The End of the Book (11 page)

In months to come George would try to make light of the terrible weather that marred the wedding, how the drizzle on the tent grew to a great downpour that muffled the toasts and drowned out conversation. He couldn't recall the few audible words, only the suspended feeling of his father's speech dragging on, the tent's roof growing heavy with rain, the caterers furiously sopping the floor with towels, his new wife reaching her hand to her hair to make sure her tiara of orange blossoms had not fallen.

On their first wedding anniversary, in July 1906, George and Margaret had dinner at Henrici's on Randolph, in the Theater District. They had spent a pleasant afternoon together, walking in Lincoln Park and reading under an umbrella on North Avenue Beach.

“Why didn't we have this weather a year ago?” Margaret asked.

“If we had, there wouldn't have been a story,” George put in, and repeated something he'd overheard a farmer say at Biff Carter's Lunch Room in Winesburg: “Rain and pain are both for growth.”

“You're quite the philosopher, George Willard.” Margaret wore an off- the-shoulder evening gown of dark heliotrope and had grown her ginger hair long, some swept up and the rest a cascade of curls down her shoulders and arms.

A year into the marriage, George found himself for the most part content. He had gone into the arrangement in such a headlong manner that the morning after the wedding he had woken up disoriented, wondering how he had materialized in the bridal suite of the Morrison Hotel, his clothes a tangle on the floor and lying next to a girl he hardly knew. He was still just becoming acquainted with Margaret Willard, getting used to his name affixed to hers, and perhaps the gloss of novelty was the key to his well-being. He spent longer hours than ever at the office, steering between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Service and Performance Departments. So he enjoyed coming home, having a late dinner with his wife, and relaxing before bed with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writing about self-discipline and “the infinitude of the private man” calmed his whirling nerves. And he looked forward most of all to turning in for the night, having spent the better part of ten years sleeping alone on a straw mattress in a grubby boardinghouse. Though it was still the fashion to sleep apart in twin beds, now George lay down on a horsehair mattress between the finest cotton sheets. For months his nightly ritual was to climb into Margaret's bed and stroke her hair, touch her hip and shoulders, and more often than not she would take him into her arms. Though lately, it was true, she turned him away with greater frequency, complaining of fatigue or the summer heat or the bed built for one.
Wouldn't you rather talk?
she'd ask.
I haven't seen you but for a minute all day
.

Margaret's talk consisted mostly of society matters that didn't much interest George. She complained endlessly of her mother's active social calendar but was quick to take up the latest gossip. She knew who'd been prowling the resorts of the vice district, who'd given up children for adoption before marrying well. She knew of fortunes gained on the backs of the poor and of secret memberships in covens and cults. A year out of the university, she had no apparent prospects or plans for the road ahead. She came into the office two days a week as a creative advisor on her father's campaigns, and George endured the derisive looks of his coworkers. He wished she would find a permanent position in a theater or a gallery—she had a passion for the arts—but as much as she groused about her parents, she could not disentangle herself from their lives.

George had expected that he and his new bride would own a house by now, in Lake View or one of the areas along the Lincoln Avenue streetcar line. He pictured an unassuming greystone with deceptively grand interiors in a neighborhood of new arrivals from Ireland, Luxembourg, Nebraska, Indiana. As a child he used to make believe that the New Willard House was a palace, that he was crown prince and the guests all functionaries of court. But when he stepped into the streets of Winesburg he drifted toward odd-jobbers and millinery-shop workers, those whose best days were behind them or would never come. He felt at times that two different George Willards were battling within him: the striver after money and position and the solitary figure at the margins of the world. Perhaps this explained his restlessness, his enduring dissatisfaction: He wished to be a deserter from his own internal civil war.

Yet he had not so much as escaped his in-laws' backyard. After the honeymoon in Lake Geneva, he and Margaret moved into the carriage house behind her parents' mansion on Lake Shore Drive. It was meant to be a temporary solution, since there had been no time to find a house amidst their sped-up wedding planning. Margaret's father thought nothing of dropping in with an armful of extra work, and her mother had taken up gardening and could be heard spading the dirt and pruning the bushes outside their bedroom window. When George would say
We can't live here forever
, Margaret would agree:
You think I want my mother pawing through my bloomers?
But nothing happened. George would bring home the real estate ads, press the subject too far, and Margaret would call him a nag and walk away. Now should have been a fine time to talk of the future, but George was not going to risk upsetting his wife, who looked ripe as a peach in high summer, on this of all nights.

George ordered the Diamond Jim cut steak and Margaret the whitefish on a plank of fragrant hickory. They toasted themselves with champagne and shared a bottle of Château Margaux with dinner. After the waiter filled their glasses with the last of the bottle, Margaret asked, all at once, “So why did you marry me?”

George took a long drink of water and carved at the gristle of his steak.

“No, really, I want to know,” she said, her mood shifting from chirrupy to earnest. “It occurs to me I've never asked you.”

“Well—” George put down his silverware. “The harder question is why you married me.”

“I can answer that without any trouble. These questions aren't supposed to be difficult in the first place.”

“I thought we were having a fine time. Is this some kind of test?” George asked.

“No, just something I should have asked a long time ago. Why did you marry me?”

George picked Vienna roll crumbs off the table linen and dropped them on his plate one by one. “You shouldn't have to ask,” he said, then, digging himself in deeper, added, “I don't know what to think about couples who steal kisses in public and talk of their mutual affection with the regularity of coffee and toast. Speaking of love diminishes it. Holding it in the heart makes it grow.”

“I disagree,” Margaret said. “Do you really believe that?”

“I do.”

“Well, this isn't any other day.” Margaret tapped her fingers on her wine-glass. “If I didn't know better I'd say you were stalling for time.”

The waiter passed nearby, and George summoned him.

“Another bottle?” the waiter asked.

“Sounds like a swell idea,” George replied, but Margaret said, “That won't be necessary. You could bring us the dessert menu instead.”

While the waiter was away the couple sat in silence, surrounded by the jocular din of Henrici's patrons, most coming or going from the theater. Until two nights ago Margaret and George had tickets to see
In the Bishop's Carriage
at the Powers, but the show had been canceled without warning, apparently due to a dustup between the playwright and the theater owner over the use of “mistress” to describe a lady friend of the main character. Harry Powers refused to allow such a word to be uttered on his stage, and the playwright acceded for the first few shows, then defiantly returned to his original script. Margaret and George had run out of time to make alternate plans, in the opening act of what was turning out to be a most disappointing anniversary.

George wondered what had gotten into Margaret to ask such a question, particularly late in the evening, when George's mind was addled from too much food and drink. He saw nothing wrong with daily confessions of love, fancied himself a converser, even a romantic at times, one who knew his heart's core. So he couldn't understand what had come over him, why he hadn't answered straightaway:
You're smart and beautiful and sophisticated. You're all this small-town boy ever dreamed of, lying in his room late at night listening to the trains running off to better places. I'm lucky as loaded dice
. But his tongue had frozen, as if he didn't believe what he hadn't been able to say. Whatever the reason, it was too late to go back and fill Margaret's ears with sweet nothings; the moment had passed, perhaps unalterably.

He glanced across the table, but she was looking away. He fixed his gaze above and beyond her shoulder, and there, in the distance, talking animatedly to the bow-tied maître d', stood a woman the very image of Helen White.

The host stepped away for a moment, and the woman turned so that George could see her straight on. He felt a shiver of recognition and grew certain it was the girl, now woman, he had once loved. She had the same slim figure, in a pouter-pigeon blouse and trumpet skirt, her hair combed up and pinned in a bun. George had half a notion to dart over and greet her, but then the host returned, a stack of boxes in his arms. When the woman—Helen, or her double—turned to profile again, George began to wonder if his eyes were deceiving him, or if he were somehow conjuring her. Though striking, she was humbly dressed. It would be unlike Helen to wear the costume of the middle class, especially here, in one of the finest restaurants in Chicago. The host handed her the boxes, she bowed her head to thank him, he held the door open for her, and she vanished into the night.

The waiter returned with dessert menus. Margaret ordered the German almond cake, George the chocolate mousse and a cup of café noir. He decided to buck up and try to salvage the evening, but just as he was getting ready to apologize and make some excuse about not feeling quite himself today, she put an end to the thaw between them. “You know what,” she said, “I'll go first, if that would make it easier. I'll tell you why I married you. Maybe that will help loosen your tongue.”

George had been curious about the source of her affection ever since her startling confession at her twenty-first-birthday soiree. He'd waited for this moment, had not known how to draw the story out of her, and now here she was about to tell him. But instead of hearing every word he was thinking about the woman he'd just seen leave the restaurant. It had to be Helen. Seth Richmond had said she was living in Chicago, and wouldn't it be the ultimate sign that in this city of two million souls they would both end up here, of all places, of all occasions? He remembered sitting with her on a cold night in late fall under the grandstand at Waterworks Hill, the reverential feeling that swept over him as she nestled close and he placed his hand on her shoulder. The thought he had then returned to him now:
I have come to this lonely place and here is this other
.

But when he looked across the table it was not Helen White but Margaret Lazar, his wife of one year. And the room was so boisterous that it took a great effort of concentration for him to make out her words: “When I saw you in the street that day of the automobile accident I felt the strangest sensation,” she was saying. “It was something I'd never experienced before or since. Mind you, I'm no Florence Nightingale, but from the very first time our eyes met I wanted to take care of you.”

“But you were so young,” George said, slipping out of his reverie.

“I know,” Margaret continued. “But in that moment I swear I saw the future.” She spoke of the years that followed, how she almost never saw him but would tune in at the dinner table whenever her father mentioned the tall young man from Ohio and his talent for business, his innate understanding of people's moods and needs. Margaret would see him each summer when she worked part-time for the agency, and every year George's workspace marked his progress, from cubby to desk to interior office to window office with a sweeping view. “Growing up the way I did,” she said, “I had never met a self-made man who was anywhere close to my age. I remember pointing you out to friends from school and their saying, ‘Now that's a man, all right. The rest of your admirers have never had to lift a finger. Boys, Margaret, the whole lot of them.' I agreed, but I didn't tell my friends that I saw something of the boy in you, as well. The openness, the sensitivity, the part of you—I don't know how to describe it or where it comes from—that needs caring for. It's that combination, man and boy, that brought me to this place.”

George picked up his dessert fork, then set it back down.

“There—” Margaret exclaimed, raising her empty glass. “Happy Anniversary.”

“I'm speechless,” George said, though he knew full well that his turn had come.

Dhara was not usually jealous. At work or at parties, she didn't appear threatened by other women. Only people I knew from long ago caused her to act this way. It was as if our lives began when we met and we were only allowed to live for the future. Our building looked straight out of the Jetsons; we'd furnished our apartment with austere modern sofas and chairs. Dhara knew the names of the designers and how to distinguish the Neo from the Portola Collection, an Arco floor lamp from an Orbit sconce. We worked for the company that had contributed more than any other to the death of print, the end of the book. I wondered if Dhara secretly hoped that I'd give up my dream of writing a novel, because storytelling was an act of memory. She never talked about her own childhood, and her attention drifted when I talked about mine. Besides two or three visits home each year to Dayton, she rarely brought up her family. What I knew about them had come not from her but from listening at the table over the Christmas holiday or during the annual festival of Diwali.