The End of the Book (24 page)

We stayed long enough for Lucy to introduce herself to the third reader. She complimented the story, gave her a business card, said feel free to send work, but on our way to the Damen El stop she scolded herself for “falling all over the poor woman.” “I don't usually drink this much,” she said, looping her arm around mine. “And I shouldn't be operating these heels under the influence of alcohol.” Since we'd been sitting down, I hadn't noticed the three-inch pumps, and now was feeling short walking next to her. We made our way up Damen, and she didn't let go of my arm until we put our fare cards into the turnstiles. We sat close, shoulder to shoulder, our hands almost touching, as the train rattled and pitched back toward the Loop, and I wondered what would happen when we got to Clark, the first transfer station to the Brown line: Would I walk Lucy back to Armitage and her apartment? Or would I stay where I was, continuing on to the next stop: State, Harbor City?

The Bankers' Panic began on October 17, 1907, when two dubious financiers failed to corner the copper market, and the institutions that lent money to the scheme, most of them already teetering from the recession, hurtled toward insolvency. Within a week one of the nation's largest trust companies collapsed and regional branches around the country withdrew their deposits from New York City banks. Amidst the rumors of bad loans and uncertain of the safety of their money, thousands of people poured into local banks to take out all their funds, sending Wall Street into paralysis and the nation to the brink of catastrophe.

The bank runs began in cities—from his office window on October 21, George could see the line at First National of Chicago stretch four full blocks—before spreading to suburbs and towns. Tom Willard stood outside Helen's father's bank for nearly an hour and withdrew his meager savings to stash in a basement safe. In the last week of October, the great Midas himself, J. P. Morgan, who had bailed out the U.S. Treasury during the Panic of 1893, asked Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou to transfer tons of gold, silver, and paper money into Morgan's private pool to stem the crisis. He gathered the richest bankers and trust officers in New York to meet at his home library, then locked the doors and said they were going nowhere until they agreed to make emergency loans to faltering banks. Hours later, an agreement was reached, and the crisis was soon averted.

Still, real output would decline the next year by 11 percent, the recession would continue for another four years, and soon thereafter, following a great fight, Congress would pass the Federal Reserve Act, creating a Central Bank to regulate institutions and maintain stability. For decades the Bankers' Panic of 1907 would serve as a warning in recessionary times, until less than a year beyond its hundredth anniversary, at the end of another age of wild speculation, when it would be spoken of again as a cautionary tale that too many had ignored.

Though most of the country survived the crisis in 1907, a number of towns, Winesburg among them, were not so lucky. Bled of its assets, Helen's father's bank would go into receivership in the winter of 1908, and Banker White would retire and put his mansion on Buckeye Street up for sale. The house would stay on the market for two years, eventually selling to an undertaker at a fraction of its former value. Though her parents offered to continue to pay for her schooling, Helen knew they were doing so out of pride. They had lost most of their savings, and she couldn't conscience depleting their accounts any further. She finished her spring classes at the University of Chicago, still two years shy of her graduate degree, and for the first time in her life faced uncertainty.

In mid-April 1908, George received a Western Union telegram from his father:
Lost the hotel. At a loss for what to do
.

George cabled back right away:
Come to Chicago. Think things over
.

Tom Willard replied:
Look for me 1 June. Must settle affairs
.

A Cleveland bank was soon to take over the New Willard House, and George's father had limited time to vacate the premises. With his name on the deed of the town's most visibly shuttered property, his liquid assets listed at fifty-three dollars, he had no choice but to declare personal bankruptcy.

Perhaps in his delirium he forgot the date when he'd said he would be arriving. Perhaps the bank asked for his keys sooner than he had planned. Either way, he neglected to inform George and left Winesburg on May 16, two weeks early—dyed his hair and mustache, shrugged into his summer suit, pinned a half-blown rose to his lapel, strode down the ramp to the train station, and greeted the conductor who'd been working this same “easy run” for as long as anyone could remember:

Beautiful morning, eh?

Going to see your son?

That's right. He's a big bug, that boy. One of the top admen in the city
.

You tell him hello for me
.

And that's just what he did when George opened the door to find his father, gripsack in hand.

“The conductor, Mr. Little, sends his regards,” he said, then stepped into the house looking up and down. “Well I'll be damned. You're doing all right. Just fine, I'd say.”

He was too distracted to notice Margaret and her parents having tea in the parlor. “You remember the Lazars,” George said.

“From the wedding. Of course.” Tom took off his straw hat and shook hands with everyone.

“What a surprise!” Margaret declared. “We weren't expecting you.”

Tom removed a handkerchief from his suit pocket and mopped his brow. “You'll have to excuse me. I'm just off the train. What a free-for-all the Loop has gotten to be!”

“Just in for the weekend?” Harriet asked. She'd been caustic all afternoon, since her husband had convinced the family to take a drive along South Park Boulevard in his new Richmond touring car. Harriet couldn't stand his automobile hobby, found the entire enterprise vulgar. George, on the other hand, preferred these occasional jaunts to the alternative: dinner or the kinds of social gatherings his in-laws might otherwise demand of him and Margaret. At least the loud motor and city traffic could be counted on for squelching conversation.

Tom Willard set down his gripsack. “Can't say for certain how long I'll be.”

“You seem to be traveling light,” Harriet noted.

Tom returned his hat to his head. “I had a trunk sent around. Should be here by evening.”

“A trunk!” Margaret exclaimed.

“Just a wardrobe trunk. Could have managed it myself, but I'm saving my back.”

Margaret turned to her husband, and her eyes flashed like semaphores. George addressed Tom Willard: “In the cable you said June 1.”

“Did I? Impossible.”

“Shall I show it to you?” George felt a momentary relief that he had physical proof of the misunderstanding, until Margaret interrupted: “The point is you never bothered to tell
me
.”

Lazar touched his wife's wrist. “Perhaps we should be leaving,” he said and Harriet all but slapped his hand away. “We just sat down for tea. It's early yet.” By which she meant she had no intention of missing any marital fireworks.

“I didn't mean to cause trouble,” Tom began, and George said, “Margaret, sweetheart, I'd been planning to tell you, but each time it crossed my mind you were over at Hull House.”

The freckles along her collarbone were plunged in crimson. “So this is my fault?”

“You've been busy. That's all.”

“Too busy to hear that your father is moving in?”

“He's not moving in. Tell her—”

Tom hesitated. “What do you want me to say?”

“You know, about the business—”

Harriet couldn't resist stirring the pot. “We understand you're a hotelier. I hear the slump has been especially trying in the provinces. How
are
you holding up?”

Tom twisted the ends of his mustache. “You can't believe what you read in the papers. But George will tell you that I've talked for a good many years about getting out of innkeeping—and Tom Willard isn't one to pass up an opportunity.”

Harriet wore a falsely ingenuous look. “An opportunity?”

“It's still in the planning stages,” Tom said. “But we're on to a new chapter—you can bank on that.”

George stood in curious awe of his father's self-denial. He had steered the family business, the hotel he'd inherited from George's mother, over every imaginable rock and shoal, and had finally run it aground. And here he was unwilling to own up to his failure. He could be lying in his casket, and he'd still be muttering,
I'm doing okay. Just fine. You've not heard the last from Tom Willard
.

Indeed, he would continue to make his presence felt for longer than anyone would have liked. He took the top-floor room.
Which we were saving for the baby
, Margaret told George. This became a running joke between them—
Have you checked the baby's room? Make sure the baby's room is in order
—until the joke felt too cruel and a little too true. That spring Tom got up each forenoon and dressed as if going to work. He had his bowl of farina and coffee, and made George late with his talk. He kept pressing his son to help him make contacts, but he wouldn't say what line of business he wanted to pursue. George suggested hospitality, but his father demurred.

Finally, toward the end of June, George gave in and arranged a private meeting between his father and his father-in-law. He wished he had demanded to attend, or rather that he had not agreed to the meeting in the first place, because Tom Willard boldly asked Lazar for a sizable campaign contribution. His great and secret plan was to make a late entry in the race for U.S. Congress, Sandusky County.
You could be looking at the future governor of Ohio
, he'd been known to say—and to think that
he
used to be the one telling George to
Wake up
. Here was a man with no income, no fixed address, living out of a wardrobe trunk hundreds of miles from town, his name stenciled on the walls of Winesburg's newly derelict hotel. Furthermore, Lazar was a Republican, and would never have dreamed of supporting a Democratic candidate, family ties be damned.

And so Tom Willard abandoned his political plans as cavalierly as he had hatched them. He spent the summer rattling around the house, reading aloud from newspapers and stalking his next delusion. At first George and Margaret indulged him and stayed at the kitchen table while he beat his gums over a “promising” new investment scheme. Tom's fifty-three dollars disappeared, and he asked his son for a “loan” to tide him over; this became a ritual. George and Margaret learned to speak in code to avoid saying anything that might set Tom off on a new caprice, and before long they found themselves in flight from their own home.

Margaret spent time at the stereopticon, with its pictures from the Louvre, and revisited the idea of moving to Paris for the summer. George had to admit, given recent developments, that the plan had appeal. But after a week or two Hull House reclaimed Margaret's attention, and she dismissed the idea of travel as “frivolous.” She continued her work with the lending library and put increasing amounts of her own funds toward the purchase of art reproductions for local schools; she served as stage manager on Bronson Howard's
Old Love Letters
and John Galsworthy's
The Silver Box
. And Stefan recruited her into the Toynbee Club and had her awarded a new title: Director of Philanthropy.

For the first time in years, George lingered at the office at the end of the workday, but found his prospects unchanged. He had read through his old notepads, one after the next, but the entire lot of them disappointed him. Mostly he'd jotted down the daily comings and goings of Winesburg's citizens:
A. P. Wringlet received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road
. He had recorded curious quotes such as this, from the Standard Oil agent Joe Welling:
The world is on fire
. But he had forgotten the context of Joe's pronouncement, and his spirits sank upon realizing that the notepads contained few seeds for the books George hoped to write. He returned to the box of keepsakes he had stashed in his closet and unearthed a story he had begun as a teenager, a love story he'd once told Seth Richmond about. He had asked Seth to inform Helen White that George was in love with her, for he wanted to know how love felt in order to write a story about it. But he had gone no further than a few pages of outline notes and hackneyed lines. And now as summer gave way to fall he got in his mind that he ought to call around to Helen to see how she was managing.

They hadn't run into each other since the end of spring term. Helen had gone home to Winesburg for the summer to help her parents pack the family estate and prepare it for the market. She wrote half a dozen times, more than she had back in college, and George noted that she sent the letters not to his house but to his office. Was she trying to avoid raising Margaret's suspicions? Was she being thoughtful or furtive? Or was he reading too much into her choice of postal address? She said she'd planned to stay only a week or two in Winesburg, but coming home opened her eyes in ways she hadn't anticipated. She was surprised to find her parents, her mother especially, chastened by the blow fate had landed. They offered once again to pay for her degree, but seeing the toll the new century had taken on her neighbors, so many of them out of work and looking hollow on their porches, only made her more determined to do something serious with her life.

She spent her days going through old chests and closets and visiting friends she hadn't seen more than once or twice in a decade, schoolmates who had children, as many as three or four by now.
We're getting old, George
, she wrote. She took long walks through town and out between the berry fields along Trunion Pike.
I went up Waterworks Hill on a perfect afternoon to visit the fairgrounds, and I remembered going there with you one evening to flee an especially tiresome suitor that my mother had arranged. Do you recollect how we ran down that hill, got in a tangle and you tumbled and fell and picked yourself up? We were laughing and then everything seemed so quiet and still as we walked toward the valley and the lights of town
.