The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  I knew not to push my father, so I looked for a way around the subject of why I was there. “I tried to call yesterday to say Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Dad. Did you talk to anyone else?”

  He took off his thick-rimmed glasses and wiped them with the sleeve of his purple cardigan. He was slim and fine-featured, his silver hair no less thick and wavy than when he courted his first wife and left her for a classmate, escaped from his second wife into the arms of my mother, and abandoned my mother for a graduate student. “The phone rang a few times,” he said.

  “You could have picked up. It was only me, and probably Michael and Eric. No one from the bank would be calling on Christmas.”

  “Don’t count on it.” With a wobbly hand, he put his glasses back on. “I could use a drink.”

  “Maybe we should grab some dinner and talk,” I said.

  The adrenaline from finding me outside the house seemed to have run its course. He leaned over the back of his old fainting couch, curled like an approaching wave.

  I took him out to what passed for fine dining in Normal, a cook-your-own steakhouse called Rustler’s Grill in a strip mall on the north side. I’d never been before, but I figured it was interactive and primal, a good place for father and son to commune, mutely grilling cuts of meat over an open flame.

  Still rattled, I had forgotten about the low-fat, low-salt diet he was supposed to be on. He’d managed to stop smoking after the bypass and claimed he rode an exercise bike, but the seat always seemed dusty, and I wondered if he kept up with the blood thinners and superaspirins, thrombolytics and beta blockers he was supposed to be taking. I couldn’t tell him not to eat a steak when I was the one who’d suggested this place, so we ordered top sirloins from a glass case and took our plates to a massive grill in the middle of the room.

  My father asked loud enough for others to hear, “Why go out to dinner when you have to do the work?” and I told him no one else was complaining; look at those happy families spearing their marbled Delmonicos. “What’s next?” he said. “Butcher your own beef? Raise the herd yourself?”

  We were standing there, sprinkling our dinners with mystery seasoning, brushing butter on our Texas Toast, when a man in a cartoon cardinal sweatshirt came up to my father and shook his hand. “Mr. Clary. What a surprise.” He had an inland honk and a flattop, the look of an athlete gone to flesh. “I stopped calling you a month ago. We’re past the point of no return. Bob Jagoda.” He introduced himself and gave me the handshake of a linebacker clinging to glory.

  I glanced at my father, who had turned pale and reticent. “Adam,” I put in.

  “Are you family?” Jagoda asked.

  “I’m his son,” I said.

  “You don’t live in town, do you?” His voice carried an edge of judgment.

  “I’m the youngest,” I felt compelled to explain. “I live in Chicago.”

  “Well, it’s important to have family around in tough times. Season of giving and all,” he said.

  With a pair of tongs I moved my steak back from the flame and set a baked potato on the grill. My father seemed shrunken and lost outside the walls of his own topsy-turvydom.

  “How do you know each other?” I asked.

  Jagoda said he was a housing counselor with American Dream Assistance. “We’re HUD-approved—legit,” he said. “But your Pops took months before agreeing to meet me. Isn’t that right, Mr. Clary? And by the time he came to the office, we had the smallest window to try for a loan modification. These banks, I’m telling you. Your pops had the worst mortgage, an adjustable rate that shot up like a rocket.”

  When my father had signed for that loan I was on business in Ann Arbor and couldn’t be there, and though I’d harassed him to go over the terms, asked him to fax me the paperwork and give me the name of the lender, he’d refused my help.

  Jagoda jutted his chin at me.

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  My father flipped his steak, which had charred in the flame. “This is a family matter.”

  “You’re right.” Jagoda put up his hands. “I’m not in the I-told-you-so business, but after you ignored the court summons and the notice of default, we talked about the seven-month time frame, and you knew all you had to do was say, Go for it, and I would have turned the screws on your lender and gotten you a better deal, probably saved your house. I have a lifetime success rate of 80 percent plus, tops in the region.” He paused to let this sink in. “But you didn’t answer my e-mails or calls, Mr. Clary, and now you’re past the Redemption period. Once they sell the place, do you know how long you’ll have?”

  My father forked his sirloin and dropped it on his plate. “This is enough,” he said, and walked away.

  I removed my food from the grill, not sure whether to thank the housing counselor for trying at least or call him out for browbeating an old man. I gave him a feeble, “Happy holidays,” then headed for the table under a pair of horseshoes where my father slumped over his plate, slowly carving.

  “Charming guy.” I sat down.

  He lifted a piece of steak—charred on one side, nearly raw on the other—into the dim light. “Why did you have to drag me here? You know I don’t like to go out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me your situation?” I snapped back. “It’s been months, almost a year. This news came out of the blue.”

  My father shrugged and took a bite, set his silverware in the bloody pool on his plate.

  “What does it mean to be past the Redemption period?” I asked.

  “It means I missed my chance at atonement. So much for getting delivered from sin.”

  “Seriously, Dad. This isn’t a joke.”

  “You’re right. Maybe it’s not too late. Waiter, bring me a sackcloth and ashes. This flesh is going to need extra mortification.”

  I knew when my father got this way it was best to let him go, so I ate my potato and looked uninterested. He seemed cheered by his little attempt at humor. When the waiter did come by, he ordered a rum and Diet Coke, and before long was into another. I saw Bob Jagoda leave the restaurant with his wife and burr-headed sons, and when I sensed my father was good and loose, I asked, “How long before you have to move out?”

  He pushed his pecked-at dinner aside. “Thirty days after the sale,” he said. “Alea iacta est, quoth Caesar. ‘The die is cast.’”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “How about I buy another house? Weren’t you the one who said real estate is a can’t-miss investment?”

  “Don’t try to pin this on me.”

  “What the hell was I doing investing, in the first place? I’ve got one foot in the grave, for Chrissake, and now here we are: end of ’08. Worst economy since the Great Depression. I’m making national news!”

  “There’s no sense looking back,” I said. On some level I knew that my father was right, that I had urged him to buy a house when I should have realized that it was too late for him to make that kind of commitment. In a flare of guilt, and thinking neither of the consequences nor of Dhara—whose nickname for my father was Vritra, the Hindu god of drought and destruction—I said, “Why don’t you come and live with us?” I knew it was a mistake even as I formed the words, “Dhara and I can help. We have an extra bedroom. You don’t have to stay forever, just long enough to sort things out.”

  2

  Eight years ago George Willard came to Chicago green as a sprout, and now to his surprise, he had risen to near the top of the city’s leading ad agency. His campaigns had reached households across the land, and his large-windowed office on the fourteenth floor of the Monadnock Building looked down on the workers and vendors, horses and drays, omnibuses and cable cars crisscrossing the Loop. At twenty-seven he made a higher salary than his father had ever dreamed of, and were he to return to his hometown of Winesburg, Ohio, he could buy one of the finest houses. But he knew there was no going back. He had made a promise to his mother before she died that he would leave for the city and not follow the path of
his father, who even now was patching the walls of the gloomy family inn and promising that the New Willard House, that husk by the tracks in a dying town, would one day be filled with guests again.

  When he left Winesburg in spring 1896, George had planned to find a newspaper job, and after that to become a writer. But he’d arrived in the fastest-growing city the world had ever known only to find that this place of a thousand tongues had one universal language: commerce. You could breathe it in the air, a devil’s brew of sweat and rotting vegetables, pine and turpentine and something deep and earthy, like steam off a rendering pot. And you could see it at every corner: brokers gathered under lampposts discussing the price of wheat, seamstresses hunched over tables in basement windows, salvagers peddling iron from the backs of rickety wagons, news-boys shouting bulletins. George had wanted to write those bulletins, but an accident, an actual collision with fate, had made him a writer of a different sort, a persuader for profit: a copywriter. And though he wanted to believe that he was still a kind of artist and his work had the same aim as a novelist’s or story writer’s—to communicate, one soul to another—he’d been growing restless, and was sometimes gripped with a worry that for all his outward success he had lost his way.

  From his half-open door he could hear the voice of his boss, Alfred Lazar, in conversation with the vaunted Clyde Kennison. They were talking, as they had been for months, about Kennison’s new ideas.

  “You’re the future of advertising,” Lazar was saying now. “I want you to teach the whole firm your philosophy. From today until spring that’s your only assignment. We need scores of Clyde Kennisons here.”

  George stood up from his swivel chair and closed the door, then sat again behind his polished cherry desk. He had no one to blame but himself for the arrival of Clyde Kennison. One June evening six months ago he had been in Lazar’s office planning the next installment of his Tidy Town campaign. He’d made his reputation with Tidy Town, a mythical place where the citizens polished everything clean as pearls, from floor to ceiling, with Nuvolia Soap. George had invented all the characters and written all the jingles, had helped make Nuvolia America’s top-selling cleanser. But other brands were gaining, Nuvolia had dropped to third behind Ivory and Gold Dust, and though George did have one hidden advantage, a trump card he’d been reluctant to play, he knew he was falling out of favor at the agency.

  He remembered that day in his boss’s office when a courier had knocked on the door and delivered a note. Lazar had grabbed it and read aloud: Not a man in your firm knows the first thing about advertising. Not a man on this spinning earth knows, either. But if you want to know, tell this courier to send me upstairs. I’m waiting in the lobby.

  “Would you believe the nerve?” Lazar had said.

  George had taken the note and read it himself; even the bold handwriting had the mark of audacity. “But aren’t you a little curious to meet this fellow?”

  “Oh, go ahead, if you’re so interested.” Lazar commanded the courier to send the man up.

  Kennison introduced himself, and Lazar told him it was getting late—he had five minutes to make his case. More than a decade older than George, Kennison had keen, close-set eyes and a chevron mustache that barely concealed his supercilious mouth. He said he was a copywriter in Milwaukee who had led successful campaigns for Dr. Shute’s Restorative, Wheatabits Cereal, and the Royal Shoe Company. He’d once been ad manager for Hudson’s Bay in Winnipeg, but his truly formative experience had come during his years as an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, when he used to travel alone on horseback across the northern snows thinking of advertising day and night, meditating, like some capitalist monk, on how to reach the largest number of buyers. What he came up with was so simple that it could be summarized in one sentence, which he delivered at the end of those first five minutes: Prove They Need It.

  That single line had piqued Lazar’s interest enough to ask Kennison to explain, and for the next four hours the Canadian paced and gesticulated and went over his concepts point by point. Ads should be unadorned, easy for the average person to grasp, and must avoid cleverness and art, anything to distract from the argument that the product is essential and no reasonable human being should be without it. “Advertising is sales on the page,” he said. “Pretty pictures and rhymey jingles and silly made-up characters are useless because they make only the most general claims.” George took umbrage. “Perhaps you’ve heard of Tidy Town?” But Kennison was unim-pressed. “The tidy farmer, the tidy grocer, the tidy maid and the lot? No offense, sport, but Tidy Town will soon fall off the map.”

  George had bristled at this prophecy, but he should have been alarmed when Lazar failed to defend him and allowed the meeting to go on until close to midnight. George couldn’t have known then what he was beginning to realize now, that advertising was changing, that the soft sell, which had made his career thus far, would soon be eclipsed by Prove They Need It, that the meeting George himself had made possible would go down in business history and launch the agency so far into the firmament that one day Alfred J. Lazar would become known as the father of modern advertising.

  George put on his coat and hat and left his office. He wasn’t sure where he was going, only that he wanted to get out of the building and feel the December air on his face. On his way to the elevators he nearly sailed into Lazar, who was stepping out of the Service Department into the hallway. Everyone dreaded the Service Department, where an enormous wall chart displayed due dates for the firm’s assorted campaigns. Lazar was notorious for setting the dates weeks ahead of clients’ schedules in order to keep his workers under continuous deadline pressure. This, and his habit of firing 10 to 20 percent of his employees every couple of years in what he called a regenerative act of nature, kept everyone buzzing with anxious efficiency. It had been a while since the last purge, and George had grown used to the look on his peers’ faces: you might be dead weight, but certainly not me.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?” Lazar asked.

  George stood a head taller than his boss, but Lazar had dark eyes under a heavy brow and a thistly posture that magnified his presence. “I was headed to lunch,” George said.

  “But it’s four in the afternoon.”

  “I’ve been so busy I plumb forgot to eat.”

  Lazar rubbed his chin. Slender and young-looking for forty-nine, he was obsessed with grooming and had been known to interrupt meetings in order to run down to the barbershop for a midday shave. “Well, I want you back here soon, d’you understand? I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

  Those words wedged in George’s mind like pebbles in a shoe, and as daylight dissolved into the smoky haze that forever hung over the city they gathered a sense of foreboding. He walked up State Street amidst the mad scurry of workers and Christmas shoppers and tried to imagine what Lazar might want to tell him. Nuvolia had recently signed a new contract running through the end of next year, and George had taken this as a vote of confidence that though sales had been slipping of late his future was secure. So many products had entered the market—cleanliness had become the imperative of the age—it was all one could do to keep up. But what of that overheard conversation: We need scores of Clyde Kennisons here? George was a writer, not a salesman, and couldn’t imagine being remade into a bloodless advertising machine. Lazar knew this, and it was his company, so what would keep him from saying to George, perhaps this very afternoon, Thank you for your time, but we no longer need your services?

  There was a contest within George between the pursuit of art and financial security. His mother was a failed artist, his father a failed businessman, so George had much to compensate for. Elizabeth Willard had wanted to be an actress and travel the world, but never managed to leave Winesburg, and the disease that made her the hollow figure haunting the New Willard House went undiagnosed but might have been called disappointment. George shared his mother’s sensibility and knew he had come to Chicago in part to avoid the trap of unrealize
d dreams. At the same time, he had grown up in that bedraggled hotel, and each year the hallway outside his room, dimly lit with kerosene lamps, had grown quieter as travelers continued on to the next town or sought more welcoming accommodations. Tom Willard lived in denial of the failure that surrounded him; he walked briskly along Main Street twirling the ends of his black mustache, and greeted his fellow citizens with a mayoral air. At first George had resisted the path of wealth that his father had urged him toward, but Chicago was a dynamo that sucked him in, and now the thought of losing his income and falling from his comfortable perch among the Monadnock “cliff-dwellers” made him shudder.

  It was the Friday before Christmas. Lights illuminated every window, voices rose with the clatter and grind up skyscraper walls, and George was swept by the convulsion of people past Adams, Monroe, and Madison Streets. Crossing Washington, he forgot to hold onto his pearl-gray homburg, and a crosswind off the lake sent the hat airborne. As it spun toward the ground, a girl with an armful of flowers dropped what she was carrying and caught the hat in both hands.

  George rushed over to where she was standing in the middle of the street. “Thank you,” he said. “But look what’s become of your flowers.” Her chrysanthemums lay scattered about the macadam, trampled under the boots of indifferent passersby. The girl bent to gather the few salvageable blooms, and when she looked up George saw the dark rings under her eyes and her pale dreamy face and recognized her as one of the many flower girls, immigrants from central Europe who went about the city’s corners and saloons singing popular ballads or playing concertinas or sticking carnations in buttonholes with the entreaty, “Give me whatever you please.”

  The traffic was encroaching on either side, drivers yelling, “Hurry up already! Out of the street!” George took the girl’s arm and hustled to the curb. “What do I owe you?” he asked, pulling his hat tight over his head. “I’m terribly sorry.”