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.”