VIVIEN, 1919
The obituary writer, Vivien Lowe, usually did not know her clients. They came from Silverado and Calistoga; from Point Reyes Station and Sacramento; from San Francisco and Oakland. She had even had clients come from as far away as Ashland, Oregon, and, once, Los Angeles. They read about her gift for bringing the dead to life, and they came to her clutching their tearstained handkerchiefs, their crumpled notes, their photographs of their deceased loved ones.
They were all very much like Mrs. Marjorie Benton, who sat across from her now on the small deep purple velvet loveseat. It was a rainy March afternoon in the town of Napa, California, in 1919. Outside the window, the leaves on the oak trees were wet and green. The office looked like a sitting room, with its Victorian furniture salvaged from the old apartment in San Francisco, the loveseat and chairs and ornate, beaded lamps. The obituary writer lived above her office, in one large room that looked down on Napa’s main street. On the rare occasions when she parted the draperies that hung on the windows upstairs, she could watch small-town life unfold before her. The farmers with their wagons of fruit; the vintners with their hands stained purple from Mission grapes; women clutching children’s hands. But she preferred to keep the draperies closed. Downstairs, however, in her office, she let the light in; she believed sunlight had healing properties.
Mrs. Benton was crying softly. Her cup of tea, which sat on the small table between them, had grown cold.
Even though they did not know it, Vivien knew that grieving people needed food and something to quench their thirst. She believed in the powers of clear broth and toast, of sustenance. So she always put out a small plate of cheese and crackers, or cookies, or fruit. She always offered her clients a drink. Cool water, hot tea, even a glass of wine from her friend Lotte’s family vineyard up Highway 29. Mrs. Benton had asked for tea when Vivien offered her a drink. Long ago, in another lifetime, she had learned about tea from David’s law partner, Duncan, who had spent his childhood in India. Duncan liked to pontificate about everything from tea to séances to the mating habits of tigers. I only trust about ten percent of what he says, David used to say. But he is entertaining.
Vivien kept many varieties of tea on hand. Mrs. Benton had chosen Earl Grey. It sat now, amber in its china cup, forgotten.
“My Frank,” Mrs. Benton was saying, “graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1899.”
Vivien did some fast math. Frank Benton was only a man in his early forties. Not much older than Vivien herself; she was thirty-seven. Mr. Benton had died after having a tooth pulled.
“His degree was in mathematics,” Mrs. Benton added. She frowned. “Aren’t you going to write any of this down, Miss Lowe?”
Vivien shook her head. “That isn’t how I work,” she explained.
She didn’t tell Mrs. Benton that these facts—degrees and numbers and jobs and affiliations—were not what made a life. Everyone who came here to her small office in Napa answered her request of: “Tell me about your loved one” with facts. Vivien let them tell her about places of birth and accomplishments, number of grandchildren and siblings. Then, when they were finished, she would say again, “Tell me about your loved one.” That was when the person began to come to life.
“We were married on June 17, aught four,” Mrs. Benton continued. “Lost everything in aught six.”
Vivien felt that lump in her throat, the one that seemed to appear at the mere suggestion of the earthquake. Lost everything, Mrs. Benton said matter-of-factly, and Vivien nodded, willing herself to be calm. It had been thirteen years and she was getting better at holding her own grief at bay.
“That scared the bejesus out of us,” Mrs. Benton said, “so we moved up to Monticello.”
Vivien waited. With a sigh, Mrs. Benton went on. “Three children. Owen, fourteen. Maxwell, twelve. June, ten.” She frowned again.
She was a plump woman with saggy skin that made Vivien think of elephants. Of course, Vivien had never actually seen an elephant, except in books and magazines at the library, which was where she spent her free time. There and at Lotte’s place. And here, of course. Alone.
Even in her grief Mrs. Benton had applied red lipstick and too much face powder. Out of habit, no doubt. Grieving people operated by rote. They went through the motions of living, pulling their hair from their faces or pinning on a brooch without thinking.
“Are you going to write that down?” Mrs. Benton said.
“No, no, I have it. Owen. Maxwell. June,” Vivien said.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Benton said, shaking her head and sending her folds of skin into a tremble. “I came because of what you did when Elliott Mann died. Do you remember that obituary you wrote? Why, people went up to his wife for weeks afterwards saying that after reading it, they felt they knew him better than when he was alive. Why, no one at all knew that he had rescued those boys from drowning way back.”
She waited for Vivien to say something. When she didn’t, Mrs. Benton said, “You put in that poem by Emily Dickinson. Remember?”
“Of course,” Vivien lied. In truth, after she wrote an obituary, she pushed that person’s name, that life, out of her mind. It was too much of a burden to keep so many deaths so close.
“I liked that poem,” Mrs. Benton said. “Maybe you’ll use it for my Frank?”
“Perhaps,” Vivien said.
The women sat across from each other in silence. Vivien was very aware of the grandfather clock’s loud ticking. She wondered if Mrs. Benton heard it too.
Finally Vivien said, “Tell me about Frank.”
Mrs. Benton’s overly powdered face seemed to fall in on itself. “When I think of him, it’s always with his birds, you know?”
“Birds?”
Mrs. Benton nodded, no longer trying to control her tears. “He raised songbirds. What will become of them all now? Cages and cages of songbirds. He could exactly imitate each of their songs. Couldn’t carry the tune of a regular song, mind you. But the man could chirp.”
Yonder stands a lonely tree, There I live and mourn for thee, Vivien thought. Would Mrs. Benton be satisfied with Blake instead of Dickinson?
“I used to accuse him of loving those birds more than he loved me. I didn’t really think that. If you had seen him, Miss Lowe, when I was sick with consumption a few years back. How tenderly he cared for me. How gently he brushed my hair and laid cool cloths on my forehead. He was a gentle man, my Frank. And to think something as simple as a tooth . . .” She shook her head, unbelieving.
Vivien thought again of “The Birds,” when the voice of the woman asks: Dost thou truly long for me? And am I thus sweet to thee? Yes, Blake was exactly right for Frank Benton’s obituary.
“It had to come out, didn’t it?” Mrs. Benton asked suddenly, her eyes wild. “It was infected. You know the pain an infected tooth can cause. I told him to go and have Doc Trevor take it out. I told him that. But it had to come out, didn’t it?”
“Of course, darling,” Vivien said, reaching for Marjorie Benton’s doughy white hands. “Of course.”
Grief made people guilty. Guilty for being five minutes late, for taking the wrong streetcar, for ignoring a cough or sleeping too soundly. Guilt and grief went hand in hand. Vivien knew that. The morning of April 18, 1906, threatened to creep into her mind. She saw it there at the edges of her thoughts, her younger self in their bed with the bedclothes they had bought in Italy crumpled around her. The room was still dark, and Caruso’s voice still rang in her ears.
David bent to kiss her goodbye. “Last night,” he said. “It was musical.”
She smiled, even in her drowsiness. This was a game they played. “It was delicious,” she said, remembering the lamb chops, the potatoes dauphinoise, the baby peas.
“Intoxicating,” he whispered.
“That was mine!” she said, swatting his arm.
“Sexy,” he whispered.
“Go,” she laughed.
“Not until you say one.”
Vivien sighed. “Too short,” she said finally. “Last night was too short.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Damn Duncan for insisting we meet so early. It’s not even light yet.”
“Ah! So you’re leaving me to meet someone else,” Vivien teased. She ran her fingers up his arm, enjoying the goosebumps that rose beneath them. David and his partner in the law firm were opposites: Duncan flamboyant, loud, flashy. He drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost all around town, and wore a white suit. He had grown up in India, and threw huge parties where he served curry so hot he provided linen handkerchiefs to all the guests so they could wipe the sweat from their faces.
“Everything’s an emergency with Duncan,” David said. He caught her fingers in his hand, and raised them to his mouth, kissing each one.
“You will put out yet another fire Duncan started,” Vivien said.
“I hope so. It’s difficult to deal with Duncan on three hours’ sleep,” he added, laughing.
“You will,” she said, stifling a yawn. “You are heroic. You can do anything.” She was teasing him, but Vivien did believe it. She had watched him in court, the way he argued cases, the way he saved men’s lives.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said, kissing her again.
Vivien listened to his footsteps move away from her. She imagined him downstairs eating bread and jam, drinking a cup of espresso he had made from the temperamental machine he used. Finally, the door opened on its hinges that needed oiling, and closed shut.
She snuggled deeper under the blankets, and closed her eyes, knowing that in a few hours Fu Jing would arrive noisily, banging doors and shaking dishes. Fu Jing would appear in the doorway with her breakfast tray, muttering in Chinese about Vivien’s laziness. And about her immorality. Vivien wondered which of the angry Chinese words Fu Jing muttered meant mistress or whore? Which meant homewrecker, kept woman? She didn’t care. If she did, she wouldn’t be here in this lavish apartment that her lover paid for while his wife woke alone across town in their house in Pacific Heights.
Vivien closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. Less than an hour later, she woke not to Fu Jing rattling about and cursing, but to the entire house shaking and rolling as if it were riding waves across the ocean. Vivien sat up with great difficulty, and clutched the sides of the bed. The clock, the one that chimed so beautifully on the hour, the half, and the quarter, with whimsical paintings across its face of all the astrological signs, said 5:12. Outside, people had begun to shout and things had begun to fall—streetlamps and stairways and windows. The noises grew louder and more frantic. The light grew brighter outside her window. But all Vivien could do was sit holding on to her bed, as if it were a life raft keeping her safe.
The clock chimed and Mrs. Benton shifted in her chair. Vivien pushed away the memories. And that small illogical part of her rose, the part that believed, ridiculously, that perhaps David was still alive somewhere. Perhaps he had hit his head during the earthquake. Hadn’t entire walls and columns and roofs fallen that day? Wasn’t it possible that he had hit his head and had amnesia? She had spent hours in the library researching that condition. The word came from the Greek, amnestia. Not remembered. She knew it was, in simple terms, the loss of memory, and that it came from a head injury or psychological trauma. She knew too, that it was possible that David suffered one or both of those that terrible day of the earthquake.
It sounded foolish, Vivien realized that. But she clipped articles from newspapers and journals about amnesia, about people who suffered from it, and people who had recovered. She clipped these articles and pasted them in a large leather book and kept it by her bed. There was hope in those stories. One of them discussed a different kind of amnesia, one in which a person has the inability to imagine the future. Funny, Vivien had thought when she read that, how she and David were perhaps both suffering from amnesia. His, the more common type, and hers this other one. The inability to imagine the future.
Mrs. Benton sighed. She glanced toward the window and touched her own powdered cheek as if to prove that she was still alive.
“People always say how nice his feet are,” she said softly. “Isn’t that the craziest thing? A man’s feet? Once we were on Stimson Beach and a man came up to us and asked Frank if he could take a photograph of his feet. The man said he was a photographer and that he was certain that Frank could be a foot model for catalogues. Do you know that I think for a minute Frank considered it?” She blinked and then narrowed her eyes at Vivien. “Listen to me go on about nonsense,” Marjorie said. “But they were beautiful, my Frank’s feet.”
It was dusk. The sky was turning violet and the lamps on the street were lit.
“I think I have enough,” Vivien told her.
Already a person was taking shape. Mrs. Benton had arrived an hour and a half ago, her hair and coat wet with rain, and she had brought with her a dead man, a blank thing without breath or life. But she had left behind a living man who could perfectly imitate a bird’s unique song.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Benton said, surprising Vivien by pulling her into a suffocating hug.
Mrs. Benton smelled sour. Vivien guessed that since her husband had had that tooth pulled two days ago, and come home looking ill and feeling, as Mrs. Benton said, “not quite right,” and gone to bed where he had died by suppertime, Marjorie Benton had not washed. She had cried and screamed and pulled her frightened children close to her. She had applied powder and lipstick without thinking because that was what a woman did when she went into town.
Now, she held Vivien close, pressed to her, for a long while. Vivien felt the sobs rising in Mrs. Benton’s chest, felt her shuddering. Finally, Vivien was released. She stepped back and took a deep breath, letting the soothing smell of lavender fill her. She kept dried lavender in small dishes placed all around the office. Lavender was known to calm and comfort. The people who came to her needed that. Vivien needed it too.
She walked her client to the door. For a moment she was afraid Mrs. Benton would hug her again, but instead the woman just pressed Vivien’s hands in her own soft ones before hurrying out.
Vivien stood in her small office, listening to the clock tick and breathing in the scent of lavender. She stood for some time, trying not to think about those three fatherless children in Monticello, or Mrs. Benton’s sour smell, or her own long-missing love. But as always, this last was impossible.
Vivien Lowe met David Gardner on an afternoon in May on Market Street in San Francisco. She was wearing an oversized, ridiculous blue hat that she had owned for exactly ten minutes. It was spring and she was twenty-two years old. She saw that hat in an expensive milliner’s shop and without thinking about it at all, she bought it. The hat made her feel foolish and sophisticated. She pretended she was a Frenchwoman, a Parisian, instead of an English teacher at the Field School, a private school for girls on Nob Hill. Lotte would laugh at the hat, Vivien knew that. She would laugh and then beg to borrow it. Lotte had been her best friend since they themselves were students at the very school where Vivien now taught. Both of them had been orphaned young, and this sad history had made them instant friends.
Catching her reflection in the window of the Emporium, Vivien smiled. Perhaps she would go inside and take the elevator to the fourth-floor tearoom and have a sandwich, pretending to be French. She would order her sandwich in a French accent, and pretend not to understand when the waitress in her pink and white uniform asked if she would like lemon or cream in her tea. Vivien giggled at the thought.
“I’ve never seen a woman who enjoyed herself quite so much as you do, mademoiselle,” a man said.
Vivien saw his reflection in the glass too. He was tall and broad-shouldered with golden hair. He was smirking.
“Je ne comprends pas,” Vivien said. She had always received A’s in French.
The man replied in such rapid French that Vivien turned away from their reflection to see him better.
He laughed at the look on her face.
“That is quite a magnificent hat,” he said.
Embarrassed, Vivien turned and continued down Market Street, wondering how he had known her fantasy of being a fancy Frenchwoman. She wondered what Lotte would say about this, if Vivien mentioned it. In three weeks, Lotte was getting married and it was hard to get her attention and keep it for any length of time these days.
Footsteps rushed up beside her. “Pardon me,” the man—that rude man—said. “I couldn’t resist teasing you.”
Vivien wished she had not bought the hat. Or that she could take it off now. Maybe she would just give it to Lotte, although her friend certainly wouldn’t be needing it up in that one-horse town she was moving to. In Napa, people grew fruit and made wine and had babies. The thought of losing her friend made Vivien’s eyes tear. They had been together forever, since they were six and wore the gray jumpers that all Field girls wore in the lower school. Now Lotte was moving a world away.
The man, whom Vivien had stopped noticing, touched her elbow. “I’ve upset you,” he said.
She shook her head. “I forgot you were here,” she said honestly, missing Lotte already.
They stopped walking. Vivien saw her streetcar approaching but did not move to catch it.
“What then?” he asked her.
She did not know how to articulate her loss. It seemed too large for words to capture it.
Without warning, the sky grew dark and large fat drops of rain began to fall hard and fast. The man took her elbow again and guided her into a small restaurant at the corner. Already, Vivien’s skirt was wet. The hat drooped.
A waiter rushed over to them and offered a table for two by the window. He pulled Vivien’s chair out for her, then slid it back to the table, handing her a large, heavy menu. It was, she noticed, all in French. The stranger was sitting too, ignoring his menu and staring at Vivien instead. Outside, rain lashed the window, which rattled from the wind.
“A storm,” Vivien said.
“Quite,” the man said.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I’m not in the habit of picking up strange men on the street and allowing them to take me into dim French restaurants.”
The man grinned at her. He was older than she, with fine lines at the corners of his green eyes.
“And I,” he said, “have never fallen immediately in love with a hat. Until now.”
The waiter hovered nearby.
Vivien knew that some people believed that in the moments before death, a person’s life flashed through their mind. Although she did not believe she was dying as she sat in that French restaurant on that May afternoon during a rainstorm, her life did pass before her. The vague shadowy images of her parents; her Aunt Irene and the house on Fremont Street; all of those years at the Field School for Girls with their Latin and French and Literature; holding Lotte’s hand; the small room in the boardinghouse across the bay in Oakland where Vivien lived while she studied at Mills College; her first beau, Langston Moore, who kissed her with such passion her teeth ached afterwards; the classroom at the Field School that was hers now with its neat rows of desks and the girls in their gray skirts and white blouses and the smell of chalk dust and books being opened; her first glimpse of the blue hat in the window of the milliner’s shop.
The man, this stranger sitting across from her, was speaking to the waiter. Ordering supper, she realized.
Vivien stood abruptly, banging her knee against the table and spilling some water onto the starched white tablecloth.
“I can’t eat supper with you,” she said. “I have to be at Lotte’s bridal shower at the Fenn Club.” She was going to be late, she realized, and without even telling the man her name, Vivien rushed outside into the rain. Her streetcar was there, ready to close its doors. She shouted to the conductor, and lifting her skirt, ran across the street, hopping onto the streetcar, wet and out of breath. From the window, she saw the man standing in the doorway of the restaurant, still holding one of the white linen napkins, like a soldier offering surrender to his enemy. For the first time since he’d spoken to her in front of the Emporium, she saw the thick gold band on his left ring finger.
“It’s infatuation, that’s all,” Lotte told Vivien.
It had been three days since Vivien had met the man on Market Street, and she had not had a good night’s sleep or been able to keep him out of her mind. Even as she sat with Lotte recording the wedding gifts for her, murmuring over the heavy silver and delicate crystal lined up on the dining room table, all she could think about was that man.
Sometimes she blurted, “The audacity of him! Assuming I’d want to eat dinner with him.”
To which Lotte, tracing the bluebells on her china, replied, “And him a married man too.”
Or Vivien would say dreamily, “He is handsome, though.”
“And married.”
Vivien sighed. She hadn’t told Lotte that part of what kept her up at night was imagining his wife, hoping she was ill or insane or something that would allow him to pursue Vivien. But then she would worry over how he would ever find her again. She was just a nameless stranger in a blue hat.
“Love is something else,” Lotte was saying now.
Vivien, bored with her job of carefully writing down each item and the name and address of who had sent it, was contemplating how she might find him. If she went to Market Street and stood in front of the Emporium every afternoon, would he pass by again?
“It’s a more practical feeling, Vivvie,” Lotte said as she unwrapped yet another china plate. She admired it as if she had not already received six others. “Love is reliable. Infatuation is temporary.”
Vivien realized she’d been holding a sterling silver fish knife for far too long, and lost track of who had sent it.
“Have you recorded that yet?” Lotte asked her.
The thank-you notes, engraved with dark brown letters on thick cream paper, waited on the sideboard to be written.
“Yes,” Vivien lied, and laid it on the table. “It doesn’t matter,” she continued. “I’ll never see him again.”
“Which is a good thing,” Lotte said. “Since he’s—”
“I know.”
“You’ll see at the wedding. Robert has some very handsome friends. And a cousin who’s a dentist in Boise.”
“Idaho? No thank you, Lotte. You might be willing to move to the country, but I prefer to stay right here, thank you.”
“Boise is a city, Viv.”
Vivien made a sound in her throat which she hoped Lotte took as agreement.
Lotte walked dreamily around the table, her fingers fluttering over her wedding presents as if she were already placing them in her new home.
“If I went back to the very spot where I first saw him,” Vivien said, pretending to admire a sterling silver ice bucket, “do you think he might pass by?”
“One of Robert’s friends also owns a vineyard. We could be neighbors,” Lotte said, her eyes shining. “Our children could be best friends too. And we could grow old together.”
Vivien smiled. “That sounds nice,” she admitted.
It did sound nice. More than nice, Vivien thought. It sounded right. She and Lotte had been like family to each other ever since both of their parents had died during the influenza epidemic. By coincidence, they each had a spinster aunt who took them in. By coincidence, those aunts lived next door to each other in Pacific Heights. Although both of those women were loving and kind to the girls, Vivien and Lotte found comfort with each other. At night, Lotte always turned her nightlight on and off three times. And Vivien responded by doing the same. It was their way of saying Good night. I’m here.
Now of course Lotte was leaving San Francisco. Leaving Vivien. Lotte was starting a family of her own, with Robert and her china and silver. What was Vivien supposed to do by herself?
“What’s this friend’s name?” Vivien asked Lotte, a panic rising in her chest. “I’ll pay special attention to him.”
Perhaps that was what she should do. Fall in love with the vintner, move to Napa, manage a vineyard and have babies and keep Lotte close.
Lotte brightened. “Thomas,” she said.
“That’s a good strong name,” Vivien said, carefully unwrapping white tissue paper and lifting a crystal goblet from its nest there. “I always liked the name Thomas.”
“There,” Lotte said, her voice heavy with relief. “You’ll forget all about this other man. You’ll see.”
But it wasn’t infatuation. That’s what Vivien understood almost immediately when she saw David again. That very afternoon, as she and Lotte opened the wedding gifts, the doorbell rang and a letter was delivered for the woman in the blue hat, in care of Lotte.
“I had just two clues. Your friend’s name was Lotte and her bridal shower was at the Fenn Club. I trust this will find you and we can have our dinner together, though by now it has probably grown cold. Tonight? At eight-thirty? Yours, David Gardner, Esq.”
“You can’t go,” Lotte told her.
But of course, Vivien did.
Ah, David, Vivien thought, that too-familiar ache of sadness filling her.
Mechanically, Vivien collected the teacup and saucer, the small plate of cookies, from the table. She would wash them in the kitchen, then climb the stairs to her bedroom and take a long warm bath. She would enjoy a glass of Lotte’s wine, and climb into bed to read until she grew drowsy and could finally sleep. Her nights were often exactly like this one. But rather than causing boredom or loneliness, this solitary routine brought her comfort.
Vivien rinsed first the teacup, watching as the Earl Grey disappeared down the drain, then its saucer, both of them rimmed with a silver stripe. Her wedding china, she and David called it, even though there had never been a proper wedding. Exactly half of it had survived the earthquake. The irony of this was not lost on Vivien, herself a surviving half. Vivien took a cookie, a lacy Florentine, and nibbled it as she rinsed the plate. She realized she had not had any supper and considered making herself a little something. There were good fresh eggs in the icebox, and mushrooms, the dirt still clinging to them, waiting on the counter. Vivien imagined cracking two eggs in the cobalt blue bowl, and stirring them with some salt and pepper. She imagined wiping the mushrooms clean, slicing them, then sautéing them in butter.
In her mind, she could see the result, a golden omelet, earthy with mushrooms and a snip of the chives she grew on her windowsill. But instead, Vivien turned off the light in the kitchen and went upstairs. A book lay open on the night table. Without undressing, she picked it up and settled onto the bed. She could almost hear Lotte reprimanding her. Eat! Take a walk! Let the Italian man who adores you buy you dinner in town. She could hear Lotte telling her, You are wasting your life on a dream, Vivvie.
Vivien placed her finger on the page, and closed the book. If David had died, she thought for the millionth time, she would have felt it. She would have felt his life leaving. By now, he would have come to her somehow—in a dream, as a ghost, somehow. She shook her head, as if she were actually arguing with Lotte. He had to be out there. He had to. If not, then Lotte would be right. She had wasted so many years on the dream of him, on this sliver of hope.
These kinds of thoughts could keep her up all night, Vivien knew. She opened the book again, and forced herself to focus on the words there.
“I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia,” she read, “but I never did . . .”
And soon, Vivien was back in Willa Cather’s world, safely removed from her own.