The End of the Book (15 page)

The experience at the stockyards had marked George to this day, and it bothered him that Richard Trumbull seemed to be sulking on the car ride along Lake Shore Drive. Perhaps the Nuvolia representative should have been forgiven for wanting to see where soap comes from, but George was not in an accommodating humor on this hot day when his father-in-law was treating him like an errand boy and his father had returned in memory, dismaying as ever. When Virgil pulled over beside a lagoon near the end of Lake Shore Drive and asked, “Where to now?” George's snap reply was, “Take us to Hull House.”

“Are you sure?” Virgil asked.

“Is it such an odd request?”

“Hull House?” Trumbull said.

“Wouldn't you like to meet the extraordinary Jane Addams? I hear she receives visitors right off the street.”

“I hear she's a socialist.” Trumbull mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

“Perhaps you should take your coat off,” George said. “We're getting no break from the sun.”

Trumbull returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “I'll be fine, thank you.” He sniffed.

Virgil steered the Thomas Flyer south and west through Old Town and across the river at Kingsbury Tract, then straight down Halsted into the Nineteenth Ward.

“Nothing like the taste of coal smoke on the tongue.” Trumbull fished out another piece of Beemans and snapped the gum between his teeth. “And I thought New York was bad.”

They had entered an industrial neighborhood of long brick factories and simple wood-frame houses that crouched beneath the level of the street. Sooty-cheeked children played on sidewalks while their mothers glowered from sloped porches. “This car's going to need a good wash and tightening,” Virgil said as he rumbled along Halsted's jagged grooves. “Did you tell Mr. Lazar you were coming down here?”

It was true there weren't many cars in the Maxwell Street district, and certainly no luxury cars owned by one of the city's millionaires. “We're going to the most famous settlement house in the world. It should be on all of our tours. These people—” George gestured around the overcrowded neighborhood, “could be our future customers, the future inhabitants of Tidy Town.”

“They don't look so tidy to me.” Trumbull shifted in his seat.

“They work around the clock for pennies,” George said. “Some union men I used to live with told me whole neighborhoods on the south and west sides are without plumbing. There are places where the city refuses to pick up garbage, and if a horse dies on the street it's left there to rot.”

“Looks like your run-of-the-mine immigrant neighborhood to me,” Trumbull said. “Dirty Slavs, dirty Armenians, dirty Italians, dirty Bohemians all stacked on top of each other. It doesn't matter who they are or where they're from, you can bet they haven't had a bath since one of their kind shot McKinley. Anarchists and flunkies. And they just keep on coming. Doubling in number every year. If we don't say enough is enough we're going to lose this country.”

George had seen this kind of talk in the papers, but had never experienced it firsthand. He knew he shouldn't say another word, since this man held a brief for George's most important contract. Though he had only a general understanding of the squabbles between the Liberal Immigration League and the Immigrant Restriction League and all the other entities fighting for or against the new arrivals, his sympathies lay with the bottom dog. “I have no issue with immigrants,” he said.

“So you stand with the outcasts of other nations?”

“They work as hard as you and me.”

Trumbull pointed to a peddler hawking iron from the back of his wagon, then a ragpicker diving for salvage in an overflowing garbage box. “They come from the ghettos of Europe and make slums out of our neighborhoods. They're the weakest of the weak, and they're dragging us down.”

Beyond a billboard for Edelweiss Beer, the vista opened up to a large complex of brick buildings surrounding an Italianate mansion. Virgil parked the Thomas Flyer at the curb and climbed out to open the door for Trumbull. When the visitor from New York hesitated, a gale of worries swept over George. Perhaps he should have taken Trumbull where he'd wanted to go and kept silent like the model employee he used to be. And what if Jane Addams was indeed home, just inside the entrance? Did George want a scene, one he himself had set in motion? And then there was Helen White, the very reason he'd asked Virgil to drive into the Nineteenth Ward in the first place. What if she really did work at Hull House? What if she were looking out one of the arched windows right now and recognizing the younger man in the back of the luxury automobile that was drawing so much attention to itself?

“We don't have to go in,” George said. “We can go to the stockyards, anywhere you'd like. Virgil—” he began, but Trumbull had already delivered himself from the car and was making his way up the front walk.

George thanked the chauffeur and told him keep the motor running, then hurried toward the open doors of Hull House.

I made a habit of bringing my father lunch, and throughout much of that winter could count on his being away until one o'clock. I'd arrive around noon, on my break, put his food in the fridge, have a sandwich at the kitchen counter, then poke around his apartment in search of the elusive
Book of the Grotesque
. I looked in every closet, bookcase, cabinet, and drawer, cast my eyes over every Xerox and index card, turned the place over with the thoroughness of a forensic investigator. But I found nothing. Less than nothing, in fact: the title page, fragments, and folders were gone.

I usually managed to leave before my father's return, but when I couldn't get out in time he seemed unsurprised to see me, deliverer of his midday meal. Flushed and out of breath, he'd set down his cane and battered valise and lower himself onto the camelback sofa. Wing would come out of hiding and hop onto my father's lap for a scratch behind the ears. I'd bring out lunch, ask where he'd been, and the answer would always be the same:
Out to take the air, as they used to say
.

By the end of March I had searched the entire apartment and could no longer stand not knowing what had happened to the evidence I'd seen of my father's novel. I'd been watching his valise, which he carried everywhere, but it never seemed full enough to contain even a partial manuscript. So one day I got an extra key from the building manager to my father's storage cage on the twentieth floor.

The cage was empty but for three cardboard boxes. The first two were marked “CRBC” and were full of old books including, I noticed, the
Spoon River Anthology
I'd shelved in his apartment a couple months before. Most of the books were fiction titles by Sherwood Anderson's contemporaries, including Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I didn't think much of the books at the time; they looked like any number of editions I might have pulled from the Lakeside Library stacks or stuck under the robotic scanner.

Of greater interest were the contents of the third box, marked “BOG.”
Book of the Grotesque
. I sat on the concrete floor, lifted out the pages and note cards, and went through them piece by piece, careful to leave the arrangement as I'd found it. Once again the title page sat on top, and beneath it the same fragments and manila folders I'd seen before. Below that, inch upon inch of more notes and folders:
Chicago Barons of the Gilded Age; Street, Rail, and Waterway Maps; The Panic of 1907
. Since I didn't have all day and worried that my father might stumble upon me at any moment, I flipped through the stack quickly. I did pause to skim some of the material, like firsthand accounts, dated 1906, of a day at the Union Stockyards, or biographical sketches of the advertising kings of a hundred years ago, their objectives little different from those of my colleagues at Imego.

Toward the bottom of the stack I found an accordion file marked
Old Drafts
. But the file was mostly empty; only the first section contained any manuscript. The twelve typewritten pages began:

From the window of the westbound train George Willard saw what fifty thousand new arrivals a year had witnessed. In the distance, over the corn and oat fields, a gray pall hovered like a storm cloud. He had heard stories about Chicago since he was a boy, had risen at two o'clock this morning unable to sleep or slow his heartbeat, which even now pounded in his ears with the rhythm of the wheels rumbling over the tracks
.

The chapter goes on to describe the landscape from the train, the blighted neighborhoods, the grand boulevards
tracing the lakeshore like the curve of a woman's hip
, the shock and wonder George feels upon his first encounter with the
unruly metropolis
. Had I seen the chapter in workshop I would have praised the writing and period detail, but said the story was slow to trigger. I would have rolled out the old familiars:
What's at stake? Where's the conflict? Who are the antagonists?
I wondered where the rest of the book had gone, what happens in chapter two, once George is off the train, in the maw of the city.

As I was putting the box marked “BOG” back in place, I noticed just behind it a brochure I hadn't seen at first. I had a passing worry that it had fallen out of one of the boxes, but I'd been so careful—I was sure it must have been sitting loose. I held it to the light. LIVING WITH CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE, it read. THE GOOD HEARTS PROGRAM AT LAKESIDE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL.

I checked my watch. Well past one. I couldn't linger any further. I put the brochure back and returned to the office, where I spent much of the afternoon searching the Internet. I knew my father had heart disease, but congestive heart failure put him in a whole new category. Since all I'd seen was the brochure, no ECG results or instructions for treatment, I had no way of knowing the severity of his condition. Stage A meant his future risk was high but functions were fine for now, B and C could be managed with meds and treatment, but if he'd reached Stage D, he needed a transplant, or in the case of a seventy-eight-year-old who'd put on hard miles and still took a drink before five: palliative care.
I have one foot in the grave
, my father had said. Perhaps he wasn't kidding.

But I knew I couldn't mention his heart without admitting I'd been through his things. It was enough that I'd uprooted him, made him agree to see the cardiologist. If he wanted me to know his business, why would he hide the boxes and brochure in the storage cage? When I asked about the appointment back in February, he'd said his heart was
same as ever: ticking like a bomb
. He claimed he was taking his pills, walking more than he had in years, had cut back on butter and salt.
My last cigarette was postcoital
, he'd said.
And believe me:
that
was a long time ago
.

So unless I confronted him, all I could do was keep an eye out for symptoms. He did have a slight wheeze in his chest, but the raspiness dated back to his Pall Mall days. He seemed tired on occasion and sometimes short of breath, but not alarmingly so. I looked for veins standing up in his neck, swelling of the ankles, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I even checked the medicine cabinet every couple weeks and counted his pills to make sure he was taking them. By that measure, at least, he was proving a man of his word.

My attention to my father had not gone unnoticed at work. At a rare dinner out at an Indian place in the neighborhood, Dhara told me there'd been chattering in my bullpen that my lunch breaks had been growing longer and longer.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I never see you in the cafeteria anymore.”

I'd been off the road for much of the winter. The universities I was assigned to were getting cold feet about digitization. Ordinarily I'd have been all over the Midwest, following up with librarians or at the warehouse checking in with the manager. But the scanning had slowed considerably due to legal battles over copyright. Though my team was far removed from the negotiations, our calendars had thinned, and unlike everyone else in the office we had to make an effort to look busy. “I'm sorry, Dhara,” I said. “I've been spending a lot of time at my dad's.”

“Still bringing him carry-out?”

“He wouldn't eat otherwise.”

“So Imego's his taco truck? Seriously, we ought to be careful, Adam. You can't afford to lose this job.”

And that's when I told her about the heart-failure brochure. I don't know why I'd kept it to myself. I guess I felt I'd exhausted Dhara's patience, and didn't want to hear her say I was making a song and dance about nothing. “He could be terminally ill,” I said.

“How long have you known?”

“A month or so.”

“Why didn't you tell me before?” she asked. “We used to go over the whole day at dinner. Now I never see you.”

“You're the one who works late,” I said.

To my relief, Dhara had no rejoinder. She nipped the top off her samosa, and the steam rose like a mini volcano. “So you haven't badgered him with questions?”

I didn't admit I'd sneaked into his storage cage. “I stumbled across the information.”

“But you don't know how sick he is?”

“He looks the same—scarecrow in a cardigan—but I think he doesn't want me to know. The brochure was hidden. I wasn't supposed to see it.”

“You've got to find out,” Dhara said. “If you don't want to talk to him, I will.”

I was surprised she cared. She'd only seen him a couple of times, coming and going, since he'd moved in. Mutual discomfort had marked the few times they'd spoken, and privately she'd always been critical of my father—for good reason. Perhaps she was remembering her mother's last years and realizing, for my sake, there was only so much time.

“I'll do it,” I promised, though I didn't know how. The prospect set my foot to tapping.