The End of the Book: A Novel

Chapter 17

168 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 169 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...