The End of the Book (13 page)

“I survived the first purge,” Lucy said. “But six months later we learned that our whiz-kid financier was seven billion dollars in debt thanks to his spending spree, and now, with the world economy going belly-up, he was desperate to cut his losses. Soon after that a company spokesman none of us had met announced a freeze on acquisitions. The next day my boss quit in protest, and on December 1, known around the publishing world as Black Monday, nearly half of our depleted staff was let go.”

“Including you—”

“I was given until the end of the week to pack up my office.”

“That's brutal.”

“Surely it's worse at GM or Alcoa or in the one-company towns all over the country where there's no hope unless you pick up and move. I'm just lucky to have a safety net.”

We never used to talk about Lucy's safety net. Her father was a top executive at the pharmaceutical megacorp Bowen & Leary. She grew up in a mansion on Meridian Street, three houses down from the governor of Indiana, and though she had always tried to hide her privilege, her safety net was threaded with twenty-four-carat gold. I never liked going to her parents' house and sitting through their noisy dinners where her mother, Yvonne, threw table scraps to their Vizslas while complaining in her husky voice about the provincial Midwest. She was brought up in Richmond, Virginia, which couldn't have been much different, but she assumed a queenly air and sat on more advisory boards than anyone in the city.

I never thought she liked me, for all the typical reasons—I was beneath her daughter, had no great plans; I was taciturn and didn't kiss the ring. Yvonne was fascinated by my mother, though—a relatively young woman who had never remarried and was raising me alone. She would ask prying questions about my mother's personal life—
Does she date? Is she still in touch with your father?
—in a falsely intimate way. Even if I had trusted Yvonne I had no news to share. My mother had found a lump in her breast not long after we moved to Indianapolis; she'd been ill off and on ever since, and didn't have the energy to go looking for companionship. She put all she had into running the school library and covering up signs that something might be wrong. She forbade me to tell friends she was sick; only her sister, Kathleen, knew. Even Kathleen's kids, my younger cousins, who lived a couple miles north of the little rambler we shared off the Monon Trail, were in the dark.

I figured that Lucy's mother persisted because she sensed, somehow, that all was not well, and she wanted me to surrender what little I had: a secret. The Youngbloods had everything: private school, a live-in maid, a summer house in Lake Geneva, four kids, boy-girl-boy-girl; they were the flawlessly orthodontured family you find in purchased picture frames. I resented them, even Lucy, who volunteered at soup kitchens, made her own money at the Broad Ripple Beanery where we first met, wore thrift-store clothes, and drove an old Honda festooned with progressive bumper stickers. The only time she ever talked about money was on the rare occasion when I would bring it up.

My mother died toward the end of my junior year, and I moved in with my aunt. That fall I applied to the best school I could afford: Indiana University, where my father had once taught but left under unpleasant circumstances. When I got my acceptance and asked Kathleen where I should go to take out loans, she said I wouldn't need much, because Lucy had given her a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to go toward my college fund. Kathleen had broken her promise not to tell me, and since Lucy had been covert about the money I didn't mention it until years later when we were having one of our long-distance arguments. She was complaining that I never visited her in Boston; I said I couldn't afford the ticket, and as always she offered to pay my way. But we'd begun to grow apart; our calls and visits had become less frequent. It was late on a Saturday night, and I'd had too many beers at a party where everyone else was coupling up. So I asked her about that twenty-five thousand, and she said she'd meant to tell me but didn't want to make a big deal of it. I explained that my mother had life insurance; I was eligible for loans; I already worked thirty hours a week; I wasn't a charity case. But Lucy knew from my aunt that the policy didn't yield much, that my father couldn't be counted on, and that my aunt and uncle had limited income and their own kids to worry about.

Lucy said she had raised the money along with a bunch of friends. Everyone pitched in what they could. I pressed her for the names and amounts of those who contributed and said the least I could do was write them thank-you notes, even years after the fact. Lucy said I was missing the point. The donations were anonymous, given out of sympathy—just be grateful and forget it. But I had to know where the money had come from, and when Lucy refused to say, we fought through the night and for weeks afterwards. I called our mutual friends, and they said they'd given what they could, but certainly not thousands. That summer before her senior year at Harvard, Lucy studied abroad in Venice. I received a few postcards but never replied, and that August we met at the old coffee shop, and she asked if I thought we should take some time off. I didn't bring up the college fund again, and instead put the blame on the universal fall guy, geographical distance, even though we'd made it three years and had just one to go.

Maybe we can try again later
, she'd said.

If only we lived in the same city
…. My voice had trailed off.

Now, twelve years later, here we were.

I wondered if she was thinking:
This is my old boyfriend, who I put through college
. I still believed that nearly all that money had come from her, that she had drawn it from the small fortune she'd be coming into right about now, one of those trust funds that kick in after age thirty. I didn't know what to think about Lucy's gesture: Was it genuine, done out of compassion, as she'd claimed? Or was I the face on the
Save the Orphans
box that she could stuff full of bills to ease her rich girl's guilt? I used to believe it was an act of control, a way to ensure that I'd be forever in her debt—yet years had gone by; if a job hadn't come up in Chicago, perhaps we never would have seen each other again.

“Enough about my woes,” she said now. “What have you been up to?”

I didn't want to talk about my job, my role as termite in the house of the printed word, so I asked about her new position at the University of Chicago Press. She said it was small and she'd have more autonomy, and though she'd mostly be doing academic titles she did convince the editorial board to start a new fiction series. “How's your writing coming along?” she asked.

“My writing?”

“I have a confession,” she put in. “Sometimes when I read the industry circulars about forthcoming books I look for your name. Did I miss something?”

I sipped the sugar at the bottom of my empty coffee cup. “I'm still working on it.”

“You better be. You've got talent, Adam. I've seen my share of manuscripts, and I can tell within the first page, the first paragraph even. You know how to see beyond the surface of things. Remember the open-mic night we started at the Beanery and how I pushed you to share your stuff and you were so shy and nervous you practically read in a whisper? But everyone was riveted.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“I still have a piece you wrote called ‘The Oldest Man in the World.' Remember that one?”

I did, but I never thought much of it. The story was based on a walk I used to take through the cemetery near our house in Bloomington. I'd cut through the graveyard every day on the way home from elementary school with a girl from the neighborhood named Talia Kuplinski. She was my first crush, and to impress her I'd make up stories about the people buried there, particularly the ones who died young or lived to a very old age. One day we came across a mossy stone with the names of a husband and wife: Nathaniel and Leonore Rose. They'd both been born in 1845, and though the year of Leonore's death, 1903, was listed, there was no year of death after the dash under Nathaniel's name. I did the calculation: it was 1985, so Nathaniel Rose would have been 140 years old if, as the tombstone showed, he were still alive. In the story I imagined that after his wife died, Nathaniel moved to Chicago to try to escape the memories. He eventually remarried but kept a secret stash of pictures and mementos of Leonore, who was, as my father would say, his
twin flame
. He couldn't bear to remove his name from her tombstone, so he never told his second wife that a plot had been reserved for him a few hours away in another state. When he died she had him buried in a cemetery on the North Side under a stone with the dates 1845–1932. She eventually joined him there, not knowing he had left a symbol etched in stone in Bloomington, Indiana, that his love for Leonore would go on forever.

“It was a maudlin story,” I said. “I used to specialize in those.”

“Well, I thought it was sweet, the way the old man couldn't let go and even in death was living a kind of double life. What are you working on now?” Lucy asked. “Imagine that you're writing a query letter. What would it say?”

“I've never been good at that kind of thing.”

“How about the title at least?”

“Okay, that I can do,” I began, but the name of my graduate thesis,
A Brief History of the Fool
, the only “book” I'd written, was not what came to mind. “It's called
The Book of the Grotesque
,” I said.

“A Gothic novel? I didn't know that was your thing.”

I explained Sherwood Anderson's idea of the grotesque and reminded her about my father's lifelong work. “He's still plugging away at that second volume. Forty years in the making, and you know he's never going to finish.” I asked when she last picked up
Winesburg, Ohio
, and she said not since high school when we read it together one summer. “It's a surprisingly steamy book. Those small-town dreamers just bursting at the seams. Anyway, at the end of
Winesburg
, if you remember, George Willard boards a train for Chicago in the hope of becoming a writer. My novel picks up where Anderson left off.”

“I'd love to read it,” Lucy said.

“I should have a draft by the end of summer.”

Later that afternoon, headed north on Lake Shore Drive for an appointment at the Lakeside library, I thought of my father at his desk, scribbling his endless notes about George Willard in Chicago, and tried to imagine how his missing manuscript, his
Book of the Grotesque
, might unfold.

On the afternoon following the anniversary dinner, George tried to clear his head of the specter of Helen White, but it begirded him like the thick summer heat, and instead of heading home after work he took the grip to the Theater District and found the host at Henrici's. The slight, fastidious man wore the same bow tie and waistcoat from the night before, and seemed in a hurry, though no other patrons appeared to be waiting for him.

“I have an odd question,” George began. “My wife and I came in for dinner last night, and I saw you speaking with someone who might be an old acquaintance of mine. Do you remember handing some boxes to a woman fairly late in the evening, around ten o'clock?”

“And what was the name on your reservation?”

“Willard,” George said. “You seated us at that table over there.”

“Yes, of course. I recognized your wife. Her father has dined with us on several occasions.”

“I work for him.”

“Right,” the host said, as if he already knew.

George cautioned himself not to share more information than necessary. This fellow had a high-hatted manner and seemed just the kind of gatekeeper who would continue to ask questions if given the opportunity.

“Those boxes….”

“Bread for the poor. We give all the rolls we don't use to Hull House. They have a bakery over there, but can't keep up with demand.”

“And the young woman—do you happen to know her name?” George asked.

“She told me once, but I've forgotten.”

“Was it Helen? Helen White?”

“There's always a chance, but I doubt it. Part of my job is to recollect names, and that one's ringing no bells.”

George thanked him and caught the grip at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, and all the way home he recounted this exchange. He knew Lazar had been to Henrici's on a few occasions, but was surprised that the host could pick Margaret out of a crowd. It was also curious that he couldn't name this other woman who came into the restaurant perhaps every day. Was he so wonder-struck by automobiles and finery that charity workers slipped beneath his notice? Or was he withholding the mystery woman's name, for some reason? He did seem the dissembling sort, and George wondered for a moment if he would soon be reading in the society pages that the son-in-law of the city's top adman was looking to rekindle an old flame.

Impossible. Even if it was Helen, the host couldn't recall her name, so how would he know the first thing about her? And why all this hand-wringing? George had done nothing wrong, had not so much as entertained a wayward desire. He thought he'd seen a friend from his hometown and it was only natural that he'd want to say hello.

By the time he stepped onto the sidewalk at Lake Shore Drive he had convinced himself that the woman at the restaurant was not Helen White, after all. In a rare moment of marital tension he'd seen a chimera in a perfect stranger, an employee of Jane Addams's Hull House. That night he recited to Margaret an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, “The Best Thing in the World,” which the speaker defines as
Love, when, so, you're loved again
, and by month's end George had read nearly all of the sonnets aloud.

He had struggled when Margaret asked his reasons for marrying her, but in the pressure of the moment he recalled that she'd been a member of the Browning Society at the university. In his first months in the city, when he was hoping to become a writer, he had made himself memorize a famous poem every few days, and among those that he had learned by heart was Browning's Sonnet 43. So when it came time to tell his wife why he had married her, he let the verse do much of the talking:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. / I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace…. I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life! / and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death
.