“We’re here for dinner.” She slipped off her gloves. And when he had turned a suitable shade of crimson, she gave him the name of the reservation.
George tried to avoid looking at the slender, fastidious man, but Helen introduced the two.
“Yes, I know who you are,” the host said. “Will you be expecting others?”
“No,” Helen broke in. “The reservation is for two.”
At the table, after Helen had been seated, George whispered to the host, “We’re old friends, she and I.”
“Of course,” the man replied.
After he had left, George and Helen spoke nearly in unison.
“Embarrassed to be in my company?” she asked.
“So I see you’re trying to get me sacked,” he said.
“I have one question for you, George: Do you take me for a fool?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about Margaret? We work in the same building, for gracious sake. Did you think I wouldn’t hear that she quit to plan some grand tour overseas, not as a new beginning to her life without you, but as a kind of marital renewal?”
“That’s not why she quit,” George said, pathetically.
“How long did you think you could go on like this, living with your wife while keeping a room in the Palmer House to use as a snuggery? Do you take me for some babe in the woods?”
“It’s not at all like that—”
“Isn’t it, though?” Helen clutched her gloves like gauntlets. “I wonder how long this has been going on, how many playthings have come before me.”
“No one came before you,” George said. “You’re the first, the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I’ve never meant anything more in my life.”
Menus appeared and were quickly put down.
“I should have listened to Seth Richmond years ago,” she continued. “Here I was thinking you were the deep one, when it was Seth all along. He used to complain about everyone in Winesburg who talked and talked, nothing but piffle. It was you he meant, George.” She told him of a time when they were seventeen or eighteen, desperate to leave, how Seth had come to her one night to report that George Willard was in love with her. “‘He’s writing a story,’ Seth had said. ‘And he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it feels.’ Is that true?” Helen asked.
“I loved you then, as I love you now,” George said.
“That’s not what I asked. I want to know if you were playing at being in love, using Seth as your messenger and me as your dupe.”
“I don’t remember the incident.”
“I do, and I can tell you it was a fine prelude to where we are now,” Helen said. “You’re still playing at being in love, using me for I don’t know what purpose: material, perhaps. Something to write about. But I’m no longer a girl. I have a life. A real life. Among people with real troubles.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t being truthful,” George offered.
“Perhaps!”
“Okay. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m in a bind, you see. I want to leave my wife. We’re not right for each other. You can see that. I think she can see that, too.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, George. As we speak she’s planning a trip to Europe. Were you ever going to tell me? Or would I call over to the hotel one day and find that you had left?”
“I was going to tell you. I just needed to find the right time. Just as I need to find the right time to talk to Margaret, to tell her we can’t go on like this.”
Helen put her gloves in her purse, and again sent the waiter away when he came by to inquire about drinks. “You’re afraid that if you leave your wife, you’ll lose your job. You want to be a writer. You always have. But you’re faced with the age-old conundrum: how to make a living at something you love. I can’t help you out of this. And you’ll come to regret that you thought I could.”
George opened his mouth to speak, but found nothing to utter.
“Remember how I teased you and called you McAdams, the character from your story who hoped to become the American Caruso?” Helen continued. “I don’t think you realize how much you were writing about yourself. In your case you’d be leaving all that wealth behind. In McAdams’s case, four children. Either way, a terrible loss. I think you’re going to leave, George. By this time next year you’ll be living in New York.”
He reached out his hands for hers, but she drew them away. “I need you, Helen,” he said. “I want to stay. I want to be with you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You wouldn’t have me?”
“I don’t think you want to be with anyone,” she said. “Or, rather, I think you desperately want to be with someone, then as soon as you have her you wish for nothing more than to be alone.”
This thought would weigh heavily on George’s mind. He and Helen managed to get through the dinner at Henrici’s, but it would be the last he’d see of her for weeks. He held out hope that she would forgive him, but she made no promises. He knew he had broken her trust, perhaps irreparably.
Throughout the heat of July, Margaret continued her planning, and in between questions like Should we skip Pisa? or Do you want to be in London for the Imperial Exhibition? she would mention that ever since Tom Willard had left, the house was quiet as a moonbeam. “You might as well do your writing here,” she suggested.
George wanted to hold on to the apartment because Helen might yet return, and he dreaded coming home and facing a wife who, for all her airs, did not deserve this treatment. “I just want to finish my novel,” he said. “And look—” He produced from his pocket a letter he had received that day. “My father seems to be getting nowhere with his civic protest. The demolition is continuing as scheduled. My birthplace will be rubble by the end of the month.”
“I’m sorry,” Margaret said, but wouldn’t let it drop: “If your father returns to Chicago, why don’t you let him live in your garret, and you can write here?”
“I was thinking he could stay at the house. Then he could watch over matters while we’re gone.”
“Come home, won’t you?”
“I just need one more month,” George said.
And, reluctantly, she dropped the subject.
Not a week later, Tom Willard cabled to say that the Castalia Wrecking and Shoring Company had begun its work.
It seemed only a matter of time before he would be arriving once again with his trunk.
At the office George fulfilled his obligations and little more. Lazar and his backscratchers were forever seeking new ways to Prove They Need It, and to George’s bewilderment his old contract, Nuvolia, had become the top seller in the land thanks to Kennison’s dull, unvarying, ruthlessly effective technique, the same no matter what it was employed to sell: identify a problem (body odor, dandruff, foul breath), attach a clinical name to it, and claim that only one product could provide an effective solution. No room for nuance or for secondary selling points: “You can’t chop a tree in two by hitting it every time in a different place,” Kennison would say. And it seemed he could do no wrong.
Besides soap, he laid claim to the best-selling cereal, biscuit, and scouring powder. He could take a routine step in the manufacturing process and turn it into advertising gold, as he did with Stroble Beer. Though many breweries used steam to clean their bottles, no one saw this as a potential selling point until Kennison focused on the one detail that set Stroble “apart from the rest” : “Taste the Steam-Cleaned freshness.”
So much for the artful turn of phrase, the clever, cadenced pitch. With Kennison out front and Lazar driving the team, advertising had become a science, the copywriting department the province of laboratory technicians. George continued to wonder how he had lasted this long.
The Western Union telegraph arrived on the first of August: Eureka! Box of money found in rubble. Authorities determining rights of treasure trove. Likely going to mos
t recent deed-holder: Thomas Willard. I told them they hadn’t heard the last of me!
A week later a letter came in the mail:
Dear George,
My darkest hour has become my brightest. With these eyes—and I’m not ashamed to tell you they shed tears—I watched the New Willard House fall roof by wall by beam to the ground. It seemed the whole town came out on the first day. People I hadn’t seen in years, some I’d never seen before, squinting into the sunlight as if they hadn’t left their rooms since the last century. You should have seen the spectacle. Five bodies deep on Main Street. So many hands clapped my shoulder I woke up the next morning bruised. And you should have heard the racket those workers were making with their sledgehammers and pneumatic guns. Bang! Crack! Boom! Pow!
A few days on, and most everyone had gone home. But not your old man. And not Will Henderson either (he’s so strapped at the Eagle he does all the reporting himself). It must have been the sixth or seventh day when they found the tin box. They’d put up scaffolding to protect the street, torn off the roof and blasted away the brickwork. They’d ripped out the plumbing and had sundered just about all the partition walls when I heard a call go up. “Looks like something’s plastered in here,” one of the wreckers said. I went as close as I could to get a good look at them tearing away the wall with their crowbars. The foreman knelt down and pulled out a tin box, and damned if he didn’t open the thing right there. Lucky it wasn’t windy that day or the dollar bills would have scattered all over town.
You can imagine the scene I made. This was my hotel, so that box, that money was mine. And right next to me stood Will Henderson, his pencil poised to write upon the pad of public influence. We met with a bank representative, who said it was his fiduciary responsibility to unite lost property with its original owner. And though my claim was clear as day, I had to wait for the state court’s confirmation. I’m writing you to say the tin box and its contents, all eight hundred dollars, are now mine.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need some time to think. I’ve taken out a room above the shoe-repair shop on lower Main. I’ve had a lot of dreams, George. Maybe now I can put them in order and see them through.
Yours, paternally,
T. Willard
20
The week after scattering my father’s ashes I visited the Chicago Rare Book Company in search of the lean, eager man with chain-slung bifocals. He was easy to find since he ran the shop by himself, and during the hour and a half I spent with him I was the only patron to walk in. He introduced himself as Hardy—I failed to ask if this was his first or last name—and indeed he could have passed for a minor character in a Thomas Hardy novel, a vicar perhaps: pale, angular, and fidgety. We sat by the picture window that looked out on the main drag of Old Town, and I asked him if he knew my father, Roland Clary.
“I won’t soon forget him,” he said. “He came in out of the blue one day with some of the most valuable books I’ve seen. I bought as many as I could afford, and I put him in touch with a private collector in Highland Park for whom money is no object.”
“How much are we talking about, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“You should probably discuss that with Mr. Clary,” Hardy said. “I don’t generally share those details.”
I told him about my father’s death. “I’m his executor,” I explained. “And I’m trying to settle accounts.”
“I’m so sorry.” Hardy touched my hand, then quickly withdrew it. “I only saw him a couple of months ago.”
“He had heart trouble.”
“I know how that is. A heart attack got my father last year. This used to be his shop,” he said. “And I know about settling accounts, too. My dad kept no records. His ledgers were all up here.” Hardy pointed to his bald head. “The shop didn’t always look like this.” The books stood sentry on dusted shelves, and the place had that almond aroma of old paper and glue, along with the fresh scent of wood polish. “My father was not the most orderly person.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said, and passed along my sympathies.
Hardy went into a back room and brought out an old laptop computer. He put on his glasses, clicked open some windows, and went over the transactions one by one:
Death in the Woods by Sherwood Anderson. Hardcover, first edition. A few chips along the top edge of the dust jacket. Otherwise, good condition. $2,200.
Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson. Hardcover, first edition. Excellent copy in a fine unclipped dust jacket. $3,500. “This was the book that Hemingway parodied in Torrents of Spring,” Hardy said. “So much for that friendship.”
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, rare first edition, signed by the author on the front free endpaper. Original dust jacket in fine shape. Tight binding. $8,500. “The amazing thing about this one is that your father came into the shop with three signed first editions of Winesburg. The other two were in even better shape. I appraised them at $9,750 and $11,000, but could only afford the one.”
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, first edition, first issue, slight age-toning to the white jacket and modest chipping at the crown. $3,200. Hardy peered over his bifocals and continued his running commentary: “Not only did Anderson borrow the structure of Spoon River—interrelated stories set in a small midwestern town—he also stole Masters’s girlfriend and married her.”
The list went on, including first editions by John Dos Passos and several writers of the Chicago Renaissance, among them Dreiser and Sandburg. “All told, I paid over thirty-five thousand dollars.” Hardy closed his laptop. “Your father must have come in here four times over the course of a couple months, so I gave him four checks in varying amounts.”
“Do you remember what other books he brought in?”
“Do I remember?” Hardy said. “It about killed me that I couldn’t buy all of them. He had a first edition of Hemingway’s In Our Time, one of only 170 printed by Three Mountains Press in 1924. Very good condition. I’d put it at fifty thousand. And he had two rare books by Faulkner: Sartoris, a signed first edition worth fifteen thousand. And the crown jewel: a first edition of Soldier’s Pay that Faulkner inscribed to Sherwood Anderson himself. What’s even more remarkable about the Soldier’s Pay book is that Faulkner thanked Anderson for being, and I’m quoting here, ‘the father of my generation of writers.’ Also interesting: the inscription date was after they’d had their falling out, so the book is a kind of olive branch. I remember your father saying that Faulkner probably sent it to Anderson’s publisher, but it’s possible the book never got into Anderson’s hands, because this was during one of his crisis periods, when he and his third wife were moving around a lot, from New Orleans to San Francisco to rural Virginia, with a bit of Europe mixed in.”
“How did my father wind up with such a book?” I wondered aloud.
“I asked him the same question. And you know what he told me: ‘I am the Sherwood Anderson Collection. Eventually everything falls into my hands, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to find a real gem.’”
“Wow,” I said. “So how much do you think that one was worth?”
“My conservative estimate—” Hardy took off his glasses and let them fall to the end of the chain. “$85,000.”
“Good Lord.” I remembered the last time I saw my father alive, how he said he was going to have dinner with a book collector, then took off in a taxi. That must have been the big spender who now owned his treasures. “I can’t wait to tell my brothers about this. They laughed when I guessed where the money likely came from.”
“Books are a rare thing,” Hardy said. “Nothing in the world compares.”
Before I left, he showed me a couple of the copies my father had sold him, including the edition of Winesburg, with Anderson’s own signature, a sharp cursive like choppy waves. Seeing the ninety-year-old book reminded me to stop by the Newberry to ask if anyone knew about my father’s missing or suspended novel project, The Book of the Grotesque. Dhara and I had already searched the
storage locker in Little Italy and found nothing. We’d checked the cage in Harbor City and turned his apartment over. And still all I had was a stack of notes and fragments, false starts, and that one curious little story, “The Writer’s Writer.”
On my way home from the Chicago Rare Book Company, I stopped at the Newberry and talked to the curator of Midwest manuscripts, white-haired, cigarette-voiced Alice Wyman, who said she’d met my father a couple of times but mostly knew him by reputation. I hesitated to ask what that meant, and she didn’t elaborate. She did pass along her condolences, though, said she’d read the obituary in the Chicago Tribune, which ran only because I called the editor, a self-acknowledged history buff, and won him over by reminding him of Anderson’s ties to Chicago.
Alice said that my father had recently visited the Newberry and wanted to check the accuracy of the appraisals he’d gotten on some books. “Since we’re not a commercial outfit, we couldn’t be much help,” she said. “But we were able to bring in an expert to help verify the signatures. And it was worth the trouble, because one of those books was not only rare but historic.” I said I’d heard, but she nevertheless repeated what Hardy had told me about Faulkner’s inscribed copy of Soldier’s Pay.
That night I wrote my brothers a long e-mail with the subject line: Father of us all.
Dhara and I had been getting along better than we had in months. She had taken off time at work, made many of the funeral arrangements, and on her own initiative had gone to the Harbor City rental office, closed the books on my father’s apartment, and called in movers to take his furniture and belongings to the storage locker in Little Italy. Our search for The Book of the Grotesque had captivated her, and it was Dhara who first suggested that if a complete manuscript never surfaced I should assemble the notes and see what they added up to.
The End of the Book Page 24
