by Hood, Ann
“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 EMILY POST, 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 t
he 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I have many people to thank for helping me to tell this story. Gretchen Jaeger helped me with details about vineyards; Nan Young told me about Denver in 1919; Diane and Pablo Rodriguez gave me a lesson in obstetrics in 1961; David Pires and Thom Anderson explained how someone in 1919 would get from San Francisco to Denver by train. The books The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson, 52 McG.’s by Robert McG. Thomas, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, and A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester all inspired my imagination as well as providing necessary information. Kerrie Hoban, Lyndsay Ursillo, Hillary Noble, and Mary Hector who gave me the time in which to write, and Sharon Ingendahl who is a friend and a reader extraordinaire. Thanks too to Gail Hochman and Jill Bialosky, the best agent and editor a writer could have. And to Lorne, Sam, and Annabelle, who always give me the love and support a writer needs.
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Ann Hood
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hood, Ann, 1956–
The obituary writer / Ann Hood. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-08142-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-08984-4 (ebook)
1. Housewives—Fiction. 2. Women journalists—Fiction.
3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Regret—Fiction. 5. United States—
Social life and customs—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.O537O25 2013
813'.54—dc23
2012040074
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ALSO BY ANN HOOD
The Red Thread
Comfort
The Knitting Circle
An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
