Obituary Writer (9780547691732)

by Shreve, Porter

  "I have a story," Alicia said, seeming herself again. "You'll have to let me think about it some more, but I do have a story."

  She talked then about the funeral arrangements. She had to drive out to the country on Monday to pick up her brother-in-law, Joe. "He's kind of funny, you'll see. He's not allowed to have a car." And Arthur's sister could be stopping by at any time. Between now and Tuesday she had a hundred things to get ready.

  "Who knew funerals could be so stressful? Besides, I'm not very good with big groups. I prefer one on one," she said. "I used to tell Arthur that I knew we could be happy, just the two of us, out on a big ranch in Montana, with nobody around but the dogs. In Montana, they speak of land in units, not acres. Isn't that funny? Just us and the biggest blue sky."

  Thea had told me she wanted to live by the ocean. We'd have a wood-burning stove in a camp house up high on the rocks over the Pacific, somewhere in Oregon or northern California, near a town of carpenters and potters and fishermen, real people who smelled of their work.

  Alicia stood up, stuffing the clips back into the envelope.

  "Well, goodbye Gordon Hatch. It's been nice meeting you." She smiled. "I'll call you about Tuesday. I need you to be there."

  6

  I WAS STANDING at a long traffic light, the bright sun warming my scalp, when I decided I couldn't wait to see my Bette Davis obit on the page. Tomorrow morning I'd call Alicia to tell her who wrote it. She'd read her favorite parts aloud and say what a wonderful writer I was. Where did I get such a talent? She would tear the obit out, slipping it among the clips in her thick manila envelope.

  By now, at four o'clock, the copy desk would have written a headline and caption and sent the obit downstairs to the composing room. A composing technician would be pasting the typeset copy onto a drafting board, making page proofs for editors to review, sending the board along a conveyer belt for platemaking. St. John would see a proof within the next half hour, and I wanted to be nearby for his reaction.

  A new guard was working at the security desk.

  "How are ya?" I said, flashing my ID. "Gordon Hatch. I'm a reporter up in the newsroom."

  He had a look of distrust as I shook his hand.

  Jessie Tennant, one of the metro columnists, joined me in the elevator. A thin woman with chestnut skin who dressed as if every day were Easter, she wrote about neighborhoods, mostly in East St. Louis. Her husband was a press operator and her son worked in Distribution, so she usually kept night hours. Editors were afraid of her. Not merely for her strong opinions. She was elusive: formal on the phone, with the tidiest desk in the newsroom, hers the only column that ran without a mug shot. I didn't realize, arriving early each morning to work on my advancers, that seeing Jessie Tennant in her bright pinks and yellows was an uncommon privilege.

  I punched 5 for composing and 6 for the newsroom. "Isn't this a little early for you?" I asked, feeling a rare gregariousness overcome me.

  As often as I had seen her, we'd never spoken. She always looked absorbed in her work and over time I'd gotten used to it, she and I alone in the newsroom at eight-fifteen in the morning, not bothering to introduce ourselves.

  "They're having a special meeting on minority hiring," she said. "They wanted me to be there."

  "I'm Gordon Hatch."

  "I know who you are," she said as I got off on 5.

  At the obituary page drafting board, I admired a proof copy of the Davis obit, SCREEN LEGEND BETTE DAVIS DEAD AT 81, the headline read. Under her picture, the copy editor had written Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth, 1939.

  I found Greg DePaul, the composing room foreman, and asked him if the page was on its way to be plated, and he made a tasteless joke about Bette Davis's being "primped, pressed, and put on rollers."

  "You know who wrote it?" I asked.

  "I just move the pages," he said with practiced boredom.

  "I wrote it," I told him. "I've got a huge advancer file in my computer, and I've had this thing lying around since April. As far as we're concerned, the old lady's been dead for six months."

  Climbing the stairs one floor to the newsroom, I regretted this last comment. I always feel guilty saying what I don't believe, particularly for the cause of male camaraderie.

  The newsroom was quiet, typical for a late Sunday afternoon.From the east wall I could see editors and columnists from various sections streaming into the conference room. In the distance I saw Ritger with a proof sheet, and stepped up my pace.

  Passing the photo lab and the research library, I walked by the open conference room door, my hands in my pockets, feigning casualness. St. John stood in the doorway wearing a silver and blue galaxy tie.

  "You want to come in here a minute," he said, motioning with his hands. He had large hands for a man his size.

  Ritger was sitting in one of the chairs along the perimeter, not bothering to look up at me. On the dark-paneled wall behind him hung the lithograph of Joseph Charless and his hand-operated press and five somber portraits of the Independent's publishers since 1945.

  Jessie Tennant sat near the head of the table, next to St. John's empty chair. On the long glass table lay a proof of metro page D-7, with the headline across the top: SCREEN LEGEND BETTE DAVIS DEAD AT 81.

  More than a dozen people were there: Jason Haas from Business, Matt Mankowski from Sports, Beatriz Acevedo from the editorial page, Doug Greiff from Entertainment, city desk editor J. B. Loveland, and Gloria De Angelis, who ran special assignments for Metro. Several columnists, among them Hannah Greene and Ben Richards, sat in a row between Jessie Tennant and the young reporter Marshall Holman, who had left my slot to work the night police beat.

  I remained standing near the middle of the room. Jim St. John closed the door and took his seat at the head of the conference table.

  I moved forward as if I were about to say something, but somehow my mind was a blank. I had been expecting congratulations, an instant promotion, a collegial embrace, but there was an unsettling feeling about the room.

  "Before you get started, Hatch, let me tell you a little story." St. John leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. "I'll make it quick. I don't need to remind you that we work on a deadline.

  "Last night, I went to my son's school—he's in the seventh grade at Kirkwood—and something happened that I think has a lesson in it."

  People around me shifted in their chairs.

  "They were putting on a play—King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—and Jimmy was in the lead," St. John said. "A pretty big deal for him, since a lot of kids tried out for King Arthur and he ended up getting it."

  St. John's voice was oppressive. I wondered where this was going. Was I supposed to congratulate him on his son's success?

  "This one kid in the play didn't have any lines—he was a minor knight—but he was putting everything into it, like he had pulled the sword from the stone,"

  I fixed my eyes to a spot above St. John's head where an old page plate of the Mississippi's worst flood hung on the wall, with the banner headline AN OLD MAN RISES.

  "So it's the wedding scene with Guinevere. She and Jimmy say their vows and give each other a kiss, and the knights swear never to fight in an unjust cause and always to protect damsels and widows, then everyone leaves except Jimmy and Guinevere and this one kid."

  St. John seemed to be enjoying himself. I could feel him looking around the room.

  "Never mind that in the scene before, the kid fell off the stage in a lance fight. Now he's right in the middle of the big romantic moment between the king and queen, and he's too busy swishing his goddamn sword around to notice that all the other knights have cleared the stage."

  The room had fallen completely still.

  "What do you make of that story, Hatch?"

  I shook my head. What did he want me to say? That his son must have been upset having his big moment stolen? That chivalry is dead? That when it comes to women, men do the craziest things?

  I scanned the room for a potentia
l savior and came up empty. Everyone was looking down, with the exception, I'd later remember, of Jessie Tennant, who was eyeing St. John. My face felt hot.

  "I'll tell you what to make of that story." St. John sat up. "Everyone's got a role to play in this life, and if you stick to your role, it'll all work out."

  He picked up the Davis obit as if it were a dead mouse.

  "If I had wanted the obituary desk to have an advancer file, I'd have asked for it a long time ago."

  He dropped the page proof in front of me and got up to open the door.

  As a boy, I used to imagine that the news of the world happened just around the corner: dictators lived up the street, planes were shot from the sky as I slept, anyone in a raincoat could be a foreign agent.

  One sunny Wednesday when I was in fourth grade, I had been walking behind a young dark-haired woman in big purple sunglasses and a long black coat heading toward Boone County Savings Bank. As she turned, I saw under the shadow of her black beret what I was sure was the slender nose and subverted stare of Patty Hearst. I knew her face, her walk, the smiling girl from childhood photos that I'd seen in the newspapers. I imagined her captors, dark and crazy, in an idling van. By turning her in, I had thought I might save her.

  I ran the three blocks up to Elm and west a block to the precinct station, where I stopped a policeman on his way out the door.

  "Patty Hearst is robbing a bank!" I shouted.

  "Is that a fact?" He cocked his head and frowned, folding his large forearms high on his chest. "And what bank would that be?"

  "Boone," I said, nearly out of breath.

  He put a hand on my shoulder, not reassuringly, and asked me how old I was.

  "Nine," I told him. "I saw her walk in. I followed her all the way from the card shop."

  "And what time is it?" the officer asked, leading me inside the station to a room where more policemen were sitting around finishing lunch.

  "The kidnappers are there too. I didn't see them, but I know they're there. I bet they're in the alley waiting for her."

  The officer leaned over me. He had a thick red mustache and a cleft chin, poorly shaved. "Let's not play games. I asked you what time it is."

  "One o'clock," I guessed.

  "It's two in the afternoon, young man. Where're you supposed to be at two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon? Aren't you supposed to be somewhere right now?"

  It was a school holiday. I had every reason to be wandering around downtown, but as the officer's face darkened and I realized that he didn't believe me, I grew quiet. He asked if I knew what the word "truant" meant, said I better not have any pals up the street hoping to make a fool of a police officer. "Did you ever wonder what it's like to spend the night in jail?" he asked.

  When it was over, when he had sat me down at his black metal desk and called my mother, sending her into hysterics, when he had humiliated me in front of his grinning cop friends, I promised myself never again would I assume that anyone else knew good from bad, right from wrong, virtue from corruption. He had had Patty Hearst within his grasp—and had let her go. I knew. From now on, that would have to be enough.

  I sat at my desk, the lead-removing fan clattering away, surrounding me in white noise. I crumpled up the Davis obituary and hit the speed-dial button for AP Chicago. In a few minutes the AP artide appeared on my screen. The length had not changed—still twenty-four inches. I called Layout to say we were running a correction on text but that the picture and the page layout would not be affected. I called the copy desk to promise them a new version just as soon as I had it, and I read through the AP obit word by word, struggling to concentrate.

  AP's obituary was a mere catalogue of Bette Davis films and a few quotes from critics and old-timers that did nothing to capture the world-weariness and wisdom of the great actress. None of her good lines was mentioned—"I'd like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair." And the article dwelt more on her mannerisms—the batting eyes, the sweeping gestures—than it did on her role in Hollywood history.

  Above the obit, as I had done countless times before, I typed, Reprinted courtesy of the Associated Press.

  Later, around five-thirty, after avoiding Greg DePaul in the composing room, where I checked and double-checked that the AP obit, not mine, would be running in the first and all subsequent editions, I stopped by St. John's office.

  I had planned to leave a note, but he was there. His diversity meeting must have ended early.

  "I've moved the Davis obit from AP," I said. "The length is the same, and it looks fine on the page."

  St. John had a so-you've-learned-your-lesson smirk on his face.

  "Good, Hatch," he said. "Good."

  "Do you need me to stay around? It's my day off," I reminded him.

  "Nope," he said with a bottom-lip smile and a backhand motion toward the door.

  I walked out, turning left for the elevators, and made my way home, counting off the names in my head, like a passenger list from an airline disaster, of seventy-nine advancers that would never make it to print.

  7

  SUNDAY NIGHT and all day Monday I waited for Alicia to call. I checked the machine from work, then the switchboard from home every hour, my mood shifting between angry and resigned. One minute I'd feel determined to prove St. John wrong; the next I'd wonder whether I'd blown my career.

  My mother often talked about one of my father's early trials. He was posted in Dallas in the winter of '64, still working for the Kansan but beginning to outgrow the small paper. His editor in Wichita, out of jealousy or in a misbegotten attempt to try to hold on to him, kept reining him in, killing any material that lacked a clear, identifiable source. My father had befriended a Dallas police captain who was feeding him stories about Oswald's connections with the Communists and his links to Jack Ruby days ahead of any of the other papers, but the Wichita editor held fast to a policy that no stories would appear that didn't name names.

  "Today such a policy would be preposterous," my mother would say. "What if Ben Bradlee had told Woodward and Bernstein that he wouldn't run the Watergate stories until Woodward revealed the identity of Deep Throat? Your father wasn't about to break the most sacred law of journalism and betray a source."

  My parents had argued over what to do. My mother encouraged my father to leave the Kansan, but my father had been born and raised in Wichita and felt a strong loyalty to his hometown paper, particularly since he had put its name on the journalistic map. But in the end, my mother convinced him to take the Dallas bureau job with the Chicago Tribune, which had been coveting him for months.

  Compared to my father's, my own troubles seemed insignificant.

  By late Monday night, Alicia still hadn't called. I busied myself with making dinner—shredded wheat doused in blueberry yogurt—and cleaning the apartment. I swept the floor and wiped down the kitchen counter, gathered up the Sunday newspaper and put it in the closet along with the others. Finally I turned the scanner on low and listened awhile. Someone had run his car off I-64 and firefighters were cutting him out. A row house had caught fire in Dogtown but apparently no one had been home. In between images of mayhem, pictures of Alicia kept appearing in my mind, her slimness, the way she covered her mouth when she laughed, the sound of her bangles sliding down her arms, clinking together as she combed back her hair.

  I turned on the news and watched street scenes from Czechoslovakia—swarms of students in Wenceslas Square demonstrating peacefully. I called the switchboard at work one last time, left a message for Ritger that something had come up and I wouldn't be in until the afternoon, then fell asleep on the couch with the lights still on.

  On Tuesday morning, I checked Arthur Whiting's death notice for the location of his funeral. Just as I was leaving the apartment for the funeral home, the phone rang.

  "Is that you, Gordie?"

  I needed a second to recognize the voice.

  "I got the number from your mom." It was Thea, sounding far away. "I know you hate to be bothered at work,
so I called here."

  "Oh, it's fine, I'm always happy to hear from you," I said, my voice pulling back in a way that must have let her know that I was headed out the door. "So how have you been?"

  "Is this a bad time?" she asked.

  "No. No. It's perfectly okay."

  I heard an echo over the phone, footsteps and voices, the open sounds of a public place. I guessed she was calling from a pay phone at the bottom of a stairwell.

  "So, your mom told me you're an investigative reporter," she said.

  "Did she?" And in that instant I wanted to tell Thea that my mother was wrong, that I'd been lying to her. Nothing's going right, I wanted to say. Two days ago everything I worked for blew up in my face.

  I wanted to tell her about St. John and Ritger and their brand of mean-spirited journalism. I wanted to go back to the summer of 1985, when I could tell her my secrets, and start over from there. But a moment later, I felt foolish for having allowed such thoughts into my head.

  "Tomorrow I start a long rotation at the hospital," she said. "I wanted to know if you'll have dinner with me tonight."

  The invitation took me by surprise, so without thinking I said yes, sure, that would be fine.

  "Eight o'clock at Arcobasso's?" she asked. "It's in Soulard."

  "I know Arcobasso's." The restaurant was only a couple of blocks from my apartment. "It'll be good to see you."

  It had been four years.

  I made a mental note of it, hung up the phone, and rushed out the door, late for the funeral.

  Crawley's Funeral Home was a converted rambler next to a Dunkin' Donuts near one of the older neighborhoods in suburban St. Charles. Its structure was made of smooth brick in various shades of tan and brown. A matching pair of windowless additions, covered in white siding, arched back from the main building, running parallel on either side. From behind, where I pulled around to park, the place looked like a giant magnet.