The Obituary Writer (8 page)

But they never could afford to buy a house like that. Apparently, she had accepted that stoically, never showing his father her disappointment, but Peter saw it in her face, in the way she would park on Bowen Street or Lloyd Avenue and stare up at the painted ladies there.
Someday, I’m going to buy you one of those houses,
Peter had promised her when he was ten or eleven.
No, no,
she told him,
then I would have to clean all those windows.
He told Claire these stories with a mixture of sadness and pride.

To have her eightieth birthday party at this venerable club was a point of pride for Birdy. As she walked in, her cheeks flushed with excitement.

Claire watched her, and saw that her whole demeanor changed when she stepped inside. She had not given much thought to her mother-in-law’s past—Peter had told her that she’d been a teacher long ago—but seeing her as she gave her coat to the butler and took a glass of champagne from the tuxedoed waiter, Claire saw that Birdy had once been a very different woman. Or perhaps still was that woman, somewhere deep inside.

There were hors d’oeuvres passed, shrimp paste on triangles of toast and smoked salmon with capers and dill. Claire let Peter keep one hand on the small of her back as he introduced her to the guests. The snow had not kept anyone away, and a small crowd soon gathered in the dining room, looking for their place cards, their names written in calligraphy on heavy white paper.

Claire’s mind drifted to Jackie and JFK. What were they doing tonight, on the eve of the inauguration? she wondered. What must it be like to be them, their future stretching gloriously ahead of them?

The night swirled on, Claire drinking too much champagne with dinner.

Before the toasts began, she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room to freshen up. She was slightly drunk, she realized. Or maybe more than slightly.

Peter was waiting for her when she came out.

“I didn’t want you to get lost,” he said.

“I am,” she said softly, but he didn’t hear her.

He was guiding her backwards, his hands on her shoulders. She almost lost her balance, but he held her tight, urging her into the cloakroom. Inside, it smelled of wet fur and wool, and mothballs.

“You look so beautiful,” Peter whispered.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her hard on the lips, parting her lips and pushing his tongue inside to meet hers.

Claire let him kiss her like that, wishing she could feel what she used to.

Peter pressed her between the coats, his hand reaching under her dress.

“Peter,” she said, surprised. “Anyone could walk in.”

He took a step back. “Why can’t you be like this again?” he asked her.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Like you are tonight. Happy. Like a good wife. Like you’re mine,” he said, his voice cracking.

“I’m trying,” she said.

But even as she said it, she imagined years and years of this, of smiling and nodding and pretending to like his kisses. Of pretending to love him.

“I want to forgive you,” he said. “God help me, I do.”

She was afraid if she tried to speak, she might scream, so she just nodded and gulped back this thing rising in her throat.

“I want to have this baby and make it work.”

Claire was nodding and nodding, choking.

“But I’m not sure I can ever look at you without picturing—”

This was too much. She quieted him by kissing him again, by letting him kiss her and grow hard against her.

“Tell me you love me,” he whispered.

“I love you,” she said, the lie coming easily because this life she was living, all of it, had become such a lie.

Peter stepped back.

“The toasts,” he said.

“I just have to put on lipstick,” Claire said.

“I’ll wait.”

He would never trust her again, not even here in this strange city. Obediently, Claire went into the ladies’ room, reapplied her lipstick and powdered her cheeks, then went out where her husband waited for her.

Back home after the party, Birdy still beamed.

“It was worth living this long just to have that party,” she said.

“It was a wonderful party,” Claire said agreeably.

Her ankles were swollen, and she’d removed her shoes. She wanted nothing more than to go to bed. But here they were, the three of them sipping cognac, and recollecting the details of the evening.

Finally Claire excused herself.

“Of course, darling,” Birdy said, perhaps eager to have Claire leave. “You need your rest.”

Claire didn’t even bother to hang her beautiful dress. She pulled on her nightgown and slid in between the cool stiff sheets. Her mother-in-law ironed her sheets, and her napkins, Claire remembered. She was more sober now, and thinking of the party at Dot’s that she would miss tomorrow.

The door creaked open and Peter appeared, backlit from the hall light.

“Checking up on me?” Claire said.

“Coming to bed,” he said.

He closed the door and she heard him undressing.

“You can stay up with Birdy,” Claire told him. “You should.”

“She wanted to turn in. Besides,” he continued, coming to the twin bed where she lay, “ever since those kisses in the cloakroom . . .”

He didn’t need to finish. Claire understood. She made room for him in the narrow bed, and almost immediately he was on top of her, pushing inside, his lips brushing her cheek.

When he was finished, he smoothed her hair back.

“You’re getting too big for this way,” he whispered.

“I need to sleep,” Claire said, kissing him lightly, hoping he would go.

He did. But Claire couldn’t fall asleep.

As she lay there trying, she heard a bang from somewhere down the hall. And then a faint voice.

Claire sat up, straining to hear.

Yes, someone was calling out there.

Quickly, Claire got up and hurried out of the room.

At the end of the long hallway, Birdy lay crumpled, still in her Chanel suit and pearls. Her skin was a strange gray, and from here it looked like she wasn’t breathing.

“Peter!” Claire yelled as she rushed to her mother-in-law.

6

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

VIVIEN, 1919

T
he Western Union man stood on Vivien’s doorstep. She could see him there, waiting.

He banged on the door again.

“Western Union,” he said in a voice that let Vivien know he had said those words too many times in his life.

“Yes,” she called to him. “I’m on my way.”

She smoothed her skirt and patted her hair in place, primping as if for a date. Ridiculous, she thought, taking a deep breath and finally moving toward the door.

“Telegram,” the man said.

Vivien nodded, but didn’t hold out her hand to take it from him. He was sweating in his rough brown wool jacket with a WU pin on its collar.

“For Vivien Lowe,” he said impatiently, shaking the telegram at her.

When this didn’t seem to do the trick, he added, “From Denver, Colorado.”

“Thank you,” Vivien managed.

She accepted the telegram, but did not open it or go back inside. Instead, she stood and watched him straighten the bicycle he had leaned against the house, jump on it, and ride off down the street. A young man in a black suit passed the Western Union man, his head dropped, his eyes on the street.

“Watch it!” the Western Union man shouted, swerving.

But the young man did not look up. He kept moving steadily down the street. When he reached Vivien’s door, he stopped and checked a piece of wrinkled paper clutched in his hands. Then he raised his eyes, not seeming to notice that Vivien stood there, and checked the number above the door.

She immediately recognized the grief on his face. The flat eyes rimmed in red. The face blotchy from tears.

“Are you the obituary writer?” the man asked in a voice hoarse from crying.

“Vivien Lowe,” Vivien said, extending her hand.

But the man did not offer his. He took a step back, and opened his arms wide as if to indicate the size, the enormity of what had brought him to Vivien’s door.

“They’re dead,” he said. “Both of them.”

Vivien walked over to him, taking his arm and gently guiding him toward her. Grief paralyzed you. She knew this. It prevented you from getting out of bed, from moving at all. It prevented you from even taking a few steps forward.

“You found your way here,” she told him softly. “That is quite an accomplishment.”

He let her bring him inside. He let her slide his heavy black coat from him and lead him to the sofa. With her fingertips on his shoulders, Vivien gently pushed him down so that he was sitting.

“Both of them,” he said again.

Vivien sat in the chair across from him. His hands, folded as if in prayer, were creased with dark red. Blood, she realized, swallowing hard.

“Who, darling?” she asked. “Who has died?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he tried to speak.

“It’s all right,” Vivien said, patting his knee. “I’m going to make you some hot tea. And some toast. I bet you haven’t eaten anything in hours.”

He shook his head, as if the very idea of eating was impossible to comprehend.

“You sit right here,” Vivien said.

She poured him a glass of water for his dry throat, and placed it in his hands. When he didn’t take a sip, she wrapped her hands around his and lifted the glass to his cracked lips. The man began to drink, greedily, water spilling down his stubbled chin and onto his white shirt, which Vivien saw also had dark rust spots splattered across it. He finished the water and held out the glass for more. Three times Vivien refilled it for him.

After the last glass, the man stood, clutching his stomach.

“I’m going to be sick,” he said.

Vivien brought him into the bathroom, holding his damp head while he vomited into the toilet.

“There, there,” she said as he retched.

Finally, he collapsed onto the floor, pressing his body against the wall. He was a big man, well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and long legs. His dark blond curls were flattened with sweat, and he gave off the iron smell of blood.

He looked up at her, shaking his head as he spoke.

“Everything seemed to be going fine,” he said, his voice filled with disbelief. “She was doing fine.”

Vivien kneeled beside him.

“Who?” she asked.

“My Jane.” Saying the name out loud made him choke on it. “And our daughter.” His eyes shined with tears. “We were going to name her Hazel. Hazel Jane.”

The grief-stricken want to hear the names of those they’ve lost. To not say the name out loud denies that person’s existence. People seeking to comfort mourners often err this way. They lower their eyes at the sound of the dead’s name. They refuse to utter it themselves.

“But you have,” Vivien said, beginning to understand what had happened. “You have named her Hazel. She’s Hazel Jane.”

“Hazel Jane,” he said softly.

Vivien stood and opened the small cabinet above the sink. She took out some baking soda and some lavender water.

“You’ll freshen up now,” she said. “I’ll make your tea and toast while you freshen up.”

He got awkwardly to his feet.

“Then we’ll sit down and talk and I will write something beautiful for Jane and Hazel,” Vivien said.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome . . . ?”

“Benjamin.”

“Benjamin,” Vivien repeated.

As Vivien sliced two pieces of sourdough bread from the loaf, Emily Dickinson, that strange reclusive poet from Massachusetts, came to her. She had read both of her collections,
Poems
and
Poems: Second Series
, and been struck by the simplicity and power of the writing. That combination seemed to speak to the grief of the young man in her parlor too.

The teakettle whistled and Vivien poured the boiling water over the tea leaves waiting in the cup.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me,
Vivien thought.

No, that one wasn’t quite right. It didn’t capture the permanence of this double loss. Wife and infant daughter. Gone.

The smell of toasted bread filled the room. Perhaps the most comforting smell in the world, Vivien believed. It soothed the sick and the grieving equally, this simple nourishment. Vivien removed the toast from the small slot beside the oven, and spread it thickly with sweet butter. She cut each slice into four triangles, and arranged them all on a pale blue plate. She considered adding a ramekin of marmalade. Lotte had sent her home on Sunday with jars of Meyer lemon and orange marmalade. More than one person could ever eat. Vivien took a jar from the shelf, the pale orange jelly thick with rinds.

But then she changed her mind. Simple toast with butter. A cup of tea. That was what was needed here. She returned the marmalade to the shelf, placed the cup and the plate on a tray, and went back into the parlor.

Benjamin sat on the sofa, hunched forward, his face buried in his hands. She saw that he had scrubbed most of the blood from them. Even so, some remained beneath the fingernails.

“Here,” Vivien said.

Slowly, he lifted his face and looked at her with an expression of utter disbelief.

“Tell me about Jane,” Vivien said, holding the tea out to him.

He took the cup, but put it right back down.

“She’s beautiful,” he said. “You’ve never seen a more beautiful girl.”

Vivien waited.

“And healthy,” he said, his eyes growing wild with disbelief again. “Never sick! During the Spanish influenza, she nursed me and her parents and never got sick herself.”

“There’s no explanation for what happens,” Vivien said. “Or why.”

Benjamin picked up a piece of toast and carefully tore it into tiny bits.

“Nine months,” he said. “And fine. Just fine. Never even had morning sickness.”

He picked up another piece and tore that one too.

“I’ve never seen so much blood,” he said. “I was in France, at Somme, and I’ve never seen so much blood.”

Vivien watched him start on a third piece.

“I saw the life go out of her eyes. One minute she was looking at me, scared, you know? Puzzled. And then she was gone. I saw her go.” He said this last with something like amazement.

Was there ultimately some relief in witnessing death? Vivien wondered. If she had been with David that day, if she had watched him die, today her life would be different. Wouldn’t it?

“The baby,” he was saying, “came out with the cord around her neck. She never took one breath. Not one. The midwife whisked her away so Jane didn’t see. And then the bleeding wouldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop it,” he said. “How can that be? We win wars and we stop flooding and . . . and we can’t stop a twenty-two-year-old girl from bleeding to death? We can’t save her baby?”

All but Death, can be Adjusted,
Vivien thought. The perfect Dickinson poem for Jane and Hazel’s obituary.

Dynasties repaired — Systems — settled in their Sockets — Citadels — dissolved . . .

“Don’t worry, Benjamin. I will write them a beautiful obituary,” Vivien said.

After Benjamin Harwood left, Vivien sat at the small cherrywood desk looking out over the street. She filled her pen with ink, and took a sheet of heavy vellum paper from the single drawer. Lotte teased her about her reluctance to invest in a typewriter. But Vivien had tried to use one and only grew frustrated by the way the keys kept sticking.

A few months ago, Lotte had shown Vivien the new one she’d bought. “Look, darling,” Lotte had said, demonstrating, “This shift key makes it all so easy.”

“But why go to all the trouble of learning this when I can simply write on a piece of paper?”

Lotte shook her head. “You are stuck in the nineteenth century, Viv.”

“I’m not,” Vivien insisted, knowing that perhaps Lotte was right.

Sighing, Vivien stared at the blank paper in front of her now. How to capture a life that never had a chance to blossom? Or one cut so abruptly short? Benjamin Harwood had sat in her parlor for most of the afternoon, talking about his Jane. Vivien resisted the urge to take him into her arms and comfort him. His grief was palpable, like a living thing in the room with them. Listening to him, Vivien felt in some way he was articulating her loss too.

She put the pen down.

The telegram. What had she done with the telegram?

Benjamin’s appearance at her door had completely undone her. She’d had the telegram in her hand when he arrived. Vivien began to search for it, carefully at first, but then more frantically. How could she have been so careless with something so important?

It wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. She looked under the sofa and the chair and the table in the parlor. She went outside to see if it was on the doorstep, or if it had blown into the street. But it seemed to have vanished completely.

Back inside, Vivien opened drawers, knowing that of course she wouldn’t find the telegram there. She turned her pockets inside out, and lifted the corners of the rug.

In her heart she believed that the man in Denver was David. Perhaps she would just go, now, to the train station and buy a ticket to Denver. To hell with the telegram. After so much time, she didn’t need anything but to find him and take him home.

Trembling, Vivien collapsed onto the sofa. She could almost feel his lips on hers that long-ago April morning when he left her in bed. How many times had she imagined his journey away from her, as if it held a clue to his fate? He had walked down the street, turned the corner, and either hopped on the trolley or continued on foot to Market Street. If he’d gone by trolley, then he would have been in his office when the earthquake hit. His partner would have already been there, waiting for him and their meeting. But Duncan had died that morning, crushed by the collapse of the building. They’d found his body there, buried. Vivien had no one to ask if David had ever arrived. She imagined him dazed, wounded, wandering from the rubble. Wandering all the way to Denver, perhaps.

Something caught her eye, peeking out from beneath the tray of tea and toast. A white edge of paper. Vivien pushed the tray away so hard that the half-full cup of tea toppled and spilled. There was the telegram, waiting to be found.

Her hands still trembled, with relief now, as she ripped it open.

ROOM NUMBER WORN AWAY. STOP. MAN HAS SCAR ON FOREHEAD INDICATING HEAD INJURY. STOP. IN GOOD HEALTH EXCEPT SEVERE AMNESIA. STOP. EYES BLUE. STOP. HAIR GRAY. STOP. HEIGHT
6’1”
. STOP. COME TO DENVER IMMEDIATELY TO POSSIBLY CONFIRM IDENTITY. STOP.

Vivien read it once, twice. A third time. Yes, David’s hair would have grayed after all this time and trauma. But she could see his blue eyes still. She could remember gazing up the length of him to meet those blue eyes with her own. The possibility that this man in Denver was David now seemed even more likely.

She needed to go there as soon as possible. Immediately, the telegram said. This would require packing. Purchasing a ticket. Finishing the obituaries for Benjamin Harwood’s wife and newborn daughter. It would require taking a train for several days, getting off in Denver, Colorado, and walking into a hospital to reclaim her life. Finally.

Vivien stayed up until well after midnight composing the obituaries. She knew that her words comforted people in grief. It was a responsibility she took seriously. Even those people who believed that David had died on April 18, 1906, still did not know what to say to Vivien. Grief made people awkward. It made them afraid and hesitant. But an obituary writer could not be awkward or tentative. An obituary writer had to be assertive and honest, kind and insightful.

She included the Dickinson in Jane’s. She wrote about how as a young woman Jane had nursed her own parents and future husband when they had the Spanish influenza; how she held Benjamin in her arms at night when nightmares about the war woke him and he trembled, remembering; how her cheeks flushed in the sun; how she liked to knit on cold nights, the yarn tumbling from her lap like a waterfall.

But to write for Hazel, who never got a chance to see the world or to know her father’s love, the way it felt to be in her mother’s arms, was more difficult. Vivien stood, her neck and shoulders tight from having sat so long bent over the paper. A light rain had begun to fall; she could smell it in the air. David used to love the smell of spring rain. He would wake her if the rain came late at night, as it had now, and make her get dressed to stand in it with him.