The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  Dhara opened the closet and removed the shoes and blankets. “It’s remarkably organized in here,” she said. She turned the key in the lock of the safe, which was about the size of a microwave oven. I drifted over and knelt. Dhara pulled out the contents of the safe: three envelopes, which she handed to me. On each my father had written the name of one of his sons: Michael, Eric, Adam.

  I tore open my envelope. Inside was a cashier’s check, made out to me, for eighty-five thousand dollars.

  16

  THE WRITER’S WRITER

  Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works—and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. We were influenced by him. He showed us the way.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  He didn’t know he was dying, but at the end of this voyage from New York to Panama City on the SS Santa Lucia, he would be met by an ambulance, taken to a Colón hospital, then laid out on his deathbed. This was supposed to have been a new beginning, though he’d had too many of those to count over his six-and-a-half decades. He’d moved from one small town in Ohio to the next, west to Chicago like so many other dreamers, then back to Ohio again; after his breakdown, he returned to Chicago, but it seemed he couldn’t sit still more than a year or two before lighting out once more: to the Missouri Ozarks, upstate New York, downstate Alabama, Paris, New Orleans, rural Virginia for a new career as a country newspaper editor. And now, with his fourth wife beside him, he planned to sail through the Panama Canal, then down the west coast of South America and settle in a town—he hadn’t decided where—and get to know the people.

  He had made his reputation with a book about a young journalist who got to know the people, and in the twenty and more years since this one enduring achievement he had been trying to keep pace, trying so hard, book after book—twenty-seven in all—that he’d become a subject of parody. But since easing into the country life hundreds of miles removed from the stony heart of publishing, he had found what he called inner laughter. In his posthumous memoirs he would say that his life had begun at just the right time, and he hoped it would end at the right time, not carry on too far.

  His friend Gertrude Stein—loyal friend, unlike Hemmy, Faulkner, and Scott Fitzgerald—had said you had to learn to do everything, even to die. He had been thinking about death, preparing for it, for years. When it comes, he wrote, there will be a real comfort in the fact that self will go then. There is some kind of universal thing we will pass into that will give us escape from this disease of self…. It is this universal thing, scattered about in many people, a fragment of it here, a fragment there, this thing we call love that we have to keep on trying to tap. He had defended euthanasia five years before, when another writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, took chloroform after learning her cancer was inoperable. My hat off to her. I wish I also could be assured of the same sort of clean departure, of the courage and the sanity of it, he wrote. The little white pill. The hell is to know when to swallow it.

  He was unaware, but he had swallowed something. Not a pill, and not intentionally. At a bon voyage party a few days earlier, February 26, 1941, while slugging his fourth or fifth martini of the night, a three-inch, olive-speared toothpick went down his trachea, esophagus, stomach, and intestines and thrust into his abdominal cavity, perforating his colon (so would say the medical examiner in, of all places, Colón). His demise, death by toothpick, would rival that of Aeschylus—who perished after an eagle dropped a tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a rock—as the most bizarre in literary history.

  But the writer would never know the name of his condition—peritonitis—or that it was fatal if untreated. The first day out, the Atlantic had been rough, the second day so stormy that most passengers stayed in their rooms. He figured the cramps across his lower abdomen, his lack of appetite, must have been caused by seasickness. But by day three the spasms were coming in ever-shortening waves. And though he tried to keep his spirits up, and told the editor of the Nation, who also happened to be on board, that he wouldn’t let doctors spoil his trip, it was clear by the time they reached the Caribbean that he was seriously ill. The ship’s medic administered morphine, which did little good. His wife arranged for that ambulance to be waiting at port. And the writer, whose pulse would soon race, who would soon descend into full delirium, then a coma, plowed the watery depths of his memory.

  And what arose might have surprised him, for he had spent half his life cultivating his legacy—what is a writer, after all, but gardener of his own grave, custodian of his own mausoleum? But he did not remember the reviews, the parties, the fleeting adulation, or the moment when he realized for the first time that he was a real writer, how the words of his first great story, “Hands,” wrote themselves across the page on a single glorious night. He had told his first wife that he felt like a harp that the wind blew through. If only it had remained that easy.

  Nor did he remember the marriages, their beginnings or endings. How he’d tried to be a family man and entrepreneur, selling an illusory compound that promised the “cure for roof troubles,” yet nothing could keep him under one roof. He stumbled out of the door one morning, left his wife and three children, and never came back. His second wife, a sculptor with a sex drive to match his own, he stole from the Illinois poet who gave him the structure for his most famous book. So began his bohemian years: the beard, the barefoot wedding and open marriage. Yet still he felt confined. He fled east, south, abroad, and she followed. He met someone else and rushed to Reno for a quickie divorce. A few years later, remarried, miserable again, he learned of his second wife’s overdose from sleeping pills, perhaps an accident, more likely not.

  He would come to think of his third wife as The Princess. No place was good enough, but wherever they went the air was thick with disapproval. Her intellectual parents made him feel more like the college dropout he was than a leading voice of his generation. She endured his darkest hours, when he championed Hemingway and showed Faulkner to his own postage stamp of native soil, only to have both men betray him. Reviews of one book after the next came back dismissive or killing, and the day arrived—this, too, he would not remember aboard the SS Santa Lucia—when driving with his wife through the countryside he said in what she would describe as a strange blank voice: I wish it were all over. Abruptly he turned the wheel, sending the car off the road. They didn’t flip, but skidded into the middle of a field and for a long while sat in silence. Then the writer, whom everyone used to call the life of the party, pulled back onto the road and drove word-lessly home.

  To think that he was in his last days, on this ship, on a Goodwill tour, in the Caribbean, no less, with the only woman from whom he’d never thought of running away, might have seemed a cruel joke. But as land approached, his mind didn’t pause to consider—for time was running out, and he was down to this: Chicago. 1898. Maybe ’99. He’d been there only a short time. Living in a tenement. Making two dollars a day for ten hours’ work in a warehouse. Lifting kegs of nails. Or was it frozen meat? He was lonely and lustful, and he’d begun looking at prostitutes on the corners, in the bars, saving his money with the intent of approaching one. But he resisted until one wet evening in March or April, winter grappling with spring, when he did stop under a windblown awning on lower Michigan Avenue to talk to a woman with painted lips and gaudy jewelry. He did not recall what she looked like, though he remembered her pale breasts billowing over her corset, and the scent of gasoline that trailed behind her as she led him up the stairs. This was when everyone wanted but few could own an automobile, and the fashion for women was to put dabs of gasoline behind the ears, on the wrists and cleavage. In the middle of the third-floor hallway she opened the door to her room, and inside were two beds, one empty and in the other a sleeping infant and young boy. With practiced swiftness, she rolled the bed her children were sharing—they barely stirred—into an alcove. When she returned to him she began to undress. Here, just take the money, he said. But she wouldn’t have it: I’m not a beggar. He shrugged into his coat and left. B
ack on Michigan Avenue the rain turned to snow. On the long walk home the writer, his money thick in his pocket, began to cry.

  This was his last clear thought. Not: who will cry for me?

  17

  The same week that Margaret forced George to tell her, “This is your house,” he got an apartment of his own. He’d lost another client that morning, had endured another reproof from Lazar, and on his lunch break had wandered into the Palmer House, where he’d lived during his engagement. The same manager from three years before, Lemuel Means, still patrolled the desk, same pince-nez perched beneath his stern, heavy brow. George inquired about month-to-month vacancies, and the manager signed him up for a room on the fifth floor.

  “How’s married life?” Means asked, insipidly.

  George was surprised the manager would remember or care. “Just fine,” he said. “The apartment will be for my father,” he felt compelled to add. “But you’ll see me coming and going, running about for the old man and the like.”

  This wasn’t true, though it did have a shred of veracity, to which George clung. In fact, he had decided he had to have a place of his own. An escape, where he could look out the window and let his mind wander free, where he might finish a story, then write another and another again. He had no plans of telling Margaret. Since he handled the bills in the household, if he cut expenses here and there she’d never need to know. If, for some reason, she did find out, he could say he’d rented the apartment for his father—it wouldn’t take much to convince him to move in.

  For a time, just having these secret lodgings gave George a thrill. He would spend his lunch break at the Mission desk in his room, and the hour would grow longer by the day. He’d stay after work, go in on weekends, and soon he was finishing whole stories, watching the characters he’d been sketching out take shape beneath his pen. One piece, in particular, had come in a white heat, and he’d revised it during the last snowmelt of the winter of ’09. There came a point when he needed to share the story, so one Saturday after a meeting of the Little Room he asked Helen if she would read the manuscript and have lunch with him later in the week to say what she thought.

  They returned to the same booth at Schlogl’s on a Friday in late March. Lazar and Kennison were in New York that week, and Helen was on spring recess, so George figured on taking the afternoon off. When he ordered a bottle of wine, he said, “I think I’m going to need this.”

  “I might as well join you,” Helen put in.

  After the waiter left, George asked, “Is the story that bad? I guess we’ll have to drink our way through my blighted hopes.”

  “Look who’s fishing for praise,” Helen said, then raised a toast. “To one of the most gifted writers I know.”

  George withheld his glass for a moment. “This is no time to make game of me. I’m a sensitive fellow, you know.”

  Helen leaned into the table. “Your sensitivity thrums on every page.”

  “So you liked the characters?”

  “I wouldn’t say I liked them. But that wasn’t your objective, was it? I understood them, understood why they’d put up a certain face to the world.”

  “McAdams is not me, just so you know,” George interjected.

  In the story, the main character, a postal clerk in small-town western Pennsylvania, leaves his wife and four children and starts walking, then running, then riding the rails toward New York City. He wants to be a great tenor, an American Caruso. He has memorized some of the best-known operas and practiced his singing in empty barns around the county. But his wife can’t appreciate his talent and only reminds him of the chores to be done, the mouths to feed.

  Helen didn’t respond to George’s disclaimer, instead saying, “You’ve captured the way men seem to need a certain order in their lives before taking on anything beyond themselves. If they don’t find that sense of purpose in time, they burrow inward, and people suffer. McAdams’s tragedy lies in the particulars, the intensity of his stress, the pain he causes his family when he rejects them for his art. His flight from home is truly operatic. The long passage where you show his tortured mind sorting through past and future feels like an aria of a high order.”

  George made like he was going to say something—he wasn’t sure what—but Helen continued: “I can’t deny that my hands trembled when I picked up the pages and began to read. What if George Willard, who our town had always said would become the writer—what if he were no good?”

  “Did you have trouble with the ending?” he asked.

  “It ends at the beginning of something new; it’s agonizing and exuberant, which seems just how it should be. He’s on the train. We know he’s not turning back.”

  “Do you think someone might want to publish it?”

  “Well,” Helen paused, and gave a canny smile. “I hope you don’t mind, but I passed it along to Francis Browne at the Dial on Tuesday, and he got back to me this morning. He wants the story, George. You need only say Take it.”

  The Dial was the finest literary magazine in the Midwest and among the top in the country. While George sat speechless, Helen refilled their glasses. “You don’t have to get back to him right away,” she said.

  “Good heavens, yes, he can have my story. I’ll pay him for it. The Dial—my word.”

  “I bet your wife will be proud,” Helen said. She rarely mentioned Margaret, and the comment had the feeling of a test.

  “She knows about the Little Room, but not that I’m writing stories.”

  “Surely she’d be sympathetic. She has an interest in the arts.”

  “You want the truth: I haven’t told her because she’d be envious.”

  “Why should she care? She’s not a writer.”

  “Everyone’s a writer—in the mind, if not in practice.”

  “I’m not,” Helen said. “I’ve always loved to read, for companionship, for the shape of a story. And, lately, as a call to social change.”

  “Are you talking about Upton Sinclair?”

  “Yes, and Frank Norris, George Eliot, Dickens. There’s quite the fervor at Hull House, a belief that novels ought to shine a light on inequality, injustice. I’m due to teach a class on the labor novel next term. I have quite the leaning tower of books on my nightstand.”

  “My wife still reads the Romantic poets. But we haven’t turned out like Elizabeth and Robert Browning, as perhaps she once hoped,” George said. “Oh, listen to me complaining about my marriage. I’m sure you don’t believe me when I say I’m not McAdams.”

  Helen dabbed a napkin at the corners of her lips. “You don’t have four children.”

  “True.”

  “And you don’t live in Pennsylvania.”

  “True again.”

  “Have you committed Puccini’s most famous arias to memory, and are you willing to stand up in this restaurant and sing ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in full voice?”

  “No and no.”

  “Then it seems you’re not McAdams. What a relief!”

  George poured the last of the wine and when the braised rabbit and bouillabaisse arrived ordered another bottle. They lingered at Schlogl’s until the last of the lunch crowd had taken their leave and the waiters had begun to look impatiently in their direction.

  They stepped into the bright glare of afternoon and were walking along Washington Street past the Daily News, the Chronicle, the Journal, the Herald, newspapers he might have worked for were it not for a certain accident a few short blocks from here. They passed the Opera House. “Shall we go in, Mr. McAdams?” Helen said.

  “You’re a terrible tease.” George looped his arm around her waist, and they were walking that way for a block or two before he put his hands in his pockets at the corner opposite Marshall Field’s. He had a floating feeling, not unlike the last time he had a woman in mind outside the great department store. Neither Helen nor he had said what they would do with the rest of their day, or when they would part, or how. As the drays and trolleys lurched by on State Street, George caught the refl
ection of himself and Helen in a bank window, and wanted to hold the picture in his mind.

  “Well—there’s my stop.” She pointed across the street to where the westbound trolleys picked up. George knew she could have said the same at any number of stops over the past several blocks. “I had a lovely time.” Her voice carried a lilt of expectancy.

  “We must do this again.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Helen.” George didn’t bother to look around as he took her hand. People pushed by, but the bustle seemed to fall away. “Thank you for reading my story.”

  “You’re welcome. And congratulations.”

  “I have other stories, you know. I’d love for you to look at them.”

  “Anytime.”

  “I could show them to you now,” George said. A discarded newspaper rustled at his feet.

  “You take your stories with you?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. You see, I have an apartment in the Palmer House. We could go, if you’d like—”

  “You have an apartment?” Helen asked.

  This shouldn’t have thrown him. Chances were she was just being conversational, but her question sent his mind scrambling for an explanation. Had she said Sure, or Yes, let’s go, or That would be nice, had she said nothing at all and they’d just started south toward the hotel, he might not have felt the need to lie. “Margaret and I have been living apart,” he said. “I guess you could call it a trial separation. But we both realize things will not end well.”

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said.

  “We were mismatched from the start. No sense getting into it. We’re certainly not the first this has happened to.”

  “I had no idea.”

  At the time he was grateful she left it at that, though later he’d wonder what might have happened had she asked: What about your job? Will you be staying on? What about your father? Where is he living now? How is Margaret taking this? She’s told no one at Hull House. Are you keeping the separation a secret? But these questions never came, nor did they occur to George as he stood there on State Street, a little drunk, a little dizzy over the possibility of taking Helen up the elevator, down the hall to room 542, opening the door, throwing open the windows because no matter what he did, no matter how often he complained, the radiators in his apartment always ran too hot.