The End of the Book (6 page)

“Yes,
we
. We're married. Not
your
apartment.
Ours
.”

I went on, trying to make my case. I said he was the only family I had and she of all people should understand that no matter what a thorn in the side he'd been, he was my father, and I couldn't allow him to waste away because that's what he'd do if I put him in some transient apartment in Normal. When I'd asked if he'd been to the doctor lately he'd laughed and said he was trying natural remedies, as in
Let nature take its course
. “And no, Dhara, I'm not overdramatizing when I tell you he's never looked worse. Having a father is not like having a cat; they don't just wander off when they get old, crawl under some neighbor's porch, and exhale their last breath. Abandoning him now is something I refuse to live with.”

Dhara stopped me right there. “If your father moves in, I refuse to live with you.”

“Be reasonable.” I reached for the bill.

“It's him or me,” she said. “Your choice.”

George never did go back to work that Friday. Lazar's request that he return soon because “I've been meaning to tell you something” faded into a quiet corner of his mind. At the jewelry counter he wasted little time choosing a one-and-a-half-carat Marquise ring with a brilliant diamond in the middle and sparkling clusters at the edges. He paid five hundred dollars, a third of his annual salary, and exhausted most of his savings account. But no sooner had he bought the ring and called a coachman to take him and his precious cargo home in the safety of a covered landau than he began to worry that the ring was not impressive enough for the likes of Margaret Lazar.

At the boardinghouse he climbed the narrow staircase and sat at his desk. He took the ring from its velvet box and held it to the single gaslight that illuminated his Spartan quarters. The saleswoman had urged him to consider a larger diamond, of superior color and clarity, but given his uncertain future at work in the regime of
Prove They Need It
, he could not afford to go into debt. Though the ring might not have been the most expensive in the case, here, in George's room, it glittered like an animate eye looking back at him. As the light ricocheted from facet to facet he told himself that of course the ring was good enough. How could Margaret expect anything more from one of her father's employees, a salary-earner without name or fortune?

At the birthday party he had wanted to ask what she saw in him, but he was thrown by her confession, and such a question would have been foolish, anyway. She grew up with money; he grew up with none. No sense drawing attention to the fact. He would ask her to marry him, and she would say yes. He was good enough for her, good enough for anyone. But after he climbed into bed and pulled the layers of wool blankets up to his eyes, trying to warm his bones in these shoddy quarters that put up only the frailest resistance to the Chicago winter, he was beset with further doubts.

Through the thin walls a man and a woman—a streetcar conductor and his pregnant wife—were having an argument. They had gone at it before, and weren't the only quarrelers at Ma Kavanagh's. George had long ago learned to tune out his neighbors' voices when he'd come home from work still adrift in the cartoon world of Tidy Town. And Ma, who lived in a top-floor apartment with her unmarried daughter, only rarely thumped her broom handle on the planks or yelled into the stairwell:
Keep it down!
Everyone turned a deaf ear to fights on the property, even to the sounds of men striking their wives, of plates crashing to the floor, and of the metronomic creaking of bedsprings that so often followed, like defective apologies.

I told you we're not leaving early
, the streetcar conductor said.
I put in for the weekend shift, and we can't afford to give up the wages. Your mother will have to wait until Christmas Eve
.

But we promised a longer visit this time
, his wife said.
You never let me go back to Belle Plaine
.

If you had a job we wouldn't be in this spot. But you're too good for factory work. Like some kind of princess
.

Some princess I am in this tenement, living with a man like you. Twenty-nine and already a curmudgeon
.

You'd be one too if you worked my hours and put up with a thousand stinking straphangers after you with the push. But no, you sit by that window all day flipping through the Ward catalogue, decorating your mansion in the clouds
.

At least I have a few dreams left
, she said.
When we met I thought you had ambition, but you're all talk
.

I'd find something better if I didn't have to work morning and night. And now look what you've done: an ankle-biter on the way. Just what we need!

What
I've
done?

That's right
, he said.
I took every care
.

You took what you wanted and always have. You're no better than a barnyard animal
.

Something shattered. A picture frame? And a great scrambling could be heard, followed by the thud of an upended chair.

I never should have married you!
she screamed.
You're the mistake of my life!

A door slammed. Heavy footsteps resounded in the hallway, then the falling scales of the conductor hustling down the stairs and out into the bitter night.

George lay awake wondering over the future of the child curled inside his neighbor's belly. He would grow up in a boardinghouse so hastily constructed for the World's Fair that cracks veined the walls and splinters widened dangerously in the sagging floorboards. The building should be condemned, George thought on freezing nights like this, and wondered anew why he continued to live in such a place, this scruffy urban cousin of the New Willard House. The streetcar conductor and his wife might well have been George's own parents, squabbling over the vacancies and paths untaken. He clutched the velvet box beneath his pillow. Marriage. Was this what he had to look forward to?

Three days later he took his seat at Christmas dinner with Ma Kavanagh, her skittish, snaggletoothed daughter, and seven other boarders at the Cass Street table. He had spent the weekend pacing his room and gazing out the window toward Michigan and Superior, wanting to venture into the city but leery of the cold and the thieves lying in wait to relieve him of the contents of his pockets. The Alfred J. Lazar agency was closed for the holiday, and George pushed away the thought of how he would be received upon his return to work. He had fled, and Lazar had not bothered to send over a note or call after him. Perhaps he was as good as finished at the agency, and no amount of pleading, even a proposal of marriage to Lazar's daughter, would save his job.

He cast his eyes around the table at the other boarders, only half of whom he knew by name. There was Tiptoe Joe, whose heels never touched the ground on his daily walk to and from the West Side bicycle factory where he worked as an assembler. Across from him stooped Ostrinski, a bouncer at a LaSalle Street resort who stood at least six and a half feet tall but wore the abashed, tentative look of someone hoping not to be noticed. Next to him, adjusting his peacock-blue cravat, sat the dandy of the building, the ancient widower Harry Quincel, who seemed unaware of his stained clothes and spent most of his days sitting on a bench outside the tobacconist's tipping his hat to pretty girls. And setting out dinner at the head of the table was Nellie Kavanagh, who looked a good deal older than her thirty years, due in part to her work as chambermaid, cook, and caretaker of her mother's boardinghouse.

George imagined himself out of a job and back at street level, where he'd lived his whole life before coming to Chicago. The candles and gaslight cast a lambent glow about the room. A fire crackled in the hearth. Ma Kavanagh took her place and raised a Christmas toast. Cream-of-oyster soup made its way around, then Nellie selected George to carve the goose. Her fingers trembled as she passed him the knife and wiped her hands on her aproned hips. When he had finished carving she gave him a quick smile, the candlelight flickering in her eyes. He had never noticed her regard before, and wondered if she had seen the ring while cleaning his room and was drawn to the sparkle of the diamond, the romance of an imminent proposal. Then he realized, of course, that he hadn't let the velvet box out of his sight, had barely ventured out of his apartment in days. He touched the pocket of his dinner jacket, felt the jut of the box, and smiled back at Nellie before taking his seat.

George felt an upsurge of kinship for his fellow diners. He only knew them coming and going, but their presence here, the warmth of the room and the headiness of the spiced wine, made him nostalgic for something he couldn't quite name. He'd always been the person anyone could come to, the reporter, the writer in the making, and it occurred to him as he passed the browned sweet potatoes to Nellie, who sat on one side of him, and the creamed onions to a doleful-eyed man who sat on the other, that before long a decade would have gone by since his train pulled out of Winesburg. Yet this ragtag group of strangers felt more familiar to him, more like the people he knew growing up, than any of the cliff-dwellers he saw and bantered with every day.

He tried to dismiss the thought as the sentimental longings of one far from home, and pictured his father cutting into a turkey or saddle of venison at precisely the moment George had been carving this Christmas dinner, 280 miles between them. Last time he went home for Christmas, three or four years ago, his father had purchased more than enough food to satisfy a teeming dining room, but the only guests to show up that night were a small convergence of melancholy bachelors from town, a starry-eyed young couple on a long haul to California, and a family from Monroeville whose matriarch had recently passed away and couldn't bring themselves to do the holiday board. Most depressing to George was the sight of his father the next morning examining the larder full of food that would soon spoil, and the way he announced, with false cheer, “How's that for a king's ransom?”

These are my people
, George thought for a fleeting moment. Though he knew he could not return to Winesburg, even if Helen White herself were to summon him back, he felt more at home than he had in years. The ring in his pocket was like a weight in his heart, and he decided he must return the diamond to Marshall Field's as soon as the store reopened after the holiday. He had been foolish and impetuous. He was not in love with Margaret Lazar. He was merely afraid.

But before long the room fell into silence. Silverware scraped on plates; the fire hissed and the mantel clock kept time. There were chewing sounds and gulping, an almost desperate hunger to the way people ate and drank. The dandy widower Harry Quincel picked the apples out of his Waldorf salad one by one, licking the pieces, then crunching into them with little moans of satisfaction. No one, apparently, had a word to contribute by way of conversation, so Ma Kavanagh said, “Let's get to know each other,” and began asking questions. People went around the room saying where they were from; not surprisingly, everyone had arrived from the Midlands or overseas.

Nellie leaned toward George and whispered, “My mother has no shame. You see, the man sitting next to you is a great mystery, and this whole charade is meant to unmask him.” She said she was surprised the doleful-eyed man had come to dinner, when no one so much as knew his name, and though better rooms had been available, he had requested the one farthest back on the top floor. He shut himself in there for the entire day and toward dinner could be seen furtively leaving the property carrying what looked like a cashbox under his arm. After being gone all night, he would slip in the front door around breakfast time. He voluntarily paid extra rent—for the inconvenience of his odd hours, he said. “My mother thinks he has something to hide and is trying to buy her silence.”

After everyone answered where they were from, Ma Kavanagh circulated a new question—“And what work do you do?” It came around to Nellie, and she said, with an effort at humor that had the edge of a sneer, “I'm mother's little helper.” Then it was the doleful-eyed man's turn, and he said simply, “I work in a Turkish bath. I'm the resident chiropodist.”

“Come again?” pressed Ma Kavanagh.

“He removes plantar warts,” Tiptoe Joe put in.

“Mostly corns and bunions,” the chiropodist clarified.

Ma Kavanagh seemed flustered at having her conspiracy demystified in front of her daughter, and perhaps to hide her embarrassment she didn't prompt George about his job, but rather answered for him. “Young Mr. Willard is a very successful man,” she said. “Top brass at one of our city's finest advertising agencies. Makes a pretty penny, he does, yet he lives right here in a little room with a sink and table. I keep telling him: Get out of this place, buy a house, find a nice girl. You're better than the lot of us. He doesn't listen, just goes about his business. But really,” she asked, “why do you stay? What's keeping you here?”

George looked around the room at the faces—suspicious, wary, confused—all turned in his direction, and froze where he sat, reaching inward for some kind of answer.

By New Year's Eve, George was determined to begin 1905 in dramatic fashion. He had not come up with an adequate answer for why he was still living in a tumbledown boardinghouse, and Ma Kavanagh's challenge had compelled him to make a change. He told her that he would soon have an announcement and she might as well begin to look for his replacement. He did not return the engagement ring on the day after Christmas. Instead, he went into the office intent on recommitting himself and patching up any misunderstandings with his boss. But Lazar was apparently gone for the week, so George spent his workdays looking out his window at the clotted streets, taking the ring from its box and tumbling it around his fingers, and trying to read the expressions of his fellow employees. Did they know something about his future that he did not?