Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (11 page)

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 their 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."

Interspersed with her game summaries, she imagined herself joining my father in the South Pacific. She wrote of them walking the beaches of Fiji, sailing a sloop over an archipelago, setting up camp on empty lagoons. In later letters, when he had returned to the States and she was in her last year of college, she fantasized about crossing the country on a motorcycle and riding down the coast with him to Florida. I couldn't help smiling at the image of my mother on a motorcycle, or even of my mother in love. She had always simply been my mother. It was strange to imagine her as anything else.

She never dated after my father died. At least not so far as I knew. She had suitors, but only the most self-abasing kind, men who sought out rejection. I remember meeting one of them, a furry little geology professor named Alvin Bosky, who had been begging her for months to have dinner with him. We were at a cocktail party after the Missouri Awards, the biggest event of the year at the journalism school, and I'll never forget the look she gave him when he approached her with two glasses of wine. It was a look that went beyond scolding, something a third-grade teacher might spend a lifetime getting right. A will-you-ever-learn look that settled into one much harsher: "you're miles below me." I had rarely seen her icy side and wondered if my being there hadn't encouraged her to drop the temperature a few dozen degrees. "We're just leaving," she had said, and grabbed my hand and walked away.

It's difficult to say, of course, but my guess is she chose not to remarry less because of me than for the fact that my father had been everything to her and no man could live up to that standard.

The door off the kitchen opened, and I could hear my mother struggling with the groceries. I quickly put the letters back in the box and went into the living room.

"Are there more in the car?" I asked.

"This is it," she said. "Sorry I'm so late." She put the groceries on the counter and took out orange juice, iceberg lettuce, a store-made rotisserie chicken. "How's this for an early dinner?" she asked.

"Great, but I'm still pretty stuffed from this morning."

"It was a madhouse at Schnucks. You would have thought warheads were on the way," my mother said. "It's Sunday afternoon. I don't understand."

"Everyone's out buying chips and beer," I said. "The Cards are playing a night game and the fans need their fuel."

"Baseball?" she asked.

"Football," I said.

"I thought the football team moved out west."

"They did, but people stay loyal to them anyway. I guess it's all part of the mourning process."

She handed me the latest issue of
Time.
More protests in Eastern Europe. "So what did you do while I was away?"

I leafed absently through the magazine, then set it down. "Not much. Just checked out those old newspapers in the garage. You really don't need to keep them," I said. "We have everything archived at work."

My mother finished unpacking the groceries and leaned against the kitchen sink. "You just want me to throw them away?"

"I assumed you already had."

She looked at me as though we weren't understanding each other, then shook her head and crossed into the living room, gathering up the morning paper. "Those newspapers are your childhood, Gordie," she said, "and I'm going to keep them."

Later that afternoon, we ate our chicken dinner in silence. I had clearly upset her, but I didn't know how nor did I have the energy to set things right again. Reading the letters, I had felt closer to her than I had in months. I had glimpsed a side of my parents' lives that I hadn't known before, but talking about it seemed awkward. Just like that, my mother and I had fallen back into our old patterns.

As I put on my jacket to leave, she was standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. "I guess I expect too much," she said, a mix of anger and disappointment in her voice.

"What do you mean?" I turned around to face her.

"I thought we'd have a nice day together, that's all."

"I thought we did," I said, because there was nothing else to say, and crossed the room to hug her goodbye.

TUESDAY MARKED
two full weeks since Arthur Whiting's funeral, and still I hadn't heard from Alicia. The visit home and my parents' love letters had only increased my loneliness. I had been thinking about driving by Alicia's house again when Arthur's brother, Joe, called me at work.

We had spoken a couple of days after the funeral, right in the middle of deadline, and I'd had to hang up after failing to explain in ten chattery minutes why it was a bad time to talk. He had called back a half-dozen times since, leaving word with the switchboard or, to my great embarrassment, with Ritger, who took a devilish glee in passing on his messages.

"I had a nice talk with your friend Joe Whiting," he'd say, his face a piggish pink. "He's upset you've been stealing his medication."

On the rare occasion that Ritger said something meant to amuse, he'd laugh rapidly through his nose, then stop all of a sudden, letting his face go serious, the way the comedian Paul Lynde used to. But Paul Lynde was funny.

"You're there, perfect, you're there," Joe said, ecstatic that he had finally gotten through. "Right in the nick of time, Nick. You're right in the nick of time."

"Sorry I haven't gotten back to you," I told him, careful not to say too much. "We've been very busy here at the paper. In fact we're very busy now."

The fan above me clattered away. Ritger had gone off to lunch. It was, in reality, the most convenient time for Joe to have called. But I'd set my mind to ignoring him, which was why, when he said something I had waited two weeks to hear, I wasn't listening. Were it not for his manner of catching and repeating certain words, I might not have had another chance to see Alicia.

"I'm going to the museum today," he was saying. "I've been to the museum before. They have pictures on all the walls. Bobby Campanis will be there. The greatest painter of the United States."

I was drawing in blue ink around the outline of V´clav Havel's face, the lead picture on the front page of the morning paper. Havel had spoken the night before in front of a huge coalition of opposition groups known as the Civic Forum. Editorials everywhere were predicting that the Czech Communist government would soon fall.

"Margaret won't go because Alicia will be there. You should go. I can give you a ride," Joe was saying. "I don't drive, but I can give you a ride, you know, not me, but the car I'm in can give you a ride."

"It's really not a good time, Joe," I said. "Seriously, I'm going to have to go now."

"Oh, you don't
have
to go. It's not so serious. Don't feel you
have
to go," he said. "Alicia says it's not to be missed.
Not to be missed,
she says."

I sat up.

"What does Alicia have to do with the museum?" I asked.

"Quite a to-do at the museum," he said. "Quite a to-do, and everyone will be there."

I spotted Ritger returning from lunch and hastened Joe Whiting off the phone, thanking him for the call, saying I'd do my best to make it.

I buzzed the research library for a calendar of events and later found an announcement on the schedule for that Tuesday evening, October 22. The announcement must have come from an old press release; Arthur's name was still on it.

ST. LOUIS DOG MUSEUM
—Portrait unveiling of local champion Gambolling Gavin of Galway to be held in the main exhibition room following regular hours at 6
P.M.
Featured speakers: Helen Stansbury of Missouri AKA and Arthur Whiting of the Irish Wolfhound Club of North America. Wine and cheese to follow. The dog museum is open to visitors daily, except Mondays and holidays, from 9–5 (Sundays 12–5). A not-for-profit organization.