The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  And so Tom Willard abandoned his political plans as cavalierly as he had hatched them. He spent the summer rattling around the house, reading aloud from newspapers and stalking his next delusion. At first George and Margaret indulged him and stayed at the kitchen table while he beat his gums over a “promising” new investment scheme. Tom’s fifty-three dollars disappeared, and he asked his son for a “loan” to tide him over; this became a ritual. George and Margaret learned to speak in code to avoid saying anything that might set Tom off on a new caprice, and before long they found themselves in flight from their own home.

  Margaret spent time at the stereopticon, with its pictures from the Louvre, and revisited the idea of moving to Paris for the summer. George had to admit, given recent developments, that the plan had appeal. But after a week or two Hull House reclaimed Margaret’s attention, and she dismissed the idea of travel as “frivolous.” She continued her work with the lending library and put increasing amounts of her own funds toward the purchase of art reproductions for local schools; she served as stage manager on Bronson Howard’s Old Love Letters and John Galsworthy’s The Silver Box. And Stefan recruited her into the Toynbee Club and had her awarded a new title: Director of Philanthropy.

  For the first time in years, George lingered at the office at the end of the workday, but found his prospects unchanged. He had read through his old notepads, one after the next, but the entire lot of them disappointed him. Mostly he’d jotted down the daily comings and goings of Winesburg’s citizens: A. P. Wringlet received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road. He had recorded curious quotes such as this, from the Standard Oil agent Joe Welling: The world is on fire. But he had forgotten the context of Joe’s pronouncement, and his spirits sank upon realizing that the notepads contained few seeds for the books George hoped to write. He returned to the box of keepsakes he had stashed in his closet and unearthed a story he had begun as a teenager, a love story he’d once told Seth Richmond about. He had asked Seth to inform Helen White that George was in love with her, for he wanted to know how love felt in order to write a story about it. But he had gone no further than a few pages of outline notes and hackneyed lines. And now as summer gave way to fall he got in his mind that he ought to call around to Helen to see how she was managing.

  They hadn’t run into each other since the end of spring term. Helen had gone home to Winesburg for the summer to help her parents pack the family estate and prepare it for the market. She wrote half a dozen times, more than she had back in college, and George noted that she sent the letters not to his house but to his office. Was she trying to avoid raising Margaret’s suspicions? Was she being thoughtful or furtive? Or was he reading too much into her choice of postal address? She said she’d planned to stay only a week or two in Winesburg, but coming home opened her eyes in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She was surprised to find her parents, her mother especially, chastened by the blow fate had landed. They offered once again to pay for her degree, but seeing the toll the new century had taken on her neighbors, so many of them out of work and looking hollow on their porches, only made her more determined to do something serious with her life.

  She spent her days going through old chests and closets and visiting friends she hadn’t seen more than once or twice in a decade, schoolmates who had children, as many as three or four by now. We’re getting old, George, she wrote. She took long walks through town and out between the berry fields along Trunion Pike. I went up Waterworks Hill on a perfect afternoon to visit the fairgrounds, and I remembered going there with you one evening to flee an especially tiresome suitor that my mother had arranged. Do you recollect how we ran down that hill, got in a tangle and you tumbled and fell and picked yourself up? We were laughing and then everything seemed so quiet and still as we walked toward the valley and the lights of town.

  He did remember, of course. Which is why, in part, he suggested they meet again. She’d been back in Chicago but a week. His timing was fortuitous, she said, because a few trunks were due to arrive at her lodgings and she would probably need help getting them upstairs.

  They met on a bright, humid Saturday while Margaret was at the theater working a matinee. Seeing where Helen lived eased George’s worries about a single woman alone on the South Side. Her caravansary, pale brick with tall iron gates, was guarded like a citadel by the formidable Mrs. Bedrosian and sons. The building sat catty-corner to campus and the famous Midway Plaisance, part of the former fairgrounds of the Columbian Exposition.

  George arrived too late to be of much assistance. The twins, Shahnazar and Norhad, thick as pillars, insisted on doing the work themselves, plucking the trunks from the ground and sweeping them up three flights of steps. George did catch a glimpse of Helen’s room, and though not nearly as meager as his quarters at Ma Kavanagh’s, it was modest, to be sure, a large bedroom with mullioned windows looking out toward the Midway. He was surprised to find her desk untidy, her bedding rumpled, and her clothes and books scattered higgledy-piggledy about the furniture and floor. She made no apology, though perhaps felt disconcerted, as George did, by the presence of Mrs. Bedrosian, who stood cross-armed in the hallway like a sign of posted rules, among them: No gentleman callers, especially those with wedding rings.

  Helen led George along the Midway, past the campus buildings and the library to the Laboratory School, at the east end, where she had put her studies into practice. The building was locked, though they did peer into the windows at the darkened classrooms.

  “Do you think you’ll go back?” George asked.

  “Honestly, I haven’t decided. I hate not to finish something—”

  “I know what you mean.” George tried flirting with danger, to test her response: “Regrets can be impossible to live with.”

  But Helen didn’t seem to catch his implication and continued where she’d left off. “I’ve always been one to set a goal and see it through,” she said, “but over the last couple years I’ve had competing plans: graduate school and Hull House. Then the world turned upside down. When I went home, I realized I’d spent the better part of my life pursued by guilt: Why should I have so much when others are in despair?”

  They returned to the path and continued walking east along the Midway, toward Lake Michigan. “Perhaps that guilt chased me unawares to the normal school and into teaching,” Helen went on. “I’d wanted so much to be around ordinary people, people for whom pretense cuts no figure. You were one of those people, George. You still are. I envied how easily you could move between bankers and cobblers, merchants and pensioners. You had a way of making anyone comfortable, even high-mettled me.”

  “If I seemed comfortable in your presence, you should praise me for my acting,” George said. “You had me nervous as a cat.”

  They crossed a thoroughfare and headed toward a lagoon. “But you know what I mean. You have a natural way about you. You don’t let society tie you up in knots.”

  If ever that were true it no longer seemed to apply, but he wasn’t about to disabuse her of the notion. They were walking close. Her voile skirt brushed against his hand. People passing by must have assumed they were married.

  “I grew up behind castle walls,” Helen was saying, “and though I tried to leave that behind when I went to the city, I was still Banker White’s daughter. Even if no one knew who my father was, my privilege enveloped me like a skin.”

  “You always struck me as perfectly genuine,” George said.

  “I think you recognized our shared desire: We were both desperate to leave, and we knew we had to get out of town in order to create our own expectations.” She pointed to a bench by the banks of the lagoon. “Is this all right?”

  George offered her his hand, and they both sat down. To the left, beyond a stretch of immaculate lawn, stood the Palace of the Arts, one of the last remnants of the World’s Fair; to the right, the wild habitat of Wooded Island. Before th
em lay the lagoon, ringed with people out to take the air, and in the distance the lake, light-spangled and beaded with boats.

  “Oh, listen to me running on and on,” Helen said. “I do apologize. Your ears must be positively ringing with my talk.”

  George put his hand on hers long enough to feel its warmth, then removed it. “I haven’t had a more pleasant afternoon in a great while.”

  “You’re kind—and patient, at that,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I feel both liberated and adrift at the same time, like I’m piloting one of those boats on the lake, yet never learned to sail.”

  “I think you’re making your way just fine.”

  “Well, I’m not Banker White’s daughter anymore, that’s for sure.”

  “I never felt you were. You’re being too hard on yourself, Helen. I always said you were the only girl in town with any get-up to her, and that’s never been more true than now.”

  “Chicago is full of such girls.”

  “Well, I don’t know any.”

  In the silence that followed George wondered if she was going to ask What about your wife? But Helen only pointed out a couple of children feeding the swans, the birds nudging each other as they stretched their necks toward shore.

  “I have two choices, it seems,” Helen began. “I could teach and perhaps one day go back to school. Or I could put in application for permanent resident at Hull House. They have some paying positions there, and I get on well with Jane.”

  “What do you want to do?” George asked.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I bet you know what you want but aren’t ready to say.”

  “I have a confession,” Helen put in. “The first time I went to Hull House, on a field trip with the Lab School, I had convinced myself that I would see you there. I have no idea how the notion got into my head. I knew you still lived in Chicago because your father would go up and down Main Street telling anyone he passed what a big wheel you’d become. But I was afraid to look you up.”

  “Why?” George asked.

  “It had been so many years. I figured if we were going to meet we were going to meet,” she said. “But I had this intuition that it would happen at Hull House. You were an ace copywriter, so the settlement seemed an unlikely place. But I never believed the reports that went abroad about your life among the smart set. I used to see you talking to laborers outside Daugherty’s Feed Store or to misanthropes like Wash Williams, who my mother tried to get fired from the telegraph office for what she called ‘his grotesque appearance and prehistoric hygiene.’ You were friend to the outcast and displaced, people who would be welcome nowhere more than Hull House. But I didn’t see you there, so after a while I dismissed the thought that I ever would. Then, lo and behold, you appeared.”

  “I have a confession of my own,” George said. They sat next to each other, and so, not looking into her eyes, he felt a certain boldness. It occurred to him that directly east of this bench, almost a straight line across the lagoon, the lake, the farms and towns of Indiana and Ohio, stood Winesburg. “When I saw you at Hull House that day, it wasn’t entirely coincidental.” He went on to tell her about Henrici’s, how he’d spotted a woman across the restaurant who looked just like her, how the host had claimed he didn’t know her name but did say she collected bread for Hull House. George had wanted to stop by for months, and when the opportunity arose he took it. He didn’t say his stock had fallen at work or that increasingly he felt like a coward and a fraud. He didn’t say that he might well have been in love with Helen once, and found her every bit as appealing now as ever. Nor did he tell her, not yet anyway, that he had married a woman he didn’t love.

  “So I guess I’m not the clairvoyant that I thought I was,” Helen put in.

  “On the contrary,” George replied. “You thought you would run into me at Hull House, and eventually you did. Your intuition was right all along.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Helen said.

  “Have you decided what to do?” George asked.

  “About what?”

  “Hull House or teaching.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to tell me the answer to that?” She gave a little laugh.

  “Trust your instincts,” George said. “They were right about me.”

  “Then I guess I shall be drafting a letter to Miss Addams.”

  And so she did, that very evening.

  Two months later, Chicago celebrated the Cubs’ victory in the World Series, unaware that the team wouldn’t win another championship for a century and more. It was amidst the city’s jubilation that Helen called once again on Shahnazar and Norhad, this time to help her move from the third floor of Mrs. Bedrosian’s to the third floor of Jane Addams’s Hull House. She joined the forty residents who lived on the property, and agreed to stay on for at least six months. She taught grammar, reading, and literature to a range of students, collaborated with an art teacher on a bookbinding class, and spelled Jane as primary Hull House liaison to the Little Room.

  Later, George would not remember whether it was his idea or Helen’s that he should join the literary club. He had begun filling up his notepads again, this time with observations. He went back to taking the grip to work, and most days would walk the two miles home, stopping midway at the river to watch the drawbridge open with its loud, plaintive wail. He’d write down descriptions of tugboat captains and steamer workers and of the gray-green water, befouled with flotsam and oil. He’d continue on his way and sit up at night cataloguing the faces he called up out of the dark moil of the street. He remembered something the schoolteacher Kate Swift had once said, that he should try to know what people are thinking about, not what they say. So into his notepad went the halting beginnings of character sketches and interior monologues, first of people he knew—Helen, his father—then of people he saw but knew not at all, like Virgil the chauffeur and the violin teacher at Hull House who positively swooned whenever Helen breezed by.

  Into the winter of 1909, George had begun spending weekend afternoons at Hull House. He signed on for Helen’s bookbinding class, and played the wallflower at meetings of the Little Room. He read the novels and stories of members who assembled there—Henry Blake Fuller, Elia Peattie, George Ade, Hamlin Garland, and Edith Wyatt—but shied away from the heated discussions that surrounded books such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which some considered a work of empathic genius and others amoral and awkwardly written. There was much anxiety about the salons of New York, and though certain members made a case for Chicago, George knew that the heart of literary America sat eight hundred miles to the east. With no books of his own or even published stories, he felt a bit like an imposter at these meetings, but Helen assured him that others were in their apprenticeship, too, and he could learn a great deal from the company of writers.

  Margaret was not so approving. Though she never said as much, she gave the impression that she had discovered Hull House and George was horning in on her territory. She asked why he didn’t attend the roundtable at Schlogl’s instead, and he explained that only established writers gathered there. She asked about the bookbinding, and this put him in a corner. “If I’m hoping to publish books of my own, I want to know every part of the process,” he said. She gave him a skeptical look, but didn’t accuse him of wanting to spend more time with Helen White. He had never admitted to a history with her, and he was careful not to seem interested when the three were together in the same room.

  Margaret had other reasons for being on edge that winter. George’s father had still not found a job. He claimed to have exhausted every contact he had, mostly salesmen he’d known from the drummers’ room. While George was at work, Tom Willard supposedly met with these men and their bosses, but the meetings came to nothing. “They tell me I’m too experienced,” he said, and later Margaret complained to George, “Too experienced? Bosh! He’s almost sixty. He’s been out of work going on a year. He talks so much you can’t hear y
ourself think. And he lives in a world of make-believe.”

  The faltering economy didn’t help. The Lazar Agency was doing better than most, but that only made Tom more dependent on his son and daughter-in-law. One night, while Tom was down at the corner tavern again and had left a sink full of dishes, Margaret told George she’d had enough. “Why don’t you send him to a boardinghouse?” she said. “Ring up that Irish woman on Cass Street. Surely she has rooms to let.” But George knew that having tasted the good life for the better part of a year his father would be in no hurry to pack his bags. “You can’t tell an innkeeper that he’s stayed too long at the inn. And I’m not about to banish my own flesh and blood,” George said. “Besides—you’re never here, so what does it matter?”

  He didn’t mean to stir up a fight, or at least he thought he didn’t mean to. Margaret had yet to tell him she’d grown disillusioned with Hull House, and was feeling beleaguered and used. Ice webbed the windows; it was the time of year in Chicago when people wondered if spring would ever come.

  “This is my house,” Margaret said.

  “You’re not serious,” George replied. “I make a handsome salary.”

  “You wouldn’t were it not for me.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You can admit it.”