The End of the Book (31 page)

“Knowing my father, he'll be on the next train back,” he replied. “He has as good a chance at stopping this demolition as he does of winning a seat in Congress. And I know Will Henderson won't put up with him for long.”

But Margaret was watching the calendar, and perhaps watching her husband, too. “We can talk about this another time,” she said.

George wondered if he hadn't contrived this situation in order to generate drama in his life, the kind of drama he might someday write about. There had been times in his youth, in the days when everyone in town said he would become a writer, when the person acting out his life seemed secondary to the one recording it. His notepads meant more to him than anything in the world, and now he wondered if, after an absence of more than ten years, he was coming back to that old self for whom the story was all. He didn't stop to think how he might regret what he was doing to these women, one whom he probably loved and the other who had given him security he never could have imagined growing up. He only knew that for all the trouble he had set into motion, he had never come as close to the fire of life.

But at the end of those two weeks Helen called at the Palmer House on a Thursday, one of the rehearsal nights when they used to meet. George closed the door behind her, but she did not venture more than a step or two into the apartment. “We need to talk,” she said.

“Of course—” George gestured toward the settee.

“Not here.” She wore a silk brocade gown and a plumed hat. A scent of White Rose formed a nimbus at the threshold. He had never seen her looking so well turned out.

“We really should be cautious.” George lifted her hand. “Surely you can see my position.”

She pulled her hand away. “We're going out, so you'd better put on your jacket and tie. Business attire should do just fine. I've made a reservation at Henrici's on Randolph.”

“They all know Lazar over there,” George said.

“That's your concern. Not mine.”

“Helen—”

He tried to reason with her, insisted on knowing what was on her mind. But she would not go into it until they were at the restaurant. When George suggested they exit the hotel separately so as not to be spied by the Palmer House Pinkertons, she refused. In fact, as they passed the front desk, where Lemuel Means made a show of looking busy, she reached her arm around George's waist and kept it there until they were out on the street. In the taxicab she let go and they rode in silence to the theater district.

At Henrici's, they were greeted by the same bow-tied host from a couple years before, when George and his young wife had celebrated their anniversary and he saw the vision of Helen White. For a moment the host seemed confused, assuming no doubt that Helen had come for boxes of bread, though he might have wondered why she was dressed so elegantly. “I don't believe anyone from Hull House put in an order,” he said.

“We're here for dinner.” She slipped off her gloves. And when he had turned a suitable shade of crimson, she gave him the name of the reservation.

George tried to avoid looking at the slender, fastidious man, but Helen introduced the two.

“Yes, I know who you are,” the host said. “Will you be expecting others?”

“No,” Helen broke in. “The reservation is for two.”

At the table, after Helen had been seated, George whispered to the host, “We're old friends, she and I.”

“Of course,” the man replied.

After he had left, George and Helen spoke nearly in unison.

“Embarrassed to be in my company?” she asked.

“So I see you're trying to get me sacked,” he said.

“I have one question for you, George: Do you take me for a fool?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Did you really think I wouldn't find out about Margaret? We work in the same building, for gracious sake. Did you think I wouldn't hear that she quit to plan some grand tour overseas, not as a new beginning to her life without you, but as a kind of marital renewal?”

“That's not why she quit,” George said, pathetically.

“How long did you think you could go on like this, living with your wife while keeping a room in the Palmer House to use as a snuggery? Do you take me for some babe in the woods?”

“It's not at all like that—”

“Isn't it, though?” Helen clutched her gloves like gauntlets. “I wonder how long this has been going on, how many playthings have come before me.”

“No one came before you,” George said. “You're the first, the only woman I've ever loved.”

“Oh, sure.”

“I've never meant anything more in my life.”

Menus appeared and were quickly put down.

“I should have listened to Seth Richmond years ago,” she continued. “Here I was thinking you were the deep one, when it was Seth all along. He used to complain about everyone in Winesburg who talked and talked, nothing but piffle. It was you he meant, George.” She told him of a time when they were seventeen or eighteen, desperate to leave, how Seth had come to her one night to report that George Willard was in love with her. “‘He's writing a story,' Seth had said. ‘And he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it feels.' Is that true?” Helen asked.

“I loved you then, as I love you now,” George said.

“That's not what I asked. I want to know if you were playing at being in love, using Seth as your messenger and me as your dupe.”

“I don't remember the incident.”

“I do, and I can tell you it was a fine prelude to where we are now,” Helen said. “You're still playing at being in love, using me for I don't know what purpose: material, perhaps. Something to write about. But I'm no longer a girl. I have a life. A real life. Among people with real troubles.”

“Perhaps I wasn't being truthful,” George offered.

“
Perhaps
!”

“Okay. I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm in a bind, you see. I want to leave my wife. We're not right for each other. You can see that. I think
she
can see that, too.”

“I wouldn't be so sure, George. As we speak she's planning a trip to Europe. Were you ever going to tell me? Or would I call over to the hotel one day and find that you had left?”

“I was going to tell you. I just needed to find the right time. Just as I need to find the right time to talk to Margaret, to tell her we can't go on like this.”

Helen put her gloves in her purse, and again sent the waiter away when he came by to inquire about drinks. “You're afraid that if you leave your wife, you'll lose your job. You want to be a writer. You always have. But you're faced with the age-old conundrum: how to make a living at something you love. I can't help you out of this. And you'll come to regret that you thought I could.”

George opened his mouth to speak, but found nothing to utter.

“Remember how I teased you and called you McAdams, the character from your story who hoped to become the American Caruso?” Helen continued. “I don't think you realize how much you were writing about yourself. In your case you'd be leaving all that wealth behind. In McAdams's case, four children. Either way, a terrible loss. I think you're going to leave, George. By this time next year you'll be living in New York.”

He reached out his hands for hers, but she drew them away. “I need you, Helen,” he said. “I want to stay. I want to be with you.”

“I don't think so.”

“You wouldn't have me?”

“I don't think you want to be with anyone,” she said. “Or, rather, I think you desperately want to be with someone, then as soon as you have her you wish for nothing more than to be alone.”

This thought would weigh heavily on George's mind. He and Helen managed to get through the dinner at Henrici's, but it would be the last he'd see of her for weeks. He held out hope that she would forgive him, but she made no promises. He knew he had broken her trust, perhaps irreparably.

Throughout the heat of July, Margaret continued her planning, and in between questions like
Should we skip Pisa?
or
Do you want to be in London for the Imperial Exhibition?
she would mention that ever since Tom Willard had left, the house was
quiet as a moonbeam
. “You might as well do your writing here,” she suggested.

George wanted to hold on to the apartment because Helen might yet return, and he dreaded coming home and facing a wife who, for all her airs, did not deserve this treatment. “I just want to finish my novel,” he said. “And look—” He produced from his pocket a letter he had received that day. “My father seems to be getting nowhere with his civic protest. The demolition is continuing as scheduled. My birthplace will be rubble by the end of the month.”

“I'm sorry,” Margaret said, but wouldn't let it drop: “If your father returns to Chicago, why don't you let him live in your garret, and you can write here?”

“I was thinking he could stay at the house. Then he could watch over matters while we're gone.”

“Come home, won't you?”

“I just need one more month,” George said.

And, reluctantly, she dropped the subject.

Not a week later, Tom Willard cabled to say that the Castalia Wrecking and Shoring Company had begun its work.

It seemed only a matter of time before he would be arriving once again with his trunk.

At the office George fulfilled his obligations and little more. Lazar and his backscratchers were forever seeking new ways to
Prove They Need It
, and to George's bewilderment his old contract, Nuvolia, had become the top seller in the land thanks to Kennison's dull, unvarying, ruthlessly effective technique, the same no matter what it was employed to sell: identify a problem (body odor, dandruff, foul breath), attach a clinical name to it, and claim that only one product could provide an effective solution. No room for nuance or for secondary selling points: “You can't chop a tree in two by hitting it every time in a different place,” Kennison would say. And it seemed he could do no wrong.

Besides soap, he laid claim to the best-selling cereal, biscuit, and scouring powder. He could take a routine step in the manufacturing process and turn it into advertising gold, as he did with Stroble Beer. Though many breweries used steam to clean their bottles, no one saw this as a potential selling point until Kennison focused on the one detail that set Stroble “apart from the rest” : “Taste the
Steam-Cleaned
freshness.”

So much for the artful turn of phrase, the clever, cadenced pitch. With Kennison out front and Lazar driving the team, advertising had become a science, the copywriting department the province of laboratory technicians. George continued to wonder how he had lasted this long.

The Western Union telegraph arrived on the first of August:
Eureka! Box of money found in rubble. Authorities determining rights of treasure trove. Likely going to most recent deed-holder: Thomas Willard. I told them they hadn't heard the last of me!

A week later a letter came in the mail:

Dear George
,

My darkest hour has become my brightest. With these eyes—and I'm not ashamed to tell you they shed tears—I watched the New Willard House fall roof by wall by beam to the ground. It seemed the whole town came out on the first day. People I hadn't seen in years, some I'd never seen before, squinting into the sunlight as if they hadn't left their rooms since the last century. You should have seen the spectacle. Five bodies deep on Main Street. So many hands clapped my shoulder I woke up the next morning bruised. And you should have heard the racket those workers were making with their sledgehammers and pneumatic guns. Bang! Crack! Boom! Pow!

A few days on, and most everyone had gone home. But not your old man. And not Will Henderson either (he's so strapped at the
Eagle
he does all the reporting himself). It must have been the sixth or seventh day when they found the tin box. They'd put up scaffolding to protect the street, torn off the roof and blasted away the brickwork. They'd ripped out the plumbing and had sundered just about all the partition walls when I heard a call go up. “Looks like something's plastered in here,” one of the wreckers said. I went as close as I could to get a good look at them tearing away the wall with their crowbars. The foreman knelt down and pulled out a tin box, and damned if he didn't open the thing right there. Lucky it wasn't windy that day or the dollar bills would have scattered all over town
.

You can imagine the scene I made. This was my hotel, so that box, that money was mine. And right next to me stood Will Henderson, his pencil poised to write upon the pad of public influence. We met with a bank representative, who said it was his fiduciary responsibility to unite lost property with its original owner. And though my claim was clear as day, I had to wait for the state court's confirmation. I'm writing you to say the tin box and its contents, all eight hundred dollars, are now mine
.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I need some time to think. I've taken out a room above the shoe-repair shop on lower Main. I've had a lot of dreams, George. Maybe now I can put them in order and see them through
.

        
Yours, paternally
,

             
T. Willard

The week after scattering my father's ashes I visited the Chicago Rare Book Company in search of the lean, eager man with chain-slung bifocals. He was easy to find since he ran the shop by himself, and during the hour and a half I spent with him I was the only patron to walk in. He introduced himself as Hardy—I failed to ask if this was his first or last name—and indeed he could have passed for a minor character in a Thomas Hardy novel, a vicar perhaps: pale, angular, and fidgety. We sat by the picture window that looked out on the main drag of Old Town, and I asked him if he knew my father, Roland Clary.