The End of the Book (27 page)

Remember Elizabeth Willard's tin box, the one she plastered into the walls of her hotel/prison, the inheritance she meant for her son but was too far gone to bequeath? That story, “Death,” had always haunted me, until I realized that I could rewrite the ending
.

In the same desk drawer with my address book you will find three keys on a Chicago Cubs ring. One is to my storage locker in Little Italy, where I still have a few belongings of limited value. One is to my storage cage in this building, where I have put boxes of research material, including my abandoned manuscript for Volume Two. And the third key is to a small safe hidden under blankets and shoes in my bedroom closet. You should look there, and recall how “Some time it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.”

Farewell
.

      
Love
,

      
Dad

P.S. Please take good care of Wing
.

I read the letter twice and was reading it a third time when a knock came on the door. It was Dhara.

“You've been crying.” She helped me out of the chair. We held each other on the camelback sofa, and after a while, I handed her the letter. She read it and returned it to me.

Her eyes welled with tears. “How do you think he did it?”

“Liquor and pills,” I said.

“Do you want to make sure?” she asked. “We can still order an autopsy.”

“You remember what the coroner said: They're expensive.”

“I'll pay for it,” Dhara offered.

“He wouldn't want someone cutting him up, and the letter is pretty clear. He just doesn't say exactly how. He looked good. That's the miracle of it.”

“Is the letter dated?” Dhara asked.

I checked. It wasn't. “I wonder when he wrote it. Yesterday? How long has he been planning this?”

“Since the diagnosis, it sounds like.”

“I wish I'd never sent him to that doctor,” I said. “This never would have happened if I'd just left him alone.”

“He made his own choices. He didn't have to go to the doctor. You didn't force him. If anything, knowing that his time was limited gave him a chance to ‘own his departure,' as he said.”

“I can't help feeling responsible.”

“But you're not, Adam. He could have had a heart attack on the street, in an elevator or some public place, a bunch of strangers circling him or walking right by. He died at home. In bed. Probably fell asleep without any pain. Who wouldn't want to go that way?”

When the funeral director and another man arrived with a gurney, Dhara showed them to the bedroom, then steered me to the balcony. We stood and watched the State Street Bridge lower in the wake of a sailboat flotilla. The sun was going down. The streetlights cast a gold glow on the river. And the warning bells rang and rang as the Clark, LaSalle, and Wells Street bridges rose into the sky.

The funeral director poked his head outside, and we arranged a time to meet the next day. After the men wheeled the gurney away, Dhara and I went into my father's room, and I pulled his comforter taut to erase the impression his body had made on the bed.

“What a day,” I said. “Like a thousand days pressed into one.”

Dhara put her arm around me and rubbed my back.

“Could you do me a favor?” I sat down on the squeaky bed my father had picked up at some estate sale. “Could you get the keys from his drawer and open that safe? I'd be much happier if you did it.”

Dhara left the room and returned with the address book and keys. She handed the book to me, and I thumbed through the pages. Indeed he had put asterisks beside twenty or so names. I wished there had been more, and even now was wondering who else to invite to this “cocktail party.”

Dhara opened the closet and removed the shoes and blankets. “It's remarkably organized in here,” she said. She turned the key in the lock of the safe, which was about the size of a microwave oven. I drifted over and knelt. Dhara pulled out the contents of the safe: three envelopes, which she handed to me. On each my father had written the name of one of his sons: Michael, Eric, Adam.

I tore open my envelope. Inside was a cashier's check, made out to me, for eighty-five thousand dollars.

THE WRITER'S WRITER

Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works—and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. We were influenced by him. He showed us the way.

—
WILLIAM FAULKNER

He didn't know he was dying, but at the end of this voyage from New York to Panama City on the SS
Santa Lucia
, he would be met by an ambulance, taken to a Colón hospital, then laid out on his deathbed. This was supposed to have been a new beginning, though he'd had too many of those to count over his six-and-a-half decades. He'd moved from one small town in Ohio to the next, west to Chicago like so many other dreamers, then back to Ohio again; after his breakdown, he returned to Chicago, but it seemed he couldn't sit still more than a year or two before lighting out once more: to the Missouri Ozarks, upstate New York, downstate Alabama, Paris, New Orleans, rural Virginia for a new career as a country newspaper editor. And now, with his fourth wife beside him, he planned to sail through the Panama Canal, then down the west coast of South America and settle in a town—he hadn't decided where—and get to know the people.

He had made his reputation with a book about a young journalist who got to know the people, and in the twenty and more years since this one enduring achievement he had been trying to keep pace, trying so hard, book after book—twenty-seven in all—that he'd become a subject of parody. But since easing into the country life hundreds of miles removed from the stony heart of publishing, he had found what he called
inner laughter
. In his posthumous memoirs he would say that his life had begun at just the right time, and he hoped it would end at the right time,
not carry on too far
.

His friend Gertrude Stein—loyal friend, unlike Hemmy, Faulkner, and Scott Fitzgerald—had said you had to learn to do everything, even to die. He had been thinking about death, preparing for it, for years.
When it comes
, he wrote,
there will be a real comfort in the fact that self will go then. There is some kind of universal thing we will pass into that will give us escape from this disease of self…. It is this universal thing, scattered about in many people, a fragment of it here, a fragment there, this thing we call love that we have to keep on trying to tap
. He had defended euthanasia five years before, when another writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, took chloroform after learning her cancer was inoperable.
My hat off to her. I wish I also could be assured of the same sort of clean departure, of the courage and the sanity of it
, he wrote.
The little white pill. The hell is to know when to swallow it
.

He was unaware, but he
had
swallowed something. Not a pill, and not intentionally. At a bon voyage party a few days earlier, February 26, 1941, while slugging his fourth or fifth martini of the night, a three-inch, olive-speared toothpick went down his trachea, esophagus, stomach, and intestines and thrust into his abdominal cavity, perforating his colon (so would say the medical examiner in, of all places, Colón). His demise, death by toothpick, would rival that of Aeschylus—who perished after an eagle dropped a tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a rock—as the most bizarre in literary history.

But the writer would never know the name of his condition—peritonitis—or that it was fatal if untreated. The first day out, the Atlantic had been rough, the second day so stormy that most passengers stayed in their rooms. He figured the cramps across his lower abdomen, his lack of appetite, must have been caused by seasickness. But by day three the spasms were coming in ever-shortening waves. And though he tried to keep his spirits up, and told the editor of the
Nation
, who also happened to be on board, that he wouldn't let doctors spoil his trip, it was clear by the time they reached the Caribbean that he was seriously ill. The ship's medic administered morphine, which did little good. His wife arranged for that ambulance to be waiting at port. And the writer, whose pulse would soon race, who would soon descend into full delirium, then a coma, plowed the watery depths of his memory.

And what arose might have surprised him, for he had spent half his life cultivating his legacy—what is a writer, after all, but gardener of his own grave, custodian of his own mausoleum? But he did not remember the reviews, the parties, the fleeting adulation, or the moment when he realized for the first time that he was a real writer, how the words of his first great story, “Hands,” wrote themselves across the page on a single glorious night. He had told his first wife that he felt
like a harp that the wind blew through
. If only it had remained that easy.

Nor did he remember the marriages, their beginnings or endings. How he'd tried to be a family man and entrepreneur, selling an illusory compound that promised the “cure for roof troubles,” yet nothing could keep him under one roof. He stumbled out of the door one morning, left his wife and three children, and never came back. His second wife, a sculptor with a sex drive to match his own, he stole from the Illinois poet who gave him the structure for his most famous book. So began his bohemian years: the beard, the barefoot wedding and open marriage. Yet still he felt confined. He fled east, south, abroad, and she followed. He met someone else and rushed to Reno for a quickie divorce. A few years later, remarried, miserable again, he learned of his second wife's overdose from sleeping pills, perhaps an accident, more likely not.

He would come to think of his third wife as The Princess. No place was good enough, but wherever they went the air was thick with disapproval. Her intellectual parents made him feel more like the college dropout he was than a leading voice of his generation. She endured his darkest hours, when he championed Hemingway and showed Faulkner to his own
postage stamp of native soil
, only to have both men betray him. Reviews of one book after the next came back dismissive or killing, and the day arrived—this, too, he would not remember aboard the SS
Santa Lucia
—when driving with his wife through the countryside he said in what she would describe as a strange blank voice:
I wish it were all over
. Abruptly he turned the wheel, sending the car off the road. They didn't flip, but skidded into the middle of a field and for a long while sat in silence. Then the writer, whom everyone used to call the life of the party, pulled back onto the road and drove word-lessly home.

To think that he was in his last days, on this ship, on a Goodwill tour, in the Caribbean, no less, with the only woman from whom he'd never thought of running away, might have seemed a cruel joke. But as land approached, his mind didn't pause to consider—for time was running out, and he was down to this: Chicago. 1898. Maybe '99. He'd been there only a short time. Living in a tenement. Making two dollars a day for ten hours' work in a warehouse. Lifting kegs of nails. Or was it frozen meat? He was lonely and lustful, and he'd begun looking at prostitutes on the corners, in the bars, saving his money with the intent of approaching one. But he resisted until one wet evening in March or April, winter grappling with spring, when he did stop under a windblown awning on lower Michigan Avenue to talk to a woman with painted lips and gaudy jewelry. He did not recall what she looked like, though he remembered her pale breasts billowing over her corset, and the scent of gasoline that trailed behind her as she led him up the stairs. This was when everyone wanted but few could own an automobile, and the fashion for women was to put dabs of gasoline behind the ears, on the wrists and cleavage. In the middle of the third-floor hallway she opened the door to her room, and inside were two beds, one empty and in the other a sleeping infant and young boy. With practiced swiftness, she rolled the bed her children were sharing—they barely stirred—into an alcove. When she returned to him she began to undress.
Here, just take the money
, he said. But she wouldn't have it:
I'm not a beggar
. He shrugged into his coat and left. Back on Michigan Avenue the rain turned to snow. On the long walk home the writer, his money thick in his pocket, began to cry.

This was his last clear thought. Not: who will cry for me?

The same week that Margaret forced George to tell her, “This is your house,” he got an apartment of his own. He'd lost another client that morning, had endured another reproof from Lazar, and on his lunch break had wandered into the Palmer House, where he'd lived during his engagement. The same manager from three years before, Lemuel Means, still patrolled the desk, same pince-nez perched beneath his stern, heavy brow. George inquired about month-to-month vacancies, and the manager signed him up for a room on the fifth floor.

“How's married life?” Means asked, insipidly.

George was surprised the manager would remember or care. “Just fine,” he said. “The apartment will be for my father,” he felt compelled to add. “But you'll see me coming and going, running about for the old man and the like.”

This wasn't true, though it did have a shred of veracity, to which George clung. In fact, he had decided he had to have a place of his own. An escape, where he could look out the window and let his mind wander free, where he might finish a story, then write another and another again. He had no plans of telling Margaret. Since he handled the bills in the household, if he cut expenses here and there she'd never need to know. If, for some reason, she did find out, he could say he'd rented the apartment for his father—it wouldn't take much to convince him to move in.

For a time, just having these secret lodgings gave George a thrill. He would spend his lunch break at the Mission desk in his room, and the hour would grow longer by the day. He'd stay after work, go in on weekends, and soon he was finishing whole stories, watching the characters he'd been sketching out take shape beneath his pen. One piece, in particular, had come in a white heat, and he'd revised it during the last snowmelt of the winter of '09. There came a point when he needed to share the story, so one Saturday after a meeting of the Little Room he asked Helen if she would read the manuscript and have lunch with him later in the week to say what she thought.