Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (24 page)

She stopped and turned around, her restless look settling to a gaze. "Fine, then. I'll meet you at eleven."

I arrived early at the restaurant where I was meeting my mother for dinner. I waited by the window, read over the menu, made distracted small talk with the maitre d', then went to the men's room to clean up. At the sink, I washed my face and neck, slicked down my hair with water, tried unsuccessfully to press the wrinkles out of my clothing. Up close to the mirror, I checked my reflection for signs of trouble.

My mother was all dressed up in a new black dress and an embroidered shawl. She wore a string of heavy pearls with earrings to match and had on deep red lipstick. I had never seen her in such bright lipstick before.

The Roma was a midrange Italian restaurant whose moment had long passed, but it remained one of my mother's favorite places. She had come here with my father in the springtime during college. They'd taken
off
their shoes and stomped grapes in the garden, sung along with the piano player who had played the standards. But now the garden was closed for the season, the piano tucked away in a darkened room. The place was mostly empty. Our table was in the middle of the restaurant, though I had been hoping for a booth, where I could spread myself out, try to relax for later tonight.

"You don't look well, Gordie," she was saying. "I don't know what they're doing to you, but it's got to stop. You're wearing the same shirt you had on yesterday. You can't even pull yourself together in the morning."

I picked at my carbonara, which was rich and salty. I was eating too much bread, drinking more white wine than I had wanted to.

"It's not the same as it used to be," my mother said. "I'll give you that. There are too many Ivy League types in newspapers these days, too much cuteness. The real journalists, the ones who go out and get the story—they're few and far between."

She went on this way for most of dinner, which was a relief. It allowed me to drop out of the conversation. Lately time had accelerated for me, headlong into uncertainty, accelerated for Alicia as well. We were on the same clock, moving at the same speed, going, it seemed, in the same direction. She seemed truly to believe that she was a reporter on the verge of a breakthrough story. She had taken hold of my delusion and made it her own. When the road ended for me in St. John's office, and I realized that in a sense I had been pursuing a story all along, Alicia was right there with me, waiting at the curb to merge, two into one.

After the main course, the waiter brought out a plate of tiramisu with a single lit candle, and the few people left in the restaurant sang "Happy Birthday" to me. My mother leaned over and gave me a kiss, handing me a card with my full name, Gordon Charles Hatch, written on the envelope.

On the front of the card was a close-up black-and-white shot of a pair of old cowboy boots leaning against a post. Inside she had written, "A little something for your pilgrimage..."

The check was for three hundred dollars.

Later, when I dropped off my mother at Thea's, telling her that Alicia—A.A.—had found an apartment and was planning to move her boxes out over the weekend, she told me that she understood. I hugged her and thanked her for the evening. She said she was proud of me and insisted that I hurry home and try to get some sleep.

Driving off, I felt like a bastard for the three-hundred-dollar check in my pocket.

ALICIA WAS WAITING
in the lobby in her khakis and white T-shirt and a pair of round tortoise-shell glasses that I hadn't seen before. She was carrying my father's briefcase. I thought about telling her that certain things were off limits but instead signed her in at the security desk, saying, "I didn't know you wore glasses."

"I don't." She took the glasses off, then put them on again. "I saw a reporter on TV who was wearing glasses, so I went to Osco's and bought these."

"Well, they look good." I was suddenly nervous.

"And I found this junky old briefcase in the apartment. I knew you wouldn't mind."

The doors of the elevator closed, then opened again, the gentle "Going up" cut off midsentence. An arm reached in and Jessie Tennant stepped inside, not noticing me at first as she pressed the button for the sixth floor.

Before I could say hello, Alicia said, "I'm doing a big story tonight. I've been telling Gordie that I'm sick and tired of writing all these crime stories. Everyone knows I'm better than that."

Jessie Tennant raised her eyebrows.

"My story is going to be front page," Alicia said, looking severe.

When the doors opened on the sixth floor, I tried to signal Jessie Tennant to let her know that she shouldn't worry, I'd explain it all later, but I failed to get her attention.

Alicia headed straight for the conference room, walking fast, not looking around.

"We're doing the story here." She opened the door, waiting for me.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean we've got to do the story now and we're doing it here. We don't have all night."

"You can't write the whole story in the conference room," I said. "When I write a story, I do it on the computer, and there are no computers in here."

"Well, I don't know computers. And I want to do it right here, right at that table." Alicia sat down at the head of the glass table, St. John's place. "Why don't you get a tape recorder, then," she said. "Let's not get anything wrong."

"I guess I'll put the story on the computer later." I went to Marshall Holman's desk to find an extra tape recorder, wondering how I was going to finesse this.

The newsroom had mostly emptied out. A couple of copy editors were still at their desks, as well as the night city editor, who was dispatching Holman from crime scene to crime scene. The late crew, many of them demoted from dayside, were haggard looking, embittered, not a likely group to guard the sanctity of the conference room.

I found a tape recorder in the middle drawer and tested it, taking some extra batteries and tapes. On the way back I passed Jessie Tennant's desk, and whispered, "I promise I can explain this later."

Alicia was ready.

She had lined up several pencils and a notepad alongside an assortment of newspaper clips, different from the ones she had brought to Union Station. I noticed that my own envelope, the one with my advancers and Arthur's grid and notes from Jessie Tennant and Margaret, still sat undisturbed in the inside pocket of the opened briefcase.

I glanced over the clips. Alicia had clearly lost interest in features. This new batch held the kind of stories that lead off the evening news: shootouts, sieges, domestic tragedies.

I set the tape recorder on the conference room table, prepared to play along. "Ready?" I asked.

"Of course."

She adjusted her drugstore spectacles and pressed Record.

"This is A. A. Whiting." She leaned over the tape recorder. "The following account is my front-page story."

"Let's begin at the beginning," I said.

I had thought out how I was going to do this, rehearsed it at the Roma as my mother dispensed advice, though I realized my control was now limited. "I've done a little research," I began. "And I understand that in Weatherford, Texas, 1973, you knew a boy who was poisoned—"

She didn't seem at all surprised that I knew this. Instead, she corrected me. "Let's not say that I knew a boy who was poisoned. Remember, I'm the reporter and I've got to protect my source. It's one of the first rules of journalism."

"How do you propose to do that?" I asked.

"Let's just say instead, 'There was a girl who knew a boy who was poisoned.' We'll call her 'the girl' and we'll call him 'Phillip.'" A glassy look came over Alicia's eyes. The presence of the tape recorder seemed to be having a soothing effect on her. "Phillip was a scientist, and he performed scientific experiments in his lab in his basement."

"What kind of experiments?"

"I know what I'm doing, Gordie," she said. "First I wanted readers to know that his parents were divorced and he lived with his father, who was hardly ever home."

He used to mix poisons, she said, and test them out on small animals, mice and squirrels, cats, and eventually dogs from the next town over. "Four milligrams of ricin could kill a cat. Six milligrams could kill a dog, and anything after that could probably kill a person, but he didn't use ricin on people."

Phillip was working on a number of different poisons—some that killed slowly, the victim showing symptoms of a short natural death; others that took effect immediately, causing cardiac arrest.

"And how did the girl feel about Phillip killing animals? Didn't it seem barbaric?" I asked.

"She was just a girl. She hadn't been out in the world, so nothing seemed real," Alicia said. "And he was very convincing, very sure about himself. He put a lot of importance on the process of dying. He wasn't religious, but he did talk about the afterlife, how you had to be prepared." She was leaning over the table, speaking dreamily. "He thought if death catches you by surprise, then you have to relinquish a kind of eternal control."

The girl fell in love with Phillip. They were two people in a world that didn't understand them. He was a genius and she his assistant. The beginning of the end occurred when he took her to the film version of
Romeo and Juliet,
the one by Zeffirelli, shown downtown at the Mayfair Theater.

"He was Romeo and the girl was Juliet. The story was the most perfect romance ever told and they took it as a call to action, a personal message meant just for them," Alicia said. "They believed it was their fate to die together."

Outside pressures only strengthened Phillip's resolve—from his mother who lived in Dallas and had married a wealthy man, from his father who drank too much and wanted him out of the house, from people in town who saw him at the counter of Woolworth's and told him he was squandering his future. What he had not foreseen was that the girl might change her mind.

"She told him she would do it. She imagined herself doing it. She thought about drinking the poison and dying in his arms. But then the girl realized it was a bad idea." Alicia shook her head. "Besides, Phillip wanted to die. He was obsessed with death. Perhaps he didn't want to lose himself to the vastness of his own talent. Dying was a form of control."

By Valentine's Day, the girl had lost courage. "They went to the cemetery at dawn, to the mausoleum of a man named Robicheaux. Phillip said he thought Robicheaux was a romantic name," Alicia said. "They had the poison with them, in the pockets of their lab coats—four jequirity beans ground up in sugar water. Phillip drank his glass and the girl drank hers, but she had secretly switched her beans for hard candies."

"What did the beans look like?" I asked.

"They're half black and half red and about this big." She showed a space of less than a quarter of an inch between her thumb and forefinger. "They're the size and hardness of lentils, but rounder," she said. "They have this yellow stuff inside called abrin. It kills you."

She slid the notepad and pencils toward me. "Don't you want to write some of this down?"

"I can get it from the tape. How long did it take for him to die?"

"A couple of hours," she said. "Phillip loved jequirity beans because they're rare and pretty. In Mexico, they put them on rosaries."

I checked the tape. It was less than a third of the way through.

"For a long time the girl felt guilty about what happened," Alicia said. "For years after she left Texas she actually wished that she had followed through with the plan. But unlike Phillip, she wasn't so fascinated with death and had never considered suicide before meeting him. The fact is, if the girl hadn't come along, he was going to kill himself anyway. She is still convinced of that. The way she looks at it now, at least he was in love and thought he wasn't dying alone."

Alicia had little to add about the aftermath. She said that the girl lay with her eyes closed on the cold ground trying to distract herself by thinking of cartoons. Then she ran home and got a camera to take some pictures of Phillip lying outside the mausoleum, pictures she later put in a photo album which she had since lost.

"She thought it was important to capture that moment. She did it for him," Alicia said.

The girl would have left Weatherford right away, but she'd never been anywhere and didn't know where to go. The way she eventually did leave, and later left the other places she moved to, was by bus, going to the station and getting on the first bus out, regardless of where it was going.

I couldn't help but think of my father's trip to Dallas then, an eerie parallel.

"She got off at Albuquerque. It was the last stop," Alicia said.

I turned off the tape and excused myself, saying that I'd be back in a second, I had to use the men's room. Alicia nodded patiently, saying she'd wait.

In the men's room, I felt queasy. I leaned over the sink, thinking I might be sick. At the mirror, I touched my face, as if to make sure I was really there. My eyes were mapped with blood veins.

Outside the door, Jessie Tennant was taking a drink at the water fountain.

"That woman I've been talking to has a big local story," I said to her. "Don't mind what she said in the elevator. She's not all there."

Jessie Tennant nodded her head conspiratorially.

Alicia was sitting up straight, her superfluous glasses at the end of her nose, her blond hair in a high ponytail, a number 2 pencil behind her ear. For a moment, seeing her there, I felt sad. She was like a child, with her clear eyes, her serious, almost sweet expression, the way her small hands were folded on the table. I wondered if she just didn't know what she had done.

"Sorry to keep you waiting." I sat back down.

Picking up the tape recorder, my hands were shaking. I couldn't feel my fingers pressing Record. "And Arthur?" I asked, trying to make my voice sound strong.

Alicia was eyeing me pensively, pulling at her lip.

"Let's say that the girl became a woman and married an older man. She had kept her four jequirity beans, the ones she had promised to drink with Phillip. She had carried them from place to place, hidden among her things."