Obituary Writer (9780547691732)

by Shreve, Porter

  "Come on," I coaxed, begging for a gas station to rise out of the darkness.

  I flew through the blinking yellow lights at the intersections. Shredded tires and hubcaps lay strewn along the divider. Plastic grocery bags caught the wind and danced in the air like ghosts. Peeling billboards lined the roads—YOUR ADVERTISEMENT HERE and WORRY NO MORE ABOUT BAD CREDIT.

  This would be life for the last person on earth.

  I leaned over the wheel to keep my eyes off the sunken fuel gauge and thought about the ghouls and Holman and the police officers laughing over the stained white bundle. I pictured the photo album, its stilled images of death, heard the echo of Dr. Osborn casually describing how this boy was shot off his bicycle.

  In the distance, where the streets began to widen, where The Ville gave way to the northern edge of the St. Louis commercial district, I saw the red, white, and black of a Texaco station sign. Coasting in neutral down a small hill, the red Texaco star large against the night sky, I pulled the Gremlin under the bright lights of the service island, promising myself I'd never go to another crime scene.

  9

  THE NEXT DAY the temperature dropped into the forties. That night we had our first hard frost, and by the weekend the leaves had begun to turn. It was only mid-October, but already you could see the alertness in people that comes with the first real chill in the air, that sense of purpose anticipating change.

  Where I grew up in Columbia, fall had been characterized by football Saturdays and the hapless Missouri Tigers, who would draw sellout crowds of middle-aged diehards in gold and black jerseys. They would park on our street, six blocks from the stadium, and stumble back four hours later from yet another trouncing, with empty souvenir cups in their hands. The smell of fall for me had been Budweiser and cheap mustard and tailgate bratwurst that floated downwind from the stadium into our open garage. In Columbia, fall lasted a full twelve weeks, six home games and six away, ending on the final Saturday in November, with a fight for last place with the Kansas State Wildcats.

  But in St. Louis, the pro football team had moved to Phoenix a year ago and the season seemed cloudy and short. Without the smell of football in the air, fall was a four-week bridge between summer and winter, a shame for a city whose buildings seemed made with autumn's colors in mind. Like most of the old Mississippi River trading towns, St. Louis was built largely of brick—brown-red brick for the warehouses near the river, orange brick for the old downtown office buildings, yellow brick for the neighborhood row houses—colors to match the leaves falling off maples and oaks, sweetgums and birches that grew tall and exuberant along the city's avenues. Even the siding on the suburban ranch houses was made to look like some shade of brick.

  One such house belonged to Alicia Whiting.

  In the days following my visit to the crime scene, having already been humiliated once, I had begun to consider the possibility that I might actually fail at becoming a reporter. Increasingly, my mind was turning toward Alicia.

  I kept going back to her first phone call, when she had convinced me of her husband's importance. She had been so certain, deluded by her own grief into thinking Arthur was extraordinary, that of course I had believed her. When it turned out that Arthur was just another man who worked in a bank, I didn't feel deceived. I had a predisposed sympathy for young widows, after all, since I had grown up with one.

  I felt a natural protectiveness for Alicia almost right away. She had an unexpected quality, an odd combination of formality and freedom, cardigans and chiming bangles, white flowers and ticky-tack, grand observations followed by self-mockery. And, for some reason, those contradictions set me at ease, made me do things I wouldn't ordinarily do. Vulnerability and overriding grief were not qualities I usually found myself drawn to. But Alicia seemed to have something. Who knew? Maybe even a story.

  On Saturday, a week after her first phone call, three days after meeting the ghouls, I looked up her number in the St. Charles White Pages: 324-9679. I copied it into my address book and practiced dialing it with the receiver still in the cradle. The more times I dialed, the more familiar her number became, my fingers memorizing the zigzag path across the phone pad.

  What were the odds, I wondered, of getting her answering machine? I wanted to get her answering machine—I had to know whose voice was on the outgoing message, Alicia's or Arthur's? I figured if it was her voice, she'd be ready to hear from me.

  Alicia had said in our first conversation that lately she never left the house. Still, if she was there all day, I wondered if she even answered the phone. At a time like this, wouldn't she screen her calls? I could listen and hang up. If she answered, I could hang up too, divining her emotional state from the tone of her voice.

  But just as soon as I summoned the courage to call, I worried that a new widow would be extra-sensitive to a hang-up. She might have the call traced. The police could show up at my apartment, or worse, they'd find me at the obituary desk.

  Instead, at the library I discovered a detailed map of St. Charles County. The city of St. Charles sits ten miles north of St. Louis, just below the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The Whitings lived on Dalecarlia Drive, which lay near the middle of St. Charles, off Kingshighway, a few blocks beyond the old section along the Missouri known as Frenchtown. I made a copy of the map and for three days carried it around in my briefcase.

  I suppose I had in mind that something might happen between Alicia and me. I cleaned my apartment, paid my bills early, bought wine and candles and a poster for my bedroom from the movie Top Hat—Fred Astaire, in tux and tails, dancing across a marble floor; Ginger Rogers, in an ankle-length dress, twirling out of his arms.

  At work, I made myself busy, meeting deadlines, acting deferential toward Ritger and St. John. And I sent Marshall Holman a missive through in-house mail:

  Dear Marshall,

  You must have been surprised to see me at that crime scene the other night, so I thought I'd explain myself. It had nothing to do with what happened recently in the conference room. St. John and I had a little misunderstanding, and I'm sorry that the whole event took place.

  I said before that a tipster had called me. I'd been at the office doing research when the city desk phone started ringing incessantly. I'm not sure where your editor was at the time—maybe getting coffee—but the tip, which I now realize was bogus, required a reporter at the scene immediately. I didn't know how to reach you, so I went myself. You must get these false alarms all the time.

  Just an overexcited obituary writer,

  Gordon Hatch

  In the nights after my trip to The Ville, I'd kept to my old routine, falling asleep to the crackle of the police radio, still imagining myself at the scene. But I had not gone out again. A week later, I dreamt that I was a figure from one of the pictures in Lucas's photo album. An eight-by-ten shot that filled the page. The ghouls were laughing at me, at my lifeless face and body curled up on a black tile floor. I sat up in bed and turned on the light. I knew then that I would drive to Alicia's the next day.

  The city was under a sheet of gray when I left work at lunchtime the next afternoon, Thursday, October 17. The temperature had dropped several degrees, and by the time I crossed the bridge into St. Charles it was raining steadily. I was glad for the cover that the rain provided and relieved that I had, in the end, decided to rent a cellular phone, since I knew they were difficult to trace.

  I pictured Alicia lying in her bedroom listening to the patter of rain on her roof. The rain would feel symbolic, almost personal, as if it were coming down only for her. She wouldn't have bothered to close any windows, letting the elements into her room.

  As I crossed Kingshighway and turned onto Dalecarlia Drive, my heartbeat quickened. Number 436 Dalecarlia stood right there on the corner, surprisingly close. I drove to the end of the block, made a U-turn, pulled the Gremlin under a large orange-leafed maple half a block down from her house.

  I had brought a newspaper to hide behind, thinking of movi
e stakeouts. But with the rain coming down hard now, my face through the windshield well obscured, the newspaper seemed hardly necessary.

  Her house was a split-level, with a bay window and faux brick siding a shade of burnt yellow. An ordinary house, really, nearly identical to the one next door. The lawn had recently been cut. A high fence, barely weathered, surrounded the yard.

  In the driveway sat a blue Delta 88.

  I cut my lights, left the motor running. For a moment I was unable to move. She was home. She had to be.

  The rain fell between us. Even so, I felt exposed. If she looked out onto the street at this moment, the way unhappy people are supposed to look out windows on rainy days, she would certainly see me. The light above her front door was on. The morning paper still lay on her doorstep.

  I turned on the cellular phone and nervously dialed her number, my thumb on the red button ready to cut off the call. It rang once, then again, then I realized—Alicia had seen my car before; she'd know it was me out here. I had parked the Gremlin in back of the funeral home where Alicia had stood under the green awning passing out directions. I had walked down the steps and climbed into my car. Surely she had watched me.

  I could almost see her sitting at her bedroom window now, leaning out, squinting into the rain. I pressed the hang-up button, let down the hand brake, and drove slowly away.

  That Sunday, I was relieved to be returning home to Columbia to see my mother. I had promised her a visit, and since I had nothing to do on my day off anyway but worry over my future and daydream about Alicia, I was happy for a change of scenery. Not that I was looking forward to being around my mother, who lately had been driving me crazy with her career harassment and her talk of Thea, but I knew I needed to leave St. Louis, if only for a day, to gain some perspective on what had been a whirlwind couple of weeks.

  After an early start, I arrived at 102 La Grange before she was expecting me. From the living room came a loud wave of The Pirates of Penzance: "I am a Pirate King!" the stereo blared. "And it tis, it tis a glorious thing to be a Pirate King!" I went into the living room and turned the volume down.

  "You're early," my mother said, emerging from the back hallway, the Sunday crossword in hand.

  "The boarders must love that stuff." I flipped through the Independent that was sitting on the dinette and picked out the metro section.

  "What stuff?" she asked.

  "Gilbert and Sullivan."

  "It's good for them," she said.

  "At ten in the morning?" I sat on the living room couch and opened the paper to the obits. "They're graduate students. I assure you they're asleep."

  "What kind of a greeting is this?"

  "Sorry, Mother. One can only take so much 'taran-tara!' at this hour."

  She sighed. "People don't appreciate language anymore. Plays on words," she said, turning the stereo off. "I sometimes wonder if the end of rhyme didn't go hand in hand with the end of happiness." She sat down next to me on the couch, throwing aside her mostly finished crossword puzzle, and gave me a quick hug.

  "Cheer up." She smiled and then started singing half seriously: "Ah, leave me not to pine/ Alone and desolate;/ No fate seemed fair as mine,/ No happiness so great!"

  "And what are you so happy about?" Music always cheered her up, but she seemed in particularly good spirits.

  "Oh, nothing," she said. "I've been reading some old letters. Have you had breakfast? I had in mind a visit to Country Carl's."

  Country Carl's was a diner on the other side of the university that I hadn't visited since college. There was a waitress named Alma with a pile of red hair who called me "sugar" and my mother "darlin'." The cook was leaner than Jack Sprat, a poor endorsement for the food he was slapping together. Faded posters of meal platters, like the cole slaw, fries, and cheese surprise—a Velveeta-impregnated hamburger—plastered the walls. Country Carl's had such authentic atmosphere it seemed almost inauthentic.

  My mother drank a cup of coffee while I gorged myself on a big plate of biscuits and gravy. I hadn't realized how long it had been since I'd had a genuine, mid-Missouri, cardiac-inducing breakfast.

  "Disgusting, I know," I said.

  "You're not eating well, are you? You look skinny."

  "This won't exactly keep me skinny."

  "The same thing happened to your father in Dallas. When he left Kansas he looked wonderful, but by March when I went out to join him in Texas, I swear he'd lost twenty pounds."

  Alma brought the check, and I offered to pay the bill, but my mother wouldn't allow it. "So tell me about Thea," she said, calculating fifteen percent of the $6.50 total on the back of the check, an annoying and stingy habit she had.

  "What's to tell? I still haven't seen her."

  "But you will see her, won't you? She's moved to St. Louis to be near you, you realize."

  I rolled my eyes. "St. Louis University has a very good hospital. It's cheap and close to home," I said. "I don't need the guilt trip, Mother. You know she didn't move there for me."

  "But you've told me yourself that there's only one perfect person for everyone, Gordie." She slipped her pen into her purse. "Don't you still believe that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Of course you do. Your father was the one perfect person for me. I never had a doubt about that." She looked at me steadily. "Have you ever thought that Thea believes you are that one person?"

  I slid out of the booth and put my jacket on. "I guess you never know," I said.

  After breakfast, she dropped me off at the house, saying she needed to do a few things at the office and would be back shortly. I watched her drive off wondering why she was going to work when we had planned to spend the day together.

  As it turned out, her leaving was completely in character. My mother loved nothing more than a dramatic presentation, and now I saw sitting on my bedroom desk a box marked "Charlie—Navy, 1959–1962." It was overflowing with yellowed notes and letters, correspondence I had never known existed. I couldn't help feeling like a voyeur, but it was clear that my mother had wanted to share them, to urge me in her odd way toward Thea, and to acknowledge that she thought my life was about to take off.

  My parents had first met in 1958 in Columbia, where my father was finishing his degree in history. He hadn't known much about the journalism school until his final year, when he took a class in journalistic ethics that first sparked his interest in reporting. My mother, an actress and dancer at Stephens, a small liberal arts college in town, was three years younger than he.

  I didn't know the particulars of their courtship. I had always considered it sacred ground, not for me to ask about, and my mother's stories dealt less with details than with the broader picture of their ideal romance. Still, I had always imagined that they met at my father's favorite bar, the Heidelberg, since closed down. The bar had been a block from the Stephens College Theater, and my mother had told me that she used to go there for cast parties after a show. I had always assumed that my father had been instantly smitten, had probably glimpsed her across the bar still playing the role of Maggie the Cat. And my mother, in turn, would have been drawn to this tall, clean-cut soon-to-be-graduate who could transform a room with a phrase. Theirs was an uncommon union, and when my father left for the Navy, my mother staying behind to finish her degree, their devotion to each other solidified all the more.

  My father's telegrams and postcards were short and considered, nothing wasted, as though he had taken great care with the sentences. He wrote in a meticulous print, and I was pleased by the balance of his words, their measured emotion: "There's nothing more sad than the silence of this place without you," he wrote from New London. "I can't wait for the end of this silence and the beginning of our life together." They were full of private references that weren't difficult to decipher: "Sorry I'm so camera shy when you're so beautiful," he wrote on one note that must have accompanied a photograph. "Twelve days, seven hours, thirty-five minutes away," he signed off on another, dated May 1959, just before thei
r wedding. "Now I know why they call it the blue, blue sea," he had sent, by Western Union telegram, from the South Pacific.

  I was searching for his long dispatches about Navy life, as a kind of warm-up to his eventual work as a journalist. They would read like a special report in serial—a peacetime look at the naval apparatus, full of observations and history and keen insights—but none of those letters was here. For the most part, when he wasn't telling my mother how much he missed her, he was describing his mates or generally lamenting the tedium of his daily life.

  My mother, on the other hand, had written long, rambling letters in loopy handwriting, full of florid passages, that I could only glance at before feeling embarrassed and moving on to the next. "I am thinking now of how, when you drive, you rest one hand at the top of the steering wheel and every so often lift it to glance at one of those gauges. What do they call them? Speedometer? Odometer? RPM? Always keeping watch."

  Often, she would stop in the middle of a long reverie and step back to note how silly in love she was: "You must forgive my carrying on. What would the other fellows think of you if they were to catch a glimpse of this wonderful mush you get in the mail?

  "The mush is everywhere and I surrender to it. I see it before me and I must plunge in. And it's all your fault, darling. You're the one who turns me to this. I try to put my feelings into words, to say how much I miss you, how my entire life begins in May 1962, when we'll be together forever, but at the end of my words there are only more words. Have I told you this before?"

  In the summer of 1961, my father was posted at a base in the Marshall Islands. He loved the New York Yankees, having come of age in the era of DiMaggio, and he couldn't stand that he was out of the States during Maris and Mantle's chase of Babe Ruth's home run record. My mother, who admitted she didn't like baseball, would nevertheless listen to Yankee games on the radio and report back long descriptions in order to keep my father up-to-date. "Maris's 53rd was on a low outside pitch in the seventh inning. The count was two balls and two strikes," she wrote in one of the letters. "It was a line drive that cleared the left field wall by ten feet, giving the Yankees a 4–2 lead."