The Obituary Writer (14 page)
VIVIEN, 1919
O
n the ride back to Napa, Vivien and Sebastian did not speak. The Ford truck he’d borrowed from Robert to come and get Vivien bounced uncomfortably. It was made for farmwork, not for long-distance drives. Vivien was relieved to not have to make conversation. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat, inhaling the smells of leather and earth that filled the cab. Pamela’s face kept floating into her thoughts, startling her into remembering why she was heading north back to Napa instead of asleep at the Hotel Majestic in San Francisco.
Ever since that man had wandered grief-stricken onto her doorstep and launched her into her career as an obituary writer, Vivien had written hundreds of obituaries, too many of them for children. Just last year, when the Spanish influenza hit, not a day passed without a parent falling into Vivien’s arms, overwhelmed by grief. Vivien had struggled to honor a person so young that their character had not yet revealed itself. She had sat at her small desk, staring at a blank piece of paper, trying to find the words to capture the child who had just taken her first steps, the boy who had loved his big sister or applesauce or his mother’s lullabies. Children who could only say a few words—
Mama
,
doggie, bye-bye
; who had learned to wave or jump or kiss good night; children who could recite the alphabet or count to ten or write their names in shaky oversized letters; so many children dead, and Vivien given the task to capture the thousand days or less they had lived.
On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it.
She knew the things that brought comfort: hot tea, clear broth, a blanket on one’s lap, the sound of one’s loved one’s name said out loud, someone to listen, a hug. But even these things could not comfort a parent who has watched their child die, who has sat helplessly by their child’s bedside. The parents of dead children wail. They pull at their clothes and their hair as if they need to leave their bodies, shed their skin, disappear. Vivien had come to recognize the blank stare in their eyes, the grief robbing them of any other emotion but it.
And now Pamela was dead, and Lotte had entered this world. Vivien remembered a mother who had come to her last winter, her face bloated with grief. The woman had been unable to sit still, and instead paced relentlessly around Vivien’s parlor. She had lost not one but two children, within hours, and she kept repeating the events of that morning as if by mere repetition they would change. Vivien had seen this often. Mourners needed to tell their stories. Not once or twice, but endlessly, to whoever would listen.
“They were playing together at my feet,” the woman said. “I even remarked on how cheerful they both were, how happy. I remember thinking that I had been doubly blessed. Two beautiful happy children. And then first Amelia got sick, right in front of me. I rushed her off to my bedroom, to get her away from Louisa. This influenza is highly contagious. I know this. And by the time Amelia was gone, Louisa was already sick, already dying too. The doctor never even made it to our house. When he arrived it was too late. He said, ‘So many children gone. Too many.’ And I screamed at him. ‘But not mine! Not mine!’”
She walked and told the story again and again, stopping only to stare at Vivien in disbelief.
Finally she said, “The Twenty-third Psalm. I keep saying it to myself. But the words have stopped making sense.”
That was when Vivien realized that in fact those particular words made too much sense.
“The psalm says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” the woman said. “But God isn’t comforting me. I hate him! He is cruel, not loving.”
How the grief-stricken hated God! Vivien thought. She could hear her own voice cursing him, could feel her own heart hating him.
She wrapped her arms around the woman, and said softly, “Darling, the psalm tells us that we must walk through the valley. We cannot walk around it, I’m afraid.”
The woman’s voice against Vivien’s shoulder was muffled. “I don’t want to,” she cried. “I don’t want to be there. I want my babies back.”
Vivien used the Twenty-third Psalm in Amelia and Louisa’s obituaries.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Their mother’s cup had runneth over with joy and with sorrow, all in a matter of hours.
“Yes,” she had told Vivien later that afternoon, when exhausted from pacing and crying and the business of death. “Yes, that is the perfect thing to express this grief, for which there are truly no words.”
The touch of a hand on her knee jolted Vivien. Lost in the world of grief, she had forgotten that she was in this truck with someone else.
“You’re crying,” Sebastian said softly. He held out a white handkerchief to her.
“Am I?” Vivien said.
Light was just beginning to break in the distance. Vivien took the handkerchief and wiped her eyes and cheeks.
“It is a sad day,” Sebastian said.
“Yes,” Vivien said.
She wondered, not for the first time, how the sun dared to show itself on a day such as this one. But it would. It would shine brightly down on all of them. Flowers would blossom, trees would bear fruit, women would give birth, and the world, as if ignorant of what had happened here, would continue to spin.
“We should arrive in another hour,” Sebastian said.
The sky had turned the particular shade of violet that it did as the sun prepared to rise, a color Vivien had seen too often during sleepless nights wracked by grief. Although that condition of her grief had passed some time ago, she recognized this color, this sky too well.
“How do you call this color?” Sebastian said, pointing one finger upward without moving his hands from the steering wheel.
“Violet,” Vivien said.
“Like the small flower? But the color is not the same.”
“It’s also a female name,” she said.
“Violet,” Sebastian repeated under his breath.
Vee-oh-letta.
“Do you have this name in Italian?” Vivien asked him.
“We have Viola. Like in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
.”
Vivien glanced at him quickly, as if she had never laid eyes on him before. Maybe Lotte had been right about this man.
“You like Shakespeare?” Vivien asked him.
Sebastian sighed. “Like is too weak a word for how he makes me feel.”
Vivien nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“Yes, I see you in the library. The way you love the books.”
“How did you land in Napa, California?” Vivien asked him, feeling a genuine tug of interest.
“You see, my father, he was a soldier for the king. But when there was no more king, he had no work. He tried farming, but he was not a good farmer. I learned, though. About soil and crops, the rain and the seasons. How to nurture things.”
“So you came here,” Vivien said.
“My sisters came to America first and they got jobs in New Jersey, in the factories. But I didn’t want to be inside all day. I couldn’t be. My friend Michele, he told me they were looking for workers for vineyards in California. He went to work for Gallo, and he sent for me. And here I am now.”
Despite herself, she felt her heart softening toward him. It was grief making her so vulnerable, she thought. The news of Pamela’s death, what waited for her at the end of this trip.
Sebastian reached across the seat and took her hand in his rough, callused one.
“I nurture you,” he said.
It was the wrong word, Vivien knew. But she didn’t pull her hand away. She let it rest there, in his.
Sebastian kept his eyes on the road ahead as the sky turned from violet to lavender, lightening with the sun.
When the truck passed under the arch with the words
Simone Vineyards
carved into it, Vivien reminded herself why she was back here instead of at the ferry terminal boarding her train to Denver.
Pamela is dead.
She repeated the words, as if by saying them over and over they might make sense. But as Sebastian parked and Pamela didn’t appear to greet Vivien, the words made even less sense. Pamela dead? The little girl’s tanned face, with her bright blue eyes and tangle of blond curls floated in front of Vivien, alive and vibrant.
Her eyes darted to the house. White crepe streamers and violets hung on the door. Lights blazed in every room. The shadows of people moving about the kitchen were silhouetted in the windows.
“I don’t want to go in,” Vivien said.
Sebastian, who had already opened his door to get out, closed it quietly.
“Then we sit until you are ready,” he said.
Didn’t he understand? She would never be ready. Her friend was in there crazy with grief. Vivien, so familiar with the landscape of death, for once did not know what to do or say.
“As long as I’m out here,” Vivien said after a moment, “then nothing has happened. Once I step inside that house, Pamela will really be dead.”
“Vivien,” Sebastian said softly. “Pamela really is dead. I saw her myself. The dottore, he came, but it was too late. The influenza is not as strong this time, but it still can kill. The lungs fill up—”
“Stop!” she said harshly. “Shut up.”
“I stop,” he said.
Vivien tried to sort out what he had told her. Pamela had influenza. The strain was less virulent this time around, yet it had turned to pneumonia anyway and killed her.
“You saw her,” Vivien said.
“I did.”
The kitchen door opened and a man and a woman stepped outside. It was light enough now to see that they were the couple from the neighboring vineyard, the ones who raised goats and made the cheese. The woman looked dazed, her face creased from crying. The man kept his head down, until they neared the truck. Then he looked up and, recognizing Vivien, stopped at her window.
She rolled it down, reaching her arms out toward him.
“She’s been asking for you,” he said, grasping her hands.
His wife’s eyes were wild. “Pamela’s dead,” she said, and there was awe in her voice. “Dead,” she repeated.
Sebastian got out of the truck and came around to the passenger side.
“Sebastian,” the man said. “I know they’ll be grateful you found Miss Lowe and brought her here safely.”
He let go of Vivien’s hands to reach into his coat pocket.
“I’m sure they intend to compensate you, but they’re not themselves. You understand.” He took out a fat roll of bills and began counting them.
But Sebastian stopped him. “I will not take money for helping,” he said.
“I insist,” the man said.
“It is my honor to do this for them,” Sebastian said. “For Pamela.”
But the man kept thrusting the bills at him.
“He said he doesn’t want to be paid for this,” Vivien said sharply.
At the sound of Vivien’s words, the man shoved the money back in his pocket, mumbling an apology.
Sebastian put his arm around Vivien protectively. She turned her face away from what the woman was saying and into his scratchy wool coat. She could hear his heart beating beneath it, and smell his sweat.
“Thank you,” Sebastian said. “I take her inside now.”
He steered her away from the couple, his grip on Vivien strong and steady.
“I’m sorry for that,” she said.
“Stupid people,” he muttered.
The kitchen door loomed in front of them. Vivien had to pull herself together before she saw Lotte.
“Can we sit a minute?” she asked.
Without answering, he led her to the picnic table where just a short time ago she had sat eating chicken and beans, drinking wine with Pamela on her lap. He guided her down to the bench, and he sat close beside her.
Vivien breathed in the morning air.
“You can do this,” Sebastian said.
He took her face in both of his rough hands. It had been so long since she’d been touched by a man in this way that Vivien felt her knees actually tremble. Then Sebastian pulled her face toward his, and kissed her on the lips. His lips were chapped, rough like his hands. The kiss was not passionate or long. Before she could think what to do, it was over and he was helping her to her feet.
“Lotte needs you,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Vivien told him.
She took another deep breath, then walked ahead of him into her friend’s kitchen.
The silence surprised her. Someone stood at the stove making coffee and scrambling eggs. People sat, stunned, at the kitchen table. Even the dogs, two German shepherds, lay quietly in the corner, staring out at everyone.
“Where is she?” Vivien asked. “Where’s Lotte?”
The woman at the stove said, “With Pamela. In the parlor.”
Vivien thanked her and moved across the kitchen, through the narrow hallway lined with muddy boots and dusty hats and jackets. Pamela’s were there with the others, as if she would come to claim them at any moment. Vivien paused, and pressed the girl’s jacket to her nose, inhaling. The jacket smelled of the outdoors, and faintly of Pamela.
The night she was born, Vivien had sat in that kitchen, making tea for Robert and warming milk for Bo, who was still a toddler. She had run upstairs when she heard Lotte’s screams, and arrived by her side in time to see the baby’s head crowning. Lotte had grabbed her hand and squeezed hard as the midwife ordered her to keep pushing. Vivien watched Pamela arrive in one fluid motion, all of her sliding from her mother and into the midwife’s waiting hands.
