The End of the Book (20 page)

That's when my father said, “I knew it.” I wasn't sure what he meant: He knew I wanted to be a writer? Or he knew I didn't have the guts? It wasn't clear, and I wouldn't find out, not then or ever, because he proceeded to tell a story I'd heard before but never at such length, about how Sherwood Anderson, at age thirty-six, stressed by debt and a yearning to be free, to be a writer, fell into a fuguelike state and left his wife, children, and job in Elyria, Ohio, literally walked out the door of his office one November morning and four days later turned up at a drugstore in Cleveland, unshaven, still in his business suit, pants covered to the knees with mud. He didn't know his name or where he was, and wouldn't begin to recover his faculties until days later in a hospital ward, his wife at his bedside. Within two months he had moved alone to Chicago, picked up copywriting work to pay the bills, grown his hair long, and fallen in with an artistic crowd on the forefront of what would become the city's greatest literary moment.

“I'm not telling you to leave your wife,” my father said. “That never worked out too well for me. Nor am I pushing the benefits of a nervous breakdown. But an artistic temperament repressed can be a withering thing.”

And then he was on to another story, which I remembered as the most poignant instance of dramatic irony in all of
Winesburg, Ohio
. It occurs in the tale “Death,” about the demise of George Willard's mother. In her youth, Elizabeth had artistic desires, and was even given a chance to explore them when her father, at the end of his life, gave her eight hundred dollars, a significant sum in the 1870s. “It is to make up to you for my failure as a father,” he said. “Some time it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.”

But instead of going to the city, where she dreamed of becoming an actress, Elizabeth closed the door forever, and would pass the rest of her short life trapped in Winesburg. Her father had been the proprietor of the town's hotel, and against his wishes she married the desk clerk Tom Willard “because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the determination to marry came to her.” Her father had made her promise never to tell Tom about the money—and this wish, at least, she fulfilled. Not long after her wedding she stashed the eight hundred dollars in a tin box and sealed it behind the plaster walls of her room. She had always intended to give the money to George so that he could embark, in some big city, on the artist's life that she had denied herself. But she had grown tired and gravely ill, and in her last six days she couldn't move from her bed or speak, couldn't tell her son about his secret inheritance. My father quoted from the story: “She struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard to his future, and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for years.”

My father sat down on the camelback sofa, as if recounting the tale had exhausted him. “George might have gone to Chicago with a leg up to start the work he was meant to do. But no such luck. All he'd have had in his billfold were his last paychecks from the
Winesburg Eagle
. He would've had no choice but to join the rat race.”

“And those eight hundred dollars just sat in the walls, like buried treasure.”

“No one would have known to look. The secret would have died with Elizabeth,” he said. “Maybe years later the hotel would have been razed, the mangled tin box hauled off and buried in the rubble of the county landfill.”

All this talk of mortality made me realize I might not have a better chance to ask about my father's heart. “Last time I was in your bathroom I couldn't help noticing all the new canisters of pills,” I began. “I know you hate to talk about this, but are you sure everything's okay with your heart?”

My father's expression soured. “Did I invite you to look into my cabinets?”

“The pills were out in the open, prescriptions from your last appointment.”

“So you were reading the labels?”

“I was washing my hands, and they caught my eye. They looked more like the kind of collection a heart failure patient might take.” There. I'd said it.

“Are you an amateur cardiologist? Moonlighting on the side? Are you a nurse? Well, you're not who I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of Ursula Andress.”

“No, I'm your son,” I said. “Pardon me for giving a damn.”

“Look, I can take care of myself. I made it this far.” He got up and mixed a Diet Rite and rum.

I knew I'd been foolish to think I could get a straight answer. I wanted a letter—A, B, C, or D—but all he gave me were the usual one-liners. For a while there, we were having a real conversation. But up came the old shield, out the old arrows.

“I should be getting back to the office,” I said.

“What's today's date?” he asked.

I told him it was the thirtieth of April.

“Just a minute,” he said, and began fumbling in his desk. Wing jumped up and expected a scratch. Ignoring the cat, my father pulled an envelope full of money from the drawer. “It's a day early, but here.” He handed me May's rent. “I might not see you tomorrow, so you may as well take this now.”

The Willards arrived at the main entrance of Hull House in Lazar's apple-green Pierce-Arrow, the most reliable winter car in his collection. George was embarrassed when Virgil opened the side door and gave Margaret his arm to help her down to the curb. Children and their laborer parents were sliding about the icy sidewalks, and no one for miles was formally attired. George had insisted that Margaret's Merry Widow hat, well over a foot wide, with a fountain of feathers, was too much for the settlement—“You'll be lucky to fit in the door” —but Margaret had said, “The theater's the theater. And really, George, are
you
one to tell
me
what's fashionable?”

Within the house, no one seemed to notice. Both drawing rooms were in use for evening classes. A chorus of singers could be heard from the top floor, and below it the scamper of feet. The greeter was so busy shepherding children from club to lesson to meal that she only had time to point her finger and say, “Next building over,” when George asked where the auditorium was.

At the box office, out of his wife's earshot, he inquired after Helen, and the ticket-seller said she was working backstage that night. George had not attended much theater, but
Odysseus in Chicago
had a powerful effect on him. The set was spare, the cast made up entirely of Greek Americans from the surrounding neighborhood, men and women with day jobs as factory workers and deliverymen, teachers and clerks, yet their inexperience only intensified the performances. Though some of the actors spoke with heavy accents, George felt as if he were watching the last ten years of his life play out on stage. The immigrants delivered their lines with a longing that reminded him of his own journey, his own distance from home and desire to get back to that place—not Winesburg so much as a feeling he had there, about the people, their hopes and defeats. Tears pooled in his eyes as he watched Odysseus pine for Penelope from the snares of Calypso, and reunite at long last with his true love.

After the play George found Helen talking to the German Union baker.

“You're back!” she exclaimed.

George stepped aside to make way for the Merry Widow hat. “This is my wife, Margaret,” he said. “And this is Helen White, from home.”

“Ah.” Margaret reached out her gloved hand, and with practiced nonchalance asked, “How do you know each other?”

“Why, everyone knew your husband,” Helen replied. “He was our paper's star reporter.”

“Only reporter, more or less,” George put in.

“He's being modest,” Helen said.

George couldn't be sure of its source, but a tension hummed in the atmosphere. Did Margaret know? Was she jealous? He'd never seen her territorial side, never been in a setting where the tables were turned. Helen was the more beautiful woman, and carried herself with an ease and discretion that the younger Margaret perhaps recognized she couldn't match. And who was this baker, Stefan Wirtz, that Helen was introducing? A suitor? A lover? He gave nothing away, in his derby hat with a dusting of flour on the brim, his four-in-hand tie sitting slaunchwise about his wrestler's neck.

Everyone spoke all at once, praising the play in a flurry of words, before Helen suggested they sit down for coffee. “Stefan can arrange a discount,” she said in a jocular way. But Margaret seemed to take her seriously: “We always pay full price.”

In the spacious coffeehouse, with its stained rafters, diamond windows, and rows of blue china mugs, they got coffees and shining rolls Stefan himself had baked that morning. They took a table by the large, crackling fireplace, and the conversation cast about, from
Odysseus in Chicago
to the treacherous winter to the daily operations at Hull House and its myriad classes, taught by trained volunteers at fifty cents a course, including Grammar, Literature, History, Political Economy, Parliamentary Law, Latin and a range of languages, Physics, Chemistry, Geometry, Trigonometry, Music, Dance, Painting, Clay Modeling, Sewing, and the Domestic Sciences.

In its eighteen years, Hull House had grown to thirteen buildings that took up a whole city block. There were weekly classes, constant lectures, concerts, recitals, and plays, a daily kindergarten, a free day-nursery, gymnastics and a variety of athletics to keep restless children off the streets. And the coffeehouse, too, convivial and filled to capacity every evening, kept the parents away from the bars in a city well known to have one saloon for every sixty people.

Margaret seemed to have lowered her guard, though she was directing most of her questions at Stefan. In his mild accent, he enumerated the clubs on the Hull House block—the Women's Club, the Men's Club, the Newlyweds' Club, too many children's clubs to recall, and the smaller groups for gardening, stargazing, mandolin, fencing, and countless other interests.

Helen began to say, “I'm not sure where you stand politically—” when Margaret bristled, as if accused: “I'm a Square-Deal Progressive. Pro-settlement. Anti-trust. I think Roosevelt is doing a swell job.”

“I only meant to mention that some of our clubs do have a mission about them,” Helen said. “I have friends in the Eight-Hour Club, a group of women in local factories who push their fellow workers to hold fast to the eight-hour law. And Stefan is a member of the Arthur Toynbee Club. They discuss economics and social reform.”

“We just met last night.” Stefan slurped his coffee and set the cup down. “Our treasurer is a refugee from San Francisco. Lost everything in the earthquake last year. He warned us about the stock market—not that a baker has any bread to begin with—but he says a catastrophe is coming, sooner than we know.”

“What does your father think?” George asked Helen, referring to Banker White.

“He's been worried since the nineties about easy credit, and thinks the speculators are paving the road to ruin.”

“That's right,” Stefan agreed. “This fellow from San Francisco says we haven't felt the last of the tremors. That city's in ashes. But the whole country could have another thing coming now that foreign insurers have paid the claims and their lenders have raised rates on American banks.”

“Well, my father's agency is driving a roaring trade,” Margaret put in. “Last year was their best yet.”

“What business is your father in?” Helen asked.

“Advertising. George is his top deputy.”

“I don't know about that,” George said. “But I guess I'm doing okay.”

“He's doing more than okay.” Margaret tilted back her head, sending the feathers on her hat aquiver. She had taken off her gloves and tented her arms so that her jewelry was on display. The engagement ring was her least expensive piece, something George had noticed at parties and outings but couldn't bring himself to note. She wore her grandmother's diamond bracelet, her mother's opal and rose diamond ring, and a double-strand necklace of cultured pearl. In the auditorium and coffeehouse she looked like the queen consort come to give alms to the poor.

“Yes, I work for my father-in-law,” George said, and felt compelled to add, “I've been with the agency going on ten years. I was well established by the time Margaret and I got married.”

“You shouldn't have to explain,” Margaret declared, and an awkward silence followed.

When the conversation turned back to the goings-on at Hull House, George grew distracted and relived his fear that no one would respect him now that he had married rich. He wondered if Helen thought he was a sycophant, or a kept man. He hadn't told her who his boss was when he'd had a chance, and now she might not believe him if he tried to explain.

But he knew he couldn't say a word, not here, not in front of his wife and the gap-toothed baker, who issued warnings about the money supply like some folksy market guru. Did he really think he was impressing Helen, living hand to mouth while vaporing on as if he had the ear of tycoons?

Back in the Pierce-Arrow on the drive home, George couldn't help confronting Margaret. He didn't care if Virgil heard every word and reported back to the Lazars. “Did you have to mention that I work for your father?”

“I didn't think it was a source of shame, George. One should be grateful.”

“But bringing up the business had no bearing on the conversation.”

“The German was talking bunkum and I had a clear example why he was wrong,” she said. “The agency is booming, and as Father says: Busy advertiser, bustling economy.”

“They might have thought you were trying to boast, to put them in their place.”

“I was doing no such thing.”

“The point is you made me look like a sponger.”

“You're a self-made man,” Margaret said. “That's one of the reasons I married you.”