Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (2 page)

THE
St. Louis Independent
was a morning paper with a circulation of 305,000, the twenty-ninth-largest daily in America. Many around the journalism school and in the national press considered it the last of a dying breed, a true old-fashioned newspaper, neither sentimental nor cynical, but reflecting the famous "show me" skepticism of the state of Missouri. The
Independent
had grown out of the ashes of the
Missouri Gazette,
the first North American newspaper published west of the Mississippi River. The pioneering spirit of the
Gazette
's founder, Joseph Charless, who in 1808 had pulled the first edition of his paper from an old Ramage press and delivered it himself, lived on at the
Independent.
Our logo, overarched by the Missouri state motto—"The Welfare of the People Shall Be the Supreme Law"—was a lithograph of Charless working his hand-operated press.

I admired the paper's history, was proud to work in a place that seemed to back the underdog. Growing up, I had followed the
Independents
many battles with Monsanto, the multibiliion-dollar chemical company across the river in East St. Louis, which had introduced PCBs, dioxin, and Agent Orange to the world, to go along with its more "beneficial" products, like saccharine, Nutrasweet, and dairy hormones. Unswayed by Monsanto's advertising dollars and its power in the region, the
Independent
ran series after series in the early eighties exposing the deadly contamination that Monsanto's manufacturing had brought upon East St. Louis. Thanks in part to the
Independent,
the national press began for the first time to think of the environment as front-page news.

The
Independent
's offices took up seven floors of an industrial-era steel and concrete building that loomed directly above the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, home to Earl Anthony, Dick Weber, Floretta McCutcheon, and other legends of the lanes, in downtown St. Louis. Most days I arrived before anyone else in the newsroom. The elevator up to the sixth floor would be full of the eight-to-four crowd, on their way to Classified, Accounting, Circulation, or Personnel. I would stand in a back corner, listening to bits of other departments' gossip—who was dating whom, who got canned, who was too ambitious for his own good—as the creaky elevator stopped at each floor. One month a new elevator was installed, with an intercom that spoke in a woman's voice. "Please stand back," she said gently. "Going up." Such instances of modernity were rare in our offices.

It was the sixth floor, though, that harbored all of the tension and adrenaline of news reporting that I craved, and where, as absurd as it seemed, I thought I could detect my father's presence. He would descend as a kind of heat, a shiver across my scalp and down my spine. Sometimes I'd swear I could sense him looking out through my eyes, a young reporter waiting for the flare in the sky that points to the great discovery. I'd stop at the rackety wire machines under the mural of Remington's
Pony Express
to scroll through the overnight news, then pick up a late edition from the stacks before taking the long, slow route to my desk.

Along the east wall the managing and assistant managing editors had offices with sweeping views of downtown. Jim St. John headed up the metro section, and had the largest office. A small man with a wiry mustache who wore brown suits and galaxy ties, St. John had a booming voice and a morbid sense of humor. Without fail, at five o'clock each day when I stepped into his office with a list of the next day's obits, he would swivel in his chair and reach out his hand, saying, "Give us this day our daily dead."

The editors and writers for the metro section covered the middle of the newsroom. Metro had the largest staff, the biggest budget, its own investigative unit, and a dozen special beats; it was the training ground for the national post in Washington and the foreign desk in London—and where I very much hoped to be.

My desk, nestled between a thick column and a huge clattering overhead fan, was at the end of the last row of metro clusters. The fan marked the terminus of a vast network of tubing which looked like a Bauhaus air-conditioning duct but served the purpose of transferring lead particles to a work site on the floor below. The lead removal program had been ongoing since my arrival fourteen months earlier, slated then to last another six months. One day a yellow sign was posted above my desk:
LEAD REMOVAL NEARING COMPLETION, BUT DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH.

Two of us worked on obits: myself and Dick Ritger, a twenty-year veteran of the
Independent
who had once been editorial page editor and now wore a mouth guard so he wouldn't chew himself from the inside out. As a result we rarely talked. When I had arrived, he had been writing obits for a year and a half and his jaw had been wired shut. The cause of Ritger's downfall was anybody's guess. He had few friends in the newsroom, and everyone had a different opinion about what had happened. Post-traumatic stress, cocaine, a double life about to be exposed. Something from his past, quite literally, gnawed at him. Before the newsroom ban on cigarettes four years ago, Ritger had been a chain smoker, and when he could no longer light up in the conference room, he quit, cold turkey, and started filling his mouth with gumballs.

Before the breakdown, Ritger was by all reports a classic, why-because-I-said-so newspaperman. He had a gravelly voice and a bad temper. His favorite word was "asshole." His face went from crimson to purple depending on the time of day, and he was bald but for a band of close-cropped gray hairs. His physical deterioration, however, belied his sense of style. Tall and trim, he wore fine tailored suits, perforated black suspenders, and pointy Italian shoes.

When the gumballs no longer worked, when, as one of his colleagues at Editorial explained it, "he looked as if his head would explode," Ritger checked himself into the hospital. Diagnosed with an extreme condition of tooth grinding, which if unchecked would eventually wear away the dentin and expose the nerves, he took three months to recuperate. An announcement was left on the office bulletin board explaining the situation, giving the address of a rehabilitation center where flowers and good wishes could be sent.

When Ritger returned to work in a neck brace and with his jaw wired shut, the editorial page had a new editor. Within a week another young obituary writer had been promoted, and Ritger was placed in the vacant slot. That young obituary writer was now one of two metro reporters covering the demonstrations in Eastern Europe. It had taken him just a year and a half to make it—enough to give a young reporter hope.

I had been working long hours, coming in on weekends and staying late, helping the ad people compile death notices, getting my name out to funeral directors, scouring the wires for recent deaths. I wrote thirty of the forty obituaries that ran each week, leaving a handful for Ritger, who seemed interested only in writing up decorated veterans and old-school journalists.

Secretly, I had started the
Independent
's first archive of prewritten obituaries, which I saved in my personal computer file, accessible to no one else, under the trade name "advancers." Every morning until eleven, when Ritger steamed in, and evenings from seven until ten, I worked exclusively on obituaries of the not yet departed.

My first advancers were the four living American Presidents. I'd search
Who's Who, Lexis-Nexis, Current Biography,
and library clip files, taking four workdays and parts of the weekend to write each thirty-inch piece. Aging world leaders came next: the Pope, Deng, François Mitterrand; then entertainers: Bette Davis, Leonard Bernstein; then Nobelists, writers, athletes, and so forth. I wanted to stockpile as many advancers as possible, but at the same time I prided myself on crafting elegant mini-biographies that would make readers wish they had known the person.

When advancers crept their way back into the headlines, I'd have to make updates. A particular nuisance was Jimmy Carter, with his international peacemaking, forcing me finally, after a dozen revisions, to give up on the idea of keeping his file current. By the time he died, I figured, I'd be miles from the obituary desk.

On the morning of Alicia Whiting's phone call, in my customary first ritual of the day, I counted seventy-nine prewritten obits queuing in my archive. As of yet, however, I'd had no occasion to use one.

She called at a quarter to five on Saturday, October 5, fifteen minutes before a tight deadline for the Sunday paper. Little distinguished this day from any other. Emerson Electric's chief financial officer had died overnight and the business desk had requested a third of our allotted space. I was on hold with a funeral director, checking facts and at the same time reducing the life of a Wentzville dentist to one column, eleven inches.

"This is Arthur Whiting's wife," the woman said in a regional accent that I couldn't place. "You've probably been expecting my call."

I wrote the name on the back of a press release, put her on hold, and paused for a moment with the phone on my shoulder. I'd never heard of Arthur Whiting. I checked the space budget list to see if he was scheduled for the next day, flipped through some recent wire printouts, opened the paper to the obit page.

"What was your husband's name again?"

"Arthur Russell Whiting."

I asked if she knew this was the obituary desk.

"Of course. I assume your people were trying to reach me today. Well, I was out. I wanted to be gone when the press arrived."

She sounded too young, too self-controlled to be a widow.

"My husband, Arthur Whiting," she repeated his name in her calm, insistent voice, "was a man of consequence."

I told her I was sorry and to please hold again, then stood up to scan the newsroom for Ritger. I walked over to Editorial, where he sometimes went to make old colleagues nervous, but he wasn't there. I checked the east wall and stopped by the main stairwell and called his name from the banister. Not wanting to bother anyone furiously typing away on deadline, I went back to my desk and sat down heavily, wondering how someone "of consequence" could have escaped my memory.

I called the librarian in Research, asked him to pull up anything he could find on an Arthur Whiting, closed the computer file on the Wentzville dentist, and told the funeral home that I'd call them back.

"Not to worry," Mrs. Whiting said as I returned to the phone, apologizing for making her wait. "I understand how it is with busy people. Arthur was a busy man."

Her accent was distinctive but still unfamiliar. It had neither the languor of Kansas City and St. Louis nor the twang of the towns in between. I would have said it was Southern, but there was a touch of the stage actress as well that made it sound more refined—the way she said "not to worry," the breathiness of "Arthur." In journalism school, broadcast people were taught to speak a certain way, and I always found it sad hearing kids my age from Texas and Arkansas bury their regional accents. Alicia Whiting's voice had that same distilled quality.

"We'll have a large number for the funeral. Hundreds, I suppose," she said. "There's so much to get ready before Tuesday."

Whiting,
I was thinking to myself. I knew a construction company with blue signs and a cityscape logo. I'd seen one hanging off a crane just this morning.

"I have to put the service together all by myself," she went on. "I'll order white roses. Definitely, white roses."

I opened the Yellow Pages to Concrete—Construction—Contractors.
WILEY
, one of the bigger ads read,
BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE SINCE
1948.

"Arthur had excellent taste," she was saying. "We aren't rich, but what we have is of good quality."

I slid the phone book back into my desk.

"Our Irish wolfhound placed at Westminster last year. That's at Madison Square Garden in New York City. I don't know why people make such a big deal. I really don't care for New York City."

I looked at the clock—a minute to five—and typed her name in the new file. Besides reducing the Wentzville dentist's obit, I had to finish fact-checking with one funeral home and call another to confirm a death, a formality I rarely left to the last minute. I had yet to update the space budget list or alert Layout that we'd need a more recent picture of the Emerson Electric CFO. It wasn't wise for someone in my position to be late on a Saturday for the early-run Sunday paper. But I was strangely unfocused listening to this woman, running "Whiting" over the contours of my memory.

"What's your name?" she asked.

I paused a moment before telling her, mindful of the journalistic protocol of keeping things impersonal.

"I always like to know who I'm talking to," she explained. "I'm Alicia Whiting."

The research librarian called on the other line. I put Mrs. Whiting back on hold. "We've got two clips," he said. "The first one's about a bank robbery. Arthur Whiting was assistant manager at a Portage Savings in Creve Coeur. He tripped the alarm and was hero for the day. Front page of Metro's got a picture of him. The caption reads, 'He had never been so scared ... blah, blah, blah.'

"There's a quote here about how he kept reaching for the button and missing it, and his boss says some nice things about him. The second clip's about a dog show."

"What are the dates?" I asked.

"The bank one's from 1984, the dog show's last February. I'll bring them over."

I got back on the phone with Mrs. Whiting. I knew I sounded rushed. "I'm sorry. Our deadline is five o'clock, and I have several things left to wrap up."

She said she didn't mind holding. And for a split second her disarming calm—why she had gone on sharing such odd details of her life—made me believe I was dealing with a woman paralyzed by grief.

At quarter past I tapped on the glass door of St. John's office expecting a reprimand for being late, but the back of his high-backed chair didn't move. His secretary said he'd been gone much of the day and probably wouldn't make the six-thirty meeting. I left her the list of the next day's obituaries and asked if she had seen Ritger. "He went home sick," she said. "Just after lunch."