The End of the Book (2 page)

I rang the doorbell and peered through the glass sidelights. The hallway was dark and empty. I rang again and heard only the muffled silence of white-blanketed suburbia, post-holiday, woodsmoke brushing the air, my father's house the odd hermitage in a family subdivision. I couldn't hear the bell working, so I tried the knocker. The name of the people who last lived here—
The Fishers
—remained etched in the brass. I wondered why my father wasn't coming to the door, why his newspapers had been growing cold for three days, his walk and car buried under snow, and it occurred to me that I should have gone to the hardware store last time I visited and brought back a new door knocker or, better yet, had one engraved:
Clary
.

Dr. Roland Clary, Professor Emeritus at Central Illinois University, formerly of Indiana University, Oberlin College, and the University of Michigan, author of what might have been the essential biography of Sherwood Anderson, had he only finished. Several major newspapers and journals reviewed the first book favorably. “In this judicious, assiduously researched biography, Mr. Clary reminds us why the author of
Winesburg, Ohio
remains relevant today,” wrote the
New York Times
. “The second volume is sure to be anticipated by scholars and literary readers alike.”

Why, as I shivered under a purpling sky, was I imagining my father's obituary, and wondering where, if anywhere, it might run? Did the world care about books anymore? Who would note the passing of an obscure academic, chronicler of a mostly forgotten writer's life? A
writer's writer
, my father used to say. Even he conceded that while Sherwood Anderson influenced generations of storytellers and for a time was a godfather to Hemingway and Faulkner, he was not in their league, but for that one odd book about a town of outcasts—
grotesques
, Anderson called them. Believe me: I knew that book well. And I knew my father well enough to realize that by devoting his days to the study of these grotesques he had himself become one.

I banged on the door with my fist. Through the glass I saw the orange tabby, Wing Biddlebaum, round the corner and offer an insouciant meow. I studied the cat's face for signs of trouble, but he had the puffed, squint-eyed look of having just awoken from a long nap. He sat on the hallway tiles, licked his paws, and when I continued knocking, walked away with a vexed switch of the tail.

I took out my cell phone and dialed, and I could hear my father's phone ringing inside. It rang and rang, and still no answer. He was the last holdout against answering machines, voice mail, said cell phones were a swindle and a public menace. A few years before, I had set him up with an e-mail account, but he didn't bother using it. And he called the famous company where I worked
the grand colonizer of the Information Age
. I had to admit I didn't disagree.

Stepping back, I looked up to the second-floor windows. The curtains were drawn, but a single bulb lit one of the rooms, and I felt relieved that his power was still on. At least he wasn't freezing to death in there. But even on my unannounced visits he did always come to the door, slippered and cardiganed, his ashy pallor blending with his incongruously tidy beard.

Why wasn't he answering?

Maybe he was taking a nap. Not that I'd ever known him to do so. But his engine was running down, and he did seem tired last I saw him.
Never felt better
, he'd lied. But if he were napping he wouldn't have left the light on.

Now I was beginning to panic. I pounded the door harder, wondered if I should call the police, see if one of the neighbors had a key.

Why hadn't I thought to get my own key made?

I remembered reading about the Collyer brothers, the reclusive hoarders of upper Fifth Avenue who filled their brownstone floor to ceiling with junk. When a patrolman, summoned by a worried neighbor, broke in through a second-story window, it took him two hours to crawl to the corpse of Homer Collyer, slumped amidst the rubbish in a tattered blue robe. It seemed that Langley Collyer had gone missing, so a search fanned out across the city while police combed the house. Over the course of three weeks they cleared away three thousand books, decades of newspapers, and countless curiosities—a clavichord, bowling balls, an X-ray machine, dressmaking dummies, a horse's jawbone—more than eighty tons of trash before they discovered Langley, long dead, and, it turned out, just ten feet away from where they'd found his brother.

If Dhara were here she'd say I was overreacting. But I was my father's lone caretaker, and he was the closest family I had, so I braced myself for the worst. I trudged through the snow to the back of the house and tried to look in, but the windows were mostly frosted over and the rooms dark. I spotted a ladder beside the neighbor's garage, dragged it back, and leaned it against my father's house.

I climbed to the second floor and rapped on the storm windows, pulled off my gloves and tried to slide my fingers under the frames, but they were cased in ice.

I was blowing into my hands and thinking about breaking a pane with my elbow like a B-grade action star when I heard the creak of the back door opening, then a familiar splenetic voice: “Get the hell down from there!”

In his living room, my father and I had it out:

“What did you think you were doing? Trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Why didn't you answer the door? I've been sick with worry.”

“No one's been sick with worry over me since my mother dropped me in the Pensaukee River and thought I was drowned. You think I'm some old sentimentalist?”

“I've been calling for days, Dad. I've been out in the cold for the last half hour trying to get your attention.”

“Well, you got it, all right, with your cat-burglar routine.”

“Why did you ignore me?” I asked.

“I didn't know it was you.”

“Who else would it be?”

His friends had all retired and taken to the skies—celestial, or the fly-ways that end in warm weather. “I've been getting nothing but calls and visitors.” He flicked on a light and I saw the tide of unopened mail and papers spilling out of the dining room that he called his office.

I was still in my coat and it was too cold in there to remove it. “What kind of visitors?”

“Predators and harpies, ‘cawing their lamentations in the eerie trees.'”

“People from the bank?”

“It's none of your goddamned business.”

Manuscript boxes filled the camelback sofa he'd had since the seventies when we lived in Bloomington. The dusty almond aroma of old books mingled with the smell of buttered popcorn, which my father had long subsisted on. I would have sat down, having traveled all day, but there was nowhere to plant myself. Every chair and settee was stacked with books. On his walls he'd hung more photographs, creepy sepia portraits of other people's families, scored over the years at estate sales. My mother had drawn the line on this one fetish.
Your own ancestors I can understand. But who
are
these people?

I knew not to push my father, so I looked for a way around the subject of why I was there. “I tried to call yesterday to say Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Dad. Did you talk to anyone else?”

He took off his thick-rimmed glasses and wiped them with the sleeve of his purple cardigan. He was slim and fine-featured, his silver hair no less thick and wavy than when he courted his first wife and left her for a classmate, escaped from his second wife into the arms of my mother, and abandoned my mother for a graduate student. “The phone rang a few times,” he said.

“You could have picked up. It was only me, and probably Michael and Eric. No one from the bank would be calling on Christmas.”

“Don't count on it.” With a wobbly hand, he put his glasses back on. “I could use a drink.”

“Maybe we should grab some dinner and talk,” I said.

The adrenaline from finding me outside the house seemed to have run its course. He leaned over the back of his old fainting couch, curled like an approaching wave.

I took him out to what passed for fine dining in Normal, a cook-your-own steakhouse called Rustler's Grill in a strip mall on the north side. I'd never been before, but I figured it was interactive and primal, a good place for father and son to commune, mutely grilling cuts of meat over an open flame.

Still rattled, I had forgotten about the low-fat, low-salt diet he was supposed to be on. He'd managed to stop smoking after the bypass and claimed he rode an exercise bike, but the seat always seemed dusty, and I wondered if he kept up with the blood thinners and superaspirins, thrombolytics and beta blockers he was supposed to be taking. I couldn't tell him not to eat a steak when I was the one who'd suggested this place, so we ordered top sirloins from a glass case and took our plates to a massive grill in the middle of the room.

My father asked loud enough for others to hear, “Why go out to dinner when you have to do the work?” and I told him no one else was complaining; look at those happy families spearing their marbled Delmonicos. “What's next?” he said. “Butcher your own beef? Raise the herd yourself?”

We were standing there, sprinkling our dinners with mystery seasoning, brushing butter on our Texas Toast, when a man in a cartoon cardinal sweatshirt came up to my father and shook his hand. “Mr. Clary. What a surprise.” He had an inland honk and a flattop, the look of an athlete gone to flesh. “I stopped calling you a month ago. We're past the point of no return. Bob Jagoda.” He introduced himself and gave me the handshake of a linebacker clinging to glory.

I glanced at my father, who had turned pale and reticent. “Adam,” I put in.

“Are you family?” Jagoda asked.

“I'm his son,” I said.

“You don't live in town, do you?” His voice carried an edge of judgment.

“I'm the youngest,” I felt compelled to explain. “I live in Chicago.”

“Well, it's important to have family around in tough times. Season of giving and all,” he said.

With a pair of tongs I moved my steak back from the flame and set a baked potato on the grill. My father seemed shrunken and lost outside the walls of his own topsy-turvydom.

“How do you know each other?” I asked.

Jagoda said he was a housing counselor with American Dream Assistance. “We're HUD-approved—legit,” he said. “But your Pops took months before agreeing to meet me. Isn't that right, Mr. Clary? And by the time he came to the office, we had the smallest window to try for a loan modification. These banks, I'm telling you. Your pops had the worst mortgage, an adjustable rate that shot up like a rocket.”

When my father had signed for that loan I was on business in Ann Arbor and couldn't be there, and though I'd harassed him to go over the terms, asked him to fax me the paperwork and give me the name of the lender, he'd refused my help.

Jagoda jutted his chin at me.

“I had no idea,” I said.

My father flipped his steak, which had charred in the flame. “This is a family matter.”

“You're right.” Jagoda put up his hands. “I'm not in the I-told-you-so business, but after you ignored the court summons and the notice of default, we talked about the seven-month time frame, and you knew all you had to do was say,
Go for it
, and I would have turned the screws on your lender and gotten you a better deal, probably saved your house. I have a lifetime success rate of 80 percent plus, tops in the region.” He paused to let this sink in. “But you didn't answer my e-mails or calls, Mr. Clary, and now you're past the Redemption period. Once they sell the place, do you know how long you'll have?”

My father forked his sirloin and dropped it on his plate. “This is enough,” he said, and walked away.

I removed my food from the grill, not sure whether to thank the housing counselor for trying at least or call him out for browbeating an old man. I gave him a feeble, “Happy holidays,” then headed for the table under a pair of horseshoes where my father slumped over his plate, slowly carving.

“Charming guy.” I sat down.

He lifted a piece of steak—charred on one side, nearly raw on the other—into the dim light. “Why did you have to drag me here? You know I don't like to go out.”

“Why didn't you tell me your situation?” I snapped back. “It's been months, almost a year. This news came out of the blue.”

My father shrugged and took a bite, set his silverware in the bloody pool on his plate.

“What does it mean to be past the Redemption period?” I asked.

“It means I missed my chance at atonement. So much for getting delivered from sin.”

“Seriously, Dad. This isn't a joke.”

“You're right. Maybe it's not too late. Waiter, bring me a sackcloth and ashes. This flesh is going to need extra mortification.”

I knew when my father got this way it was best to let him go, so I ate my potato and looked uninterested. He seemed cheered by his little attempt at humor. When the waiter did come by, he ordered a rum and Diet Coke, and before long was into another. I saw Bob Jagoda leave the restaurant with his wife and burr-headed sons, and when I sensed my father was good and loose, I asked, “How long before you have to move out?”

He pushed his pecked-at dinner aside. “Thirty days after the sale,” he said. “
Alea iacta est
, quoth Caesar. ‘The die is cast.'”

“So what are we going to do?”

“How about I buy another house? Weren't you the one who said real estate is a can't-miss investment?”

“Don't try to pin this on me.”

“What the hell was I doing
investing
, in the first place? I've got one foot in the grave, for Chrissake, and now here we are: end of '08. Worst economy since the Great Depression. I'm making national news!”

“There's no sense looking back,” I said. On some level I knew that my father was right, that I had urged him to buy a house when I should have realized that it was too late for him to make that kind of commitment. In a flare of guilt, and thinking neither of the consequences nor of Dhara—whose nickname for my father was Vritra, the Hindu god of drought and destruction—I said, “Why don't you come and live with us?” I knew it was a mistake even as I formed the words, “Dhara and I can help. We have an extra bedroom. You don't have to stay forever, just long enough to sort things out.”