The End of the Book (30 page)

If Dhara were in the room she'd tease him for using a term that was a decade out of date. If my father were here, he'd say a lot of good that superhighway has done us, and quote T. S. Eliot's line about everyone in the modern age “distracted from distraction by distraction.” For my part, I had learned something about Dhara that made me understand her a little better. Perhaps she did have commerce in her DNA, and was driven by something beyond her control. Wouldn't life be easier if I believed that, accepted it, and knew that there were things about my wife that I couldn't and shouldn't change? And if I didn't complain about her long hours and California dreams, perhaps she might better appreciate my own modest ambitions.

As Jagdish and I headed back toward the balcony, he stopped at the photographs of my father. “I'm very sorry,” he said. “You're too young to lose both parents. We should—all of us who have children—remember that it's harder on the ones we leave behind.”

Dhara was stepping inside the apartment with her stepmother. Lali was calling after her, “You're in your thirties. Young in many ways, not so much in others. I can tell you this because I waited too long myself, and look at me—no offspring to receive these stunning good looks.” She flicked her hair. “I'm serious, beti. Don't be like me, girl. You have the beauty
and
the brains.”

Dhara laughed and gave me a look that seemed to say
how did this woman end up in my life?
But there was something bemused in her expression as well, as if the edge had been taken off and she was seeing Lali in a somewhat different light.

I left Dhara, her father, and stepmother to talk, and spent the rest of the party circulating through the small apartment. I caught up with my old MFA friends, only one of whom, Paul Shriver, was still writing steadily. He wasn't the most gifted stylist in our cohort, but he could tell a good story, and most of all he had stuck with it, even published short pieces in some of the better journals. Six months ago he had taken a buyout at a Schaumburg PR firm, and instead of looking for work right away launched into a novel he'd been sketching out for years. It was nearly done, and whether or not it ever saw the light of publication, he said that getting the story out of his head and onto the page was the best thing he had ever done.

I heard the first peals of thunder while I was talking to my aunt and uncle about their kids, my cousins, who had both gone to Washington after college to work on Capitol Hill. Kathleen asked if I'd heard from Lucy, and I told her about the job at U of C Press but left it at that. I hadn't spoken with Lucy since that night on her street when the idiots in the Jeep yelled at us and I headed home. She had left a voice-mail message at the end of that week, but I couldn't remember what she'd said or even if I'd listened to it. I hadn't called her back, hadn't told her about my father, but now I had this strange feeling I ought to call her soon; it seemed we had something to square away.

The last of the guests left just before the rain began. Only Dhara and my half brothers remained. Michael and Eric began putting glasses in the sink and tidying up, but I told them we'd take care of it.

“You've done more than enough already,” Michael said. “I can only imagine all the cleaning you had to do to get ready for this party.”

“I already told you the place was immaculate, more or less as you see it.”

“That's right. You did,” he said, but I could tell he didn't believe me, and must have been wondering why I would still be covering for our father.

The wind whistled through the metal balcony; the rain splattered against the sliding glass doors. My brothers were getting ready to leave, but I told them they might as well wait out the storm. “Plus,” I said, “there's something I want to show you.”

In my father's bedroom, Michael and Eric stood behind me and Dhara watched from the doorway as I opened the safe and pulled out the two envelopes. A couple days before, I had gotten into my mind that I needed to know if my brothers were getting an inheritance and, if so, was it less, equal, more? And what had my father written on their notes? I had planned to hold the letters up to the light, even thought about unsealing them. But the better part of me resisted, and this moment was in fact the first time I had touched the envelopes. I handed them to Michael and Eric, then left the room to give them privacy. Dhara followed me and softly closed the door.

The rain lashed the windows. I locked the sliding doors to the balcony. Dhara and I continued to clean up the apartment, listening for my half brothers' reactions, but the storm muffled their voices. After a while the door opened, and Eric came out shaking his head. “Just wow,” he said.

Michael, behind him, sat down on the camelback sofa. He tossed the letter and the cashier's check on the cushion next to him. From where I stood I could see the amount: fifty thousand dollars.

“What did your letters say?” I asked my brothers, hesitantly.

Michael answered first. “This is verbatim,” he said. “
I made mistakes. I wish I could have done better. I hope you'll forgive me
.”

“Same as mine,” Eric said.

Michael scratched his cheek. He'd had a beard for most of his adult life but he had a habit of touching it as if it were irritating him. “Something's not right,” he said. “Where did the money come from? I thought Dad was in foreclosure. Wasn't he supposed to be broke?”

I admitted that I was confused, too. “But I think he had some valuable books, and I'm pretty sure he sold them.”

“Books!” Michael laughed. “Who would pay, what, $150,000 for books?”

I wasn't about to tell him that I'd gotten thirty-five thousand more than he and Eric and so the total, in fact, was one eighty-five.

Eric leaned on the edge of our father's desk. “We should be grateful,” he said.

“I wouldn't start spending it until you know where it came from.” Michael pocketed his check and envelope.

It was at this point that the creaking began, a sound under our feet like an old man in a rocking chair going back and forth, back and forth. Having lived in Harbor City for a while, Dhara and I were familiar with that old man in the rocking chair. It was the high groan the building made, the friction between the concrete and reinforcing metal, as the towers swayed ever so slightly in heavy storms like this one. My half brothers, Michael especially, looked terrified, just as I was a few years ago when I first heard the sound.

I tried to explain. Dhara said, “It's an outdated building. We hear this all the time,” but Michael was spooked, and the color had drained out of Eric's face, too.

When the worst of the storm passed, the rocking slowed to a muffled creak, then stopped. Michael and Eric got ready to head back to the hotel, but before they left I said I had something else for them. “I know you're surprised that Dad made all these arrangements. But on the day I found him I came upon a letter that might explain it.” I had Xeroxed the letter and sealed into separate envelopes a copy for each half brother. “Here,” I said. “You don't have to read it now. We can talk tomorrow, if you'd like.”

They took the envelopes, thanked me, and left. Dhara and I went home to our apartment and put out food for Wing Biddlebaum. The orange tabby now lived with us but had barely ventured out of our bedroom closet, where he spent his days sleeping on my shoes.

The next morning we met Michael and Eric for breakfast across the river at their hotel restaurant. They asked the same questions that I'd put to the cardiologist, about how far gone our father's heart was at the point when, it appeared, he opened the medicine cabinet and washed down too many pills with Diet Rite and rum. I had worried that my half brothers might be angry—at our father for going out this way, or at me for not getting an autopsy to make absolutely sure. But after a long conversation full of assorted stories about their childhoods, little glimpses they'd each had of our father before he disappeared from their lives, Eric summed up his and Michael's feelings best: “The fact is, I didn't know the man, so anything he did, during his life and at the end, should have come as no surprise.”

Along with the pewter urn, the funeral home had given me some small boxes made of decorative paper in case we wanted to divide the ashes. That morning I had poured some of the “pixie dust” into plastic bags and put the bags into two boxes, one for Michael, one for Eric. I asked if they would scatter the ashes in New York and Boston, and they said if that's what he wanted they'd find a decent place. Then we paid the bill and went out into the bright, warm morning. I led everyone down the steps to the riverwalk, the pavement still glossed with rain from the night before. After we'd passed a group of tourists and let a couple water taxis and motorboats float by, I took the urn out of my shoulder bag.

The river used to flow west to east, but a little over a hundred years ago civil engineers reversed it because pollutants were spilling into Lake Michigan, the source of the city's water. If I had shaken the ashes into the river before the reversal, which would have been right around the time George Willard was arriving in Chicago, a speck or two might have caught a ride on some flotsam and traveled a current up the coast, around the bend of Green Bay, and come in with the tide to the shipyards of Marinette, Wisconsin, my father's birthplace.

But now the river flowed west.

Michael, Eric, and I each took a turn scattering ashes. We watched the dust catch the wind, then settle on the surface of the water before floating on, past the Loop and the railroad yards, through the Chicago Ship Canal into the Des Plaines River, which met the Illinois, then the Mississippi, then spilled down to New Orleans into the Gulf of Mexico, out to the Caribbean Sea, through the Panama Canal, then along the west coast of South America, to wash up on the shores of a town where everything was strange and new.

Throughout June 1909, George was trying to live for the moment. He did not want to think about September, when he was due to board a train to New York, then a ship to Liverpool. Margaret had already gone to her father and asked him to reduce George's hours so he could finish this novel, and Lazar, who would do anything for his daughter, acquiesced. In the past, George might have been upset with his wife for making such arrangements on the quiet, but he'd grown accustomed to the scornful looks of his coworkers and could endure still more if it meant leaving the office at three o'clock.

He did manage to get some writing done, but a novel seemed a daunting endeavor. For now the best he could do was to set his stories in one place, a small midwestern town not unlike his own, at the turn of the twisting century. When he finished a story he would give it to Helen, pacing before the fifth-floor window while she read it sitting in a wingback chair tantalizingly close to the bed. What he'd give to share that bed with her again, to bend down and kiss her pretty neck. But she gave no signs of willingness, said
I'd better not
when he offered a glass of wine, and he had to wonder if he had destroyed a fragile possibility, if they would ever have a chance again.

After a number of such evenings Helen began to ask why George insisted that they meet in his room and made efforts not to be seen with her in restaurants or crossing the lobby.

In truth, he wanted the intimacy, loved the feeling of bringing her to this place, of playing at making a home. But he didn't tell her this. “You said it yourself,” he explained. “It's too soon after my separation, so we'd be wise not to go out in public. And that manager, Lemuel Means, he has more eyes than Panoptes. Our agency puts clients in this hotel, and I wouldn't want Lazar hearing that I'd taken up with someone else before Margaret and I parted ways.”

“You might have thought of all that before,” she said. “I told you we made a mistake.”

Two weeks would pass before they'd see each other again, an eventful two weeks that would bring further complications to George's life. One evening he returned to the Gold Coast house to find his father waiting for him in the front hallway. “I'm going home,” he said abruptly. His packed trunk sat in the parlor. “I'm on the first train tomorrow morning.”

“What happened?” George asked.

“The New Willard House has been sold and scheduled for demolition. Apparently our friends and neighbors are up in arms. They need me, and I aim to step into the breach.” Tom Willard said the town elders were surrendering all that made Winesburg unique by selling the land to an outfit that was building drive-up filling stations across northern Ohio. “The streets used to belong to the people, to friends coming and going, to children at play, but this would mean the end of all that. Automobiles clogging downtown. The beast of motordom crushing lives under its wheels.”

“Maybe there was no choice in the matter,” George said. “Our town has been sliding for years, falling off, more like, since the Panic.”

“You don't just give up safety. You put up a fight.” Tom Willard shook his fist. “And you don't sell your character to the first four-flusher. They're tearing down your heritage, son.”

At another time, George might have been sentimental about the place, but it never was a home, just a room looking over the train tracks at the end of a mostly empty hallway. And he had his memories, ghosts of his mother and of the many transients who even now were filling the pages of his notebooks and stories. For better and worse he carried the New Willard House with him, and so had no great feeling for that shell he had left behind. “How long will you be gone?” George asked.

“Could be a week. A month. If we win, I might stay,” he said. “Your old editor Will Henderson is putting me up for a time. I'll keep him in gin for a cot.”

And like that, he was gone.

But it wasn't another day or two before Margaret was saying, “Now that your father's not here to distract you, do you need to keep your writer's garret? What are you doing there that you can't do here?” Something in her voice and the focus of her gaze gave George a shiver. “Seems a bit plush, don't you think?” she added.