The Obituary Writer (24 page)

“You came,” she said as she descended the stairs. “Thank you.”

“This was my house,” Vivien said, surprised at how small her voice sounded.

“My husband is upstairs, resting. The doctor was here a little while ago. He said the time is near.”

She motioned toward the double parlor. “Shall we sit?” she asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she continued into the room. Vivien hesitated, then followed her. The wallpaper was the same, a deep olive green with scenes from ancient Rome depicted on it in line drawings. David had found it when they went to Rome together, delighted that among the Coliseum and Pantheon were lewd pictures of couples in different sexual positions, something guests never noticed, which delighted David even more.

“Forgive me,” the woman said. “I’m Ruth. I should have introduced myself that first night at your house.”

Ruth turned to the Chinese woman hovering nearby.

“Fu Jing,” she said, “bring tea, would you?”

Fu Jing bowed slightly and walked out.

Vivien sat at the edge of a violet velvet loveseat. The one she’d had in this spot was now in Napa in her sitting room.

“I don’t know where to begin,” Ruth said. “I met my husband five years ago, when I was only nineteen. He was sophisticated. Successful. A lawyer.”

At that, Vivien sat up straighter.

“And he had an entire past that I knew nothing about,” Ruth continued. “You know how men can be, so secretive. I had to piece everything together myself, with the little bit of information he gave me from time to time. Or from what I found snooping through his belongings. That’s how I found that business card I left on your table.” Ruth’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “Maybe you think I’m just a foolish young girl, but I’ve been jealous of his past, of who he might have loved before me and what he might have done.”

“One day we were sitting here, having our afternoon tea, and he was reading the
Examiner
. All of a sudden, his face grew pale and he muttered, ‘By God, it’s Vivien Lowe. She’s alive after all.’ And in that instant, I thought that perhaps you were someone he had loved once, before the earthquake.”

Vivien got to her feet, certain now that David was here, upstairs.

Ruth stood too. “His life seems to be divided that way. Before and after April 18, 1906.”

“Yes,” Vivien said.

“When he got the news from the doctor, he asked me to find you. ‘She needs to write my obituary,’ he told me.”

Vivien pushed past Ruth, and almost knocked into Fu Jing in the foyer.

Fu Jing held a silver tray and tea service. Vivien didn’t have to look carefully to know that her own initials were engraved on each piece.

“Pardon me,” Vivien said as she began to climb the stairs.

“Please! He’s resting!” Ruth called to her, but Vivien didn’t stop.

The light streaming through the stained glass window spilled across the first landing. How she had loved the effect this made, the way it cast gold and rose here. She threw open one door after another, but each room was empty. Still, the sight of David’s study with the heavy mahogany desk littered with papers, the maroon leather cigar box she’d given him for Christmas, the crystal paperweight and gold fountain pen, all of these familiar items, made Vivien pause. She took deep breaths, as if she might catch his scent. But the room smelled of nothing, as if it had not been used in a very long time.

She continued up the stairs to the third floor. There was the sitting room, its door already opened. And across the hall from it, her bedroom. Hers and David’s. That door was open too.

Ruth had arrived first, and she stood at the door like a sentry.

“He’s very ill,” she said softly.

Vivien took a step inside the room. The air smelled like rotting fruit.
Like death,
Vivien thought. Of course everything inside looked different. Vivien had taken the bed and armoire, the lamps and rug, with her when she moved to Napa. Her furniture had been replaced with Oriental pieces: a dark red bed, an ebony trunk with an ivory carving of elephants and tigers on its front. That trunk looked familiar to Vivien, yet she was certain it had not belonged to David.

In the bed lay a man so thin he hardly made a silhouette beneath the saffron duvet. As Vivien neared, she saw wisps of white hair against the embroidered pillow.

“David?” she whispered.

The man’s eyes fluttered open.

Vivien looked into them, and instantly she knew.

“Duncan MacGregor,” she said, her throat suddenly dry.

Disappointment filled her with such intensity that she sunk to her knees. Not David after all, but his old law partner.

He gave her a wan smile, showing long, yellowed teeth.

“Ah, Vivien,” he said, each syllable an effort.

She grabbed his hands in her own.

His hands were so thin she could feel the bones in them pressing against the skin.

Duncan closed his eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them again, he began to speak in a voice so low and hoarse that Vivien had to lean close and place her ear to his mouth in order to hear him.

“You’ve come to write my obituary, have you?”

“I don’t know,” Vivien said. “I suppose so.”

“Just in time,” he said with a trace of his old humor. “How do we begin?”

“Tell me about yourself,” Vivien said, trying desperately to hold back tears.

“I grew up in India,” he said softly, “on a tea plantation.”

“Yes,” Vivien said, nodding.

Duncan continued to haltingly tell Vivien about his education, and how he came to San Francisco and when he met David. She listened, nodding at the familiar stories, until he finally arrived at the day of the earthquake.

“That morning,” Duncan continued, “April 18. David and I met in our office at 5 a.m.”

“I remember,” Vivien said.

He took a few wheezy breaths. “David, my law partner. My friend. In the middle of this dazzling life with you. A lucky bastard, he was. Until the shaking began and everything fell down around us. A support beam gave way and crashed in front of me.”

Vivien raised her head to look Duncan in the eye.

“Is David dead?” she managed to ask him, even though she knew the answer in her heart, knew it deep inside her.

“Right in front of my eyes,” he said. “An image I see every day. One moment he stood there, so bright and handsome. So full of life. And in an instant he was dead. There was no doubt. It was terrible, Vivien, but mercifully swift.”

The weight of all the years of hope made her weak. Vivien clutched the edge of the bed.

“I went to Lotta’s Fountain every day,” she managed to say, and the words brought back those awful days spent searching the city. At the fountain, survivors—their eyes red and swollen, their faces full of desperation—gathered, all of them hoping to see a loved one, to get information. All of them, like Vivien, hopeful.

“Every day,” she said again, her mind now tumbling over the past thirteen years and the lonely hours she’d spent living in grief. Strangers’ grief and her own.

“I’m sorry,” Duncan said. “I always thought you knew.”

“I was told
you
died. Of a head injury,” Vivien said.

“Rumors flew during that time, so I’m not surprised. ” Duncan said. His face was so gray and gaunt it seemed to disappear into the array of pillows beneath it. “I did get hurt, quite badly. I was in the hospital for almost a year, then I was sent to Arizona to recover more completely.”

Duncan closed his eyes. His breaths came out long and shallow.

“He needs to rest,” Ruth was saying. “Don’t you, darling?”

Duncan lifted one long finger and opened his yellowed eyes. “With his wife dead too, as his business partner I inherited his estate. Please. Take anything you want.”

Vivien’s gaze left Duncan’s face for a moment and took in all of the things that used to be hers.

“I don’t want anything,” she said.

She had to get out of that room, that house. She had to get fresh air.

“You’ll write it?” Duncan whispered.

“Yes,” Vivien said. “Of course.”

Then she was moving down the stairs, this time not pausing even briefly at the beautiful light coming through the window on the landing, but just moving as quickly as she could, through the foyer and across that threshold and into the street.

There, finally, she could breathe. It had started to drizzle. Vivien tilted her face upward and let the light cool rain fall on her.

David had been dead all of this time.
Terrible, but mercifully swift,
Duncan had said. She thought of the man she had loved for so long. How they had met that long-ago day when she wore her new blue hat. How they had heard Caruso sing. How the very morning he’d left the house and walked off to his death they had told each other that their time together was too short.

It had started to rain, a hard unforgiving rain. Vivien pulled her shawl around her and began to walk down the stairs. She did not look back at the house where she had lived so happily so long ago. In the distance, she heard the rumble of thunder. Vivien paused. She would write Duncan MacGregor’s obituary. And then she would sit at the small desk in her room, and she would write the obituary she had hoped she would never have to write.

Ahead of her, Sebastian sat waiting, lit by just the glow of his small cigar.

Vivien inhaled deeply, then slowly, steadily, she moved forward.

SEVEN

There is no reason why a woman (or a man) should not find such consolation, but she should keep the intruding attraction away from her thoughts until the year of respect is up, after which she is free to put on colors and make happier plans.

—
FROM
Etiquette
,
BY
E
MILY
P
OST, 1922

Farewells

CLAIRE AND VIVIEN, 1961

“A
long time ago,” Birdy said, “I was an obituary writer.”

“An obituary writer?” Claire said, surprised. “That must have been terribly sad.”

But her mother-in-law shook her head. “I comforted people who were grieving,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice. “It was a gift, in a way.”

Claire nodded. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

“I listened to all of their stories,” she said. “So many sad stories.”

“What I didn’t know then,” she continued, her voice growing thoughtful, “was that I was comforting myself too. When someone you love dies, after some time, no one listens anymore. I listened.”

“Who died, Birdy?” Claire asked.

“Vivien,” she said. “Call me Vivien.”

Claire sat on the bed beside her mother-in-law and studied the old woman’s face. She had been beautiful once, Claire thought. You could see it in her high cheekbones, her straight nose. The lovely hair.

“I’ll listen,” Claire said.

“Ah, but I promised to listen to you.”

“I’m so tired,” Claire said with a sigh. “I would like to just sit here and listen for a while.”

Vivien looked at this woman, her daughter-in-law. She did not know what had happened between her and Peter, but something had gone wrong. That was clear. And now they’d lost the baby too.

“Do you know the secret to writing a good obituary?” she asked Claire.

Claire shook her head no.

“All the dates and degrees and statistics don’t matter,” she said. “What matters is the life itself.”

“How so?”

“Well, I always began by asking, ‘Tell me about your loved one.’ Eventually, we always got to the truth.”

“Tell me about your loved one,” Claire said.

Vivien paused.

“When I was very young,” she said at last, “I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco wearing a ridiculous blue hat and pretending to be French. I didn’t know it then, but I was hiding behind that hat, behind that persona. My dearest friend was getting married and moving away and I felt untethered. A man stepped into my life that day and grounded me again.”

Thinking of Lotte brought it all back and Vivien had to collect herself, to push aside how Lotte’s life had turned out. She had never recovered from Pamela’s death. One day, Lotte had walked to the river and drowned herself. By then, Vivien had left California. Prohibition and an infestation of crop-destroying insects had closed many of the vineyards, sending Vivien and Sebastian east. She’d heard the news weeks afterwards, and then later, the news that Robert had married Kay Pendleton, the librarian.

She felt Claire’s hand on her arm.

“Vivien?”

Vivien opened her eyes and nodded.

“What was his name?” Claire asked. “That man who saved you?”

“David,” Vivien said, savoring the name. “David.”

“It seems like a million years ago,” she added, “and it seems like yesterday. Grief is like that. It never really goes away, it just changes shape. Some days, I don’t think about him at all. But I can still have the breath knocked out of me when I taste crab Louis, or hear Caruso sing, or a dozen other things.”

“What happened to him?”

“The earthquake of 1906,” she answered. “So long ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire said.

“But you see, that isn’t the only tragedy.” Suddenly Vivien needed to make this clear to Claire. “I wasted thirteen years hoping that he was alive somewhere. Thirteen years holding on to a dream.”

“But shouldn’t we hold on to our dreams?” Claire asked, feeling almost desperate.

“Not when they keep us from moving forward,” Vivien said sadly.

The two women sat quietly, each lost in her own dreams.

Then Vivien’s voice broke the silence.

“Tell me about Peter,” she said.

Claire looked at her, surprised.

“It’s all right, darling,” Vivien said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“I’ve hurt him,” Claire said. “I—”

“My son will be all right. And so will you.”

Claire rested her head on the old woman’s chest, and Vivien stroked her hair.

“Don’t waste your one beautiful life,” Vivien said softly.

Peter found them like that a few minutes later. He walked into his mother’s room with Kathy in his arms.

“Mommy,” Kathy said, her voice hushed.

“Kit Kat,” Claire said, standing and opening her arms to hold her daughter close.

Beside her, Vivien slept, her breathing shallow.

Claire met Peter’s eyes.

“The baby,” she said. “She was ours.”

She watched the news settle in him.

“I want to go home,” Claire said.

“Home?”

“It’s time to begin our farewells,” she said.

“Oh, Claire,” he said.

Claire glanced at Vivien, whose face had grown paler.

“It’s time,” Claire said.

Claire closed her eyes and breathed deeply all the smells around her. Death hung in the air. But so did the beautiful little girl scent of her daughter, the pungent smell of flowers, her husband’s clean soap smell, her own familiar one, all mingled together. Claire breathed them all in.

Then she took the first tentative, terrifying, exhilarating steps into her future.