Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (6 page)

She continued in this way, speaking with fondness of Arthur's little quirks, painting the portrait of an ordinary, if obsessive, man. She was right about what an unlikely pair they made.

She wore hoop earrings, big gold hoops that waved when she shook her head, and bangles on her wrists and silver rings. There was something about her eyebrows, too: they were darker than her hair and groomed into perfect narrow arches in a way that made the flesh above her eyes look soft as pillows, as though she had just awoken from a light nap.

"We met at a time in my life when I was really looking for order. It's just like me to go overboard," she said. "He offered the complete antithesis to the life I had been living, and we were generally very happy." She laughed, a high-pitched, almost mischievous giggle. "He told me that I was his creative side, his adopted imagination. I signed him up for a ceramics class, but that was pushing it too far."

I was half listening, half trying to understand why she had invited me into their private world. I felt more like a grief counselor than a reporter.

"I'm such a wreck," she said, combing her hair behind her ears with her fingers. "All I do is laugh or cry."

I'm usually a guarded person, the type who assesses everything from a distance, where I can make my judgments and approach with expectations. I find it minimizes the chances of humiliation. With Alicia, however, I was on my heels from the start.

"Well, this is really what I wanted to talk to you about," she said, as though the rest had all been meaningless matter. She pulled a thick manila envelope from her floral handbag and shook its contents onto the bench: clips, most of them recent, torn from Chicago, Denver, and Oklahoma City newspapers, and several from the
Independent.

"I collect them," she explained.

I sifted through the odd assortment of articles, reading the captions and leads, aware of Alicia's watching me.

There was one about a fireman who had glued bottle caps over every inch of his house, another about a barber who had woven a giant ball of hair from sweepings of his floor; there was the wife of the mayor of Enid, Oklahoma, who had opened a museum for her five thousand dolls, and a Denver lawyer who after losing a case hiked from the Rockies to Newfoundland.

"I want you to do a feature," Alicia said.

"A feature? What about?" I couldn't imagine what it might be, and yet I was beginning to feel I should do anything for this young widow, whose fractured life had been thrown in my direction.

"On Arthur." She smiled.

The ink-and-chemical smell of the newspaper clips had calmed me, and I began to feel a kind of confidence that comes, even to the shyest people, when grounded once again in the familiar. I was the journalist, an authority, and I wanted to impress her. "Are you sure there's a story?" I pointed to the clips: the barber and the bottle caps, the doll collection, the cross-country hike. "These things don't happen every day. In every feature there has to be a hook."

Alicia's face drained of expression. I could almost feel her drifting away. "You need a story," I said solicitously. "If you've got a story, we can really go somewhere."

I felt an unexplainable urge to touch her shoulder where the cardigan was slipping down, to lift the lock of hair that had strayed across her face and place it back behind her ear, to take her hand and turn the silver rings around her fingers.

"I have a story," Alicia said, seeming herself again. "You'll have to let me think about it some more, but I do have a story."

She talked then about the funeral arrangements. She had to drive out to the country on Monday to pick up her brother-in-law, Joe. "He's kind of funny, you'll see. He's not allowed to have a car." And Arthur's sister could be stopping by at any time. Between now and Tuesday she had a hundred things to get ready.

"Who knew funerals could be so stressful? Besides, I'm not very good with big groups. I prefer one on one," she said. "I used to tell Arthur that I knew we could be happy, just the two of us, out on a big ranch in Montana, with nobody around but the dogs. In Montana, they speak of land in units, not acres. Isn't that funny? Just us and the biggest blue sky."

Thea had told me she wanted to live by the ocean. We'd have a wood-burning stove in a camp house up high on the rocks over the Pacific, somewhere in Oregon or northern California, near a town of carpenters and potters and fishermen, real people who smelled of their work.

Alicia stood up, stuffing the clips back into the envelope.

"Well, goodbye Gordon Hatch. It's been nice meeting you." She smiled. "I'll call you about Tuesday. I need you to be there."

I WAS STANDING
at a long traffic light, the bright sun warming my scalp, when I decided I couldn't wait to see my Bette Davis obit on the page. Tomorrow morning I'd call Alicia to tell her who wrote it. She'd read her favorite parts aloud and say what a wonderful writer I was. Where did I get such a talent? She would tear the obit out, slipping it among the clips in her thick manila envelope.

By now, at four o'clock, the copy desk would have written a headline and caption and sent the obit downstairs to the composing room. A composing technician would be pasting the typeset copy onto a drafting board, making page proofs for editors to review, sending the board along a conveyer belt for platemaking. St. John would see a proof within the next half hour, and I wanted to be nearby for his reaction.

A new guard was working at the security desk.

"How are ya?" I said, flashing my ID. "Gordon Hatch. I'm a reporter up in the newsroom."

He had a look of distrust as I shook his hand.

Jessie Tennant, one of the metro columnists, joined me in the elevator. A thin woman with chestnut skin who dressed as if every day were Easter, she wrote about neighborhoods, mostly in East St. Louis. Her husband was a press operator and her son worked in Distribution, so she usually kept night hours. Editors were afraid of her. Not merely for her strong opinions. She was elusive: formal on the phone, with the tidiest desk in the newsroom, hers the only column that ran without a mug shot. I didn't realize, arriving early each morning to work on my advancers, that seeing Jessie Tennant in her bright pinks and yellows was an uncommon privilege.

I punched 5 for composing and 6 for the newsroom. "Isn't this a little early for you?" I asked, feeling a rare gregariousness overcome me.

As often as I had seen her, we'd never spoken. She always looked absorbed in her work and over time I'd gotten used to it, she and I alone in the newsroom at eight-fifteen in the morning, not bothering to introduce ourselves.

"They're having a special meeting on minority hiring," she said. "They wanted me to be there."

"I'm Gordon Hatch."

"I know who you are," she said as I got off on 5.

At the obituary page drafting board, I admired a proof copy of the Davis obit,
SCREEN LEGEND BETTE DAVIS DEAD AT
81, the headline read. Under her picture, the copy editor had written
Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth, 1939.

I found Greg DePaul, the composing room foreman, and asked him if the page was on its way to be plated, and he made a tasteless joke about Bette Davis's being "primped, pressed, and put on rollers."

"You know who wrote it?" I asked.

"I just move the pages," he said with practiced boredom.

"I wrote it," I told him. "I've got a huge advancer file in my computer, and I've had this thing lying around since April. As far as we're concerned, the old lady's been dead for six months."

Climbing the stairs one floor to the newsroom, I regretted this last comment. I always feel guilty saying what I don't believe, particularly for the cause of male camaraderie.

The newsroom was quiet, typical for a late Sunday afternoon.From the east wall I could see editors and columnists from various sections streaming into the conference room. In the distance I saw Ritger with a proof sheet, and stepped up my pace.

Passing the photo lab and the research library, I walked by the open conference room door, my hands in my pockets, feigning casualness. St. John stood in the doorway wearing a silver and blue galaxy tie.

"You want to come in here a minute," he said, motioning with his hands. He had large hands for a man his size.

Ritger was sitting in one of the chairs along the perimeter, not bothering to look up at me. On the dark-paneled wall behind him hung the lithograph of Joseph Charless and his hand-operated press and five somber portraits of the
Independent
's publishers since 1945.

Jessie Tennant sat near the head of the table, next to St. John's empty chair. On the long glass table lay a proof of metro page D-7, with the headline across the top:
SCREEN LEGEND BETTE DAVIS DEAD AT
81.

More than a dozen people were there: Jason Haas from Business, Matt Mankowski from Sports, Beatriz Acevedo from the editorial page, Doug Greiff from Entertainment, city desk editor J. B. Loveland, and Gloria De Angelis, who ran special assignments for Metro. Several columnists, among them Hannah Greene and Ben Richards, sat in a row between Jessie Tennant and the young reporter Marshall Holman, who had left my slot to work the night police beat.

I remained standing near the middle of the room. Jim St. John closed the door and took his seat at the head of the conference table.

I moved forward as if I were about to say something, but somehow my mind was a blank. I had been expecting congratulations, an instant promotion, a collegial embrace, but there was an unsettling feeling about the room.

"Before you get started, Hatch, let me tell you a little story." St. John leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. "I'll make it quick. I don't need to remind you that we work on a deadline.

"Last night, I went to my son's school—he's in the seventh grade at Kirkwood—and something happened that I think has a lesson in it."

People around me shifted in their chairs.

"They were putting on a play—
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
—and Jimmy was in the lead," St. John said. "A pretty big deal for him, since a lot of kids tried out for King Arthur and he ended up getting it."

St. John's voice was oppressive. I wondered where this was going. Was I supposed to congratulate him on his son's success?

"This one kid in the play didn't have any lines—he was a minor knight—but he was putting everything into it, like
he
had pulled the sword from the stone,"

I fixed my eyes to a spot above St. John's head where an old page plate of the Mississippi's worst flood hung on the wall, with the banner headline
AN OLD MAN RISES.

"So it's the wedding scene with Guinevere. She and Jimmy say their vows and give each other a kiss, and the knights swear never to fight in an unjust cause and always to protect damsels and widows, then everyone leaves except Jimmy and Guinevere and this one kid."

St. John seemed to be enjoying himself. I could feel him looking around the room.

"Never mind that in the scene before, the kid fell
off
the stage in a lance fight. Now he's right in the middle of the big romantic moment between the king and queen, and he's too busy swishing his goddamn sword around to notice that all the other knights have cleared the stage."

The room had fallen completely still.

"What do you make of that story, Hatch?"

I shook my head. What did he want me to say? That his son must have been upset having his big moment stolen? That chivalry is dead? That when it comes to women, men do the craziest things?

I scanned the room for a potential savior and came up empty. Everyone was looking down, with the exception, I'd later remember, of Jessie Tennant, who was eyeing St. John. My face felt hot.

"I'll tell you what to make of that story." St. John sat up. "Everyone's got a role to play in this life, and if you stick to your role, it'll all work out."

He picked up the Davis obit as if it were a dead mouse.

"If I had wanted the obituary desk to have an advancer file, I'd have asked for it a long time ago."

He dropped the page proof in front of me and got up to open the door.

As a boy, I used to imagine that the news of the world happened just around the corner: dictators lived up the street, planes were shot from the sky as I slept, anyone in a raincoat could be a foreign agent.

One sunny Wednesday when I was in fourth grade, I had been walking behind a young dark-haired woman in big purple sunglasses and a long black coat heading toward Boone County Savings Bank. As she turned, I saw under the shadow of her black beret what I was sure was the slender nose and subverted stare of Patty Hearst. I knew her face, her walk, the smiling girl from childhood photos that I'd seen in the newspapers. I imagined her captors, dark and crazy, in an idling van. By turning her in, I had thought I might save her.

I ran the three blocks up to Elm and west a block to the precinct station, where I stopped a policeman on his way out the door.

"Patty Hearst is robbing a bank!" I shouted.

"Is that a fact?" He cocked his head and frowned, folding his large forearms high on his chest. "And what bank would that be?"

"Boone," I said, nearly out of breath.

He put a hand on my shoulder, not reassuringly, and asked me how old I was.

"Nine," I told him. "I saw her walk in. I followed her all the way from the card shop."

"And what
time
is it?" the officer asked, leading me inside the station to a room where more policemen were sitting around finishing lunch.

"The kidnappers are there too. I didn't see them, but I know they're there. I bet they're in the alley waiting for her."

The officer leaned over me. He had a thick red mustache and a cleft chin, poorly shaved. "Let's not play games. I asked you what
time
it is."

"One o'clock," I guessed.

"It's two in the afternoon, young man. Where're you supposed to be at two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon? Aren't you supposed to
be
somewhere right now?"