Obituary Writer (9780547691732)

by Shreve, Porter

  Part of me wished all the upheaval could be delayed. Why was the world changing so rapidly at this moment, while I still labored in the clattering outpost of Obits? I didn't doubt that I would still be touched by history, but 1989, as it was shaping up, felt like an opportunity passing me by. I wanted to be in Eastern Europe—I daydreamed of reporting from the next great flashpoint—but I doubted that even my father would have picked up the Sunday paper and said That's where the story is and hopped the next plane to Prague.

  I was an obituary writer. My job was taking the measure of people's lives. I wanted to move on from this assignment but had to believe that it was not unimportant, even if obituary writing, when I came to think of it, was something of journalism's opposite: instead of going out to find the story, the story comes to you.

  I decided my next three advancers would be the dictators still in power in Eastern Europe: Zhivkov in Bulgaria, Ceausescu in Romania, Honecker in East Germany. One was certain to die in a coup. They were old anyway. The unrest would be too much for their black hearts to take.

  I was working on Erich Honecker's obit when Dick Ritger walked in.

  "What are you doing here, Hatch?" he asked, talking through his teeth.

  "Just looking at the final." I slid the newspaper over my research books and closed the personal file on my computer.

  "You're off today, aren't you?"

  "Just getting organized."

  Ritger threw down his shoulder bag, picking some coins out of a glass on his desk, counting them in his palm.

  "It's a nice day outside. You make me nervous coming in here when it's so nice outside."

  I smiled uncomfortably.

  "I'm getting a coffee. Need something from the cafeteria?"

  "No." I hesitated, taken aback by his gesture of kindness. "Thanks, though."

  He pulled a file off his desk, slid it among the inserts in his newspaper, and made his way to the stairwell.

  Ritger's coffee break extended well into the morning, allowing me to linger more than I should have on a particular historical abstract about President Kennedy's visit to Germany in the summer of 1963. This was the famous visit of "Ich bin ein Berliner," when Kennedy mounted a platform at Checkpoint Charlie, surveying the bleak city of East Berlin, broken and gray on the other side of the wall.

  "There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future," he had said. "Let them come to Berlin."

  Ritger returned to the desk around eleven o'clock as the phone was ringing.

  "I'll get that." He picked it up, a sour look crossing his face as he handed me the phone.

  "For you."

  It was Alicia Whiting. "I wanted to apologize for yesterday," she began. "I've been quite out of sorts since my husband's death."

  "It's okay," I said.

  "It happened so suddenly, you can't imagine. I can hardly sit still. I keep going to the window, as if it's permanently five o'clock and he'll be pulling into the driveway any minute."

  "I understand."

  "Did you get the picture that I left for you?"

  I opened my briefcase and pulled out the still unopened envelope.

  "I did." I tore it open now to see the five-by-seven head shot of Arthur Whiting. "He's very distinguished looking."

  The obituary this morning had looked so meager in the lower right-hand corner of metro page D-7 that I had turned the page without reading it, moving quickly to another section. I worried that she would be disappointed with five dispassionate inches, having spent so much time on the phone with me.

  "I'm sorry about the page," I said. "Your call came so late and everything. At least we got it in before the funeral."

  "There's so much more I have to tell you about Arthur," she said.

  Perhaps she wasn't hearing me. "About the obituary this morning—I hope you understand why we didn't run the picture." I enunciated clearly.

  "Oh, I understand," she said. "You have deadlines, and we didn't make it in time. You did what you could under the circumstances, and I appreciate it."

  Of course no amount of forethought would have gotten Arthur Whiting more than a couple of paragraphs, but I wasn't about to tell her that.

  "I want to show you a few things," she said over what sounded like running water. "Today's Sunday. Maybe you'll be free this afternoon?"

  In the year since I'd moved to St. Louis, the only woman to call me besides my mother and the long-distance and credit-card companies was a sweet-sounding girl from the St. Louis Symphony, who stayed on the line for nearly half an hour until her supervisor made her cut me off. She called at my apartment, waking me from a nap, and I was too tired at the time to rush her off the phone. I had to admit that I liked the feeling of coming out of sleep to a woman's voice.

  "I don't usually meet with people." I hesitated. "I'm an obituary writer. I do all of my work on the phone."

  "I won't take much of your time, but I think Arthur's story will interest you ... The least I owe you is a cup of coffee for rambling on yesterday."

  "I'm not sure—" My mind was turning over excuses.

  "You see," she interrupted. "I have an idea for a feature. There's much more to my husband than it might seem on the surface. People aren't just raw facts and data, you know. Some of the most interesting things happen to ordinary people."

  I thought of the Washington Posts obituary page, how under each name, in bold print, there was a subheading for occupation. I had never much liked the Post's policy, as if individuals were indistinguishable from their jobs.

  "They make you work on Sundays?" Alicia asked, as if this had just occurred to her.

  In the background I could hear her turn off the water, take a couple of steps, and sit down with the phone. After a moment, she said, "Maybe you should describe yourself."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If I'm going to meet you, I need to know what you look like."

  I wasn't sure how to respond, so I went ahead and told her that I was thin, but not from lack of appetite, with brown hair, and that my ears were somewhat prominent, which they were, since I had just been to the barber.

  "Are you tall?"

  "Not really. Five eight, five nine."

  I'd never taken much interest in my appearance until I finished growing, when my mother began to point out that I looked like a slighter version of my father. "He had tremendous presence," she liked to say. "He could light up a room."

  I told Alicia I had a long face.

  "I like long faces on men," she said. "Fred Astaire had a long face and I'm very fond of him."

  Fred Astaire had been my mother's girlhood crush. She used to make my father jealous by bringing up his name, closing her eyes, and dancing around the room with her arms pulled back. Years later she bought tapes of his musical classics—Swing Time, Royal Wedding, Easter Parade—which Thea and I used to watch.

  "That's funny," I said, thinking out loud, a warm wave running down my back. I held the picture of Arthur Whiting in my hand: a sharply handsome man in a striped tie, looking more the banker here than in the newspaper shot, stiffly posed.

  "How about we meet at Union Station, at the top of the marble staircase," she suggested. "The one that goes up to that magnificent room.

  "Two o'clock?" she pressed.

  I hesitated, then figured that meeting her was at least the decent thing to do. "Two's fine."

  "I'll be wearing a burgundy dress."

  They were strange parting words—almost as if I had just agreed to something more like a blind date.

  After her call I couldn't concentrate. I tried returning to the Honecker obit, but my mind kept wandering back to Alicia's voice. I had to admit that I was curious to meet her, not that I expected there was any kind of story. More than likely, she wanted to see her husband memorialized—an article, a picture, something to show for Arthur Whiting's life.

  But, then, perhaps there was a story. "Interesting things happen to ordinary people," she had said, and certainly this was true. How could m
y father have known that the President would be shot in Dallas the next day? His instincts told him, Go.

  I was leaning back in my chair, my feet kicked up next to the computer, when Ritger shouted "Hatch" from somewhere nearby. I picked up the newspaper and pretended to read it.

  "Hatch," he said again. "Bette Davis just died and Jim wants it on the keybox. Call AP and get us a preview."

  I sat there a long moment, the paper resting on my chest.

  Bette Davis was one of my advancers.

  I said nothing to Ritger. The beauty of my advancer file was that I had kept it a secret. Seventy-nine obituaries, stashed like gold in a hidden vault. I could almost sense my father's hand aligning the stars to make this happen, could feel the actual shiver of approaching destiny. I pictured Jim St. John tomorrow morning when I'd hand him each one—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and so on and so on, the sudden life in his face as he recognized the prospect, the enormous talent standing before him.

  I tore off the AP bulletin—BETTE DAVIS DIES—from one of the wire machines by the entrance to the newsroom, checked the article for cause of death, pulled the Davis advancer out of my personal file, and plugged in the updates. My lead began:

  Bette Davis, who hoped her epitaph would read "She Did It the Hard Way," died today of rodentoid cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of 81. Ms. Davis, whose 101 feature films included Best Actress Academy Awards for "Dangerous" in 1935 and "Jezebel" in 1938, is likely to be remembered as the first modern woman of the silver screen. Emotionally intense, fiercely independent, outspoken and in charge, she created a new prototype for the Hollywood heroine.

  I called AP in Chicago to find out how many inches their obituary would be—twenty-four—and trimmed my own so the length of mine would be consistent with theirs. In the photo lab, I looked through movie stills of Bette Davis as they came across the AP photo machine. For the front page I picked a close-up from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, with Davis playing an aging Queen Elizabeth. The movie was made in 1939, the same year she turned down the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. In the picture, she's thirty-one made up to look sixty. It was eerie how similarly she had aged in real life.

  In the midst of my excitement, I felt a genuine sadness for Bette Davis, as if she were someone I used to know but hadn't seen in years, or a memorable acquaintance who had confided a personal story. I remembered writing her obituary back in April, when I had first heard that she was sick. She had been my forty-second advancer. Forty-two, I noted—my new lucky number.

  When I had walked the photograph to the layout desk and read through the obituary word by word, thrilled at how genuinely good it was, I made one final change: on the line above the obit, which before always used to read, Reprinted courtesy of the Associated Press, I wrote, Courtesy of St. Louis Independent staff reports.

  I slipped a printout into my briefcase for safekeeping and sent the computer file OBIT/DAVIS to the copy desk for proofreading.

  5

  THE WALK TO Union Station calmed me. It was a warm fall day, bright and still, and I moved quickly, as if on assignment. I knew later that I'd remember each detail of the past hour—the sound of Ritger's voice, the shape of the words BETTE DAVIS DIES, her hair plucked back in ringlets for the role of Queen Elizabeth—but for now, outside, the day dissolved into a general happiness.

  At Walnut and Tenth I hit traffic: groups passing me on the sidewalk, some in lederhosen and funny German hats; a flatbed truck idling at an intersection with a band in the back playing oompah music; lines of cars heading for the Oktoberfest down by the river. I sensed people watching me as I crossed the street, wondering who I was and where I was going, so crisp and confident, moving against the tide.

  Beyond Kiel Auditorium, the sky opened to a spired clock tower, once the façade of the largest train station in the world, now all shops and restaurants. I pushed open the heavy doors at the front entrance and fell in with the crowd.

  Under the high open ceiling of red girders and pipes, the lacquered brick floor was alive with activity. More German music was playing from dozens of movable kiosks. The midday sun filtered through the skylights, making patterns on people's faces as they passed, and I imagined myself weaving through the charged streets of Prague on my way to see Havel for an exclusive interview. He'd invite me in, then talk of his essays, his plays, of Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution, the role of intellectuals in a new democracy. A pool photographer would get our picture, Havel and I shaking hands, leaning across a standing ashtray in a large bare room. And I would feel, in that instant with the leader of the revolution beside me, my life converging with my father's.

  From the banister of the magnificent waiting room at Union Station, upstairs from all the shops and restaurants, I was watching the marble staircase when she finally appeared, a small woman in a long burgundy dress covered by a loose-fitting cardigan.

  "Gordon Hatch," she said as she came up the stairs. "I'm late. I'm always late." She took my hand in her cold fingers. "I'm glad you came."

  Up close, she looked even younger than I had imagined. Her soft features seemed to fit her voice, and I was startled by her loveliness. She had gray eyes flecked with yellow, blond hair, lighter at the ends, in a kind of natural disarray; and though she was petite, she had a luminescent quality that took up space.

  "I'm sorry. The traffic was terrible," she said. Her lips settled into a frown, hinting at a sad prettiness.

  I put my hands in my pockets, suddenly feeling self-conscious. "They're having a festival downtown," I said stupidly.

  "The funeral is on Tuesday." She settled into a chair under an old-fashioned floor lamp. "It's at eleven o'clock. Don't feel you have to bring anything."

  Her eyebrows lifted slightly as if to say, You'll be there, of course.

  I nodded, vaguely considering my Tuesday routine.

  "A lot of people wonder how Arthur and I ever got together," she began. "We must have seemed very different. I was a painter and he worked at a bank. I read metaphysical books and he was overly attached to the stock pages."

  Sitting in a chair across from her, I pulled a notepad out of my back pocket and pretended to take notes.

  "Arthur was ten years older, and if I hadn't come along he probably never would have married," she said. "He kept charts on his computer where he recorded his entire day in half-hour blocks. 'Watched Tom Brokaw,' he'd write next to six P.M., or 'Gavin to Battery Park.' That's our dog," she said to me, as if in confidence. "I used to make fun of him for it. 'Enquiring minds want to know,' he'd joke."

  I nodded. It was a relief to have the pen and paper and not have to find something to do with my hands.

  "I thought it was sweet the way he'd write memos to himself all day," she said, "then sit at the computer filling out his spreadsheet. He got so intense. He couldn't be bothered when he was filling out that grid."

  She continued in this way, speaking with fondness of Arthur's little quirks, painting the portrait of an ordinary, if obsessive, man. She was right about what an unlikely pair they made.

  She wore hoop earrings, big gold hoops that waved when she shook her head, and bangles on her wrists and silver rings. There was something about her eyebrows, too: they were darker than her hair and groomed into perfect narrow arches in a way that made the flesh above her eyes look soft as pillows, as though she had just awoken from a light nap.

  "We met at a time in my life when I was really looking for order. It's just like me to go overboard," she said. "He offered the complete antithesis to the life I had been living, and we were generally very happy." She laughed, a high-pitched, almost mischievous giggle. "He told me that I was his creative side, his adopted imagination. I signed him up for a ceramics class, but that was pushing it too far."

  I was half listening, half trying to understand why she had invited me into their private world. I felt more like a grief counselor than a reporter.

  "I'm such a wreck," she said, com
bing her hair behind her ears with her fingers. "All I do is laugh or cry."

  I'm usually a guarded person, the type who assesses everything from a distance, where I can make my judgments and approach with expectations. I find it minimizes the chances of humiliation. With Alicia, however, I was on my heels from the start.

  "Well, this is really what I wanted to talk to you about," she said, as though the rest had all been meaningless matter. She pulled a thick manila envelope from her floral handbag and shook its contents onto the bench: clips, most of them recent, torn from Chicago, Denver, and Oklahoma City newspapers, and several from the Independent.

  "I collect them," she explained.

  I sifted through the odd assortment of articles, reading the captions and leads, aware of Alicia's watching me.

  There was one about a fireman who had glued bottle caps over every inch of his house, another about a barber who had woven a giant ball of hair from sweepings of his floor; there was the wife of the mayor of Enid, Oklahoma, who had opened a museum for her five thousand dolls, and a Denver lawyer who after losing a case hiked from the Rockies to Newfoundland.

  "I want you to do a feature," Alicia said.

  "A feature? What about?" I couldn't imagine what it might be, and yet I was beginning to feel I should do anything for this young widow, whose fractured life had been thrown in my direction.

  "On Arthur." She smiled.

  The ink-and-chemical smell of the newspaper clips had calmed me, and I began to feel a kind of confidence that comes, even to the shyest people, when grounded once again in the familiar. I was the journalist, an authority, and I wanted to impress her. "Are you sure there's a story?" I pointed to the clips: the barber and the bottle caps, the doll collection, the cross-country hike. "These things don't happen every day. In every feature there has to be a hook."

  Alicia's face drained of expression. I could almost feel her drifting away. "You need a story," I said solicitously. "If you've got a story, we can really go somewhere."

  I felt an unexplainable urge to touch her shoulder where the cardigan was slipping down, to lift the lock of hair that had strayed across her face and place it back behind her ear, to take her hand and turn the silver rings around her fingers.