The End of the Book (28 page)

They returned to the same booth at Schlogl's on a Friday in late March. Lazar and Kennison were in New York that week, and Helen was on spring recess, so George figured on taking the afternoon off. When he ordered a bottle of wine, he said, “I think I'm going to need this.”

“I might as well join you,” Helen put in.

After the waiter left, George asked, “Is the story that bad? I guess we'll have to drink our way through my blighted hopes.”

“Look who's fishing for praise,” Helen said, then raised a toast. “To one of the most gifted writers I know.”

George withheld his glass for a moment. “This is no time to make game of me. I'm a sensitive fellow, you know.”

Helen leaned into the table. “Your sensitivity thrums on every page.”

“So you liked the characters?”

“I wouldn't say I liked them. But that wasn't your objective, was it? I understood them, understood why they'd put up a certain face to the world.”

“McAdams is not me, just so you know,” George interjected.

In the story, the main character, a postal clerk in small-town western Pennsylvania, leaves his wife and four children and starts walking, then running, then riding the rails toward New York City. He wants to be a great tenor, an American Caruso. He has memorized some of the best-known operas and practiced his singing in empty barns around the county. But his wife can't appreciate his talent and only reminds him of the chores to be done, the mouths to feed.

Helen didn't respond to George's disclaimer, instead saying, “You've captured the way men seem to need a certain order in their lives before taking on anything beyond themselves. If they don't find that sense of purpose in time, they burrow inward, and people suffer. McAdams's tragedy lies in the particulars, the intensity of his stress, the pain he causes his family when he rejects them for his art. His flight from home is truly operatic. The long passage where you show his tortured mind sorting through past and future feels like an aria of a high order.”

George made like he was going to say something—he wasn't sure what—but Helen continued: “I can't deny that my hands trembled when I picked up the pages and began to read. What if George Willard, who our town had always said would become the writer—what if he were no good?”

“Did you have trouble with the ending?” he asked.

“It ends at the beginning of something new; it's agonizing and exuberant, which seems just how it should be. He's on the train. We know he's not turning back.”

“Do you think someone might want to publish it?”

“Well,” Helen paused, and gave a canny smile. “I hope you don't mind, but I passed it along to Francis Browne at the
Dial
on Tuesday, and he got back to me this morning. He wants the story, George. You need only say
Take it
.”

The
Dial
was the finest literary magazine in the Midwest and among the top in the country. While George sat speechless, Helen refilled their glasses. “You don't have to get back to him right away,” she said.

“Good heavens, yes, he can have my story. I'll pay
him
for it. The
Dial
—my word.”

“I bet your wife will be proud,” Helen said. She rarely mentioned Margaret, and the comment had the feeling of a test.

“She knows about the Little Room, but not that I'm writing stories.”

“Surely she'd be sympathetic. She has an interest in the arts.”

“You want the truth: I haven't told her because she'd be envious.”

“Why should she care? She's not a writer.”

“Everyone's a writer—in the mind, if not in practice.”

“I'm not,” Helen said. “I've always loved to read, for companionship, for the shape of a story. And, lately, as a call to social change.”

“Are you talking about Upton Sinclair?”

“Yes, and Frank Norris, George Eliot, Dickens. There's quite the fervor at Hull House, a belief that novels ought to shine a light on inequality, injustice. I'm due to teach a class on the labor novel next term. I have quite the leaning tower of books on my nightstand.”

“My wife still reads the Romantic poets. But we haven't turned out like Elizabeth and Robert Browning, as perhaps she once hoped,” George said. “Oh, listen to me complaining about my marriage. I'm sure you don't believe me when I say I'm not McAdams.”

Helen dabbed a napkin at the corners of her lips. “You don't have four children.”

“True.”

“And you don't live in Pennsylvania.”

“True again.”

“Have you committed Puccini's most famous arias to memory, and are you willing to stand up in this restaurant and sing ‘Che Gelida Manina' in full voice?”

“No and no.”

“Then it seems you're not McAdams. What a relief!”

George poured the last of the wine and when the braised rabbit and bouillabaisse arrived ordered another bottle. They lingered at Schlogl's until the last of the lunch crowd had taken their leave and the waiters had begun to look impatiently in their direction.

They stepped into the bright glare of afternoon and were walking along Washington Street past the
Daily News
, the
Chronicle
, the
Journal
, the
Herald
, newspapers he might have worked for were it not for a certain accident a few short blocks from here. They passed the Opera House. “Shall we go in, Mr. McAdams?” Helen said.

“You're a terrible tease.” George looped his arm around her waist, and they were walking that way for a block or two before he put his hands in his pockets at the corner opposite Marshall Field's. He had a floating feeling, not unlike the last time he had a woman in mind outside the great department store. Neither Helen nor he had said what they would do with the rest of their day, or when they would part, or how. As the drays and trolleys lurched by on State Street, George caught the reflection of himself and Helen in a bank window, and wanted to hold the picture in his mind.

“Well—there's my stop.” She pointed across the street to where the westbound trolleys picked up. George knew she could have said the same at any number of stops over the past several blocks. “I had a lovely time.” Her voice carried a lilt of expectancy.

“We must do this again.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Helen.” George didn't bother to look around as he took her hand. People pushed by, but the bustle seemed to fall away. “Thank you for reading my story.”

“You're welcome. And congratulations.”

“I have other stories, you know. I'd love for you to look at them.”

“Anytime.”

“I could show them to you now,” George said. A discarded newspaper rustled at his feet.

“You take your stories with you?”

“No, it's nothing like that. You see, I have an apartment in the Palmer House. We could go, if you'd like—”

“You have an apartment?” Helen asked.

This shouldn't have thrown him. Chances were she was just being conversational, but her question sent his mind scrambling for an explanation. Had she said
Sure
, or
Yes, let's go
, or
That would be nice
, had she said nothing at all and they'd just started south toward the hotel, he might not have felt the need to lie. “Margaret and I have been living apart,” he said. “I guess you could call it a trial separation. But we both realize things will not end well.”

“I'm sorry,” Helen said.

“We were mismatched from the start. No sense getting into it. We're certainly not the first this has happened to.”

“I had no idea.”

At the time he was grateful she left it at that, though later he'd wonder what might have happened had she asked:
What about your job? Will you be staying on? What about your father? Where is he living now? How is Margaret taking this? She's told no one at Hull House. Are you keeping the separation a secret?
But these questions never came, nor did they occur to George as he stood there on State Street, a little drunk, a little dizzy over the possibility of taking Helen up the elevator, down the hall to room 542, opening the door, throwing open the windows because no matter what he did, no matter how often he complained, the radiators in his apartment always ran too hot.

“Welcome to the crucible,” he said when they stepped inside.

They didn't make it to the windows before they were kissing.

They met on evenings when Helen wasn't working and George knew that Margaret had a performance or rehearsal. That one tumble upon his rented bed, which George had hoped would mark the beginning of something, felt like the clocks had wound back to 1895, when he was a wrought-up stripling who hugged the pillow and walked the dusky streets muttering to himself about love and war. How many times had George imagined a room all their own, her silver silhouette, the sweet exhaustion?

But the next time they met, just a week later, Helen had grown hesitant. She worried aloud that they had made a great mistake, that the circumstances—his trial separation, her loneliness—were all wrong. The questions she had not got around to asking had, in the sober light of morning, come to the surface one by one. She put them to George, and with each answer he buried himself deeper in his deception.

“No, it's not too soon for you and me. The time is now,” he said. He and Margaret had come to a mutual impasse, recognized at one and the same time that they had married in foolish haste. The breakup was amicable, a relief for both of them. “The trial is over,” he said. “We're as good as divorced.”

And no, it would not affect his job. “I've put in too many years, and have built my own little principality.”

“But you must see your father-in-law every day. It's not awkward?”

“He won't be my father-in-law for long, and I've been thinking about other work anyway.”

“You'd be giving up a lot,” Helen said.

“The trappings mean little to me.”

“And what about your father? He's not still living with Margaret, is he?”

“He moved out when I did. I found him a snug boardinghouse in Lake View, run by a Russian widow who collects presentable aging bachelors.” George hated to lie to Helen but at the same time took a secret, guilty pride in his ability to spin a tale. It was dangerous how naturally the lies and embellishments came to him.

Yet he knew the fragility of this web he was spinning. One misstep and he'd catch himself up. And with his wife and Helen walking the same grounds every day, crossing in the halls—who knows, even sitting down for coffee—his undoing seemed all but assured. He wondered if a part of him wanted to lay his own trap. Or perhaps he felt his marriage was a trap, and deception, then exposure, was the only way out. He wanted to return to that first evening when they had stumbled into the Palmer House after too much wine, but apparently Helen wanted to step back even further, to the moment before, when they were still friends from home getting to know each other again. Though they mostly met at the apartment, to talk about their days and share stories, they hadn't so much as embraced since.

One evening in early May George returned home to find Margaret at the stereopticon. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought Thursdays were rehearsal nights.”

“They are.” Margaret slid a card into the viewfinder and lowered her face to peer in. “I quit.”

“Quit the play?”

“The play. The clubs. The classes. I'm finished with Hull House.”

“Finished? Just like that?”

“I'll continue to help Ellen with the lending library. She's been nothing but good to me. And I still admire Jane. But the rest of them. I don't know—”

“What happened?” George asked.

Margaret told him that ever since the bottom dropped out of the economy she'd felt increasingly like an outlander at Hull House. “At the place that welcomes everyone from every shore, I, whose family has been here some three hundred years, am the alien.” George thought of her in her Merry Widow hat that first time they went to the Hull House Theater, recalled the care she took with her habiliment each morning before venturing into the slums. Unlike Jane Addams, who dressed in plain clothes and sensible shoes and despite her fame blended right in, Margaret announced her class with every click of her rhinestone heels. George knew not to say as much, though he'd dropped hints before.

“What was the turning point?” he asked.

Margaret removed the stereopticon slide she'd been looking at and set it on the table. She turned to face him. “This morning I attended what I thought would be a meeting of the Arthur Toynbee Club—we were meant to discuss tariff reform—but the gathering turned out to be a most unsubtle ruse to extort a staggering donation from me.”

“Extort?”

“Not technically, but you should have seen them put the rush on. There were people in the room from outside the club—fund-raising officers—some I'd never even met. They circled their chairs around me, and this meeting had nothing to do with the country's economics, only with my own—or, rather, my father's.”

She said that Stefan, whom she'd thought was her friend, had done a study of the Lazar family and found it was worth some eight million dollars. George had figured that his father-in-law was a millionaire, but not eight times over, and he paused at the thought of one day coming into all that money. What if he just endured his loveless marriage, carried on a secret life with Helen for years and years? If he could get a few more publications or finish a book, he could quit the agency and tell Lazar he was setting up an office in the Palmer House to become a full-time writer. Surely, Lazar would understand, having taken that route for a time before steering down the titan track. And so, too, would Margaret. What woman of culture would not want to say
My husband is a man of letters?