The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  After a half hour or so my father’s car reemerged and I followed him back along the same route we’d taken, until he turned north on the Kennedy. We took the expressway under a couple bridges, then I had to cut across two lanes of traffic when he abruptly exited. Stopped at a light two cars back at Division and Elston, I could see on the opposite corner the recently shuttered Chicago dive known only by its hand-painted sign—SLOW DOWN—and the neon tracing beneath it: LIFE’S TOO SHORT. Perched on a stagnant bend of the river, the colorful shanty used to cater to an odd mix of slumming hipsters, party-boat carousers, and antique barflies.

  Up Elston we went. If Michigan Avenue was Chicago’s storefront, Elston was its back lot. Along this thoroughfare of lube shops, tattoo parlors, contractor suppliers, warehouses, and liquor discounters, I could almost hear the music of Wilco, Jeff Tweedy’s weatherworn voice.

  Past an oxygen supplier up near Montrose, my father parked at a meter, opened his door, swung out one leg at a time, and with the help of his cane, vaulted himself onto his feet. I drove past and caught a glimpse of the sign—MAYFAIR BUY & SELL—then pulled over a block up. In the rearview I watched my father go inside. A few minutes later he returned, followed by a pot-bellied man with a chin-curtain beard. He opened the trunk, which mostly blocked my view, but I could tell they were rummaging around in there. They made three trips back inside, the man carrying boxes, my father trailing.

  Twenty minutes later he was back on the road. He did a U-turn and headed down Elston, then turned into a Goodwill near the Vienna beef factory. He pulled up to the rolling steel door, pushed the call button, and a sullen kid in high-tops and low-rise jeans emptied the contents of the Mercury’s trunk and backseat: lamps, books, records, bric-a-brac, garbage bags full of clothes, and a stack of old pictures that might have been part of the other-people’s-ancestors collection.

  My father took his receipt and headed home. It was a little before one when he gave the keys to the valet at Harbor City. I watched him disappear in the direction of the elevators, and instead of parking and going in to work I continued on, back toward Little Italy. I didn’t know when else I’d have a chance to see what he’d been up to in that storage unit. The pawn shop explained the six thousand dollars, though he must have had to make dozens of trips. No wonder he’d been gone nearly every day since I’d moved him here.

  Because the contract was in my name, paid for with my credit card, the attendant gave me a code to the gate and a key to the unit’s padlock. I punched in the numbers, drove in, and parked the Prius next to 421. As the lock clicked open I had a brief hope that I would find The Book of the Grotesque, and that the rest of the novel would be brilliant. I would convince my father to send it to Lucy; she would publish it, and this old man, whose life had appeared to be wasted, who hadn’t had a word in print in over forty years, would stun the literary world.

  There was the old optimism. Alive, after all.

  But when I threw open the rolling door, expecting to see the storage cage filled from front to back with my father’s accumulated junk, just as the movers and I had left it back in January, I found instead a nearly empty space.

  10

  The soap salesman, Richard Trumbull, had already walked into Hull House by the time George caught up. The sound of a violin playing a melancholy Chopin étude filled the large drawing room, and a greeter, a long-faced woman with hooded eyes, held a finger to her lips and whispered, “The children are having a recital. Are you with the Lab School?”

  “We’re just visiting,” George said. “We can come back another time.”

  “It shouldn’t be long. Here—” She escorted George and Trumbull to two empty seats within a semicircle of listeners.

  “We really ought to head back,” George began, but the greeter didn’t hear him. Trumbull sat down heavily in a Windsor chair and wiped his brow. Forty or fifty people were gathered in the spacious room of arched doorways, intricate molding, and floral-print walls. George had expected Spartan décor, but the main house of the settlement was comfortably appointed with Turkish rugs, claw-footed sofas, oak rockers, and plaster busts—no children rushing about pell-mell, but a sense of calm and casual order. Potted ferns billowed beside glass-enclosed bookcases, and a dozen young violinists from perhaps as many nations sat straight as their bows in front of a marble fireplace. Standing before them, an olive-skinned boy played a solo étude. He could not have been older than twelve, but he had a look of such concentration, and the music was so suffused with experience—it seemed impossible such a sound could emerge from the hands of one so young.

  When his playing was over, people applauded enthusiastically, and a man with wire spectacles and a push-broom mustache—the violin teacher, George presumed—stood up and thanked everyone for coming. He talked about the long hours the boys and girls had put into their music, and apologized that Jane Addams herself could not be in attendance—she was giving a lecture at the University of Wisconsin. But he could say on her behalf that excellence in the arts was essential to a complete education, for music had a “civilizing and refining influence and a special place in the life of an industrial community.”

  Out of the corner of his eye George caught a glimpse of Trumbull, who joggled the chain of his pocket watch but did not look down to check the time.

  The violin teacher continued, “For arranging this recital I should thank Helen White of the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. Helen, would you like to say a few words?”

  And there she was, standing up in the front row, not halfway across the room, and turning around straight into George’s line of vision. She looked slim and attractive, in a fawn-colored poplin dress, her hair gathered into a simple knot. He felt an impulse to duck, to sneak out of the room and back into the Thomas Flyer, back to his young wife and the comfortable existence he had slid into almost entirely by chance. But he was long-torsoed and couldn’t hide in the intimate crowd. Helen was saying something about partnership, about how lab schools the world over could learn so much from Hull House about bringing the arts into the curriculum. George saw that she was not wearing a ring, and recalled how the violin teacher had introduced her by her maiden name. Yet it seemed impossible that the prettiest and richest girl in Winesburg could be edging up to thirty and still unmarried. Her eyes brushed across his, and she did a double-take. The words caught in her throat, but she continued and seemed to make a point of turning slightly away from George as she praised the talent and skill of the young violinists and their teacher, who, from the look on his blushing face, had apparently fallen for Helen.

  When she had finished her remarks, George turned to Trumbull and said, “Well? Shall we get going?”

  The large man rose to his feet with an audible groan. “I thought you were urgent to see this great social experiment. And now you’re telling me it’s time to leave?”

  “The point was for you to meet Miss Addams, but evidently she’s on her lecture tour.”

  “We would have had a provocative dialogue,” Trumbull said. “But we’re here. Might as well take a look at her little collective.”

  George said that Lazar would be expecting them back at the office before too long, and with traffic the way it was in Chicago, particularly west to east, they really should be on their way. He couldn’t understand why all of a sudden he felt petrified by the thought of meeting Helen White again. Perhaps he believed their moment had come and gone. She had not so much as said good-bye when he’d left town, had written but two or three times, in her boyish hand, on her mother’s stationery, but that was nearly a decade ago.

  He led Trumbull back toward the front door, where they ran into the greeter—and were it not for that one impediment, that final barrier between safety and danger, present and past, they might have made it all the way to the car, George might have returned to Margaret satisfied that at least he had laid eyes again on his love of years ago—and perhaps that might have been enough. But the greeter stopped them and asked, “What did you thin
k?”

  “About what?” George managed through his fog.

  “About the music, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. It was quite good.”

  “Would you believe that Belio, the boy who played the last étude, ‘Tristesse,’ is nine years old? He only picked up the instrument at seven.”

  “Remarkable!” came a voice behind George. And then Helen’s hand was on his shoulder and they were face to face. “George Willard! Well, I never!”

  Acting as if everything was completely natural, George said, “Helen White. Richard Trumbull,” introducing the two. And Helen went along. “You’ve met Mary?” She indicated the long-faced woman with hooded eyes. “Yes,” came George’s reply. He wished no end to the formalities, but before he could get his bearings Trumbull was talking to the greeter, and into their small circle drifted the violin teacher, his star pupil in tow. Soon George found himself standing alone in a corner with Helen, looking into her eyes for the first time since she’d come down from Cleveland to attend the Winesburg County Fair and they had escaped to Waterworks Hill, an evening that had glowed in his mind like a beacon all these years.

  “I shall never forgive you for leaving town without saying good-bye,” Helen began.

  “You forgive me?”

  “Why, yes. You left on the 7:45. I happened to be home that weekend,” she said, “and my mother let slip that you were going away the next morning. So I got up early, but she delayed me with her yawping. I ran along Main Street, but by the time I got to the platform the train had pulled away. I saw Will Henderson there, looking bone-weary. And your father was announcing that you were going to make a name for yourself.”

  “I had no idea,” George said. “I figured you had your own society at college, and had forgotten us poor souls back home.”

  “I wrote to you.”

  “And I wrote back.”

  “But there was one letter I remember you didn’t answer.”

  “I must not have seen that one,” George said. “Maybe my father had it redirected to the wrong address. I moved around a couple of times those first months in Chicago.”

  Helen asked George to tell her everything that had happened since their last correspondence, and he began with Ma Kavanagh’s boardinghouse, skipped his run-in with the Duryea, said he fell in with an advertising firm and found he had a talent for copywriting. His hands were in his pockets, his wedding band hidden from view. “I’m still working for the firm. You know the Monadnock Building? I have a window office on the fourteenth floor,” George said. “You seem surprised.”

  “I didn’t see you in business.”

  “Nor did I,” George admitted. “But life has its practicalities.”

  “Particularly here,” Helen agreed. “I thought Cleveland was hard. But Chicago—good heavens!” Her face darkened a moment; then, as if catching herself, she smiled again.

  George had heard stories about single women coming in from the heart-land and getting ensnared in the white slave trade. Rarely a week had gone by without Ma or Nellie Kavanagh, Margaret or her mother mentioning some new, horrific case of a recent arrival abducted, brainwashed, sold into servitude in the factories or brothels. The Chicago Inter Ocean ran a regular column on “Missing Girls,” and this summer the city was in the midst of its worst crime wave—burglaries every hour, well over a murder a day, and countless unsolved cases. George worried for Helen. “Where do you live?” he asked, a non sequitur.

  “In a caravansary on the edge of Hyde Park.”

  “South Side. I haven’t ventured there more than once or twice. How’s the neighborhood?”

  He must have looked concerned, because she gave a fluttering laugh. “Oh, George. Can’t you see I’m all grown up? I can take care of myself.” She said her building was a fortress, close to the lakefront and well patrolled by a no-nonsense Armenian proprietress and her hulking twin sons. Helen had been living there for two years, since her enrollment in the education program at the University of Chicago. She had come to study with John Dewey in the Department of Pedagogy, but in the spring of her acceptance Dewey left for New York after a battle with the university’s president. She decided to go forward with her plans, but the Lab School had lost clout since Dewey’s departure, so she’d been spending more and more time volunteering at Hull House, where Jane Addams was fighting the good fight for Progressive education and seeing after each student one at a time. This afternoon’s recital, for a host of area teachers, was among several events Helen had planned. “Without the arts, what hope do we have for peace and equality—not to mention beauty?” she said.

  George was struck by her seriousness and wondered what had happened between Winesburg and now. He asked her as much, and she told him she’d found the college in Cleveland to be little more than a finishing school—it had been her mother’s choice, something she realized after her first year, when she transferred to Ohio Normal in Ada. She had trained to become a public-school teacher. Growing up she’d loved reading novels, and she wanted to share her ardor for books. But the curriculum had been too stifling. In her senior year she met a professor who had gone to the University of Michigan with John Dewey, and he urged her to study with the man who would come to be known as one of the great thinkers and reformers of his time. Dewey was a friend of Jane Addams, had often collaborated with her and given lectures at the Plato Club, Hull House’s philosophy group. “Professor Dewey believes the best teachers are like artists,” Helen explained. “Learned, but also with a compassion to see to the core of people, to unlock something in them, and bring out their potentialities.”

  “If I’d had a teacher like that,” George put in, “I might still be in school.”

  “You’d make a very fine teacher,” Helen said. “You were the artist in town, after all. Everyone knew that.”

  “And now I work in an office.” George heard a trace of self-pity in his voice.

  “What was it you said: ‘Life has its practicalities’”?

  “I’m happy,” George insisted.

  “You look well.”

  “I was going to say the same to you.”

  “My mother tells me that you’re married,” Helen said. “I wanted to pass along congratulations, but I didn’t know where to send the note.”

  “How did you hear?” George asked.

  “Seth Richmond. He still drops in on my parents when he’s in town. He said he went to your wedding.”

  George took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms. He felt called out, though he would have got around to mentioning his marriage eventually. “My wife, Margaret—perhaps you knew her at the university. Margaret Lazar? She graduated last year.”

  “No,” Helen said. “What did she study?”

  “This and that. I can’t say exactly. Is there such a thing as general education?”

  “George—what kind of husband are you?”

  “I know she read a lot of literature—she loves the Brownings—and she’s quite taken with the arts, theater, and the like. She would have been greatly impressed with that boy on the violin.”

  “I meant to ask—what brings you to Hull House this afternoon? Did you hear about the recital from someone?”

  George felt a momentary panic. He had come in the hope of catching a glimpse of Helen, and now, amazingly, here they were, but he could make no such admission. “I was showing a client around the city. What a lucky stroke to find you here.”

  “Yes, of all places.”

  “It’s a wonder we didn’t run into each other earlier,” George said. “You should have called on me when you got here.”

  “It had been so long—”

  “Anyway, this client is interested in settlement houses.” George nodded toward Trumbull, who had just come back from a brief tour of the main house and was having an animated conversation with Mary the greeter.

  “Perhaps the two of you would like to see the other buildings,” Helen said.

  Not wanting to subject her to the soap salesman
’s politics, George declined. “We’d better be getting back, but perhaps I’ll see you here again.”

  “We have an excellent theater, and I could introduce you to some of the writers in the Little Room. Quite a literary scene is coming together in Chicago, and Jane is a major part of it.”

  George asked what days Helen was at Hull House, and she said Thursdays and Fridays, sometimes on weekends. As they were preparing to part ways, a man a few years younger than George, Teutonic and blond, with a wide gap between his front teeth, passed through the room and touched Helen on the shoulder. “I’m running low again,” he said, not stopping for introductions.

  “How low?” Helen called after him.

  “I could use fifty loaves, if it’s not too much trouble.” He waved and said, “You’re a jewel,” then made his hasty way out of the room.

  “That’s the baker, Stefan. He’s overworked, so I’ve arranged to have some restaurants donate their extra bread.”

  George considered admitting that he’d seen her at Henrici’s but thought better of it. Instead, he wished her well, said he hoped to catch her again sometime. “How many from our town end up in a megalopolis like this? The ones who leave ought to stick together.”

  “I know what you mean.” That shadow of melancholy crept over her face again.

  Before turning to leave, he said, “Today is my twenty-ninth birthday.

  Can you believe how old we’ve become?”

  “Speak for yourself, George Willard.” Helen took his hand then gave it back to him. “Happy birthday, all the same.”

  Back at home that evening, George was greeted with a surprise. Margaret had hired a string trio to play just for the two of them, and had borrowed Nettie McCormick’s chef to lay out a dinner fit for crowned heads. Course after course arrived—broiled squab and supreme of guinea fowl, asparagus tips and Paris Sugar Corn, Russian caviar and a raft of imported cheeses, Golden Gate peaches and chocolat blancmange. After dinner the string trio took their leave, the servers retired to the kitchen to clean up, and Margaret led George to the parlor, where she unveiled a brand-new stereopticon and a set of slides of paintings from the Louvre.