The Night In Question

In Pharaoh’s Army

This Boy’s Life

Back in the World

The Barracks Thief

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

TOBIAS WOLFF
The Night in Question

Tobias Wolff’s memoir of Vietnam,
In Pharaoh’s Army
, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his childhood memoir,
This Boy’s Life
, won the
Los Angeles Times
Book Award in 1989. His other books include two story collections,
In the Garden of North American Martyrs
and
Back in the World
, and
The Barracks Thief
, a short novel for which he received the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also won the Rea Award for excellence in the short story. He lives with his family in upstate New York, where he is writer-in-residence at Syracuse University. The stories in
The Night in Question
—three of which were selected for the
Best American
series—have appeared in periodicals ranging from
Antaeus
to
The New Yorker, Story
to
Granta, TriQuarterly
to
Esquire
.

T
he metro editor called my name across the newsroom and beckoned to me. When I got to his office he was behind the desk. A man and a woman were there with him, the man nervous on his feet, the woman in a chair, bony-faced and vigilant, holding the straps of her bag with both hands. Her suit was the same bluish gray as her hair. There was something soldierly about her. The man was short, doughy, rounded off. The burst vessels in his cheeks gave him a merry look until he smiled.

“I didn’t want to make a scene,” he said. “We just thought you should know.” He looked at his wife.

“You bet I should know,” the metro editor said. “This is Mr. Givens,” he said to me, “Mr. Ronald Givens. Name ring a bell?”

“Vaguely.”

“I’ll give you a hint. He’s not dead.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

“Another hint,” the metro editor said. Then he read aloud, from that morning’s paper, the obituary I had written announcing Mr. Givens’s death. I’d written a whole slew of obits the day before, over twenty of them, and I
didn’t remember much of it, but I did remember the part about him working for the IRS for thirty years. I’d recently had problems with the IRS, so that stuck in my mind.

As Givens listened to his obituary he looked from one to the other of us. He wasn’t as short as I’d first thought. It was an impression he created by hunching his shoulders and thrusting his neck forward like a turtle. His eyes were soft, restless. He used them like a peasant, in swift measuring glances with his face averted.

He laughed when the metro editor was through. “Well, it’s accurate,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”

“Except for one thing.” The woman was staring at me.

“I owe you an apology,” I told Givens. “It looks like somebody pulled the wool over my eyes.”

“Apology accepted!” Givens said. He rubbed his hands together as if we’d all just signed something. “You have to see the humor, Dolly. What was it Mark Twain said? ‘The reports of my death—’ ”

“So what happened?” the metro editor said to me.

“I wish I knew.”

“That’s not good enough,” the woman said.

“Dolly’s pretty upset,” Givens said.

“She has every right to be upset,” the metro editor said. “Who called in the notice?” he asked me.

“To tell the truth, I don’t remember. I suppose it was somebody from the funeral home.”

“You call them back?”

“I don’t believe I did, no.”

“Check with the family?”

“He most certainly did not,” Mrs. Givens said.

“No,” I said.

The metro editor said, “What do we do before we run an obituary?”

“Check back with the funeral home and the family.”

“But you didn’t do that.”

“No, sir. I guess I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

I made a helpless gesture with my hands and tried to appear properly stricken, but I had no answer. The truth was, I never followed those procedures. People were dying all the time. I hadn’t seen the point in asking their families if they were really dead, or calling funeral parlors back to make sure the funeral parlors had just called me. All this procedural stuff was a waste of time, I’d decided; it didn’t seem possible that anyone could amuse himself by concocting phony death notices and impersonating undertakers. Now I saw that this was foolish of me, and showed a radical failure of appreciation for the varieties of human pleasure.

But there was more to it than that. Since I was still on the bottom rung in metro, I wrote a lot of obituaries. Some days they gave me a choice between that and marriage bulletins, but most of the time obits were all I did, one after another, morning to night. After four months of this duty I was full of the consciousness of death. It soured me. It puffed me up with morbid snobbery, the feeling that I knew a secret nobody else had even begun to suspect. It made me wearily philosophical about the value of faith and passion and hard work, at a time when my life required all of these. It got me down.

I should have quit, but I didn’t want to go back to the kind of jobs I’d had before a friend’s father fixed me up with this one—waiting on tables, mostly, pulling night security in apartment buildings, anything that would leave my days free for writing. I’d lived like this for three years, and what did I have to show for it? A few stories in literary journals that nobody read, including me. I began to lose my nerve. I’d given up a lot for my writing, and it wasn’t giving anything back—not respectability, nor money, nor love. So when this job came up I took it. I hated it and did it
badly, but I meant to keep it. Someday I’d move over to the police beat. Things would get better.

I was hoping that the metro editor would take his pound of flesh and let me go, but he kept after me with questions, probably showing off for Givens and his wife, letting them see a real newshound at work. In the end I was forced to admit that I hadn’t called any other families or funeral homes that day, nor, in actual fact, for a good long time.

Now that he had his answer, the metro editor didn’t seem to know what to do with it. It seemed to be more than he’d bargained for. At first he just sat there. Then he said, “Let me get this straight. Just how long has this paper been running unconfirmed obituaries?”

“About three months,” I said. And as I made this admission I felt a smile on my lips, already there before I could fight it back or dissemble it. It was the rictus of panic, the same smile I’d given my mother when she told me my father had died. But of course the metro editor didn’t know that.

He leaned forward in his chair and gave his head a little shake, the way a horse will, and said, “Clean out your desk.” I don’t think he’d meant to fire me; he looked surprised by his own words. But he didn’t take them back.