire picked up Birdy’s present, a collection of poems by Robert Frost. Birdy loved poetry. And Frost was reading a poem tomorrow at the inauguration.

“I’ll get Kathy,” she said, heaving herself to her feet.

At night, Claire put herself to sleep by doing the math to determine just how pregnant she was. At five months with Kathy, she’d only gained ten pounds; this time she’d gained more than double that. Did that mean she was more than five months pregnant? In which case this baby was indeed Peter’s. But no matter how she calculated, she always got the same answer. This baby was not her husband’s.

“Claire?” Peter was calling from down the hall. “Just the one suitcase?”

She stared down at the pretty wrapping paper, the mess of ribbon and scraps and tape.

“You fit everything in just the one?” he was saying.

“Yes,” Claire said, deciding to leave the mess until they got back.

Her lover’s name was Miles Sullivan, and he was not her type. Or what Claire had always thought was her type, which was tall and well-muscled with a face that seemed to be carved from marble. No, Miles—though tall, taller even than Peter—had the start of a paunch, his stomach pressing against his belt, and a fleshy ruddy face with almost a cartoonish nose. In his way, he was handsome, she supposed. Black Irish, he had described himself, which meant a head of thick dark hair that he wore slightly too shaggy and round bright blue eyes. His smile dazzled, but it was not those blue eyes or his imposing size or even that smile that attracted her to him from the start. It was the way he listened to her. He cocked his head, and turned his eyes on her as if she had something important to say. That very first night at Dot’s dinner party, Claire had noticed this and wondered if Peter had ever listened to her in quite this way. He had not, she decided. Not once.

Of course, there was desire too. A desire like Claire had never felt before. And she was embarrassed that somehow this desire was wrapped up in Dougie Daniels’ disappearance. Yet once that happened, something stirred in Claire for the first time. She remembered a night in Rome when she was an air hostess and she and her roommate Rose had met two men at a trattoria, gotten drunk with them, and then taken them back to the hotel. That night, Claire had done things she’d never before imagined doing with a man. It was the wine and the summer Roman air and all the Sambuca and the riding on the Vespa with the wind in her hair. But she’d never seen that man again. And she’d never spoken of that night, not even with Rose.

Now this thing, this
stirring
, could not be satisfied. Embarrassed after what happened with Peter, she’d tried to feed it in other ways: tennis and hot baths and even some of the diet pills Roberta’s doctor gave her (those only led her to do things like vacuum or polish the silver, and lose five pounds too many). At first, talking to Miles seemed to work. His head cocked like that, his questions, probing, asking what she thought and felt, what she wanted. But soon, her desire grew into something more, as if she wished he could actually climb inside her and fill her, fill this unnameable need she had. To both of their surprise, she had been the one to lean in for the first kiss, the one to unbuckle his belt and reach her hand inside.
I’m suffocating,
she had told him that first time. With him, she could breathe. She could say whatever was on her mind, wonder aloud about why a soufflé had failed to rise or what she would bring to a desert island or anything, really, that popped into her head. No matter what it was, Miles listened.

That was why she invited him into her home, a stupid idea. But with Peter at work in the city, and the neighborhood settled into its routines, she imagined a whole day with Miles. She’d made a pitcher of perfect Manhattans, carefully measuring the sweet and dry vermouths, dropping six neon-red cherries into the amber liquid. She put on a lace bra and matching panties in a color called champagne, bought at Hecht’s just for this day.

“A tryst,” Miles had said when he arrived, his hand slipping into her silk blouse to discover the lace waiting there.

It was a gray September morning, the kind of day that reminds you that summer is over and fall is on its way. Claire had dropped Kathy at the sitter’s, spurting lies about errands and appointments that would keep her out all day.

“Manhattans in the morning?” he’d said as he watched her place ice cubes into the heavy glasses, then pour the drinks.

“Why not?” Claire had said.

“Why not indeed,” he said, raising his glass to hers and clinking. “Obviously,” he said, “to us.”

They had talked that day too. About the election—that was all anybody could talk about. About Claire’s fascination with Jackie. About his fascination with Marilyn Monroe. But then the talking stopped. They were half drunk, having sloppy sex first on the sofa Peter hated and then on the twin bed in Kathy’s room, the one she’d never slept in yet, which they were planning on moving her from the crib onto by Thanksgiving. Miles had ripped her new lace bra. She had banged her knee on his chin, then laughed at the fact that her knee was even near his chin.

Outside, she heard voices, someone getting into or out of a car.

She felt reckless and alive. She clawed at Miles. He was saying something to her, his breath boozy and sweet, all bourbon and cherries. The air around them seemed electrified. That stirring in her, that thing, was an abyss, a chasm, something that needed to be filled. She told him that she needed to run away.
Do women ever do that? Run away from their perfect lives?
Miles had looked at her hard.
No,
he told her,
they run away from their imperfect lives
.

He kissed her, and she opened her mouth to him, tangled her fingers in all that dark hair.

Then Claire opened her eyes.

In the doorway stood Peter, his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, a pulse beating in his temple.

“Get out,” he said calmly, and at first she thought he was speaking to her.

But then she realized that he was talking to Miles, who was struggling to his feet, dragging the white sheet patterned with daisies along with him.

“Get out of my house,” Peter said.

Claire had the comforter around her now, covering herself with it, the daisies everywhere.

Miles gathered his clothes. When he walked past Peter, Peter seemed not to notice. He could only look at Claire, as if he were trying to find his wife somewhere in that bed.

“Get dressed,” he said finally.

“I . . . need some privacy,” she said. “I need a minute.”

Peter didn’t leave. He watched her clumsily pull her blue silk blouse on over her torn bra, watched her try to button the buttons.

“Are you drunk?” he asked her, his voice for the first time since he’d walked in revealing emotion.

Claire nodded. What was the point in denying any of it?

“Peter,” she said, “I’m so unhappy.”

“Unhappy?” he said, almost in wonder.

“I don’t know what I want or what I feel. I thought I wanted this. Us. But now I’m not so sure.” Her only lie that. She couldn’t hurt him more than she already had.

Peter shook his head.

“I can’t look at you,” he said, and he turned and walked out.

To Claire it seemed they would be trapped in the overheated car forever.

Peter had barely spoken since they started driving north. His hands in the brown leather driving gloves Claire had bought him for Christmas clutched the steering wheel hard, and his nose was red from the cold.

Outside, the snow fell furiously. Claire sat uncomfortable and frightened beside him. The station wagon, that massive green thing that she hated to drive, even on sunny days or for short errands, fishtailed and slid on the slick road.

“She’s so excited about this party,” Peter said. He let out a low whistle. “Eighty years young,” he said.

Claire chewed on her bottom lip, the waxy taste of her lipstick almost pleasant. They hadn’t eaten anything since they left five hours earlier. She didn’t dare ask Peter to stop, even though she would love a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. Every so many miles, she saw the orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s through the snow on the side of the road. But she didn’t bother to mention it.

Peter was hunched over the steering wheel now. “Goddamn it! I can’t see anything.”

Claire took a tissue from her purse, and wiped away the condensation on the windshield.

“Don’t do that,” Peter said. “It’s leaving smears.”

He had always been this way: demanding, a perfectionist, someone who wanted things done his way. Until last summer, Claire had accommodated him. She hadn’t liked it, the way he could be so critical of others, including her. Especially her. She hadn’t liked that when she tried to tell him what she thought or felt, he might walk out of the room, saying, “Keep going. I can hear you.” And Claire would be alone in an empty room, feeling foolish. Still, he loved her. She knew that. He loved her the best way he could. But Claire wasn’t sure that was enough anymore.