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“You’re right, you’re right,” Lincoln tells his boss.
“Maybe it’s different at newspapers, where you are working under draconian deadlines, but books!” says Duddleston. “Books are different.”
Lincoln nods very slowly. His right forearm aches where he broke it so many years ago. He’s heard stories of Duddleston’s ruthless tactics as a trader and of his volcanic temper, but around Pistakee Press, the man always seems to be concentrating on talking slowly and deliberately. “What do you think I should do?” he asks Duddleston.
“Oh, call up Bill Lemke,” the editor-in-chief/owner says, brightening. “Take him out to lunch. Flatter him. Massage him a little. All writers like that. I’m sure he’ll come around.”
“Righto,” says Lincoln, wondering if Lemke can stay sober enough through lunch to absorb a few suggestions on his book.
Duddleston stands. “You’re a brilliant editor,” he tells Lincoln. “A brilliant man of words.”
Lincoln forces out a smile. Duddleston has complained in the past about Lincoln’s “abuse of writers”—Duddleston’s term Now, something in the boss’s precise delivery of the inflated compliment makes Lincoln wonder if he’s about to be fired.
“We want to bring that book out next March, just in the middle of spring training, and it’s July already,” Duddleston reminds him. “Not much time.”
“We’ll get there,” Lincoln assures his boss.
Duddleston starts to go but pauses at a bookshelf where Lincoln has placed some family photographs—the black-and-white portrait of his father, the Washington lawyer, posed somberly in a lugubrious dark suit; the fading snapshot of mom, dad, sister, and Lincoln himself at twelve, a basketball tucked under his arm; the picture of Lincoln and his wife, Mary, bumping shoulders, touching heads, standing in front of an inviting Tuscan café.
Duddleston turns to Lincoln with an avuncular gaze. “And how’s it going with Mary?” he asks.
Lincoln shifts awkwardly in his chair. Maybe he should put away that picture, at least, for now. It was taken just a year ago, when he and Mary hoped the relaxation and distraction of a trip to Italy would enhance their surprisingly balky efforts to get pregnant. Not long after they returned, and with no success on the pregnancy front, Mary decided to put motherhood on hold until after she got an MBA. Three weeks ago, she announced that they needed “a v
acation” from each other while she decided whether she wanted to stay married, and Lincoln moved out. “OK,” he tells Duddleston. “Just trying to sort out our feelings.”
“Seeing a counselor?”
“No, not at the moment. Maybe later.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t rush into things,” Duddleston says. “You’ve put in—what?—five years on this marriage, and that’s not something you want to discard carelessly. Hold off on making decisions. Give yourselves time to cool off.”
“Right, right.”
Duddleston nods and smiles. “Go to it, Abe,” he says, closing the door carefully behind him.
John Lincoln takes a deep breath. His boss’s idea of an affectionate tic is to call his top employee after the adored president, even though John, as far as he knows, doesn’t carry a trace of the Great Man’s DNA. That’s another unfortunate consequence of landing in Chicago, Lincoln reminds himself constantly. From the moment he set foot in Illinois and introduced himself to his dorm counselor at the U of C, he’s had to explain to new acquaintances that he’s no relation to the state’s favorite son. “Oh, that’s too bad,” people often say. To which Lincoln, if he’s in the mood and the occasion appropriate, enjoys replying, “No, it’s not. Abe Lincoln was a chronic depressive and possible homosexual. Mrs. Lincoln went mad. Three of their four boys died young, and the survivor grew up to be a monumentally crass and greedy lawyer. Those are not the genes I prefer to be carrying, thank you very much.” But the retort is not much solace. He probably wouldn’t have to field the question if he lived in New York.
2
DESPERATE TO AVOID another crisis, John Lincoln spends the next hour and a half going back over the manuscript of Walking Tours of the Windy City, erasing about a quarter of his careful pencil edits and laboriously eliminating traces of his most virulent marginal comments. He struggles particularly to remove all evidence of “ZZZZZ!!!” which he’s scrawled in big letters on page 189, opposite a tedious digression into the natural properties of the winding moraine left along the Chicago lakefront twenty thousand years ago by the receding Wisconsin Glacier. Lincoln realizes that he must have been especially annoyed reading this geography lesson because even after he wears down an entire pencil eraser, the lingering imprint of “ZZZZZ!!!” is still clearly visible on the edge of the page, and even the watery eyes of Professor Fleace could probably spot it. Finally, Lincoln resorts to an old dodge and scribbles, “Well put!” in a heavy hand over the shadowy z’s, then erases the whole jumbled mess until he’s certain the professor, even with the aid of a sharp-eyed young grad student and a magnifying glass, could never decipher the underlying offense.
No more angry writers. John Lincoln is not by nature a vituperative or even unpleasant fellow, but his caustic side began building when he landed in Chicago, and lately it’s expanded to fill all corners of his life. And yet, he doesn’t see himself as a bitter person—frustrated, rather, that things haven’t turned out better. Confounded. During times of adversity, his father was fond of quoting what he claimed was an old Chinese proverb: This, too, shall pass. Lincoln has started to wonder: When?
Of course, the adversity that prompted his father was always national or global in scope, never personal. Lincoln may not be descended from the sixteenth president, but on both sides of the family tree, he comes from a long line of high-achieving WASPs whose gene pool hasn’t deteriorated over the generations (perhaps, Lincoln reasons, because they never got rich). His distinguished ancestors feature a few doctors and businessmen, but most practiced law, frequently moving between private work and public service, staying largely true to their liberal principles (Eleanor Roosevelt was a dear family friend). Lincoln’s father has followed the pattern, with two tours of duty in the Department of Justice under Democratic administrations. Growing up, Lincoln assumed that his future promised a similar course—at least, he so assumed to the extent that his thoughts of the future stretched beyond dreams of glory on the basketball court. But then he broke his arm the summer before his senior year of high school, delaying his playing season and diluting the interest of the basketball coaches at Dartmouth and Brown, whose attention might otherwise have overcome those pesky Bs on Lincoln’s transcript. Lincoln’s parents couldn’t quite believe that the best he could do was the U of C, not so much because they had an unrealistic view of his record, but because he was their son, and certainly their son didn’t default to the Midwest for college. Their disappointment inflated when Lincoln majored in English (not history! not government!) and then threatened briefly to pursue the subject as an academic career. But Lincoln found solace in the study of literature. He was good at it (in four years in Hyde Park, a sea of math and science geniuses, he never once met a student who could top his 780 on the verbal SATs), and in an odd way, literature offered an outlet for the competitive drive he’d previously exercised in sports. The right word, the best sentence, the most penetrating insight—this was a game Lincoln could play and play well. That summer as an intern at Malcolm House cemented the attraction, and Lincoln concluded he’d found an outlet for his curious personality mix of testosterone and aesthetics.
His parents sounded more baffled than dismayed when he announced he was taking a job as a news clerk at the Chicago Tribune. (“But where do you go with that?” his father had asked, as if Woodward and Bernstein, after taking down a corrupt president, had put away their childish things and gone on to productive and civic-minded careers.) Though he never discarded his original disdain for Chicago, Lincoln moved up quickly at the newspaper, and when his momentum seemed to stall as assistant metro editor, he made his move to book publishing, buying into Duddleston’s promise that together they could build Pistakee into the premier house west of the Hudson.
But that was three years ago, and scores of flaccid, forgettable manuscripts later, Lincoln realizes that building a publishing house entails hours of tedium with dribble like Wrigley Field: A People’s History and the constant hope that somewhere, somehow, he will find a book that makes a splash. He knows what he wants—at least, he thinks he does: get to New York, the publishing Mecca; land a job with one of the big houses, where he will edit real writers, the kind whose sentences leave you stunned and humbled; and bring out real books, the kind that get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. Lincoln used to be in occasional touch with Jeff Kessler, the boss at Malcolm House (who was just a bright, friendly new editor when Lincoln interned there), and Kessler offered boundless encouragement, but never a job. The same with Angela Morrisroe at Pottersby, William Upswitch at Burling, and a handful of other top editors at New York houses. Even now, with the economy stalled and publishing in turmoil, several of them remain generous with their time when Lincoln makes his periodic trips to Manhattan. But he reads perfectly the subtext of their compliments about his budding talent: Prove it. If you think you’re so hot out there in the flatlands, publish a book that somebody cares about, somebody besides a handful of ambulatory Midwest grannies and a few addled fans of the dipshit Cubs.
In her own way, Mary was probably saying the same thing. She told Lincoln that she was tired of just playing at marriage, playing at life (as if the failure to conceive in six months of trying meant they were amateurs). Selling houses on the North Side, she made half again what Lincoln did, and in the months before the breakup, she started the practice course for the GMAT. And where did she want to go to school? The U of C.
“Yes, the U of C,” she cried furiously, when Lincoln greeted her announcement with a scornful face. “It’s a great school, and Chicago is a great city. You live here, remember!”
Of course he remembers. In a perverse way, he feels fatally entwined with Chicago, as if he and the city are unspeaking partners in a two-legged race, contemptuous of each other yet forced to collaborate for the sake of the contest. He needs to show his wife, his parents, the publishing business—his own reeling ego—that he can carve out a success here, that he has not spent fifteen years (has it really been that long?) in vain.
Lincoln is blowing a storm of eraser bits from the pages of Professor Fleace’s manuscript when another knock sounds gently on his door. “Yes,” he caws disagreeably, since he knows it won’t be Duddleston again.
The door opens tentatively, and a little ruffed grouse tiptoes in, the editorial assistant who started work just last week.
