The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  “Long story. You really want to hear it?”

  “Sure.” I glanced across the way, at the west tower, and tried to find Dhara’s and my apartment. I spotted our patio chairs and the red Weber grill that she bought for my thirtieth birthday but I rarely used. At first I couldn’t see her, but then a shadow moved across the glass and I worried she’d look over here and catch me talking on the phone in the freezing cold. How odd, she’d think, and would interrogate me when I got home.

  “Adam?” Lucy asked. “You sound like you’re in a tunnel. What kind of apartment is your father living in?”

  “I had to step outside. We’ve got a couple more things to move here, then we’ll be done. I wonder if I can call you back. Or—you know what might be better: we could meet, get a coffee or something.”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. “Name the place. This is your city.”

  I suggested the Art Institute, at the end of the week. We agreed on two o’clock at the entrance to European Painting and Sculpture, my favorite collection.

  “Good luck with the move,” she said.

  “Same to you.”

  Back in my father’s apartment I rubbed my arms to get warm.

  “What were you doing out there?” he asked.

  “Had to take a phone call.”

  “You don’t want me in your business?”

  “You were working. I thought I’d give you some privacy.”

  “Who was it?” he asked.

  It wasn’t like him to show any interest in my life. He’d had to drag himself to my wedding, might not have gone without pressure from my brothers. “Someone from the job.” I put my hands over the heating vent.

  “Someone from the job, eh?” He gave me an annoyingly conspiratorial look, which I ignored.

  “I could use a cup of tea,” I said. “Want me to get you something?”

  “Diet Rite, two rocks, and a splash of Malibu.”

  “That’s not exactly what the doctor ordered.”

  “A drink or two won’t kill me.”

  “It’s three in the afternoon, Dad. You might at least wait a couple hours.”

  “Are you with the Temperance Union?” he said. “Well, my order has a different motto: ‘He who does not love wine, wife, and song will be a fool his whole life long.’”

  He had wine and song covered, but a little trouble loving his wives—or at least one at a time. I put the water on to boil and fixed the rum and cola. Wing jumped onto the desk, stepped gingerly over the drift of papers, then curled up in my father’s lap.

  “I think you’re going to like it here,” I said. “When the complex went up in the sixties, it was advertised as a city within a city, to lure suburban-ites back to the Loop. This one block has anything you’d want: grocery, dry cleaner, four restaurants. Even the laundry room, on twenty, has 360-degree views. There’s a fitness center, a bowling alley, a hotel, and I’m sure you’ll be a regular at the Boombox.”

  “I’ve already complained to management,” my father put in.

  The Boombox was a club/music venue and a magnet for testosterone-addled drunks that occupied a small stand-alone rectangular building. Before and after concerts we heard rebel yells, wolf whistles, fights breaking out, women screaming Get away, the pop of sirens, and warnings over bullhorns caroming between the towers and rising into the atmosphere.

  The kettle whistled, and I poured hot water into a cup. “We’re not far from the Newberry. It’s a quick ride up Dearborn on the 22 bus,” I said. The Newberry Library, home of the Sherwood Anderson Papers, including books, manuscripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, artifacts, sound recordings, and photographs, used to be my father’s summer retreat. I remembered as a child taking the train to the city and staying at a slatternly Howard Johnson’s, spending afternoons with my mother at Oak Street Beach.

  “I’m done with the Newberry,” my father said. “There’s nothing in that place that I haven’t seen, duplicated, and read a hundred times. Look around you.” He swept his arm—everywhere, books, papers, half-empty boxes. “I am the Sherwood Anderson Collection.”

  I stirred my tea and dropped two cubes of ice into my father’s drink. “You seem to be staying busy in your retirement. How’s your work coming?” I brought him his rum and cola.

  “It’s an accumulation.” He coughed into his fist. I came around behind him, startling Wing Biddlebaum out of his lap. He leaned over his papers and crabbed his arms to cover the manuscript pages, like a star student shielding a test from a flunky’s prying eyes. “If you don’t mind—” he said. And because this seemed such curious behavior, I couldn’t help focusing on the papers on his desk. I set down the rum and cola, and my eye fell on a page half-uncovered by his liver-spotted hand, a title page with the words:

  The Book of the Grotesque

  A Novel

  By Roland Clary

  My father, a novelist?

  Impossible, I was thinking on the elevator up to Dhara’s and my apartment. Perhaps he was now calling his endless biography The Book of the Grotesque, which had been Anderson’s original name for his one great classic. My father hadn’t cared for the title the publisher had insisted on—Winesburg, Ohio felt too quaint and regional, like antimacassars or a fish fry, he’d once told me. We’re talking about one of the most yearning-filled books of the twentieth century, far sexier than anything those dull pornographers Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin ever wrote. Winesburg teems with repressed desire. Its citizens are a constellation of unfulfilled dreams and communions. I remembered asking him, What’s sexy about The Book of the Grotesque? He’d said that to Anderson grotesques were not outwardly so much as spiritually deformed; the culture of materialism had so warped and corrupted them that they’d lost touch with each other and with what it meant to be human. Yet they were the most beautiful characters, most deserving of our sympathy, and in their isolation were the most like us.

  I was trying once more to picture what I saw on my father’s desk before his arm moved over the title page and I retreated with my cup of tea. Had I really seen the word novel, or was I projecting my own frustrations onto my father’s manuscript? Perhaps biographers wrote in their subject’s voice from time to time, as an immersive experiment. I could bring this up, but I knew my father would never answer me straight. All I’d get was the old evasiveness—unless I did some digging on my own.

  Dhara had cooked a tomato pasta and was twirling noodles on a fork at our swag-leg table.

  “I thought we were going to have dinner together,” I said.

  “You were supposed to be home more than an hour ago.” She set down her fork. “How long does it take to move into a six-hundred-square-foot apartment?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But he’s like a magician doing a hat trick; he pulls out rabbits, bouquets, one thing after another from those boxes.”

  “If it’s so entertaining, maybe you should move in with him. You’re paying for the place. Might as well get some use out of it.”

  “Dhara—”

  “So did you call back the love of your life?” She got up with her plate and scraped the remainder of her dinner into the trashcan beneath the sink.

  “Stop it, for Chrissake. And what makes you think of that anyway?” I asked, though I could picture her checking the voice-mail messages to see if Lucy’s had been saved or erased.

  “Just wondering.” She rinsed her plate and put it in the dishwasher.

  I knew I should have told her that Lucy had moved here. I should have admitted I was going out for an innocent coffee. But then it occurred to me that of all Chicago landmarks, of all places to meet, I’d chosen the European Collection of the Art Institute—the place where, on a bench with a view of Gustave Caillebotte’s nearly life-size oil Paris Street; Rainy Day, I had asked Dhara to marry me. I decided to say something true and something less than true: “I listened to the message, and I did call Lucy back. It was just as I thought. She wanted a phone number for an old friend.”

  “Who?” Dhara aske
d.

  “You wouldn’t know him. We went to high school in Indianapolis, lost touch years ago. I couldn’t be very helpful, in other words.”

  I made myself busy cleaning the stovetop, where Dhara had left a portion of pasta in a saucepan. Before sitting down to eat, I threw away the tomato seeds and garlic skins, rinsed and dried the cutting board.

  “What else did you talk about?” she asked.

  “Nothing. It was a short call.”

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “She’s still in publishing,” I said. “Like everyone else, she’s worried about layoffs.”

  “Well, I hope this will be your last conversation.” Dhara fetched her coat and scarf from the closet.

  “She called me, remember?”

  “I thought we agreed to leave the past in the past.” She bundled up and pulled on gloves.

  “Where are you going?”

  Back to work,” she said on her way out the door.

  6

  Alfred J. Lazar did not approve of his daughter’s engagement, but she was headstrong and one of the few people over whom he exerted little control. It would soon become clear to George that she got what she wanted, and no amount of cajoling or threatening could distract her from her aims. Upon his return to work he was called into a meeting in Lazar’s capacious office overlooking Jackson Boulevard. Family pictures—of his wife and daughter, of his son as a boy, and of his father, who began his career peddling tinware from a rattletrap wagon in rural Missouri and made his fortune in the wholesale grocery business—hung on the walls. It struck George that he was about to marry into this family, and photographs like these would adorn his house. He had never lived in a house, had always shared space with strangers passing through. But now he had committed to a settled life, and this man, his boss, pacing in front of the window, would soon be his father-in-law.

  “I understand that Margaret has accepted your proposal,” Lazar began. “I had no idea you were part of the cattle call. Harriet is rather beside herself. My wife does not take well to surprises.”

  George sat stiffly in a bow-arm leather chair. Out of deference he made a point to sit down when Lazar was standing so as not to tower over him. “I assumed that Margaret had told you her feelings. My feelings, as well.”

  “At the office nothing gets past me, but at home I’m the last to know. D’you understand?” He often paused midthought with this rhetorical question, and George had learned to give a look of assent and allow Lazar to continue. He didn’t like to be interrupted and spoke in commanding streams that left no room for disagreement. He stopped before a mirror and examined his trim sideburns and meticulously shaven face. He had installed full-length mirrors on opposite walls so when he sat at his desk he could see himself in multiple dimensions. “I have to say this is most unexpected.” His voice carried equal measures of chagrin and disappointment.

  “I had wanted to ask you first,” George said, “but you were away in New York. I never knew you were going on a trip.”

  “I would have told you on the Friday before Christmas, but you vanished. What’s gotten into you, George? I used to come into the office and you’d be asleep on the conference-room divan, up all night finishing a campaign. Now you’re hauling off early to start the long weekend?”

  “If you must know, I left to buy your daughter a ring.”

  “But I told you to come back.”

  “And here I am. I’m sorry it’s taken until now.”

  George had feared Lazar was going to fire him, that he would fall victim to one of those “regenerative acts of nature” that had his coworkers skittering about like cats on hot bricks. Though he would not admit this to himself now or for years, his trip to Marshall Field’s was more detour than destination. He had stumbled into the place, in the throes less of romance than of professional anxiety—of what turned out, moreover, to be unfounded professional anxiety: All Lazar had wanted to talk about, or so he said, was a new department he was setting up at the agency. He’d visited Chicago clients throughout December, and had gone to New York to announce his creation of a “Performance Department,” a grand new selling point for the firm.

  “Kennison’s idea, of course,” he said. “I told him he should come with me and give the briefing, but he’s against soldiers taking credit, d’you understand?” From now on, he continued, all of the agency’s clients would be turning in weekly sales reports to show how well each ad was performing. Within the month he’d be hiring six accountants to record and calculate the returns for all seven hundred clients on the pulling power of five thousand newspapers and magazines. “I’ll know the number of replies for every ad in every retail and mail-order campaign, and by the end of each week I’ll be able to say what’s working, what’s got to go, and who takes the checkered flag.”

  Lazar had become an aficionado of the growing sport of auto racing, and was an investor in Barney Oldfield’s “No. 999,” which won the Manufacturer’s Challenge Cup. He took every opportunity to pepper his talk with racing analogies and automotive terms.

  “There you have it,” Lazar said. “First I cried out, ‘What’s the future?’ and an echo came back: ‘Prove They Need It.’ Now, with the Performance Department, we’ll have all the evidence necessary to reach the most consumers. We’ll know who they are and what they want. It’s not the craftiest driver that wins the race, but the best-built machine.”

  After the meeting George knew he should have felt relieved. He hadn’t lost his job, and though Lazar never gave his consent for George to marry his daughter, he didn’t refuse, either. In fact, he was oddly silent on the subject, more invested in the firm than his family. Perhaps he chose to ignore George’s impending role in his life, or George’s position at the firm was indeed never in jeopardy. Kennison had told him that among the boss’s errands in New York was discussing the Nuvolia contract, but when George asked about this, Lazar said all seven hundred contracts were being revised to include the Performance Department. It was just like Kennison to mislead a perceived adversary, but George was going to be part of the family—heir apparent, untouchable.

  Despite Harriet Lazar’s protestations, the wedding was set for July. Seven months seemed an unusually short time to plan, but Margaret was graduating from the University of Chicago in spring and saw no point in waiting around for the rest of her life to begin. Harriet spread the rumor that her daughter was speeding up the schedule out of fear she might come to her senses, and George had a similar worry, accompanied by another: that he might change his mind. He wondered if he ever would have proposed had he known his job was safe. Or, perhaps, it had not been safe, and Lazar only kept him on grudgingly after learning of the engagement. Regardless, George had committed to marriage, and even while he told himself he could love this woman and spend the next half century by her side, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, there were days when he thought of catching a train east and going where no one knew him, to start another life.

  The months blurred by like a blizzard off the lake. Winter dragged into May; ice ensnarled the river, and pedestrians crowded over sidewalk grates to warm themselves in the steam. George had planned to move to better lodgings for the swan song of his bachelorhood, but hadn’t found the time. Talk at the boardinghouse turned from the weather to the factory protests, the strikes by the garment unions against Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. By spring, picket lines, ten thousand bodies long, snaked around the city, up Rush Street to Huron, just short of Ma Kavanagh’s door. And on a bitter day in April, riots broke out between the strikers and armed police. Ostrinski and Tiptoe Joe and other labor men in the building knew George worked high in a corporate skyscraper and had heard from Nellie Kavanagh, who read all the society papers, about his engagement to Margaret Lazar. At the breakfast table and passing on the stairs, George felt the hostility of his neighbors and wanted to remind them where he came from, let them know that he was one of them. But instead he took the grip to the Monadnock and the elevator to fourteen, and w
hen the scorn grew intolerable he finally moved his few belongings to a well-appointed room in the Palmer House, an easy walk to work.

  Margaret seemed of two minds about his new accommodations. Now she could tell her mother that her betrothed had a soigné address. But at the same time she claimed to support the strikers, even those who slugged nonunion workers for crossing picket lines. George felt off-balance around his fiancée, who was proud of her privilege, aflutter at the public portraits of her wealthy friends, and also quick to declare her allegiance with the man in the street. George had promised himself that sometime before the wedding he would ask Margaret what she saw in him, but May gave way to June; the labor strike moved from the streets to the courts; the Performance Department put the firm on high alert; and George’s soon-to-be wife and mother-in-law were so embroiled in their contentious wedding planning that he could barely get a meeting with Margaret, and certainly not alone.

  Before he had come to Chicago, the biggest house George had ever seen belonged to Banker White—a new stone mansion on Buckeye Street that was the pride of the town. But the Lazar estate on Lake Shore Drive was grander still, with its rusticated walls, masonry arches, three stories, two towers, and front yard of vast blue sparkling lake. Harriet had tried to insist on a traditional church wedding at Lincoln Park Presbyterian, but Margaret refused and after much debate rallied her father to her side, convincing him to host the ceremony on North Avenue Beach, with cocktails in the house and the reception on the back lawn. Harriet was furious and said her friends would be scandalized: Home weddings? Outdoor weddings? They simply don’t happen in our society; you didn’t grow up among gypsies, you know. Margaret called her mother a mid-Victorian, accused her of knowing nothing of modern customs, and seemed to relish the victory, as Lazar made arrangements with the Twenty-First Ward alderman to set up a temporary altar on a bulkhead so the bride and groom could be married with Lake Michigan at their backs.