The End of the Book (32 page)

“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.

I'd grown tired of sneaking around, so before arranging to meet Lucy, I told Dhara where I was going and why. She knew about the college fund Lucy had pulled together for me, but she had never made a big deal of it. “If you'd rather I not see her, I'd understand.”

“It's okay,” she said. “I'm not going to stop you.”

“She's just an old friend.”

“I know she is. And you probably think I've been irrational to be bothered by her return. You knew her in high school. It was long ago and far away,” Dhara said. “But Lucy's father is a millionaire many times over. She doesn't have to work. She and the guy she ends up with could live comfortably on her trust fund for the rest of their days. When her parents die, she'll come into a fortune. She could live in Europe. She could buy a small island somewhere. And I know what you really want to do, Adam. You've said it, and I'm sorry if it didn't seem like I was listening. You want time enough to write a book or many books, and how better to have that freedom than by marrying rich?”

“I never had an interest in doing that.”

“You don't need to convince me. I'm sure you've been thinking I'm jealous, so there: you know my reasons.”

“I want to meet Lucy so I can pay her back,” I said. “I didn't want her money then, and I don't want it now. She's a decent person. Under different circumstances you could be friends.” I could hear the condescension in my voice and felt a slight sting of shame, even as I continued, “But she can't help where she came from, and has never had to find her own way. She's generous, sure, but without ever making a real sacrifice.”

“Is that any way to talk about the love of your life?”

“Dhara—”

“I'm kidding. You don't have to say it.”

But I said it again anyway, and I didn't forget it when I met Lucy for lunch at a gastropub across from Millennium Park.

We had only just settled into a booth when she said, “I'm still mad at you, Adam. You might have returned my phone calls.” So I told her about my father, and she felt terrible.

We spent most of the lunch talking about him. I told her about the pills and liquor, said she had been right about the warning signs. “I guess I should feel worse that I hadn't anticipated it, but the truth is I'd been worried about him for a long time, and I'm certain he wanted to do this.” I said there were clues in a story he wrote called “The Writer's Writer” that I found when it was too late—“Did you know that Sherwood Anderson considered suicide, once intentionally ran his car off the road?”

When the coffees came, I told Lucy about the rare books and my surprise inheritance. “It must have given him a weird satisfaction to imagine my brothers and me opening those envelopes. He had lived half a life, written half of another man's story. So here, finally, was a conclusion, and even a small legacy.”

“What are you going to do with the money?” she asked.

“That's why I wanted to meet you today,” I said. “Last week I wrote a big check to pay off my graduate school loans. And now I want to settle up on the college fund.”

“It was a gift, Adam.”

“I never asked for it, and I never gave you anything in return.”

“I was happy to do it,” she said.

“You have to be honest with me, Lucy. I need to know how much I owe you.”

She tried to brush off the subject and move on, but I grew frustrated, and she must have realized, finally, how serious I was.

I had brought my checkbook, and I wrote her a check right there for fifteen thousand dollars, the amount Lucy had contributed above and beyond our friends' donations. “I know this is awkward.” I avoided her eyes. “But it means a lot to me not to owe anyone.”

“I guess I understand,” she said. “Self-reliance is its own kind of currency.”

I slid the check across the table. “You've done more for me than you know.” She started to say something, but put her hand to her mouth.

“Thank you,” I said.

With a faint shake of her head, she slipped the money into her purse.

We finished our coffees and paid the bill, and as we were getting ready to leave, Lucy said, “And what about your novel,
The Book of the Grotesque
—how's it coming along? You predicted you'd be finished by the end of summer.”

“Did I?” I asked. Somewhere along the way I'd forgotten. “Well, it's early June, and summer is long. I guess I've got my work cut out for me.”

We hugged at her bus stop on Michigan Avenue. The southbound CTA bus pulled up to the curb, and the doors swished open.

“Take care,” I said.

“See you.” She gave a little wave as she stepped onto the bus. After she sat down she looked over her shoulder and waved a second time. As she headed toward her office at the University of Chicago, I wondered when I'd see her again and recalled a story she once told me about having dinner in Boston with two older writers who had grown up in the same state but now lived on separate coasts and hadn't talked or seen each other in thirty years. At the end of a boozy evening one of the writers, who carried a cane with a duck-head handle, put his hand on the other's shoulder and said,
We need to be in better touch
. And the second writer, a once beautiful woman, now hunched and frail, replied,
Oh honey. We're always in touch
.

Lucy didn't have to explain what that meant, because somehow, being my father's son, I guess, I understood right away. A book is a letter to the world, and to read is to be in touch. So for all those thirty years the two writers had been carrying on an intimate correspondence, the enduring friendship of writer and reader. I imagined Lucy picking up a book that I had written one day. Perhaps then we would understand each other a little more.

That night, Dhara came home with the news that a number of jobs had opened up at corporate, positions with Imego's soon-to-launch eBookstore.

“They need people now, and we're both perfectly qualified.”

I must have looked skeptical, because she quickly added, “I know this isn't the first time I've said that, but I spent all day talking to people, and everyone says we're exactly who they're looking for.”

The buzz around the lava lamps was that Imego would be partnering with independent bookstores, allowing them to sell Imego's scanned books from their own websites for a share of the profits. I wasn't ready to buy the hype, but Dhara told me about a trade magazine article that quoted prominent booksellers who said Imego might well become the savior, rather than the villain it had been, in the online retail wars.