The waiter returned with dessert menus. Margaret ordered the German almond cake, George the chocolate mousse and a cup of café noir. He decided to buck up and try to salvage the evening, but just as he was getting ready to apologize and make some excuse about not feeling quite himself today, she put an end to the thaw between them. “You know what,” she said, “I’ll go first, if that would make it easier. I’ll tell you why I married you. Maybe that will help loosen your tongue.”
George had been curious about the source of her affection ever since her startling confession at her twenty-first-birthday soiree. He’d waited for this moment, had not known how to draw the story out of her, and now here she was about to tell him. But instead of hearing every word he was thinking about the woman he’d just seen leave the restaurant. It had to be Helen. Seth Richmond had said she was living in Chicago, and wouldn’t it be the ultimate sign that in this city of two million souls they would both end up here, of all places, of all occasions? He remembered sitting with her on a cold night in late fall under the grandstand at Waterworks Hill, the reverential feeling that swept over him as she nestled close and he placed his hand on her shoulder. The thought he had then returned to him now: I have come to this lonely place and here is this other.
But when he looked across the table it was not Helen White but Margaret Lazar, his wife of one year. And the room was so boisterous that it took a great effort of concentration for him to make out her words: “When I saw you in the street that day of the automobile accident I felt the strangest sensation,” she was saying. “It was something I’d never experienced before or since. Mind you, I’m no Florence Nightingale, but from the very first time our eyes met I wanted to take care of you.”
“But you were so young,” George said, slipping out of his reverie.
“I know,” Margaret continued. “But in that moment I swear I saw the future.” She spoke of the years that followed, how she almost never saw him but would tune in at the dinner table whenever her father mentioned the tall young man from Ohio and his talent for business, his innate understanding of people’s moods and needs. Margaret would see him each summer when she worked part-time for the agency, and every year George’s workspace marked his progress, from cubby to desk to interior office to window office with a sweeping view. “Growing up the way I did,” she said, “I had never met a self-made man who was anywhere close to my age. I remember pointing you out to friends from school and their saying, ‘Now that’s a man, all right. The rest of your admirers have never had to lift a finger. Boys, Margaret, the whole lot of them.’ I agreed, but I didn’t tell my friends that I saw something of the boy in you, as well. The openness, the sensitivity, the part of you—I don’t know how to describe it or where it comes from—that needs caring for. It’s that combination, man and boy, that brought me to this place.”
George picked up his dessert fork, then set it back down.
“There—” Margaret exclaimed, raising her empty glass. “Happy Anniversary.”
“I’m speechless,” George said, though he knew full well that his turn had come.
7
Dhara was not usually jealous. At work or at parties, she didn’t appear threatened by other women. Only people I knew from long ago caused her to act this way. It was as if our lives began when we met and we were only allowed to live for the future. Our building looked straight out of the Jetsons; we’d furnished our apartment with austere modern sofas and chairs. Dhara knew the names of the designers and how to distinguish the Neo from the Portola Collection, an Arco floor lamp from an Orbit sconce. We worked for the company that had contributed more than any other to the death of print, the end of the book. I wondered if Dhara secretly hoped that I’d give up my dream of writing a novel, because storytelling was an act of memory. She never talked about her own childhood, and her attention drifted when I talked about mine. Besides two or three visits home each year to Dayton, she rarely brought up her family. What I knew about them had come not from her but from listening at the table over the Christmas holiday or during the annual festival of Diwali.
Dhara grew up in the Dynasty Inn, at the crossroads of Interstates 70 and 75, in the middle of Middle America, and spent her childhood watching weary travelers headed north or south, east or west, always looking down the road toward somewhere else. The thought that a family lived here, in this motel, must have seemed as strange to the parade of people passing through as the aroma of curries that Meera Patel cooked on a portable stove in the back room office. From an early age Dhara tried to mask the smell with vanilla-scented candles, and over time she, too, saw her family as strange. She and her younger brother, Ajit, were among the few South Asian kids at their school. To combat the taunts and exclusions, Ajit took bodybuilding supplements and spent hours in the weight room until he resembled a comic-book henchman, and Dhara survived on charm and good looks. We called her Indian Barbie, her father liked to say. Her hair was so tall she had to duck to get through the door. She rode in a float as homecoming queen, won a scholarship to Wittenberg, and would have waved good-bye to Ohio for good had her mother not grown ill her senior year in college. Dhara finished school and returned to Dayton to work at the Dynasty and help care for Meera, whose cancer eventually went into remission.
Then September 11 happened, and travelers, upon seeing brown faces behind the desk, would turn on their heels and head to the next cheap lodging. Jagdish Patel bought a flagpole and raised the Stars and Stripes. On the marquee out front he hung the words AMERICAN-OWNED MOTEL and, after the deployments, WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS. If the rooms or the service weren’t perfect, customers could grow hostile. One St. Patrick’s Day a college kid told Ajit to hop on his magic carpet and fly back to his own country. Ajit wheeled around the reception desk with pointed finger, saying I’m Indian, you fool, and got his nose broken with a single lucky punch. Dhara tried to clean her brother’s blood out of the pale carpet, but her scrubbing only made the stain grow. That year she applied to business school, and though she got into a couple programs in California, her mother convinced her to go to Ohio State. Dhara did not regret it, because in the winter of her first year her mother’s cancer came back, and at least she could drive home weekends. By summer’s end her mother was dead, and too soon after that her father fell in with the Dynasty’s receptionist. When Dhara left for Chicago and a new job, she promised herself she would not look back.
I loved my wife, but we did have this fundamental difference: In order to leave she had to sever ties, while in order for me to get on with my life I had to go back and repair them. Every day I brought my father lunch, smuggled into my shoulder bag from Imego’s gourmet cafeteria. Dhara reminded me I shouldn’t abuse the free food in times like these, but I needed to cut costs, and a man can’t survive on buttered popcorn alone. On one of these visits I arrived an hour earlier than usual because I had an afternoon meeting in Madison. When he didn’t answer the door, I let myself in with my extra key.
I looked around the apartment—no one there but the orange cat, failing to camouflage himself on the battered office chair. I put the sandwich I’d brought into the refrigerator and went to my father’s desk to write a note—and there was that title page again, with the words A Novel by Roland Clary. But beyond this one piece of paper I saw no further evidence of The Book of the Grotesque. I peeked under the pile, careful not to upset the disorderly order, but all I found were scores of typewritten pages of what seemed like disconnected fragments—impressionistic character portraits, details of city life from a century ago—mixed with reams of handwritten notes on index cards and legal paper, page after page scattered about or stuffed into manila folders with labels such as Leaving Winesburg; Turn of the Century Chicago; Anderson and the Chicago Renaissance; The Golden Age of Advertising; and Secondary Characters and Other Grotesques.
I opened the thickest folder, marked George Willard, and thumbed through my father’s notes. George Willard is the central recurring character in Winesburg, Ohio, the young reporter w
ho has a gift for drawing even the most alienated townspeople out from the shadows. I leafed through articles my father had written about the death of George’s mother, his strained relationship with his father, the shabby hotel his parents run, and how, in nearly every tale in the book, different characters seek George out, as if they’ve waited their whole lives to tell him their stories. My father had written notes, mostly about George’s habits and background:
He sometimes talks aloud to himself, and his mother used to kneel on the floor outside his room listening to his soliloquies and thinking that within her son “is a secret something that is striving to grow … the thing I let be killed in myself.”
His room, on the second floor of the New Willard House, has one window looking over an alleyway and another looking across the railroad tracks. Of course George has a view of the tracks leading out of Winesburg. He shares that common small-town affliction: an unyielding restlessness.
As the sole reporter at the Winesburg Eagle, he carries a notepad with him everywhere, but what he wants to write most of all is a love story. In “The Thinker,” he tells Seth Richmond just whom he’s going to fall in love with, too: It’s the banker’s daughter, Helen White—“the only girl in town with any ‘getup’ to her.”
I was about to close the folder when I saw, on the inside flap, that my father had written more notes to himself in his shaky hand:
There are questions that linger after Winesburg, Ohio, and we can only guess at the answers. In the final scene of the book, George Willard boards a train. He has said good-bye to his beloved Helen, so their love story, for now, is incomplete. It’s the last years of the 19th Century, and he is headed for the great, teeming metropolis of Chicago. All we know is that “the young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams.” Kate Swift, his former teacher, had once told him, “You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.” She was urging him to become not just a reporter but a writer, one who can see into people’s hearts and minds. And by the last page of the book we glimpse a portrait of the artist as a young man now coming into focus: “He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamplighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.”
But questions remain: What became of George Willard in Chicago? Did his love affair with Helen White continue or come to an end? Would George have been drawn by the siren song of commerce, as Sherwood Anderson himself was, living in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th Century? Or would he fulfill the great hope that he would one day become a writer?
I was standing at my father’s desk asking myself these same questions when I heard rattling keys and then the lock turning. I quickly closed the folder and said, “Hello,” in my most unthreatening voice.
“What are you doing here?” my father asked.
“Just bringing you lunch.” I hurried to the refrigerator and put the sandwich on a plate, then explained why I was early. I expected him to berate me for letting myself in and keeping a key of my own, but he seemed distracted so I asked where he’d been all day.
He took off his gloves and Cossack fur cap, draped his coat and scarf over a chair. He leaned on a ball-handle cane that I’d never seen before. “I’ve been on a walk,” he said, his voiced tinged with melancholy. “I used to be a regular flâneur in this city, but now I’m a wheezing, jangling sack of bones. I’m lucky to cover ten blocks round trip.” He caught his breath and sat down heavily on the sofa. “I can’t remember the last time I strolled Wabash Avenue. So much has changed.” He rested his cane on the coffee table.
“Before the bubble burst we had a lot of construction. I’m sure you’ve seen Sceptrum Tower next door. Ninety stories, nine hundred million dollars, and a massive shadow over Harbor City. So what took you outside on this perfectly dreary morning?”
He dabbed at his forehead with the back of his hand and kicked off his shoes, the insoles spilling out like tongues. He said that Wabash Avenue used to be called Cass Street, and Sherwood Anderson wrote the Wines-burg stories at 735 Cass. “He worked as an advertising copywriter at the Critchfield Company in the Loop, and used to cross the bridge right down there.” My father pointed beyond the balcony to the Chicago River. “He examined the faces of people he passed, holding them in his mind as he walked home. Then he climbed up to the third floor of the rooming house where he lived—alone, a thirty-eight-year-old man who had left his family in Ohio to become a writer—and sat down at a long table lit overhead by a bare electric light. And in what he described as a series of feverish sessions in 1915, he wrote ‘Hands’ and then the rest of the stories on print paper he’d copped from the office.”
“What’s become of the boardinghouse?”
“I’d been wondering that myself. Last I checked the building still stood, worse for wear, but you could look up and see that third-floor window and imagine Anderson working into the night. But now the building’s gone. Nothing there but a fenced-in parking lot.”
I wanted to ask my father about The Book of the Grotesque, see if there was more to this novel he was writing than a title page, sketches, and haphazard notes. I hadn’t seen him this expansive since the months after his heart surgery, when it seemed, however briefly, that we could talk about anything. But if I admitted I’d been riffling through his papers, he’d shut down and demand my key and I’d lose his trust completely. So I asked what year he last saw the old rooming house, and he said it must have been a couple decades ago. And then he was off reminiscing about Chicago summers with my mother and me, and mooning as he always did about how she was his twin flame and single greatest regret.
Soon I had to get on the road to Madison, but the next day I brought lunch at the same time and again he was gone from his apartment. The windchill had dropped below freezing and the sidewalks were treacherous, so I worried about a seventy-eight-year-old setting off on these excursions, though I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him. While he was away I pored over his notes, about the dawn of the age of advertising, the theater scene at Jane Addams’s Hull House, and at night in bed next to Dhara I reread Winesburg, Ohio. By Friday I was so swept up by the notes and my father’s missing manuscript, which I’d scoured his apartment looking for, that I nearly forgot my two o’clock meeting with Lucy.
She was waiting at the entrance to the European Painting and Sculpture Collection. Dressed down in stretch pants and a soft, hooded sweater, with little makeup and her sandy hair pulled back in a band, she was attractive and rangy, though leaner, more angular than I remembered. I was both relieved and a little disappointed that she looked more like someone on her way to a yoga class than out on a date. But who was I to flatter myself, and why was I thinking of this afternoon as anything other than old friends catching up on lost years?
We hugged quickly, and I felt short beside her. She was an inch taller, and just as she always used to, she stooped to compensate.
“You look great,” I said.
“You too.” She glanced at my left hand, at the wedding ring Dhara and I had bought from Overstock.
I saw that she wasn’t wearing a ring. “I’m married.” I held up my hand. “Dhara and I just had our first anniversary.”
“Congratulations!” she exclaimed, though she seemed unsurprised by the news. We were past thirty, after all, and hadn’t spoken more than a handful of times in the last ten years. She asked how Dhara and I met, and I told her about Lakeside and tried to avoid the particulars of the book-scanning project, but Lucy asked, “She works for Imego?” And I said, “Yes, I know. But it’s quite a company—they take good care of their people.” I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was one of them.
She forced a
smile as we stepped inside the gallery. In front of us was Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, and to our left was the bench where I proposed to Dhara. Overcome with self-reproach, I said, “I asked my wife to marry me here. It’s one of my favorite places in Chicago.” When Lucy reddened I remembered how I used to tease her that I knew when she was embarrassed because the blood would rise just to her chin, like a crimson collar. As a distraction, I talked about the painting of the man and woman walking arm in arm by a cobblestone intersection near the Gare Saint-Lazare. The man, in long coat and top hat, holds an umbrella over himself and the woman, who is wearing a black frock and netted cap. I told Lucy what I loved about the painting: how, like a frame on a reel, it captures a moment in the lives of this couple—sheltered from the rain, looking off in the same direction—but also, somehow, their entire past and future.
“You sound like an old romantic,” Lucy said.
“That’s me. Don’t you recall?”
“My memory must be failing me.”
“Oh, come on.” I touched her elbow.
“I like the painting,” she said, “but maybe we should talk somewhere else.”
In the Art Institute cafeteria we got coffees and a corner table and I asked what brought her to Chicago. “I was downsized. Can’t you tell?” She slumped in her chair, then told me the story of her eight years working for H. Davenport, the venerable publisher of some of the finest writers of the past century. She’d taken the Radcliffe publishing course out of college, Xeroxed, opened mail, read slush, caught her big break at twenty-eight and begun making acquisitions. At first she was allowed to buy one or two books per list—narrative nonfiction only. But when another young editor took maternity leave, Lucy volunteered to pick up the slack, and for a short while she had the best job in the world. She was buying fiction, memoir; one of her novels became a finalist for the National Book Award, and she discovered a lost classic from the Davenport archives that became a surprising best seller. But around this time a thirty-five-year-old European financier got in his mind the foolhardy idea that serious books could turn a profit in a country where at best a small city’s worth of people—say, the population of Des Moines—read anything approximating literature. He took out massive loans to buy the company, then lured another respected publishing house into a doomed marriage. Not long after the merger, the editor who had returned from maternity leave received a pink slip, as did dozens of other editors, publicists, and salespeople.
The End of the Book Page 9