The End of the Book: A Novel

Chapter 19

186 19 Throughout June 1909, George was trying to live for the moment. He did not want to think about September, when he was due to board a train to New York, then a ship to Liverpool. Margaret had already gone to her father and asked him to reduce George’s hours so he could finish this novel, and Lazar, who would do anything for his daughter, acquiesced. In the past, George might have been upset with his wife for making such arrangements on the quiet, but he’d grown accustomed to the scornful looks of his coworkers and could endure still more if it meant leaving the office at three o’clock. He did manage to get some writing done, but a novel seemed a daunting endeavor. For now the best he could do was to set his stories in one place, a small midwestern town not unlike his own, at the turn of the twisting century . When he finished a story he would give it to Helen, pacing before the fifth-floor window while she read it sitting in a wingback chair tantalizingly close to the bed. What he’d give to share that bed with her again, to bend down and kiss her pretty neck. But she gave no signs of willingness, said I’d better not when he offered a glass of wine, and he had to wonder if he had destroyed a fragile possibility, if they would ever have a chance again. After a number of such evenings Helen began to ask why George insisted that they meet in his room and made efforts not to be seen with her in restaurants or crossing the lobby. In truth, he wanted the intimacy, loved the feeling of bringing her to this place, of playing at making a home. But he didn’t tell her this. “You said it yourself,” he explained. “It’s too soon after my separation, so we’d be wise not to go out in public. And that manager, Lemuel Means, he has more eyes than Panoptes. Our agency puts clients in this hotel, and I wouldn’t want Lazar hearing that I’d taken up with someone else before Margaret and I parted ways.” 187 “You might have thought of all that before,” she said. “I told you we made a mistake.” Two weeks would pass before they’d see each other again, an eventful two weeks that would bring further complications to George’s life. One evening he returned to the Gold Coast house to find his father waiting for him in the front hallway. “I’m going home,” he said abruptly. His packed trunk sat in the parlor. “I’m on the first train tomorrow morning.” “What happened?” George asked. “The New Willard House has been sold and scheduled for demolition. Apparently our friends and neighbors are up in arms. They need me, and I aim to step into the breach.” Tom Willard said the town elders were surrendering all that made Winesburg unique by selling the land to an outfit that was building drive-up filling stations across northern Ohio. “The streets used to belong to the people, to friends coming and going, to children at play, but this would mean the end of all that. Automobiles clogging downtown . The beast of motordom crushing lives under its wheels.” “Maybe there was no choice in the matter,” George said. “Our town has been sliding for years, falling off, more like, since the Panic.” “You don’t just give up safety. You put up a fight.” Tom Willard shook his fist. “And you don’t sell your character to the first four-flusher. They’re tearing down your heritage, son.” At another time, George might have been sentimental about the place, but it never was a home, just a room looking over the train tracks at the end of a mostly empty hallway. And he had his memories, ghosts of his mother and of the many transients who even now were filling the pages of his notebooks and stories. For better and worse he carried the New Willard House with him, and so had no great feeling for that shell he had left behind. “How long will you be gone?” George asked. “Could be a week. A month. If we win, I might stay,” he said. “Your old editor Will Henderson is putting me up for a time. I’ll keep him in gin for a cot.” And like that, he...