The Obituary Writer (9 page)

She would stand in it now, Vivien decided. She made a cup of chamomile tea, spooned some honey into it, and brought it outside. The rain was so light it was almost mist, dampening her nightgown and hair. Her hair would curl from the moisture, and thinking this she lifted her hand to smooth it. She should have put on slippers before she went out. But she hadn’t, so she stood barefoot, sipping her tea, watching the clouds moving across the dark sky. A crescent moon could just be seen through a circle of rain.
That’s our moon,
David had said that first night at the Majestic Hotel. Vivien had gone to look out the window, and he had joined her there, standing behind her with his arms around her waist and his chin resting on her shoulder, both of them still naked, sore from a night of making love. He had pointed to the sliver of moon and said,
That’s our moon. Whenever you see it, you will always think of me.

Was it a sign? Vivien wondered. A sign that the man in Denver was indeed David? She knew what Lotte would say. There are no signs or omens. A moon is just the moon. Practical Lotte. Did she ever stand outside barefoot in the rain and stare at the moon? Probably not, Vivien thought, smiling at the idea. Even as girls together Lotte had been the one to worry about danger, the one to take care of them both. She wouldn’t have followed David into that restaurant that day, or agreed to go to the Majestic Hotel with him for the night.

Vivien went back inside, catching a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror as she passed. Yes, her hair had wound into moist curls, as she expected. Rubbing it dry with a tea towel, words from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
came to her:
We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Oh, Vivien thought, letting the towel fall as she walked quickly back to the desk and picked up her pen. That was perfect for little Hazel.

The rain fell harder as she wrote about the dreams Benjamin and Jane had for Hazel. She wrote the story that Benjamin had told her about how they each wrote a hope they had for their child on a slip of paper every morning, and then sent the papers into the wind when Jane’s labor began. Where are those hopes and dreams now? Vivien wrote. The quote from
The Tempest
followed this story naturally. Vivien read the obituary over again. It was a good one. An obituary that honored Hazel and her parents.

The next morning, Vivien dressed in her good navy blue suit. She pinned the cameo David had bought her in Italy to the collar and wore her short-brimmed straw hat with the navy velvet band around it. This was an outfit for taking charge, for going to the train station and buying a ticket to Denver.

Walking down Main Street, the sun hot on her cheeks, Vivien felt alive. The air smelled of dust and horses and sweet flowers. All around her, people moved through their day, oblivious to her. Yet she seemed to belong among them, a feeling she did not usually have. When she heard someone call her name, Vivien turned expectantly and found Lotte hurrying toward her with Pamela by the hand.

It was so unusual to see Lotte and Pamela off the ranch that for an instant, Vivien didn’t respond. But when they reached her, and Pamela wrapped her thin arms around Vivien’s knees, Vivien brought her friend into a hug.

“What a surprise,” she said. “You should have let me know you were coming.”

“Well, if you ever get a telephone, I might just do that,” Lotte said.

Although she was smiling, she had small worry lines around her eyes and mouth.

“Vivvie,” Pamela said, her voice hoarse, “can we come to your house? And have a tea party?”

Pamela loved sipping tea out of one of Vivien’s china teacups, and eating tiny cucumber sandwiches with lots of butter and the special lavender shortbread Vivien made just for her.

“No tea parties for you today,” Lotte said to Pamela.

“Next time, darling,” Vivien told her.

“Where are you going?” Lotte asked. “All dressed up like that.”

Without answering, Vivien unclasped her purse and handed Lotte the telegram.

“I have to go to Denver,” Vivien said. “Surely you see that.”

Lotte shook her head. “It reeks of a wild-goose chase. A key. Blue eyes.”

“And six feet one,” Vivien said, pointing to the telegram. “With a scar on his head.”

“Gray hair,” Lotte said.

“It’s been a dozen years!” Vivien said, unable to hide her frustration.

“I know, Viv. I am sorry but—”

“But the key,” Vivien said softly.

“Mama,” Pamela said, leaning into her mother. “I’m getting so tired.”

Vivien frowned. “You haven’t even told me what you two are doing in town.”

“The doctor,” Lotte said, twisting a strand of Pamela’s fine hair in her fingers. “This one has had a fever and a terrible cough—”

As if on cue, Pamela gave a phlegmy cough.

“Almost a week now,” Lotte added.

“I shouldn’t keep you then,” Vivien said. “You need to get her home into bed with a good eucalyptus oil rubdown.”

Lotte gave a little laugh. “I suppose I should hang an onion by her bed too?”

“Don’t tease me,” Vivien said, pretending to be wounded.

“Do you know what I heard?” Lotte said. She lifted Pamela up and held her, the girl’s head on her shoulders.

Vivien saw that Pamela had dark circles under her eyes, and her cheeks did look gaunt.

“Poor Pammy,” Vivien murmured.

“I’ve heard that there’s a blue mold in Europe that might someday cure all kinds of diseases.”

“Blue mold?” Vivien said, laughing.

“You laugh,” Lotte said, “but I believe scientists are capable of taking anything, even mold, and figuring out a scientific use for it.”

While Vivien had lost herself in novels and poetry, Lotte had spent her time gazing under microscopes and doing scientific experiments.

Pamela gave a little moan, and Lotte’s face grew worried.

“I think we will head back,” Lotte said.

The two women hugged, and Vivien could feel a new heat emanating from Pamela.

“Go now,” Vivien said.

Lotte hesitated, as if she wanted to say something more.

“Let me know if you do go to Denver,” she said finally.

“I wish you could come with me,” Vivien admitted.

“You know I would if I could, Viv,” she said. Again she seemed to hesitate, but this time she indeed set off, Pamela still in her arms.

Vivien watched Lotte walk down the street. Before she turned the corner, her friend lifted her hand in a halfhearted wave.

The sight of San Francisco, her beautiful city, broke Vivien’s heart. How well she knew these streets, the hills she and Lotte used to roller-skate down as children, the North Beach corner where they would go for Italian ice. Vivien always got lemon, enjoying the way it made her mouth pucker, the tartness both painful and pleasant at the same time. Lotte liked the sweet fruity ones, strawberry or peach. If she closed her eyes, her own personal map of the city appeared on the back of her lids. The house where she lived so briefly as a child with her parents before they died, just a day apart, from the Russian flu when she was a child.

Of that house, and that couple, Vivien only had the blurriest memories: a swing tied to a tree branch in the yard, being lifted by her father’s strong hands, the rustle of her mother’s skirts, a Douglas fir so tall that Vivien had to crane her neck to see all the way to the top, where a foil star perched. Her mother had hand-sewn an entire wardrobe of clothes for a doll Vivien had named Melody. She vaguely remembered sitting on a rug in a parlor with her mother, carefully dressing Melody in her new clothes. The doll’s porcelain face and soft blond hair remained clearer to Vivien than the face of her mother.

But of course Melody had been with her longer. When Vivien’s aunt took her to live with her in the big house in Pacific Heights, Vivien first dressed Melody in the forest green coat with the black buttons her mother had made just a few weeks earlier. Even as a teenager, Vivien had kept Melody on a shelf in her bedroom, a reminder of some elusive time she could not quite recall. Standing here now on Market Street, Vivien clearly saw that room where she grew up. The high four-poster bed with the hand-tatted bedcovers and pillows; the tall windows that opened out onto the city; the fainting chair covered in pale gold silk where Vivien would sit, a blanket over her lap, and read on rainy afternoons.

Her city.

Vivien opened her eyes to see that she was standing almost exactly where she first met David on the day she bought the ridiculous blue hat. There, just ahead, was the restaurant where he took her. Vivien watched as a streetcar came to a stop, its doors heaving open. She should run to catch it, but the weight of her trunk combined with the weight of her memories kept her in place, unable to move forward.

She did not like being here. She did not like seeing the ghost of her own self everywhere she looked. But the train to Denver left in the morning, requiring that Vivien spend the night in the city. All these years, she had avoided coming back. After those weeks of searching for David in the rubble, at hospitals, on the streets, she had taken Lotte up on her offer to stay in Napa with her and Robert for a while, until she felt stronger. A while had turned into months, and those months into years. Oh, she’d left the vineyard that summer, and moved into her apartment.

At first she would sit by the window and watch the world pass in front of her. People who walked with purpose, who seemed to have somewhere to go. Mothers pushing prams, adjusting their babies’ blankets, beaming down at them or fretting over them. Boys on bicycles. Couples holding hands. An entire population of people who continued living their lives even though Vivien’s had come to such a sudden halt. They seemed audacious to her, those people with plans and appointments and futures. How could they parade in front of her? How could the world, in fact, keep spinning?

One day, a man knocked on her door. Short and squat, dressed in a bright red jacket, he stood nervously twirling a straw hat in his hands.

“Is this the newspaper office?” he asked her.

Vivien shook her head. She wasn’t even sure where the newspaper office was in town. By this time it was late autumn, but she only ventured into the grocer’s and the pharmacy, the places where she could get necessities and then return home.

“Could you please direct me to the obituary writer?” the man said as if he really did stand on the doorstep of the newspaper office.

“This is a private home,” Vivien said. “I’m sorry.”

She began to close the door, but the man stopped her.

“I need the obituary writer. It’s for my wife.”

At the word
wife
his voice cracked. Eventually, Vivien grew accustomed to that, the way a word, a name, could break a grieving person. But that day, she felt embarrassed by the man’s emotion. She recognized herself in that instant, remembering how often she’d cried as she repeated David’s name to Lotte. At times, those two syllables seemed to carry all of her grief.

“But I’m just a woman who lives here,” Vivien said.

“My wife,” the man continued, “is a baker. She came from Austria-Hungary as a teenager. Her family moved to Chicago where her father worked in the stockyards. Disgusting work, for a man who once owned his own haberdashery shop right in downtown Budapest. Her mother took in sewing, and she would stay up all night working in the dim light, beading wedding dresses, hemming gowns, making layettes for babies. My wife, my Gyöngyi, just a girl, but she baked pastries and sold them on the streets, to bring home extra money so her mother didn’t have to work so hard.
Eszterházy torta
and
rétes
and
krémes
. Do you know
Rákóczi túrós
? Cottage cheese cake? No? My Gyöngyi made this better than anyone. Better than the finest bakers in Budapest.”

As the man talked, Vivien realized that he was the first person since she had left San Francisco who understood grief. Despite all of the hugs and words of comfort, unless you have suffered loss you cannot understand the depth of it, the seemingly bottomless pit of despair that goes with grief. But this man in the bright red jacket and straw hat, he knew. He understood.

Vivien took his arm and brought him inside. She sat him down on her sofa and she made him a cup of tea. He talked, and Vivien listened.

Eventually, he stood. By then dusk had fallen. But Vivien did not light a lamp for fear of interrupting him.

He said, “
Gyöngyi
means pearl. Did you know this? No? A pearl is hidden in an oyster. Do you know, Miss Obituary Writer, how pearls get made?”

“No,” Vivien admitted, “I don’t.”

“When a piece of grit or sand or shell gets trapped inside, the oyster, it has to protect itself from this irritation. So it creates a liquid around the particle, which eventually, over time, becomes a pearl.”

Alone, Vivien sat at her small desk and wrote about this woman, this stranger. She described the pastries she baked, the flakiness of her crusts, the smoothness of her creams, how she perfectly balanced fruit and nuts and sugar in her strudels. Vivien took the final line of the obituary from Keats. “Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl!”

In the morning, she walked into town and found the newspaper office that the man could not find the day before. She explained her mission, handing the obituary to a skinny man with a big Adam’s apple.

“But this ain’t an obit, ma’am,” he said. “It don’t say when she was born. It don’t say how she died. And it don’t have much in between those two momentous occurrences neither.”

Vivien thought of David, of all the things she missed about him, the things she thought about when she yearned for him. The little word game they played.
Delicious,
she had said that last morning. And he had answered,
Intoxicating
. She missed his scrambled eggs. Such a simple thing, but on lazy mornings she would wake up to him bringing her breakfast on a tray. He added a bit of cream and sugar to the eggs, which made them light and sweet. He always had two pieces of sourdough bread, toasted and buttered and half a grapefruit that he’d already cut the small wedges for her so she could pick them up with her fork. She missed how when they stood together, her head reached his shoulder in the exact spot where she would rest it later that night in bed.