The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  “No,” I said. Then, “I don’t know.” Whenever the thought had crossed my mind that he might be suicidal I had pushed it away. He didn’t seem to have given up. He still had plenty of wit and spleen. He’d always been more angry than depressed. “He’s pushing eighty. Isn’t he too old?”

  “I thought rates were higher at that age,” Lucy said. “People take their own lives to escape the pain.”

  I recalled that December morning, pounding on my father’s door, climbing the ladder to the second-story window, the sense of panic over what I might find.

  I thanked Lucy for listening and for the good advice. She apologized on behalf of Ravenous Books & Café, and we laughed, making a vague plan to see each other again.

  That night, I brought my father a grilled chicken salad from the ground-floor restaurant, and we ate dinner in front of his small TV while watching the Cubs play their third game of the season. “Is it my imagination, or have you tidied up?” I asked. His papers were in a small stack on his desk, the settees and chairs free of books.

  “Are you going to watch the game or chitchat?” He turned up the volume.

  “It’s the top of the third, and we’re up eight runs. This hardly qualifies as crunch time,” I said. “I was merely admiring the apartment.”

  He labored to his feet and fixed himself another drink, and we spoke only of baseball until the end of the game, which the Cubs won, 11–6. “Could be our year,” I said. The team had won the NL Central two years in a row, and some were predicting World Series.

  “Ha!” he laughed, and continued laughing until he fell into a fit of coughs.

  The next morning, at the usual hour, I pulled the Prius around and waited for my father to exit the garage. He was twenty minutes late, and instead of going into the Loop on State, he headed north, up the Magnificent Mile. He turned left on Walton and parked at the curb just beyond the Newberry Library. He got out, paid at the meter, slid the ticket onto the dashboard, then went inside. A minute later a security guard came out front with him and helped bring a small box back up the steps and into the building. I wondered what was in that box. Manuscripts? Letters? Books? My father’s novel? Perhaps he was delivering it to the curator of the Sherwood Anderson Collection for a read-through.

  This time I waited for nearly two hours, so long that at one point I got out of my car and sat on a bench across the street in Washington Square Park. I called into the office to let my team know I’d be working from home that morning, and I made a round of calls to university librarians.

  When my father finally returned, he was trailing the same security guard, who once again helped with the box. Then he took off, up LaSalle, along the margins of the Gold Coast, to North Avenue, where he swung a left at a McDonald’s. From across the street I watched him grab a book from the passenger seat and go inside. He put in his order, then shuffled with a tray to a window booth. He ate an oozing cheeseburger, just what his heart needed, while flipping the pages of the book. When he had dumped his tray he returned to the car, sipping at a drink through a straw, and continued along North to Wells Street and the stretch of shops and restaurants in Old Town. He pulled over and parked under an awning marked “CRBC.” A lean, eager man with bifocals that hung on a chain from his neck rushed out to help him with the box, and they went inside.

  CRBC. I’d seen the letters before, etched on the boxes in the storage cage. I did another search on my iPhone. Citizens Republic Bankcorp? Cross Roads Baptist Church? Cannery Row Brewing Company? I added the word “Chicago” to the search, and the first page to come up was Chicago Rare Book Company. An hour passed, and then another, until I couldn’t avoid turning around and heading back to work. I wished I had looked in those CRBC boxes to see what was there when I’d had a chance.

  A big shipment—sixty thousand books—arrived, with little notice, from the University of Michigan, so I spent the rest of the week and well into the following one working Dhara-like hours at the West Town warehouse. I had meant to talk to my father, but it wasn’t until the end of April that work slowed again and I got back into the routine of delivering his lunch.

  To my surprise he was there that first afternoon, then the second and the third, until, finally, I asked, “What happened to your walks?”

  “Oh, I gave those up months ago. I found that driving is less stressful on the skeleton.”

  “I’m sure your doctor would prefer it if you got your legs moving,” I ventured.

  “What do doctors know?”

  We sat down to eat at his dinette table, and he even managed not to complain about the food. He was good for a thank you maybe once a month, and this was one of those days. We were dispatching the flavorless turkey wraps I’d picked up in a rush from a coffee chain when my father asked, out of the blue, “Are you still writing?”

  I could remember only a few times this subject had come up. It was my second year of graduate school before I summoned the nerve to tell him I was in a writing program, and just as I’d expected he called it a waste of time. These salons are a racket. They’re creating a generation of dilettantes. Did Shakespeare get an MFA? Cervantes? George Eliot? Hemingway and Faulkner got their MFAs by reading Sherwood Anderson. That’s all the degree is, a jargoned-up book club. If you want to be a writer, yes, you have to read your eyes bloodshot. But you also need a rare talent and a host of demons driving you.

  “I’m too busy at work,” I said now. “When I get home I don’t have the energy.”

  “It’s not easy, is it?” And then, as if to distance himself, he added, “I can only imagine—sitting at a desk day after day with nothing to draw on but dreams.” After a few bites, he put his wrap down and dropped his napkin onto his plate. “Tell me about what you’ve written?” he asked.

  I was hesitant to get into it, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing him quite this benign. I wondered if something was going on with his heart, a new medication, a change in dosage, lack of oxygen to the brain. He wasn’t so much out of it, though, as uncharacteristically placid. So I told him about A Brief History of the Fool, first in the most abbreviated, dismissive way, but he kept prompting me, asking more questions, until I found myself describing the stories at length, talking about the characters—a bartender, an amateur astronomer, a diver after shipwrecks around the Great Lakes—and the curious features of the town, which as I talked about it sounded too much like Bloomington. I admitted this to my father, but he said, “Sounds more like Winesburg to me. But don’t worry; you’re in good company. In all of American literature of the past hundred years, no book has had a greater influence. Not Gatsby, Catcher, or Invisible Man. The more you read the more you’ll see it’s true.”

  I cleared the table and was getting ready to go back to work when my father said, “I’d be happy to read your book.” He got up and stood by the sliding doors to the balcony, and with his back turned added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was good.”

  Shaken perhaps by the unheard-of event of a compliment from my father, I declined right away. “Thanks for the offer, but I haven’t looked at that book in years. If I have to avert my eyes, I couldn’t possibly inflict it on you.”

  “As you wish.” He shrugged.

  I felt like I’d let him down, and I wanted to give him something—if not the abandoned book, at least a thought or two I’d been keeping to myself. So I told him for the first time that I didn’t like my job, that I had problems with Imego, that I wished I could get a stretch of unfettered time to finish a book. “But I’m in no position to quit, and even if I were, I probably don’t have the guts.”

  That’s when my father said, “I knew it.” I wasn’t sure what he meant: He knew I wanted to be a writer? Or he knew I didn’t have the guts? It wasn’t clear, and I wouldn’t find out, not then or ever, because he proceeded to tell a story I’d heard before but never at such length, about how Sherwood Anderson, at age thirty-six, stressed by debt and a yearning to be free, to be a writer, fell into a fuguelike state and left his wife, children
, and job in Elyria, Ohio, literally walked out the door of his office one November morning and four days later turned up at a drugstore in Cleveland, unshaven, still in his business suit, pants covered to the knees with mud. He didn’t know his name or where he was, and wouldn’t begin to recover his faculties until days later in a hospital ward, his wife at his bedside. Within two months he had moved alone to Chicago, picked up copywriting work to pay the bills, grown his hair long, and fallen in with an artistic crowd on the forefront of what would become the city’s greatest literary moment.

  “I’m not telling you to leave your wife,” my father said. “That never worked out too well for me. Nor am I pushing the benefits of a nervous breakdown. But an artistic temperament repressed can be a withering thing.”

  And then he was on to another story, which I remembered as the most poignant instance of dramatic irony in all of Winesburg, Ohio. It occurs in the tale “Death,” about the demise of George Willard’s mother. In her youth, Elizabeth had artistic desires, and was even given a chance to explore them when her father, at the end of his life, gave her eight hundred dollars, a significant sum in the 1870s. “It is to make up to you for my failure as a father,” he said. “Some time it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.”

  But instead of going to the city, where she dreamed of becoming an actress, Elizabeth closed the door forever, and would pass the rest of her short life trapped in Winesburg. Her father had been the proprietor of the town’s hotel, and against his wishes she married the desk clerk Tom Willard “because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the determination to marry came to her.” Her father had made her promise never to tell Tom about the money—and this wish, at least, she fulfilled. Not long after her wedding she stashed the eight hundred dollars in a tin box and sealed it behind the plaster walls of her room. She had always intended to give the money to George so that he could embark, in some big city, on the artist’s life that she had denied herself. But she had grown tired and gravely ill, and in her last six days she couldn’t move from her bed or speak, couldn’t tell her son about his secret inheritance. My father quoted from the story: “She struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard to his future, and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for years.”

  My father sat down on the camelback sofa, as if recounting the tale had exhausted him. “George might have gone to Chicago with a leg up to start the work he was meant to do. But no such luck. All he’d have had in his billfold were his last paychecks from the Winesburg Eagle. He would’ve had no choice but to join the rat race.”

  “And those eight hundred dollars just sat in the walls, like buried treasure.”

  “No one would have known to look. The secret would have died with Elizabeth,” he said. “Maybe years later the hotel would have been razed, the mangled tin box hauled off and buried in the rubble of the county landfill.”

  All this talk of mortality made me realize I might not have a better chance to ask about my father’s heart. “Last time I was in your bathroom I couldn’t help noticing all the new canisters of pills,” I began. “I know you hate to talk about this, but are you sure everything’s okay with your heart?”

  My father’s expression soured. “Did I invite you to look into my cabinets?”

  “The pills were out in the open, prescriptions from your last appointment.”

  “So you were reading the labels?”

  “I was washing my hands, and they caught my eye. They looked more like the kind of collection a heart failure patient might take.” There. I’d said it.

  “Are you an amateur cardiologist? Moonlighting on the side? Are you a nurse? Well, you’re not who I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of Ursula Andress.”

  “No, I’m your son,” I said. “Pardon me for giving a damn.”

  “Look, I can take care of myself. I made it this far.” He got up and mixed a Diet Rite and rum.

  I knew I’d been foolish to think I could get a straight answer. I wanted a letter—A, B, C, or D—but all he gave me were the usual one-liners. For a while there, we were having a real conversation. But up came the old shield, out the old arrows.

  “I should be getting back to the office,” I said.

  “What’s today’s date?” he asked.

  I told him it was the thirtieth of April.

  “Just a minute,” he said, and began fumbling in his desk. Wing jumped up and expected a scratch. Ignoring the cat, my father pulled an envelope full of money from the drawer. “It’s a day early, but here.” He handed me May’s rent. “I might not see you tomorrow, so you may as well take this now.”

  12

  The Willards arrived at the main entrance of Hull House in Lazar’s apple-green Pierce-Arrow, the most reliable winter car in his collection. George was embarrassed when Virgil opened the side door and gave Margaret his arm to help her down to the curb. Children and their laborer parents were sliding about the icy sidewalks, and no one for miles was formally attired. George had insisted that Margaret’s Merry Widow hat, well over a foot wide, with a fountain of feathers, was too much for the settlement—“You’ll be lucky to fit in the door” —but Margaret had said, “The theater’s the theater. And really, George, are you one to tell me what’s fashionable?”

  Within the house, no one seemed to notice. Both drawing rooms were in use for evening classes. A chorus of singers could be heard from the top floor, and below it the scamper of feet. The greeter was so busy shepherding children from club to lesson to meal that she only had time to point her finger and say, “Next building over,” when George asked where the auditorium was.

  At the box office, out of his wife’s earshot, he inquired after Helen, and the ticket-seller said she was working backstage that night. George had not attended much theater, but Odysseus in Chicago had a powerful effect on him. The set was spare, the cast made up entirely of Greek Americans from the surrounding neighborhood, men and women with day jobs as factory workers and deliverymen, teachers and clerks, yet their inexperience only intensified the performances. Though some of the actors spoke with heavy accents, George felt as if he were watching the last ten years of his life play out on stage. The immigrants delivered their lines with a longing that reminded him of his own journey, his own distance from home and desire to get back to that place—not Winesburg so much as a feeling he had there, about the people, their hopes and defeats. Tears pooled in his eyes as he watched Odysseus pine for Penelope from the snares of Calypso, and reunite at long last with his true love.

  After the play George found Helen talking to the German Union baker.

  “You’re back!” she exclaimed.

  George stepped aside to make way for the Merry Widow hat. “This is my wife, Margaret,” he said. “And this is Helen White, from home.”

  “Ah.” Margaret reached out her gloved hand, and with practiced nonchalance asked, “How do you know each other?”

  “Why, everyone knew your husband,” Helen replied. “He was our paper’s star reporter.”

  “Only reporter, more or less,” George put in.

  “He’s being modest,” Helen said.

  George couldn’t be sure of its source, but a tension hummed in the atmosphere. Did Margaret know? Was she jealous? He’d never seen her territorial side, never been in a setting where the tables were turned. Helen was the more beautiful woman, and carried herself with an ease and discretion that the younger Margaret perhaps recognized she couldn’t match. And who was this baker, Stefan Wirtz, that Helen was introducing? A suitor? A lover? He gave nothing away, in his derby hat with a dusting of flour on the brim, his four-in-hand tie sitting slaunchwise about his wrestler’s neck.

  Everyone spoke all at once, praising the play in a flurry of words, before Helen suggested they sit down for coffee. “Stefan can arrange a discount,” she said in a jocular way. But Margaret seemed to take her seriously: “We always pay f
ull price.”

  In the spacious coffeehouse, with its stained rafters, diamond windows, and rows of blue china mugs, they got coffees and shining rolls Stefan himself had baked that morning. They took a table by the large, crackling fireplace, and the conversation cast about, from Odysseus in Chicago to the treacherous winter to the daily operations at Hull House and its myriad classes, taught by trained volunteers at fifty cents a course, including Grammar, Literature, History, Political Economy, Parliamentary Law, Latin and a range of languages, Physics, Chemistry, Geometry, Trigonometry, Music, Dance, Painting, Clay Modeling, Sewing, and the Domestic Sciences.

  In its eighteen years, Hull House had grown to thirteen buildings that took up a whole city block. There were weekly classes, constant lectures, concerts, recitals, and plays, a daily kindergarten, a free day-nursery, gymnastics and a variety of athletics to keep restless children off the streets. And the coffeehouse, too, convivial and filled to capacity every evening, kept the parents away from the bars in a city well known to have one saloon for every sixty people.

  Margaret seemed to have lowered her guard, though she was directing most of her questions at Stefan. In his mild accent, he enumerated the clubs on the Hull House block—the Women’s Club, the Men’s Club, the Newlyweds’ Club, too many children’s clubs to recall, and the smaller groups for gardening, stargazing, mandolin, fencing, and countless other interests.

  Helen began to say, “I’m not sure where you stand politically—” when Margaret bristled, as if accused: “I’m a Square-Deal Progressive. Pro-settlement. Anti-trust. I think Roosevelt is doing a swell job.”

  “I only meant to mention that some of our clubs do have a mission about them,” Helen said. “I have friends in the Eight-Hour Club, a group of women in local factories who push their fellow workers to hold fast to the eight-hour law. And Stefan is a member of the Arthur Toynbee Club. They discuss economics and social reform.”