The End of the Book Read Online Free Page A

and travel the world, but never managed to leave Winesburg, and the disease that made her the hollow figure haunting the New Willard House went undiagnosed but might have been called disappointment. George shared his mother’s sensibility and knew he had come to Chicago in part to avoid the trap of unrealized dreams. At the same time, he had grown up in that bedraggled hotel, and each year the hallway outside his room, dimly lit with kerosene lamps, had grown quieter as travelers continued on to the next town or sought more welcoming accommodations. Tom Willard lived in denial of the failure that surrounded him; he walked briskly along Main Street twirling the ends of his black mustache, and greeted his fellow citizens with a mayoral air. At first George had resisted the path of wealth that his father had urged him toward, but Chicago was a dynamo that sucked him in, and now the thought of losing his income and falling from his comfortable perch among the Monadnock “cliff-dwellers” made him shudder.
    It was the Friday before Christmas. Lights illuminated every window, voices rose with the clatter and grind up skyscraper walls, and George was swept by the convulsion of people past Adams, Monroe, and Madison Streets. Crossing Washington, he forgot to hold onto his pearl-gray homburg, and a crosswind off the lake sent the hat airborne. As it spun toward the ground, a girl with an armful of flowers dropped what she was carrying and caught the hat in both hands.
    George rushed over to where she was standing in the middle of the street. “Thank you,” he said. “But look what’s become of your flowers.” Her chrysanthemums lay scattered about the macadam, trampled under the boots of indifferent passersby. The girl bent to gather the few salvageable blooms, and when she looked up George saw the dark rings under her eyes and her pale dreamy face and recognized her as one of the many flower girls, immigrants from central Europe who went about the city’s corners and saloons singing popular ballads or playing concertinas or sticking carnations in buttonholes with the entreaty, “Give me whatever you please.”
    The traffic was encroaching on either side, drivers yelling, “Hurry up already! Out of the street!” George took the girl’s arm and hustled to the curb. “What do I owe you?” he asked, pulling his hat tight over his head. “I’m terribly sorry.”
    Under the lamplight her face had a consumptive pallor. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. “It’s no trouble, sir.” She brushed the sooty slush from the petals of her drooping chrysanthemums.
    â€œI want to buy the whole bunch from you.” He removed his billfold and took out ten dollars, two weeks’ earnings for someone in her work.
    â€œIt’s too much,” she said, but George pressed the money into her small gloveless hand. She thanked him and, before she turned to leave, pinned a flower to the lapel of this topcoat.
    When she had disappeared into the crowd like a snowflake on pavement, George found himself under the great clock of Marshall Field’s, drifting past the brilliant Christmas display windows, each as elaborate as a theater stage—this of a fire-lit living room and bright spangled tree, that of a couple riding a sleigh across a winter moon. George wondered if he would be spending Christmas alone or at the office or having dinner with his landlady’s family again at the Cass Street boardinghouse that she ran like an orphanage. Though he made salary enough to buy his own flat in one of the finer residential districts, he sent a good portion of his money to his father for renovation projects and lived a simple existence between the office and his third-floor room. He found comfort in the transience, even the dowdiness of Ma Kavanagh’s place that reminded him of home, and for a while enjoyed the feeling of living in two worlds: up in the