EIGHT

I got a very nitty-gritty view of my grandparents’ early marriage from a 1927 letter Mack wrote to Effie. After living apart for several months following the wedding—ostensibly to keep their marriage a secret (from creditors and from family)—they finally dropped the charade and found themselves in a tiny walk-up apartment with two windows, one of which was painted shut, looking out on a dreary air shaft between buildings. At the end of the hall was the single bathroom shared by all the residents of that floor.

Last night I did some necessary work here at the typewriter. Irene sits ironing while I pound the keyboard. This letter is being written at ten in the evening; when finished I shall get into bed while we read Under the Lilacs and eat our usual late evening lunch of popcorn and milk out of Japanese bowls I bought for ten cents each. . . .

The French girls still tramp up and down the hall with towels and soap and more towels and soap, but have found their usual regime sorely shattered since I became publicly married, for Irene and I work the bathroom in shifts as they used to do, and they come tapping at the door, muttering in heathenish jargon and departing in disgust. . . . I sing the “Marseillaise” or “Mademoiselle from Armentières” most of the time as I wash in the morning for their especial benefit.

This bare-bones ménage might seem a little grim, but for the newlyweds it was a heavenly improvement. One day at work, Irene, bursting with love, snuck into a stockroom to write Mack a letter that couldn’t wait:

You are part of me—the sweetest most thoughtful lover and husband a girl could ever have. What does it matter that we’re a bit poverty stricken now? Some day we’ll look back at now and laugh and be happy over it all—and never think that I shall slave and save for you and be unable to keep up with you when the time comes—Ah, no, Adorable! You are saddled with me for life! . . .

Mack appreciated their new arrangement from a more practical vantage point: “At a conservative estimate I spent more than 180 hours during the more than five months from the time I met Irene until we announced our marriage in riding back and forth from her home on the street car. More than a week of twenty-four-hour days! At that rate, I actually lost three weeks of sleep. . . . So you can imagine the beneficial change our new circumstance has made. . . .”

In October, he wrote Effie a letter for her forty-seventh birthday, “still trying to sell Mother on the idea that my marriage was all for the good, and that she was still very important in my life,” he noted in his annotations.

His plea began “Since Irene and I were married, I’ve begun to realize how many things you taught me which have made my married life happier by far than it ever could otherwise have been. I mean your efforts—so many times grievously unrewarded!—to instill a bit of patience, foresight and steadiness in the breast of a kicking mule.

“Just because I cannot write long letters often, is no reason for you to believe that I no longer love you as I did. . . . I think of you always.”

The reason he had so little time was that, when he wasn’t working, he was pounding away on the typewriter on a seemingly endless series of stories, all of which got him nowhere. Mack noted that, between 1923 and 1926, he’d submitted hundreds of manuscripts for publication with next to nothing to show for it. “Most of these were misguided, inept and unsuccessful for I had little to offer as yet, except a scorching ambition.”

It was the inevitable chain of disappointment that tests any writer’s will. In one letter he lamented: “The damndest luck! I submitted a story to the DeMolay Councillor and yesterday got the manuscript back with a letter saying they had planned to buy it but that the Councillor was going to be suspended this month. Isn’t that hell?”

Still, both he and Irene had slightly improved their employment situations. Mack had quit American Flyer to work in the claims department of Mandel Bros. department store, writing letters to people whose merchandise had been lost or broken in shipping. He’d gotten a raise to $30 a week with the additional benefit that Mandel’s was in the Loop, just across the street from Irene’s new place of employment—she’d traded her hated chore of window-shade painting for a job advising customers in the art framing department of Carson’s department store on State Street.

They luxuriated in the ability to meet for lunch during the workday, and on weekends socialized with fellow Graeme Players or Dick Little’s crowd. Mostly they enjoyed each other’s company. One weekend they went to Lincoln Park Zoo and Mack howled at the wolves until they started howling back and the keepers chased them off.

But Mack suffered in his work: “I was finding affirmation of a hideous truth. Most people didn’t like the jobs which life compelled them to hold. . . . Far cry from the small town newspaper effort of an earlier epoch. Mother and I worked day and night and . . . truly loved every minute of it.”

Trying to spin their situation positively, Mack wrote home, “We are well and fine and have no children or prospects! We are awaiting all breaks of luck. . . .”

And soon a lucky break would come, in the form of an unassuming “While you were out” message left on Mack’s desk in the claims department at Mandel Bros., waiting for him when he returned from lunch one day.

I came across that note, sitting by itself, in one of the Library of Congress files. Written in pen, in a feminine cursive hand, it said, Kantor / Call Mr. Farquhar / R 540 Great Northern Hotel.

I recognized the note immediately, because Mack had mentioned it in his autobiography sequel:

“The key landed in the dungeon cell with a clang, sooner than had seemed possible. On my desk appeared a note concerning the publisher of the Cedar Rapids Republican.”

The notepaper was in remarkable condition, and the ink appeared as dark and unsmudged as the day it was written.

I was impressed that this humble slip of paper had survived the chaos of all the life that followed it, and ended up here in the Madison building. It had been just one year shy of ninety years since some secretary or switchboard operator had neatly inscribed that cryptic, but oh so portentous message.

I understood why he had kept it. I had such messages in my life, deceptively mundane but life-changing messages that had reared up on this or that desk or sideboard, radiating alarm or promise, instantaneously altering the look of whatever place it lay—the very light surrounding it—with a rush of blood to the brain. Some of the portents were not good ones: for instance, the torn scrap of notebook paper left on my desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer by a colleague in the middle of the day, greeting me as I returned from an interview, which said, “Call your brother.” It wasn’t that I didn’t frequently talk to my brother on the phone, I did, but in this pre-cell-phone era he had never, not once, called me at work.

The expression “My heart is in my throat” stops being a cliché in moments like that. As I dialed, I knew I didn’t want to know. I found out anyway: My father, a heavy smoker for forty years, had coughed up a significant amount of blood. Within fifteen months, he was gone, and in my mind, it always began with that slip of a note lurking malignantly on my desk.

But mostly I thought of the good messages, and one especially, exactly parallel to what Mack found waiting for him at Mandel’s that day ninety years ago, a note that said, “Call Joe Workman, Fort Myers News-Press,” which led me to that claustrophobic suburban bureau with the hard-drinking bureau chief and the nasty society lady, which led to other such messages, and other jobs, and a career in newspapers that stretched through thirty-three years to one final, unexpected note waiting on my desk, announcing that I was eligible for, and encouraged to take, a buyout from The Washington Post.

—

James S. Farquhar published a medium-size city paper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—1926 population, 55,000—130 miles from Webster City. The father of Dick Whiteman, the one Webster City friend Mack would remain close to his entire life, was a prominent businessman with many contacts—including Farquhar. The elder Whiteman had put in a good word for Mack with the publisher, who looked up some of Mack’s work for The Webster City Daily News and the Tribune, and now he was sitting across the dinner table from him at a Chicago hotel.

Farquhar talked about the job. He liked what he had seen of Mack’s work, as the stories he’d done on old pioneers and ancient Civil War vets and quaint local customs were exactly the kind of thing the publisher was looking for. It all seemed to Mack too good to be real. And then Farquhar asked him how much money he would need. He heard himself, as from a great distance, say, “Could you manage $50 a week?” The figure—more than what Mack and Irene now made jointly—seemed preposterous, and when Farquhar countered with $40, Mack was almost relieved. It was a 33 percent increase in pay for Mack, and it would go as far in Cedar Rapids as the full $50 would have taken him in Chicago.

In Cedar Rapids, he and Irene could live on his salary alone. Later that night when he gave Irene the news, the two of them held hands and danced in circles in their crummy little apartment, imagining a much richer life in Cedar Rapids.

That Sunday, they continued their celebration with a dinner at Irene’s folks’ house. Mack lost himself in the fragrant casserole dish filled with fresh lima beans baked overnight with onion, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, and a dash of mustard, and didn’t even notice when Irene was summoned from the table. He did notice when she didn’t come back. He found her out on the porch, staring into the night, gripping a folded sheet of paper until it warped and twisted in her hands. When he looked at her questioningly, she extended it to him.

Mack opened the folded sheet to the letterhead of an advertising art agency. This was the company Irene had applied to before she and Mack had met, the job she coveted but thought she had no chance of getting. The letter explained that the agency had no openings when she’d applied, but they had noted the quality of her portfolio and filed it. Now they wanted to offer her a position as a staff artist.

Mack wrote that he felt like tentacles had wrapped around his chest, squeezing so he could barely breathe. Forcing out the words, he said he guessed maybe he could stand the claims department a little longer, until he could start selling his short stories, anyway, and that with the salary Irene could get as an advertising artist, plus what he made pursuing broken lamps and scratched furniture, they could get a decent apartment. . . .

Irene stopped him. “I will write to them and tell them I can’t possibly consider it,” she said.

The tentacles released their grip.

“You won’t be angry, jealous, resentful?” he asked.

Of course not, she said. “I’ll just take pride in the fact that these people did want me after all.”

“Those years of struggle to attend classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute had borne only this small and suddenly sweetly bitter fruit,” Mack wrote. “That night I would awaken to find her crying.”

—

Any regrets about the impact on Irene of their move to Cedar Rapids quickly dissipated in Mack’s mind. At twenty-three, he had obtained his dream.

“I was subsisting by the typewriter itself—by activity of fingers, memory, and whatever perceptivity I had acquired . . . and, above all, whatever skills one might burnish in the management of words. . . . Here was a typewriter on its scant desk in the newsroom, and my name and title on a card fastened against glass up above . . . Special Assignment Reporter.”

I knew just how he felt. My first professional reporting job, exactly a half century later, was for a paper of precisely the same relative size and stature (allowing for a near doubling of the U.S. population) as The Cedar Rapids Republican. In those days, even a midsize paper loomed large in its own domain. I’ll never forget the swell of power, the frisson that came with picking up the phone and appending the name of your newspaper to your own. You sensed the people on the other end of the line growing instantly alert—whether through alarm, curiosity, or delight. Being a reporter throughout most of the twentieth century had sex appeal, dash, significance. People made movies about reporters, wrote books about them—we were players.

It’s become a more complicated calculus in recent years—given the decline of newspapers and the rise of chaotic and ubiquitous communication on the Web, where amateur bloggers, “citizen journalists,” and Twitter feeds have diluted and confused the cachet of being a working reporter. Reading Mack’s description made me realize that my career in newspapers—beginning in 1976 and stretching into the first decade of the twenty-first century—had been as similar to his experience at The Cedar Rapids Republican as it was alien to that of a twenty-something hired by The Washington Post today as a “mobile innovations optimizer” or “viral meme checker,” or whatever incomprehensible job title they come up with to mask the stark fact that professional news organizations are groping blindly toward a problematic future.

And though, in the 1970s, I would not have seen Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a destination for someone with literary or media ambitions, in the 1920s, the American Midwest emerged as a cultural hot spot. Writers and newspapermen like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis all drew heavily on their Midwestern backgrounds for inspiration. All those fertile plains and that pioneer can-do spirit fed a uniquely American aesthetic and reflected the dynamism of a continental power rising to world preeminence. This somehow translated into surging creativity in the letters and arts.

So it was somewhat more than a freakish coincidence that, when Mack and Irene rented a room in a former mansion, the two large south-facing windows overlooked a rooftop apartment in the renovated barn of a funeral home that was the home and studio of Grant Wood—not yet, but soon to become, one of the most iconic American artists of the twentieth century. Wood would live in that apartment—in which he had famously adapted a glass coffin lid for use as a front door—for many years. But when Mack and Irene became over-the-back-fence neighbors in 1926, Wood was still early in residence there, and in his career. Soon he would become a pillar of the growing “regionalist” movement in art, or as he put it, “an American way of looking at things, and a utilization of the materials of our own American scene.”

Whether Mack articulated it or not, his profound affection for his Webster City upbringing and the broad-shouldered grime of Chicago, his reverence for the rugged pioneers of the generations preceding him and pride in the growth of American power—and even the fact that his education had been rustic, at best, innocent of the European focus of an elite university—made Wood, thirteen years his senior, a natural role model and inspiration.

“His standards were exacting, determined,” Mack wrote of him. “Requisitely he painted with sublimity in the face of popular opinion, popular belief and acceptance. . . . I had been of the same inclination from the start of my writing days at sixteen, but sometimes feared that I was mistaken in this course.”

His association with Wood confirmed for him that, as he put it, “my way was right and another man’s way—the wrong way.”

That certainty is astounding considering that, when Mack arrived in Cedar Rapids in 1926, he’d yet to publish anything of significance, beyond a short story and a few poems. Yet here he was, assuming common ground with Grant Wood! The fact that Wood had just established a community theater, much like the Graeme Players, the previous year—even staging the group’s first production in his loft studio—made his mind-meld with the young couple next door complete.

They quickly became close friends.

I had no idea. None. Like everyone else, I’d seen American Gothic—the gaunt, elderly rubes rigidly facing the viewer, propped up by a pitchfork—in various incarnations and representations, about ten million times. As an editor, like a million editors before me, I’d commissioned parodies of Wood’s most famous painting at least twice—and probably more, I am not proud to admit.

And yet I remember not a single mention, from my grandfather, grandmother, mother, or anyone else about this close association with the man on every list of America’s greatest painters.

Like other intriguing pieces of my grandfather’s life, the full picture didn’t emerge in a single passage in a book, Google hit, or yellowing piece of typing paper. It was, rather, like an archaeological dig, the shovel chunking on a tusk, or thighbone, followed by the careful scraping away of the surrounding sediment to reveal other fragments in particular relationship, each changing the initial idea of the find until an overall pattern emerged. And the pattern of his friendship with Grant Wood would alter surprisingly as I dug deeper.

When I first searched for joint mentions of my grandfather and the painter, I came up with something that indicated quite other than reverence in Mack’s attitude toward Wood. In R. Tripp Evans’s 2010 biography, Grant Wood: A Life, a book that critics said “blew the cover off Grant Wood’s homosexuality,” my grandfather was granted a surprising role in the artist’s evolution.

Evans cited a gossip item that Mack had published about Wood. Speaking of him as a “confirmed bachelor,” the gossip piece continued: “Pink of face and plump of figure, he was most nearly in character one night when he appeared at a costume party dressed as an angel—wings, pink flannel nightie, pink toes, and even a halo, supported by a stick thrusting up his back.”

As one reviewer of the book pointed out: “Not only did Kantor link Wood’s costume to common stereotypes of the ‘fairy,’ but after comparing Wood to Snow White, who lay imprisoned in a glass coffin awaiting her prince’s kiss, Kantor wrote: ‘The front door of his apartment is made of glass, but it’s a coffin lid. OOOOOOoooooh!’ Kantor then exhorted the ‘boys’ among his readers to ‘look [Wood] over.’ The meaning of all this is quite evident, unless one doesn’t want to see.”

Not only did Evans suggest that Mack, Wood’s supposed friend, was outing him as a homosexual against his will, but that this had the effect of forcing Wood to abandon his frequent use of a beret in favor of the decidedly unfeminine overalls he took to wearing to bolster a “farmer-painter” pose, and—more significantly—to turn away from his earlier painting style of impressionism, fearing it might appear effeminate, in favor of the stern Gothic realism that led directly to American Gothic, which, when it was exhibited in 1930, made him an instant international celebrity.

I had to laugh at my grandfather’s apparent Forrest Gump–like ability to pop up in the background of these historical tableaus. First “bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age,” and now shaming Grant Wood into American Gothic?

I found nothing to indicate that Mack had ever been accused of outing Wood during his lifetime—which by any calculus would have been a dishonorable move, even if it did push Wood to create his masterwork (which I doubt). Instead, I found this passage Mack wrote about Wood in the 1970s:

“People . . . whispered he was a homosexual. He was nothing of the kind. He was simply asexual—withdrawn by inclination, habit and choice. . . .”

As I dug deeper into ever-higher-numbered boxes at the Library of Congress, more pieces of the puzzle emerged. It certainly became clear that Grant Wood bore Mack no ill will. On the contrary, through the years he sent hand-lettered Christmas cards with breathtaking original lithographs he’d made of rural scenes accompanied by affectionate personal notes. (I found myself greedily wishing that my grandfather had passed these particular documents along to me, rather than to the Library.) In 1935, after one of my grandfather’s novels—about foxhunting with hounds in Missouri—was reviewed harshly in The New York Times, Wood wrote a long, passionate letter of defense to the book section editor.

Because the novel afforded me a great deal of delight and because a parallel case might be found in the criticism of painting, I could not resist writing with regard to it. Mr. Kantor has dared an extremely difficult form of art and in addition has chosen a phase of American life, which, while perfectly authentic, is almost unknown and thus extremely complicating the problem of a novelist. Yet he has emerged with a novel which is a work of art.

But I also found a bitterly angry 1974 letter from Wood’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, the very woman who posed for the indelible character in American Gothic (and, judging from that face in the painting, not the individual you want pissed at you). The letter, ironically, was not referring to the 1920s gossip item, but to what Mack thought of as his defense of Wood as being asexual, not homosexual—which had just been published in his memoir.

“I am very hurt and bewildered at what you have done to a fine man’s memory,” she wrote. “Grant considered you a friend and confided in you but you certainly haven’t turned out to be such. Even his very worst enemies did not suggest that he was neuter.”

She went on at length, suggesting that Mack “jumped to conclusions” because her brother had “high morals” and refused to consort with “immoral women” as well as possessing a “great fear of syphilis.” That he was a “perfectly normal, decent man.

“The night you claim you sat up all night drinking, no doubt you did plenty of talking too. But Grant was too much of a gentleman to betray your confiding in him, let alone bray it to the world. . . .”

In conclusion she wrote, “It is a shame he ever met such a cheap person as you . . . his pretend friend.”

Evans’s biography closed the case for many by insisting that Wood was in fact obviously and conspicuously gay. But New York Times art critic Deborah Solomon was not convinced:

A man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible.

Knowing what I now know, it is clear that friend was my grandfather. And maybe he was right.

But that was not the most intriguing thing I discovered about their relationship. In early January 1941, Wood’s friend and PR person wrote Mack to say,

You are about to lose a dear friend. Grant Wood has been ill for several months with what we first thought was a gall bladder ailment. Recently an operation was performed. The doctors found cancer of the liver. Of course, there is no hope. . . .

I know that Grant would like a letter from you. Just a casual note, mentioning perhaps that you read of his operation in the paper and hope that he is feeling better. He speaks of you frequently: wonders how your work is coming and how you and your family are. I’m sorry to write you this stunning news. But I knew you would want to know.

Mack responded—how could he not?—though no copy of the letter is in the file. But two weeks later, on January 23, Grant wrote what must have been one of the last letters of his life.

Your note was waiting for me when I got back to Iowa City. . . . I intended to get in touch with you (when we were both in New York) but I came down with a bad case of the flu. . . . I’m back home taking it easy for a while. Florida sounds fine and I’d love to see you and Irene. But I’m afraid that’s out of the question just now. . . .

Along with the letter he sent another stunning woodblock: three horses standing in the snow behind a barbed-wire fence, staring—eyelessly—at the viewer beneath a threatening sky. The fact that the horses number three could not be a coincidence. The image is stunningly apocalyptic. The creatures are so black only the outline of their bulk is visible, except for the wisps of manes and tails blowing in a cold wind—a stunning, frightening void. Even so, there is something about their pose, the slant of neck and head perhaps, that suggests expectancy, as if they are waiting for something, possibly warmth, or comfort.

Though the letter is dated January, the piece is titled February.

Eighteen days later, on February 13, Mack got a telegram: “Grant Wood died peacefully Thursday night.”

—

It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened to Mack if, like me, his first newspaper job had led to a slightly better job or a slightly bigger newspaper, which led to a mediocre larger city newspaper, which led to an excellent big-city newspaper, which led to one of the great newspapers in the world.

But it didn’t.

In early 1927, not yet a year after Mack took the job, the Republican was bought out, and the entire staff canned.

“After publishing for 56 years, it was sold overnight to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, our hated rival,” he explained in his Library of Congress annotations. “Ninety-odd men were out of work with less than two hours official notice, without one cent of severance pay. Farquhar announced his intention of starting a paper in California on his own. . . . He said that of all the people on the Repub, he wanted to keep me with him.”

But Farquhar’s prospects were far from certain. He hadn’t owned the Republican and didn’t profit from its sale. The new paper was still pure speculation. He said he couldn’t afford to pay Mack and Irene’s travel expenses to the Pacific, in any case, and they simply didn’t have the money to go on their own. Mack had the idea that he would work some odd jobs, sell some stories if he were lucky, and save up a small grubstake, permitting him and Irene to hitch their way west. He even got as far as soliciting recommendation letters from various worthies to ward off local authorities who might otherwise arrest the couple as vagrants.

He would never get around to using those letters, but he kept them, and thirty years later sent them along to the Library of Congress, where, eventually, I would get a kick out of reading them.

From the editor of College Humor magazine: “Very quick to follow our suggested ideas. . . . Enjoyed popularity in Chicago for quite some time.”

From the Iowa Railroad commissioner, who apparently wanted authorities to know they had the right vagrant: “Height 6’1”, eyes grey-green, weight 130–135 pounds; left leg badly scarred.”

From his Cedar Rapids publisher, J. S. Farquhar: “I commend the splendid genius of MacKinlay Kantor. . . . The time will come when his name will be known all over America.”

But the plucky plans of this tall, painfully skinny young man to migrate masked the depression he must have been feeling. After a promise of liberation from a life of jobs he couldn’t stand, a brief sampling of the excitement and fulfillment of daily publication—excitement and fulfillment that paid a living wage—it was a cruel blow to have it all collapse in the time it took for his boss to say, “Mack, come in and close the door. There’s something I have to tell you.”

For the time being, he and Irene went to ground, back to the family home on tree-lined Willson Avenue in Webster City, where he had grown up. If Mack didn’t hear the whispers directly—about how the big-shot town poet who’d won that contest and read his work over the radio had been forced back to town with his tail between his legs—he heard them distinctly in his inflamed, humiliated imagination. Decades later he would still resent it.

Effie was home to greet them, but she’d been staying thirty miles up the road in the slightly larger town of Boone, where she had been invited to start up a small community magazine charmingly named Community. There would be no salary, but the pressman would provide paper, printing, postage, and supplies for a split of any revenue. Effie would write every word, sell the advertising—even write the advertisements herself. The first issue had a distribution of six thousand—just about half the town’s entire population. After they split the proceeds and paid incidental expenses, there might just be a little left over to pay the taxes on the Willson Avenue home and buy bread and winter coal for her sickly and unemployed parents. But Effie, who had refused to buckle under the doctor’s dire prognosis the previous year, seemed as energetic as a healthy woman half her age.

“In this moment she was ardent in adventure,” Mack wrote. “No one ever sparkled more flashingly than she in such condition. The valvular heart trouble which had plagued her . . . ? A bagatelle!—she never thought of it. She aspired to be the recording angel of her adopted Boone.”

There are several issues of the all-Effie Boone monthly Community magazine in those Library of Congress boxes. The issues are fairly thick, glossy, professional-looking. In a place of honor in each is an “editorial” about the month of publication, Effie’s confident, straightforward signature at the bottom. Her prose has something, I thought as I read it. It is clear-eyed, faintly poetic:

“The yellow leaf, the fading flower, the gentle rain falling on the carpet of dead leaves . . . for a short time, in October, everything is warmly, vividly alive . . . then, a few frosts. . . .”

Reading those “month” essays provoked a faint memory. Could it be? I briefly rooted around online, and there it was: a 1986 special issue of The Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, containing a year’s worth of calendar pages, each month’s page paired with an essay about that month. Sure enough, I had written one of those essays, about the almost unbearable South Florida August:

“The heat is like an injury you keep reinjuring. You begin to worry that all that pain has got to add up to something bad. It bakes your paint job and cracks your vinyl dash. It melts the asphalt and lingers spitefully at night. . . .”

More hard-boiled than poetic, I guess. But still.

I had not set out to recapitulate the life and career of Effie Kantor. At the start, I didn’t even know she had had a career. Now, once more, I’d stumbled onto this odd parallel.

—

Back in 1927, as Effie commuted from Webster City to Boone and back, Mack began to prepare for his trip out west by doing odd jobs, but making so little at them that they seemed pointless. Irene began to urge him to use his time instead to write the novel they’d been talking about since Chicago.

There had been two moments during their courtship and early marriage when, had it not been for Irene, Mack might have been sucked into the same fog of Chicago corruption and cronyism in which his father had dwelled. While at Mandel’s in the claims department, he found a way to pick up an extra $20 whenever the city went to the polls by being a poll watcher for one of the political organizations. On one such assignment, Mack watched as his precinct captain stole the opposition’s voter list, then covered for him when cops came asking about it. As a reward, the precinct captain offered to make Mack a precinct captain himself, on the condition that he and Irene were willing to move to another precinct.

All Mack would have to do, the boss said, was keep in touch with the voters in that precinct they knew they could count on and make sure that on election day they all got to the polling place and voted the right way. For that, he would get $200 a month—enough so that he could do nothing but write when he wasn’t doing his political work. Mack was elated until Irene nixed the idea. In Chicago in 1926, it wasn’t unheard of for a precinct captain to be summarily dismissed via tommy gun. It was in the course of the coming election, after all, that those sixty-two bombs blew near polling places, killing two politicians and an unknown number of more or less innocent bystanders.

Another sweet opportunity presented itself when an acquaintance from the Line O’ Type gang showed him a stash of bootleg wine and suggested he could act as neighborhood distributor, making a cut of every sale. Again, Irene exercised her veto: Wasn’t their neighborhood already the territory of a big-time gangster, who might not look kindly on amateurs elbowing into the picture?

She was unconvinced by Mack’s contention that the wine sales would be too small-time to upset anyone.

“You won’t let me do anything!” Mack exploded in frustration.

“Oh, write a book about it,” Irene said.

Now that he had time on his hands and a desperate need to jump-start his writing career, she repeated her exhortation. This time Mack took her seriously.

As he began to think about a novel involving Chicago gangsters, he remembered a time in February 1926, just before he met Irene, when he found himself in a poker game with waiters, bartenders, and several shady characters on the edge of organized crime. By dinner, his pockets were stuffed with large bills. He knew he wouldn’t be allowed to simply walk away from the ongoing game so far ahead. So he returned after dinner. Sure enough, he lost all his winnings, and then some, going into debt by hundreds of dollars he didn’t possess. Under terrible pressure, he managed to walk away from the table by handing over a gold cigarette case his father had given him “with ornate ceremony in the presence of business associates.” Aside from its melt value, that case meant nothing to Mack, and he was not unhappy to part with it, but there was still a large debt to pay, and he was unemployed. The gangster types made their impatience, and the consequences of delay, pretty clear. Mack wrote to the only person he believed might help him out, a Webster City banker whose bank was in bad shape, but nonetheless sent $50. His creditors grabbed that, too, but still weren’t satisfied. Mack took to carrying around a .38 revolver until the worst of his creditors had been chased out of town by cops or competing gangs.

As he sat down to write, that near-miss experience was money in the bank.

His novel would be about a young reporter, leaving his job in a small town very much like Webster City, hoping to break into newspapers in Chicago. Not only does he fail to find a job on any of the papers, he fails to find any job at all—until a gangster, hiding out from hit men in the would-be reporter’s dingy apartment house, offers to pay the young man to run errands so he can stay safely off the streets. As part of the reward for his service, the mobster pulls strings to get him a patronage job in city government. In other words, Mack was imagining what might have happened if Irene hadn’t stopped his slide into the ethical, legal morass of Chicago’s corruption.

Mack didn’t waste his precious time as I did in 1980 on my Florida back porch. He knew he was onto something. He pounded the typewriter furiously in his two-fingered hunt-and-peck style, and after a couple of days had amassed twelve thousand words, enough to build a small stack of paper in the basket to the side of the table he’d set up as a writing desk.

“The manuscript!” he wrote. “I was dying to hold it in my hands—dying to read aloud, to feel that renewal of strength which powers a writer, and engages the machinery of his intellect and emotions, of his whole body, in each heartbeat as he reads.”

Effie had come down from Boone for the weekend, and Virginia and her new husband, Jim Sours, a small-town minister, were there, too, providing a ready audience. So, as Mack’s heart pulsed, he read, and when he was done his audience cooed adoringly, insisting he couldn’t possibly give up working on so promising a project. Effie said, “I’ve been making notes as I sat here. I couldn’t help beginning while you were still reading, because it was so much in my mind. Children, I have been reworking my own budget. I have found a way whereby I can send you four dollars each week.”

Virginia and Jim offered to contribute the $5 and $10 tips Jim received each time he presided over a wedding.

I thought of all those times I’d been summoned to stand around on the hard black slate floor of my grandparents’ living room while Mack chanted his latest work aloud, my eyes rolling back in my head from boredom. Clearly, I owed my brief discomfort at Mack’s command performance to that seminal moment in 1927 when his family rallied around to support and validate him.

How I wish that I had actually listened.

Even taken together, the financial tokens from his family were barely enough money to sustain two souls. Considering his alternatives—paying his own way out to California and an iffy newspaper startup, or to Kansas where some old man wanted to pay Mack a pittance to ghostwrite his memoir (no matter how hard up he got, he’d never be a ghostwriter, he vowed)—Mack’s choice was clear, and universally endorsed by this enthusiastic family focus group.

He accepted the money and went back to work, hunting and pecking on the typewriter so furiously his index fingers became bruised, then broken, splitting along the nail, oozing blood and pus into bandages for the duration as he typed.

When he finished the book—which he called Diversey, after the street where the semifictional boardinghouse resided—he hitched a ride in the caboose of a stock train carrying hogs to Chicago and, still smelling slightly of livestock, presented the four-hundred-page manuscript to his sometime editor at College Humor who had been buying scraps of verse from Mack for a few dollars apiece. Somehow Mack got the not very realistic idea that the magazine could run his novel as a serial. The editor was not quite as supportive as Mack’s immediate family. He was fond of Mack, but not above having a little fun at his expense. He balanced the paper-stuffed envelope on his palm, then tossed it in the air and caught it. “It seems about the right weight!” he cried. “But I’m still not sure you can write a novel.”

When the editor stopped laughing, he promised to read the manuscript and let Mack know his decision, but Mack already knew. So it wasn’t a surprise, but still a crushing blow, when the envelope returned to Webster City and the book remained unpurchased. Rattled now, Mack sent the pages off to an agent in New York whom he’d had some dealings with, all ultimately unsuccessful, in the past.

Today, a writer seeking publication of a semiautobiographical first novel would have about the same chance of success as someone buying a lottery ticket at a convenience store. I doubt the odds were much better in 1927.

Weeks passed. He heard nothing back. To make matters worse, Mack was once again dealing with a painful flare-up of his osteomyelitis.

As I pieced all the above together from various sources, I realized that this had been the background for a revealing letter from Effie dated August of 1927.

My dearest son,

Your little note this morning makes me sorry that you were blue so I am writing just a line of type or two to tell you to cheer up. You know that we cannot put hard honest work into things without a return sometime. It may be slow in arriving, but it WILL arrive, so do not forget it. It is harder to wait, than just to work hard. . . . Just keep up a brave heart and your ship will come sailing in. It may be only a little boat at first—those things have a way of never giving warning, but again, it may be a big sailing vessel or even an ocean liner.

The hardest part of life is waiting . . . don’t I know? . . . waiting for letters that never come, for money that never comes. . . . But women have most of that sort of thing to do. Men, even when they wait long, never have the waiting part as hard as women. . . . Darling boy cheer up. . . . When once you can get well again, things will look brighter to you. . . . I seem always to see you lying in bed, pale and wan, but trying to smile—the finest and bravest boy I ever knew. . . . That from a mother who knows you well and who cannot think of the years when we became so very well acquainted without a few tears of my own unworthiness and complete failure to be the exalted being you should have for a mother. . . . But I believe in you as I believe in a supreme being, and trust you also, as I do Him. . . .

At the time Effie wrote this, Irene, who is never mentioned in the letter, was three months pregnant.