The End of the Book by Porter Shreve Read Free Book Online Page B

curmudgeon .
    You’d be one too if you worked my hours and put up with a thousand stinking straphangers after you with the push. But no, you sit by that window all day flipping through the Ward catalogue, decorating your mansion in the clouds .
    At least I have a few dreams left , she said. When we met I thought you had ambition, but you’re all talk .
    I’d find something better if I didn’t have to work morning and night. And now look what you’ve done: an ankle-biter on the way. Just what we need!
    What I’ve done?
    That’s right , he said. I took every care .
    You took what you wanted and always have. You’re no better than a barnyard animal .
    Something shattered. A picture frame? And a great scrambling could be heard, followed by the thud of an upended chair.
    I never should have married you! she screamed. You’re the mistake of my life!
    A door slammed. Heavy footsteps resounded in the hallway, then the falling scales of the conductor hustling down the stairs and out into the bitter night.
    George lay awake wondering over the future of the child curled inside his neighbor’s belly. He would grow up in a boardinghouse so hastily constructed for the World’s Fair that cracks veined the walls and splinters widened dangerously in the sagging floorboards. The building should be condemned, George thought on freezing nights like this, and wondered anew why he continued to live in such a place, this scruffy urban cousin of the New Willard House. The streetcar conductor and his wife might well have been George’s own parents, squabbling over the vacancies and paths untaken. He clutched the velvet box beneath his pillow. Marriage. Was this what he had to look forward to?
    Three days later he took his seat at Christmas dinner with Ma Kavanagh, her skittish, snaggletoothed daughter, and seven other boarders at the Cass Street table. He had spent the weekend pacing his room and gazing out the window toward Michigan and Superior, wanting to venture into the city but leery of the cold and the thieves lying in wait to relieve him of the contents of his pockets. The Alfred J. Lazar agency was closed for the holiday, and George pushed away the thought of how he would be received upon his return to work. He had fled, and Lazar had not bothered to send over a note or call after him. Perhaps he was as good as finished at the agency, and no amount of pleading, even a proposal of marriage to Lazar’s daughter, would save his job.
    He cast his eyes around the table at the other boarders, only half of whom he knew by name. There was Tiptoe Joe, whose heels never touched the ground on his daily walk to and from the West Side bicycle factory where he worked as an assembler. Across from him stooped Ostrinski, a bouncer at a LaSalle Street resort who stood at least six and a half feet tall but wore the abashed, tentative look of someone hoping not to be noticed. Next to him, adjusting his peacock-blue cravat, sat the dandy of the building, the ancient widower Harry Quincel, who seemed unaware of his stained clothes and spent most of his days sitting on a bench outside the tobacconist’s tipping his hat to pretty girls. And setting out dinner at the head of the table was Nellie Kavanagh, who looked a good deal older than her thirty years, due in part to her work as chambermaid, cook, and caretaker of her mother’s boardinghouse.
    George imagined himself out of a job and back at street level, where he’d lived his whole life before coming to Chicago. The candles and gaslight cast a lambent glow about the room. A fire crackled in the hearth. Ma Kavanagh took her place and raised a Christmas toast. Cream-of-oyster soup made its way around, then Nellie selected George to carve the goose. Her fingers trembled as she passed him the knife and wiped her hands on her aproned hips. When he had finished carving she gave him a quick smile, the candlelight flickering in her eyes. He had never