The End of the Book by Porter Shreve Page B

Hotel, his clothes a tangle on the floor and lying next to a girl he hardly knew. He was still just becoming acquainted with Margaret Willard, getting used to his name affixed to hers, and perhaps the gloss of novelty was the key to his well-being. He spent longer hours than ever at the office, steering between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Service and Performance Departments. So he enjoyed coming home, having a late dinner with his wife, and relaxing before bed with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writing about self-discipline and “the infinitude of the private man” calmed his whirling nerves. And he looked forward most of all to turning in for the night, having spent the better part of ten years sleeping alone on a straw mattress in a grubby boardinghouse. Though it was still the fashion to sleep apart in twin beds, now George lay down on a horsehair mattress between the finest cotton sheets. For months his nightly ritual was to climb into Margaret’s bed and stroke her hair, touch her hip and shoulders, and more often than not she would take him into her arms. Though lately, it was true, she turned him away with greater frequency, complaining of fatigue or the summer heat or the bed built for one. Wouldn’t you rather talk? she’d ask. I haven’t seen you but for a minute all day .
    Margaret’s talk consisted mostly of society matters that didn’t much interest George. She complained endlessly of her mother’s active social calendar but was quick to take up the latest gossip. She knew who’d been prowling the resorts of the vice district, who’d given up children for adoption before marrying well. She knew of fortunes gained on the backs of the poor and of secret memberships in covens and cults. A year out of the university, she had no apparent prospects or plans for the road ahead. She came into the office two days a week as a creative advisor on her father’s campaigns, and George endured the derisive looks of his coworkers. He wished she would find a permanent position in a theater or a gallery—she had a passion for the arts—but as much as she groused about her parents, she could not disentangle herself from their lives.
    George had expected that he and his new bride would own a house by now, in Lake View or one of the areas along the Lincoln Avenue streetcar line. He pictured an unassuming greystone with deceptively grand interiors in a neighborhood of new arrivals from Ireland, Luxembourg, Nebraska, Indiana. As a child he used to make believe that the New Willard House was a palace, that he was crown prince and the guests all functionaries of court. But when he stepped into the streets of Winesburg he drifted toward odd-jobbers and millinery-shop workers, those whose best days were behind them or would never come. He felt at times that two different George Willards were battling within him: the striver after money and position and the solitary figure at the margins of the world. Perhaps this explained his restlessness, his enduring dissatisfaction: He wished to be a deserter from his own internal civil war.
    Yet he had not so much as escaped his in-laws’ backyard. After the honeymoon in Lake Geneva, he and Margaret moved into the carriage house behind her parents’ mansion on Lake Shore Drive. It was meant to be a temporary solution, since there had been no time to find a house amidst their sped-up wedding planning. Margaret’s father thought nothing of dropping in with an armful of extra work, and her mother had taken up gardening and could be heard spading the dirt and pruning the bushes outside their bedroom window. When George would say We can’t live here forever , Margaret would agree: You think I want my mother pawing through my bloomers? But nothing happened. George would bring home the real estate ads, press the subject too far, and Margaret would call him a nag and walk away. Now should have been a fine time to talk of the