In the grand scheme of the newspaper business, the common run of those who write obituaries comprises youngsters on an anxious path to better things, and played-out pros with more past than future. There are, of course, exceptions. For many years, the New York Times’s obituary page framed the work of Robert McG. Thomas, considered by many to be the newspaper’s finest writer. After he died, others searched vainly for his magic, Isobel Gitlin among them.
She stood out in the paper’s notorious garden of strivers-aggressive, obsessive, persistent young weeds growing with graceless gusto to the light. She’d been hired out of graduate school, where she studied Western Classics, not journalism, pretty much at her leisure, and wrote a column in the campus paper, popularly referred to as 3S but officially called “Sex and the Serious Scholar.” When she first heard of Christopher Hopman, Isobel had put four uneventful years into the Times and acquired a faint reputation for cheerful detachment.
Isobel seemed genuinely pleased with every assignment. She never badgered her editors for work on better stories. The ones she did get, while varied, were always local and rarely involved significant news. Whatever she worked on-Brooklyn sewer problems, Manhattan zoning battles, crack run amok in the Jersey suburbs-didn’t really have to be published. If it struck someone as interesting and fit the space plan for the day, it might pop up in the back somewhere, to Isobel’s delight. Most of the time she gladly researched stories for fellow reporters. Her self- regard was not tethered to the byline, and this was what set her dramatically, eerily, apart. She often wondered, if only for a moment, if it was her evident self-confidence or easygoing style that made certain editors feel uncomfortable. She was “sent to Siberia” after the firing of an aged, embittered elephant, Phil Ross, a reporter who had enjoyed decades of high status before his banishment to the bowels of the obit page. Sent there by editors not even born when he filed his first byline story in the Times, Ross, in his anger, apparently bet a colleague fifty bucks he could populate the obituary page, time after time, with feature items on the deaths of mediocre, second-rate athletes: a shortstop who, in an otherwise undistinguished career, drove in the tie run in the eighth inning of a World Series game in the 1940s; an Irish lightweight, little more than a club fighter, who fought thirty-eight times, winning thirty-two without ever boxing for the championship. A month after praising the Irishman, he snuck in a small obit for a woman he claimed was “the finest athlete” ever to attend the all-female Vassar College. Shortly after that, he got caught when, in a fit of reckless exuberance, he tried to lead one edition with an obituary for someone he dubbed “Mr. Shuffleboard.”
When permanently assigned to obits, Isobel understood that someone had succeeded in getting her out of sight, or out of hearing. That did not diminish her sense that this lateral demotion was a fine thing: a chance to do serious, worthwhile work, the work of Robert McG. Thomas.
The New York Times is the world’s newspaper of record and also a key asset in a very large media conglomerate of nearly twenty newspapers, more than a half-dozen television stations, and a couple of radio stations; it is a publicly-owned company sensitive to all the demands and requirements attendant upon high profile corporate identity. Of those at the paper who knew Isobel, some claimed that she was hired and retained only because she was Fijian-a white girl, but nevertheless a real honest-to-goodness Fijian. Her mother was a porcelain-skinned French nurse who struck that island’s fabled shores on a long-awaited vacation and never went back to Mother France. She soon met Isobel’s father, an Oxford-accented British Jew with South Pacific business interests that had moved him, some time before, to become a local citizen. Thus was Isobel born on Fiji’s soil, beneath its hopeful, sky-blue flag, soon to speak its three great tongues, plus English and Parisian French besides.
Her father named her Isabel. Her mother pronounced it Eee-so-bel, and so they spelled it Isobel. She was five foot four in stocking feet, and although unable to ignore a half-dozen unwelcome pounds, on a good day Isobel could admit that she probably looked as good as a thirty-year-old woman should. She did not confuse herself with the flat-bellied, hard-assed, high-titted beauties infesting the Times. But after a drink and a glimpse in a flattering mirror she could be confident any man worth coming across might think her attractive. Isobel’s jet-black hair was cut to the shoulders. It complemented her creamy skin and small, hazel eyes. Her nose was thin but good, her cheekbones high like her mother’s, and her chin very much English. Isobel dressed less carefully than most. She liked loose woolen suits in bright, clear colors. She wore rimless drugstore glasses for reading, which meant that she looked through them most of the time. She once heard a sympathetic colleague describe her appearance as “studious.” Isobel did not know if that was to the good.
Diversity, an ongoing enterprise and a major cultural force at the Times, is not an inordinately difficult pursuit for that institution. Droves of Latinos, African Americans, Euros, Asians, and diverse others, representing the wide world’s groups and classes, constantly besiege the paper for jobs. Yet some at the Times contend that management is never satisfied. They hold that its Human Resources barons (hardly newspaper people themselves) hunger unreasonably for the still-under-represented. Pacific Islanders were always at a premium. Thus, a female Fijian (white or not) crossing the HR horizon appeared as glory incarnate, a pearl very much above price. That Isobel suffered, on frequent occasion, from a vexing stutter added to her luster. The Times chose to classify it as a disability. After her first long interview, Isobel Gitlin e-mailed her parents that she had much to be cheerful about. The following day the Times offered her employment.
Isobel Gitlin wrote Christopher Hopman’s obituary. Although the news section of the paper carried a prominent story about the killing, her obit’s high point was the cause and manner of death: great man gunned down on golf course by high-powered rifle, no trace of physical evidence, no suspect, no hint of motive. She researched his life as a captain of industry, arts patron, and philanthropist. It was well documented and easily discovered through standard sources. Amid a generation of senior corporate executives that blossomed in the Reagan years, Hopman excelled as a driver of corporate expansion wielding leveraged debt as his weapon of choice. He didn’t run companies. He bought and sold them. His business was rerigging, repainting, rewrapping them for sale. As Isobel studied Hopman’s history she identified only one exposed mistake: his acquisition of controlling interest in a Houston-based holding company that included among its assets Knowland amp; Sons-the company most thought had precipitated the great southeastern E. coli disaster three years earlier. She highlighted that point in her notes and included it as a subordinate clause in a lengthy sentence somewhere in the middle of the piece.
“There are only two places in the paper,” an editor told her once, “where you’ll find absolute certainty: Sports and Obituaries. You make sure you get the score right.” She took that more seriously than he could have hoped.
New York
Nathan Stein was angry. He hated whatever he did not understand, and now he felt that a good deal of gobbledy-gook had been shoved in his face, possibly to make him feel small, trapped, mocked, morose.
“Agar? What the hell’s ‘agar’?” he demanded, “and this ‘sorba whatever, something MacConkey’? And what the fuck is ‘smack’? I thought it was some kind of heroin. What the hell kind of equipment is that?” He’d liked this Hindu woman, or whatever the hell she was, at first glance. She was pretty as a picture: dark and sharp featured, with little green stones in her ears and a nice yellow, silky thing hanging off her shoulder. He thought she was supposed to have a dot in the middle of her forehead, but no matter. She looked like a lovely doll and stood a good six inches shorter than him, a difference he enjoyed infrequently. She’d been standing there for half an hour before she had a chance to say a word.
“Sorbitol, Mr. Stein,” she replied in a lilting, chimelike voice. “It’s called a sorbitol-MacConkey agar. That is S-M-A-C, or smack, if you will. As noted in the report before you, the agar itself is made up of agar-agar. It’s-”
“Agar-agar?” he exploded. “Give me a break! And smack is a goddamn illegal drug. Christ, Tom!” he whined, exasperated, appealing to the man on his left. “This sounds like Abbott and fucking Costello. Agar’s on first and agar’s on second.”
Big Irish Tom Maloney shifted position wearily, it seemed to Dr. Ganga Roy, perhaps in an effort to keep his suit jacket from getting stuck beneath his ample backside. She was almost as bemused by her odd little class as she was by her remarkable classroom.
The main section of Nathan Stein’s office, where they were meeting today, was twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet deep. Its windows looked from the fifty-third floor over Manhattan north of the Battery. Stein’s battleship of a desk occupied the southeast corner of the room, and the light behind him lasted all morning long. He set it up that way purposely. The light was so bright behind him it hid his facial expression from anyone sitting in
