Three days later he took his seat at Christmas dinner with Ma Kavanagh, her skittish, snaggletoothed daughter, and seven other boarders at the Cass Street table. He had spent the weekend pacing his room and gazing out the window toward Michigan and Superior, wanting to venture into the city but leery of the cold and the thieves lying in wait to relieve him of the contents of his pockets. The Alfred J. Lazar agency was closed for the holiday, and George pushed away the thought of how he would be received upon his return to work. He had fled, and Lazar had not bothered to send over a note or call after him. Perhaps he was as good as finished at the agency, and no amount of pleading, even a proposal of marriage to Lazar’s daughter, would save his job.
He cast his eyes around the table at the other boarders, only half of whom he knew by name. There was Tiptoe Joe, whose heels never touched the ground on his daily walk to and from the West Side bicycle factory where he worked as an assembler. Across from him stooped Ostrinski, a bouncer at a LaSalle Street resort who stood at least six and a half feet tall but wore the abashed, tentative look of someone hoping not to be noticed. Next to him, adjusting his peacock-blue cravat, sat the dandy of the building, the ancient widower Harry Quincel, who seemed unaware of his stained clothes and spent most of his days sitting on a bench outside the tobacconist’s tipping his hat to pretty girls. And setting out dinner at the head of the table was Nellie Kavanagh, who looked a good deal older than her thirty years, due in part to her work as chambermaid, cook, and caretaker of her mother’s boardinghouse.
George imagined himself out of a job and back at street level, where he’d lived his whole life before coming to Chicago. The candles and gaslight cast a lambent glow about the room. A fire crackled in the hearth. Ma Kavanagh took her place and raised a Christmas toast. Cream-of-oyster soup made its way around, then Nellie selected George to carve the goose. Her fingers trembled as she passed him the knife and wiped her hands on her aproned hips. When he had finished carving she gave him a quick smile, the candlelight flickering in her eyes. He had never noticed her regard before, and wondered if she had seen the ring while cleaning his room and was drawn to the sparkle of the diamond, the romance of an imminent proposal. Then he realized, of course, that he hadn’t let the velvet box out of his sight, had barely ventured out of his apartment in days. He touched the pocket of his dinner jacket, felt the jut of the box, and smiled back at Nellie before taking his seat.
George felt an upsurge of kinship for his fellow diners. He only knew them coming and going, but their presence here, the warmth of the room and the headiness of the spiced wine, made him nostalgic for something he couldn’t quite name. He’d always been the person anyone could come to, the reporter, the writer in the making, and it occurred to him as he passed the browned sweet potatoes to Nellie, who sat on one side of him, and the creamed onions to a doleful-eyed man who sat on the other, that before long a decade would have gone by since his train pulled out of Winesburg. Yet this ragtag group of strangers felt more familiar to him, more like the people he knew growing up, than any of the cliff-dwellers he saw and bantered with every day.
He tried to dismiss the thought as the sentimental longings of one far from home, and pictured his father cutting into a turkey or saddle of venison at precisely the moment George had been carving this Christmas dinner, 280 miles between them. Last time he went home for Christmas, three or four years ago, his father had purchased more than enough food to satisfy a teeming dining room, but the only guests to show up that night were a small convergence of melancholy bachelors from town, a starry-eyed young couple on a long haul to California, and a family from Monroeville whose matriarch had recently passed away and couldn’t bring themselves to do the holiday board. Most depressing to George was the sight of his father the next morning examining the larder full of food that would soon spoil, and the way he announced, with false cheer, “How’s that for a king’s ransom?”
These are my people, George thought for a fleeting moment. Though he knew he could not return to Winesburg, even if Helen White herself were to summon him back, he felt more at home than he had in years. The ring in his pocket was like a weight in his heart, and he decided he must return the diamond to Marshall Field’s as soon as the store reopened after the holiday. He had been foolish and impetuous. He was not in love with Margaret Lazar. He was merely afraid.
But before long the room fell into silence. Silverware scraped on plates; the fire hissed and the mantel clock kept time. There were chewing sounds and gulping, an almost desperate hunger to the way people ate and drank. The dandy widower Harry Quincel picked the apples out of his Waldorf salad one by one, licking the pieces, then crunching into them with little moans of satisfaction. No one, apparently, had a word to contribute by way of conversation, so Ma Kavanagh said, “Let’s get to know each other,” and began asking questions. People went around the room saying where they were from; not surprisingly, everyone had arrived from the Midlands or overseas.
Nellie leaned toward George and whispered, “My mother has no shame. You see, the man sitting next to you is a great mystery, and this whole charade is meant to unmask him.” She said she was surprised the doleful-eyed man had come to dinner, when no one so much as knew his name, and though better rooms had been available, he had requested the one farthest back on the top floor. He shut himself in there for the entire day and toward dinner could be seen furtively leaving the property carrying what looked like a cashbox under his arm. After being gone all night, he would slip in the front door around breakfast time. He voluntarily paid extra rent—for the inconvenience of his odd hours, he said. “My mother thinks he has something to hide and is trying to buy her silence.”
After everyone answered where they were from, Ma Kavanagh circulated a new question—“And what work do you do?” It came around to Nellie, and she said, with an effort at humor that had the edge of a sneer, “I’m mother’s little helper.” Then it was the doleful-eyed man’s turn, and he said simply, “I work in a Turkish bath. I’m the resident chiropodist.”
“Come again?” pressed Ma Kavanagh.
“He removes plantar warts,” Tiptoe Joe put in.
“Mostly corns and bunions,” the chiropodist clarified.
Ma Kavanagh seemed flustered at having her conspiracy demystified in front of her daughter, and perhaps to hide her embarrassment she didn’t prompt George about his job, but rather answered for him. “Young Mr. Willard is a very successful man,” she said. “Top brass at one of our city’s finest advertising agencies. Makes a pretty penny, he does, yet he lives right here in a little room with a sink and table. I keep telling him: Get out of this place, buy a house, find a nice girl. You’re better than the lot of us. He doesn’t listen, just goes about his business. But really,” she asked, “why do you stay? What’s keeping you here?”
George looked around the room at the faces—suspicious, wary, confused—all turned in his direction, and froze where he sat, reaching inward for some kind of answer.
By New Year’s Eve, George was determined to begin 1905 in dramatic fashion. He had not come up with an adequate answer for why he was still living in a tumbledown boardinghouse, and Ma Kavanagh’s challenge had compelled him to make a change. He told her that he would soon have an announcement and she might as well begin to look for his replacement. He did not return the engagement ring on the day after Christmas. Instead, he went into the office intent on recommitting himself and patching up any misunderstandings with his boss. But Lazar was apparently gone for the week, so George spent his workdays looking out his window at the clotted streets, taking the ring from its box and tumbling it around his fingers, and trying to read the expressions of his fellow employees. Did they know something about his future that he did not?
Late that week he steeled himself and dropped into the office of his rival, who was always eating breakfast at his desk as George came in to work and dinner at his desk as George was leaving.
“Why, if it isn’t the runaway come home!” Kennison excla
imed. “Where have you been, sport? Mr. Lazar was looking for you.”
George could hear the false ring in his voice as he said, “I had an appointment.”
“You didn’t send word. We waited for you past eight on a Friday, and now Mr. Lazar is in New York taking meetings.”
George had heard nothing about that trip. Had he fallen so far that no one bothered to update him anymore? He made a pretense of knowing, anyway. “Yes, right,” he said. “When is he coming back, again?”
“Middle of next week.” Kennison twitched his mustache and leaned back in his chair. Facing outward under his table lamp sat a picture of his younger self, in profile atop a horse, in full Mountie uniform.
“And remind me: what is he doing in New York?” George asked.
Kennison seemed to enjoy offering only the smallest crumbs of information. He took a long drink of water and tapped his tobacco-stained fingers on the desk. “Among other matters, he’s discussing the Nuvolia contract.”
“But we only recently drew up a new arrangement with them,” George said.
“There have been developments. I probably shouldn’t be the one to fill you in.”
“At least tell me what you know.”
“I should let Mr. Lazar handle that. It’s really not my place.”
George was furious with Kennison, but he left the older man’s office with a tip of the hat. Within an hour he had sent a messenger to deliver a note to Margaret Lazar expressing his interest in seeing her on the day after New Year’s. She replied the next morning, and they agreed to meet in the Demidoff Collection at the Art Institute, where George had decided to ask for her hand surrounded by paintings of the Dutch Masters.
The Demidoff had been his sanctuary soon after he’d arrived in Chicago. Those days had been so bewildering; he could hardly believe he’d come this far. How many times had he nearly been shouldered into the street as he wandered over the worm-eaten sidewalks from one hopeless newspaper interview to the next? Ma Kavanagh’s looked like the Palmer House compared to the coal-blackened hotel at the thundering heart of the rail web where he spent his first weeks in the city. He remembered climbing the crumbling steps, pulling the loose doorknob to let himself in, how the clerk had burst out laughing when George had asked for a view of the lake. The view, in fact, was of a filthy alley. The windows opened over the hotel’s garbage box, and his room was dark and cramped, with damp, yellowed linens. The whole building felt damp and greasy, and he cursed his father, who had recommended the place. But what did Tom Willard know of Chicago? He had barely left Winesburg his entire life.
George had happened upon the Demidoff Collection by chance. In much the same way that he later collided with the Lazars’ Duryea, George had been wandering abstractedly along Michigan Avenue one day when he saw a crowd of students, palettes under their arms, headed up the lion-flanked steps of the great Beaux-Arts building. He followed them in and up the marble staircase to the Dutch Masters’ room, where he sat on a bench eavesdropping on the art teacher’s lecture about Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Pieter van Slingelandt, and Hans Holbein the Younger. There were landscapes and historical paintings and pictures of rustic and social life, maritime and rural settings, secular and religious subjects, scenes that took place in bawdy taverns and in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy. George used to come here every few days for a respite from the hurly-burly. The democracy of the collection appealed to him, the way it showed the full panoply of Dutch life, and he was especially drawn to the portraits of the common people, the ragged, scarred, and overlooked: Rembrandt’s The Child of the State, Slingelandt’s The Hermit, Holbein’s Portrait of an Ecclesiastic.
He planned to make his proposal in front of Jan Steen’s The Family Concert, which showed the painter strumming a lute while his wife sings along and the rest of the family gathers around, talking and playing instruments. It’s a portrait of domestic leisure and marital harmony, the only tension an amusing standoff in the foreground between the family cat, who is enjoying the lion’s share of table scraps, and the family dog, who is looking on in abject frustration.
But on the appointed day when George met Margaret at the front entrance of the Art Institute and was leading her toward the staircase, something caught her eye. She grabbed his hand and took him to Galleries 25–30, on the first floor, where a new exhibition—Portraits of Influence: Chicago and the World—was on display. The opening reception had happened the month before, and though she hadn’t been able to attend, many of her friends had gone. It was the talk of the town, she said, and added: “I have a surprise for you.”
“But wait.” George hesitated. “I have a surprise for you.”
“Ladies first,” she said.
Margaret was a curious blend of youth and sophistication, tremulousness and confidence, and though she spoke with sympathy about the working classes she could not disguise her pedigree. She was young-looking, with soft ginger curls playing about the pale, translucent skin at her temples. In her Nile-green tea dress and long white gloves she rushed through Gallery 25, scanning each painting before moving on to Gallery 26. “There’s Nettie McCormick.” She pointed to one of the portraits, of a silver-haired woman in a red velvet toque with teal feathers. “She’s looking awfully stern.”
“You know her?” George asked.
“She’s been to the house many times. She’s actually a lovely woman, one of the city’s great philanthropists. Her late husband, Cyrus, invented the grain harvester. As you might imagine, she’s richer than Croesus.
“And look,” she continued. “It’s Valerie Root! I recollect the very day she sat for that portrait. We were in school together, and she broadcast the news unabashedly. A bit of a spoiled girl. Her father was the architect John Wellborn Root.”
“I know that name,” George said.
“Of course you do. He designed the Monadnock Building. You work every day in one of his masterpieces.” George was six years older than Margaret, but she had a way of making him feel as if their ages were reversed. She went on, “Father says that John Wellborn Root would have been the finest architect of his generation had he not died young. Valerie has some talent, too. She’s quite good on the piano. Just the other day she sent us a wedding announcement. She’ll be marrying a Mr. Edgar Fletcher of Winnetka. I can’t tell you how many of my schoolmates are getting married this summer.”
“It appears you’re at that age,” George said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage myself—”
“And over there is Marshall Field.” Margaret glided across the threshold to the next gallery and stood before the portrait of a nattily dressed but dyspeptic-looking man who held his cane and hat in a way that suggested he was eager to get to his next appointment. “Have you met the great man?” Margaret asked.
“I’ve shopped in his store.” George had removed the ring from the box this morning and nested it in an inside pocket. He touched his coat to confirm that the ring was safe.
Margaret held up her hand to whisper, “He’s rather intolerable. And if the rumors are true, his first wife was a drug addict and died in France under mysterious circumstances. He had a longtime affair with his best friend’s wife. And his son, Marshall Field Jr., is a well-known habitué of the famous Everleigh Club.”
“The bordello?”
“Yes. I hear it’s very posh. Have you been?”
George reddened and shook his head. “Certainly not!”
“I’ve embarrassed you,” she said with delight, then whirled around the room browsing the other portraits.
George was about to cross into the last gallery of the exhibition when Margaret extended her arm to stop him. “Not another step,” she said. “Now put your hands over your eyes. No peeking! The surprise is in this room.”
George did as he was told. Margaret’s behavior gave him pause, and reminded him acutely of their different origins. How could she consent to marry the son of a small-town innkeeper? And even if for some curious reason she did say yes, he had to wonder w
hy he would want to spend the rest of his life feeling like a hanger-on. His every accomplishment from this day forward would be attributed to his marrying well. He could choose not to work another day in his life or, like the Canadian Mountie, spend all his waking hours at the office, and the perception would be the same. He felt as if the eyes of the elite were following him from room to room, impressing upon him that he had no business consorting with the only and eligible daughter of Alfred J. Lazar.
George had a passing wish to be back among ordinary people, the hermit and the child of the state, the bouncer and the night-shift chiropodist, the lonely souls he remembered from home: Wing Biddlebaum, who never left his porch but had the most expressive hands; the dissipated Doctor Parcival, who had few patients and once told George that “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” He thought of Helen White, daughter of the richest man in Winesburg, but who never gave him the sense that she dwelled in some Pantheon; the sphere of influence in that town reached no farther than Banker White’s lawn.
His eyes still closed, George felt a hand take him by the elbow, an arm entwine with his, and he imagined it was Helen, leading him blindly toward some new and astonishing place. The eyes of the elite no longer scrutinized him; he stepped into the darkness, heard footfalls call and respond across the floor, and he believed for the first time something he had always doubted: that his restlessness was curable, and he could achieve the greatest freedom, not alone, but in the company of another soul.
He stopped when he heard the words, “Now you can open your eyes,” but instead of looking up at the two portraits Margaret had been wanting to show him, he reached into his pocket and brought out the ring. Without a pause or catch in his voice he said, “Will you marry me?”
The End of the Book Page 5
