The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  The marriage lasted longer than any other: twelve years. I was born in 1976, the country’s bicentennial, Sherwood Anderson’s centennial, and the high point, my father claimed, in my parents’ married life. Around fifth grade I started acting up in class and spending a good part of the day out in the hall. I didn’t remember why I’d chosen that year for insurgency, but my father reminded me that 1986 was when a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Sarah Roselli, “a dead-ringer for Rachel, with that same wildness about her,” took his “Origins of Modernism” class. “I was fifty-five, same age as my father when he died of a heart attack unloading lumber at the Marinette docks. I’d been working on Sherwood Anderson: Volume Two for nearly twenty years, and I was wearing the golden handcuffs of tenure, marriage, and family. And I kid you not: on a chain around her neck Sarah wore a golden key.”

  My father’s star had faded long before. He had the worst teaching evaluations among the literature faculty; he hadn’t presented a paper or gone to a meeting in a decade. A traditionalist, he was on the losing end of the culture wars within the department, and the younger faculty saw in his affair with a graduate student a chance to pillory a member of the old guard. They had taken the fight all the way to the Standing Committee on Faculty Misconduct when Sarah urged him to hedge his bets and apply to other universities. Central Illinois made an offer; Sarah promised to follow him to Normal; and once again he chose to start over. But that summer, after my mother and I had packed the house and moved to Indianapolis, Sarah left a farewell note, moved back to her parents’ in the Chicago suburbs, and eventually joined the Peace Corps. “Served me right,” he said. “Worst mistake I ever made.”

  After we finished the bottle of wine, he turned in. I tried calling Dhara, but she wouldn’t answer. I turned off the light in my father’s apartment and looked across the balcony toward Dhara’s and my place. I watched her go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea, work on her computer for a while. I tried calling again; she lifted the phone, saw it was me, put it back on her desk. When she went to sleep I lay down on my father’s yard-sale sofa, which still smelled faintly of a stranger’s dog, and watched the lights of the city play across the ceiling.

  I figured my punishment would last twenty-four hours, but by Sunday morning two nights had passed and my wife still wasn’t speaking to me. I tried getting into our apartment, but she’d put the chain on, and wouldn’t reply when I begged her to come to the door.

  I called Lucy back that morning with no intention of going out with her, but we were catching up, having a casual conversation, when she mentioned she would be attending a fiction reading that night—“Kind of offbeat, might be fun” —and did I want to come along? I was annoyed with Dhara, who was always accusing me of overreacting, when she was the rigid, irrational one. I told Lucy if I could make it, I’d meet her at nine just inside the entrance of the bar. I did keep trying Dhara into the afternoon, and when she continued to ignore me, I sent a text: I’m sorry. I’m ready to throw myself at your feet. But first, won’t you unchain the door? When she didn’t reply, I sent another: Please answer me. I love you. Let’s go out to dinner and talk. By late afternoon my patience had worn thin: The punishment does not fit the crime. This isn’t about me; it’s about California. Seriously, can’t you be reasonable? Around seven o’clock, as I was getting ready to send another text, my father grabbed his valise off the desk and announced that he was going out to dinner.

  “Would you like some company?” I asked.

  “I’m meeting someone, as a matter of fact.”

  “A woman?”

  He laughed himself into a coughing fit. “You have quite a sense of humor,” he said. “I’m having dinner with a book collector. Our conversation would bore you.”

  “At least let me walk you to the cab.”

  Before I put him in the taxi, he shook my hand, held it for a surprisingly long moment, and said, “You’re a good kid. If I haven’t told you that before, shame on me, because it’s true. Take care, won’t you? Take good care of yourself, I mean.” He so rarely stumbled over his words that I felt at a loss, as well. “Okay,” I said, and as he was struggling into the backseat, I added, though he probably didn’t hear me, “You, too.” I watched the cab disappear up State Street. My father’s white hair floated like a low cloud in the corner of the window.

  Lucy met me at the Speakeasy, a bar and event space in Ukrainian Village that was so dark I put my hand up to make sure I didn’t run into something. We settled into a booth, and the waiter suggested a pitcher of Goose Island, the beer special that night. I hadn’t ordered a pitcher since graduate school, but told him, “Why not?” The room was crowded, the house music too loud, and I had trouble hearing Lucy. I kept asking her to repeat herself, and often nodded when I had no idea what she was saying.

  “I’ve never seen so many people at a fiction reading,” I all but yelled into her ear.

  “I’m impressed that you can see at all.”

  “I can’t, but it’s like being outside on a pitch-black night and hearing the cicadas. You don’t have to see them to know they’re everywhere.” The beer arrived, and I filled our plastic cups. “Maybe there’s hope for our generation, after all.”

  “We’ll see,” Lucy said. She explained that “Lit Up” was part reading, part drinking game. Some in the crowd were literary, but most were here for the five-dollar pitchers. All kinds of writers—good and bad—from around the city came and put their names in a hat. The organizers picked three readers—randomly, or so they claimed—and each got up to thirty minutes. “I don’t know why people want to put themselves through it,” she said, “but the drinking part goes like this: Anytime you hear a cliché or stereotype, you’re supposed to take a sip of beer.”

  “So the worse the writer, the drunker you get?”

  “That’s the idea,” she said. “One reason I wanted to come is that lately they’ve been getting ringers. A National Book Award finalist who lives on the North Side got up there a couple weeks ago, and hardly anyone drank through his entire reading.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t get booed for letting their beer get warm.”

  “But how better to win nonreaders over to books than showing a captive audience what great writing sounds like?”

  Soon a spotlight fell over the fedora-wearing emcee, who laid out the ground rules and introduced the first reader. By the time he sat down, our pitcher was empty and we’d ordered another. How he’d managed to pack so many animal-related clichés into one story that wasn’t a beast fable was a feat in itself. I drank to elephant in the room, fighting like cats and dogs, frog in his throat, hog heaven, took the bull by the horns, ate like a horse, wolf in sheep’s clothing, every dog has his day, and the coup de grâce: hotter than a fox in a firestorm. Before the second reader came on, Lucy leaned so close that her mouth touched my ear as she said, “If the next guy is that bad, I’ll be drunk as a skunk.”

  We laughed, but should have been worried, because the second pitcher was gone by the end of reader two. Her story, set mostly at a hospital over the month the protagonist’s mother is in a coma, featured a sampler of TV-movie tropes: the arrogant doctor, the sadistic nurse, the bratty kid sister, the midlife-crisis father, the degenerate boyfriend. The story ended with a turn that would have made O. Henry blush: the coma victim waking up and saying that what pulled her through was hearing the words, “Be positive.” The nurse had the final line: “Ha!” she exclaimed. “That was just me telling the doctor your blood type: B positive.”

  By the last reader we were too buzzed to order more beer. We did play along with cups of ice water, but the hush of the crowd and the lyric rhythm of her sentences made it clear that “Lit Up” was closing with a real writer. The story was told in a series of monologues, letters a woman wrote but never sent to the various love interests in her life. Piece by piece, a portrait emerges of an agoraphobe, holed up in her garden apartment checking job sites but applying to nothing, imagining whole lives with f
ormer lovers and various men she’s met online. By the end—at some indeterminate time in the future—a family member she hasn’t seen in years has come to check on her. The bell rings. But she’s ill and bedridden now, under self-imposed house-arrest. The unsent letters pool on the floor beneath her. And we’re left to wonder will she or won’t she answer the door. I couldn’t help thinking of George Willard’s mother, drawing her final breaths in the last place she wanted to be.

  We stayed long enough for Lucy to introduce herself to the third reader. She complimented the story, gave her a business card, said feel free to send work, but on our way to the Damen El stop she scolded herself for “falling all over the poor woman.” “I don’t usually drink this much,” she said, looping her arm around mine. “And I shouldn’t be operating these heels under the influence of alcohol.” Since we’d been sitting down, I hadn’t noticed the three-inch pumps, and now was feeling short walking next to her. We made our way up Damen, and she didn’t let go of my arm until we put our fare cards into the turnstiles. We sat close, shoulder to shoulder, our hands almost touching, as the train rattled and pitched back toward the Loop, and I wondered what would happen when we got to Clark, the first transfer station to the Brown line: Would I walk Lucy back to Armitage and her apartment? Or would I stay where I was, continuing on to the next stop: State, Harbor City?

  14

  The Bankers’ Panic began on October 17, 1907, when two dubious financiers failed to corner the copper market, and the institutions that lent money to the scheme, most of them already teetering from the recession, hurtled toward insolvency. Within a week one of the nation’s largest trust companies collapsed and regional branches around the country withdrew their deposits from New York City banks. Amidst the rumors of bad loans and uncertain of the safety of their money, thousands of people poured into local banks to take out all their funds, sending Wall Street into paralysis and the nation to the brink of catastrophe.

  The bank runs began in cities—from his office window on October 21, George could see the line at First National of Chicago stretch four full blocks—before spreading to suburbs and towns. Tom Willard stood outside Helen’s father’s bank for nearly an hour and withdrew his meager savings to stash in a basement safe. In the last week of October, the great Midas himself, J. P. Morgan, who had bailed out the U.S. Treasury during the Panic of 1893, asked Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou to transfer tons of gold, silver, and paper money into Morgan’s private pool to stem the crisis. He gathered the richest bankers and trust officers in New York to meet at his home library, then locked the doors and said they were going nowhere until they agreed to make emergency loans to faltering banks. Hours later, an agreement was reached, and the crisis was soon averted.

  Still, real output would decline the next year by 11 percent, the recession would continue for another four years, and soon thereafter, following a great fight, Congress would pass the Federal Reserve Act, creating a Central Bank to regulate institutions and maintain stability. For decades the Bankers’ Panic of 1907 would serve as a warning in recessionary times, until less than a year beyond its hundredth anniversary, at the end of another age of wild speculation, when it would be spoken of again as a cautionary tale that too many had ignored.

  Though most of the country survived the crisis in 1907, a number of towns, Winesburg among them, were not so lucky. Bled of its assets, Helen’s father’s bank would go into receivership in the winter of 1908, and Banker White would retire and put his mansion on Buckeye Street up for sale. The house would stay on the market for two years, eventually selling to an undertaker at a fraction of its former value. Though her parents offered to continue to pay for her schooling, Helen knew they were doing so out of pride. They had lost most of their savings, and she couldn’t conscience depleting their accounts any further. She finished her spring classes at the University of Chicago, still two years shy of her graduate degree, and for the first time in her life faced uncertainty.

  In mid-April 1908, George received a Western Union telegram from his father: Lost the hotel. At a loss for what to do.

  George cabled back right away: Come to Chicago. Think things over.

  Tom Willard replied: Look for me 1 June. Must settle affairs.

  A Cleveland bank was soon to take over the New Willard House, and George’s father had limited time to vacate the premises. With his name on the deed of the town’s most visibly shuttered property, his liquid assets listed at fifty-three dollars, he had no choice but to declare personal bankruptcy.

  Perhaps in his delirium he forgot the date when he’d said he would be arriving. Perhaps the bank asked for his keys sooner than he had planned. Either way, he neglected to inform George and left Winesburg on May 16, two weeks early—dyed his hair and mustache, shrugged into his summer suit, pinned a half-blown rose to his lapel, strode down the ramp to the train station, and greeted the conductor who’d been working this same “easy run” for as long as anyone could remember:

  Beautiful morning, eh?

  Going to see your son?

  That’s right. He’s a big bug, that boy. One of the top admen in the city.

  You tell him hello for me.

  And that’s just what he did when George opened the door to find his father, gripsack in hand.

  “The conductor, Mr. Little, sends his regards,” he said, then stepped into the house looking up and down. “Well I’ll be damned. You’re doing all right. Just fine, I’d say.”

  He was too distracted to notice Margaret and her parents having tea in the parlor. “You remember the Lazars,” George said.

  “From the wedding. Of course.” Tom took off his straw hat and shook hands with everyone.

  “What a surprise!” Margaret declared. “We weren’t expecting you.”

  Tom removed a handkerchief from his suit pocket and mopped his brow. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m just off the train. What a free-for-all the Loop has gotten to be!”

  “Just in for the weekend?” Harriet asked. She’d been caustic all afternoon, since her husband had convinced the family to take a drive along South Park Boulevard in his new Richmond touring car. Harriet couldn’t stand his automobile hobby, found the entire enterprise vulgar. George, on the other hand, preferred these occasional jaunts to the alternative: dinner or the kinds of social gatherings his in-laws might otherwise demand of him and Margaret. At least the loud motor and city traffic could be counted on for squelching conversation.

  Tom Willard set down his gripsack. “Can’t say for certain how long I’ll be.”

  “You seem to be traveling light,” Harriet noted.

  Tom returned his hat to his head. “I had a trunk sent around. Should be here by evening.”

  “A trunk!” Margaret exclaimed.

  “Just a wardrobe trunk. Could have managed it myself, but I’m saving my back.”

  Margaret turned to her husband, and her eyes flashed like semaphores. George addressed Tom Willard: “In the cable you said June 1.”

  “Did I? Impossible.”

  “Shall I show it to you?” George felt a momentary relief that he had physical proof of the misunderstanding, until Margaret interrupted: “The point is you never bothered to tell me.”

  Lazar touched his wife’s wrist. “Perhaps we should be leaving,” he said and Harriet all but slapped his hand away. “We just sat down for tea. It’s early yet.” By which she meant she had no intention of missing any marital fireworks.

  “I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” Tom began, and George said, “Margaret, sweetheart, I’d been planning to tell you, but each time it crossed my mind you were over at Hull House.”

  The freckles along her collarbone were plunged in crimson. “So this is my fault?”

  “You’ve been busy. That’s all.”

  “Too busy to hear that your father is moving in?”

  “He’s not moving in. Tell her—”

  Tom hesitated. “What do you want me to say?”

  “You know, about the busines
s—”

  Harriet couldn’t resist stirring the pot. “We understand you’re a hotelier. I hear the slump has been especially trying in the provinces. How are you holding up?”

  Tom twisted the ends of his mustache. “You can’t believe what you read in the papers. But George will tell you that I’ve talked for a good many years about getting out of innkeeping—and Tom Willard isn’t one to pass up an opportunity.”

  Harriet wore a falsely ingenuous look. “An opportunity?”

  “It’s still in the planning stages,” Tom said. “But we’re on to a new chapter—you can bank on that.”

  George stood in curious awe of his father’s self-denial. He had steered the family business, the hotel he’d inherited from George’s mother, over every imaginable rock and shoal, and had finally run it aground. And here he was unwilling to own up to his failure. He could be lying in his casket, and he’d still be muttering, I’m doing okay. Just fine. You’ve not heard the last from Tom Willard.

  Indeed, he would continue to make his presence felt for longer than anyone would have liked. He took the top-floor room. Which we were saving for the baby, Margaret told George. This became a running joke between them—Have you checked the baby’s room? Make sure the baby’s room is in order—until the joke felt too cruel and a little too true. That spring Tom got up each forenoon and dressed as if going to work. He had his bowl of farina and coffee, and made George late with his talk. He kept pressing his son to help him make contacts, but he wouldn’t say what line of business he wanted to pursue. George suggested hospitality, but his father demurred.

  Finally, toward the end of June, George gave in and arranged a private meeting between his father and his father-in-law. He wished he had demanded to attend, or rather that he had not agreed to the meeting in the first place, because Tom Willard boldly asked Lazar for a sizable campaign contribution. His great and secret plan was to make a late entry in the race for U.S. Congress, Sandusky County. You could be looking at the future governor of Ohio, he’d been known to say—and to think that he used to be the one telling George to Wake up. Here was a man with no income, no fixed address, living out of a wardrobe trunk hundreds of miles from town, his name stenciled on the walls of Winesburg’s newly derelict hotel. Furthermore, Lazar was a Republican, and would never have dreamed of supporting a Democratic candidate, family ties be damned.