NINE

On the night of their engagement, Mack told Irene flatly that he didn’t want babies, and Irene agreed—though she later told him she hadn’t really meant it and figured she’d eventually change his mind. Together they snickered at the annoying antics of other people’s children. Commenting on Virginia’s baby son, Mack wrote, “I loathed small children.”

They’d been using some primitive form of birth control involving little brown cones purchased at the pharmacy for insertion. Irene realized she was late for her period as Mack was working on Diversey. Before he had finished, she was sure.

Though Effie had made no mention of it, the prospect of soon being responsible not only for Irene but also a child, with no job and only the most unlikely hopes of selling a novel, obviously contributed to the mood addressed in her letter.

Her optimism about Mack’s ship (or at least “little boat”) coming in, proved prescient. Within days, a letter arrived from a big-name magazine, McClure’s, which was trying to relaunch itself and was soliciting short stories from a select group of writers. Mack had already sold some verse to McClure’s, but his “repeated failures” to sell short stories had knocked the confidence out of him: “I thought the Register contest . . . had been a fluke, and believed I was never cut out for a short story writer. I seemed to have no proper plots, and didn’t know how to set about getting them. Still, it was flattering to think that an editor who had actually bought verse from me was now soliciting my stories, and something had to be done about it.”

He rummaged around desperately for a story, consciously trying to tap into the creative engine that had pumped out Diversey. One thing Mack had always been fascinated by was the Civil War. As a child he remembered a door-to-door book salesman leaving a sample of a book with lithographs depicting battle scenes that had mesmerized him. He always had a keen interest in and curiosity about the elderly veterans of that war who marched down Webster City’s main street on Decoration Day. As he thought about the veterans he had known, he remembered an itinerant handyman he’d interviewed for the Cedar Falls paper. The man claimed to be a Civil War vet himself, and told so many presumptively tall tales about his adventures in the war and out West that he’d become a joke among the locals, who referred to him as the Biggest Liar in Cedar Falls. Mack wrote a four-page story about “a spotted relic in his faded coat and soiled hat” who was mocked by all until the Wild West Show rolled into town and, in front of all his detractors, his tales were certified by the star of the show, Buffalo Bill Cody.

Mack sent off “The Biggest Liar in Eagle Falls” (he changed the name of the town to protect the guilty) to McClure’s and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“Irene was down at Mrs. Atkinson’s with a lot of the other girls in the town, arranging a style show for Old Settlers Day at the county fair [when] the postman brought a white envelope from McClure’s magazine. I tore open the envelope and then staggered to the phone and called Irene. . . . We talked it over and we finally concluded that we might receive twenty to twenty-five dollars for the story. The check was for one hundred dollars [the equivalent of $1,400 in 2015]. I began to think that maybe there was something to this writing business, after all. We went to the movies that night and saw Clara Bow, and stopped at Pete Pappas’s place for ice cream afterward, and generally had a hell of a time.”

Now they felt they had enough money to rent a tiny apartment of their own, and they lived there happily, if nervously, as Irene grew larger with the fetus they took to calling Calliope, a self-consciously literary reference to the mythical muse for epic poetry and consort to the gods. Irene cooked, and Mack typed, writing forty short stories in a matter of months. He had hoped and believed that his sale to McClure’s had broken things open, but that wasn’t the case. Of the forty stories, only one sold, and for a fraction of the amount he got for “Biggest Liar.”

On a cold morning in December, Mack’s landlord summoned him to the phone. Long distance. Mack’s heart quickened at the thought that it might be news about his novel, but the unforgettable bass on the other end of the phone popped that dream like a bubble.

“Oh, hello, Dad,” Mack said.

Mack had not known where John Kantor had gotten to after the stock scandal in Chicago a decade earlier. But Effie had stayed in touch with some of her ex- in-laws, and possibly John himself.

As I now understood, this was the ultimate mystery about my great-grandmother, this smart, strong, talented, straightforward, self-made woman, ahead of her time in so many ways; in fact, a feminist forerunner, seizing the initiative in the nearly all-male world of publishing. And yet . . . Well, let Mack say it: “I thought of John Kantor, upholstered with fakery. Ponderous, pompous, deep-spoken, Sephardic— She had always been fascinated by him, and had gone back to him cheerfully time and again after he’d deserted her. She left him only because of an obligation to her children: she could not keep coming home, and finding furniture out in the street and her husband gone. Gone where?—with warrants for his arrest snapping behind him. Still she loved him with passion to the day of her death.”

Was she so blinded by that passion she didn’t see what a fraud he was? Did her compassion not extend to all those cheated by his schemes? Did she simply ignore the harm his manipulations had done her beloved children?

“Probably peddling some phony stock,” Mack started to say about his father’s new “legitimate” enterprise, but the pain on his mother’s face made him swallow the words. Grudgingly, he had complied, sending off a copy of the magazine, and now the deep voice on the phone was saying, “My son, I am offering you a job.”

Not only a job, but a writing job. Somehow John Kantor had managed to leave the headline-making scandal of the Consumers Packing Company—where he’d presided over the sale of phony stock as “chief fiscal agent”—behind him to turn up working for something called the Gold-Copper Trove in Montreal. His new title? “Chief fiscal agent.”

As a principal in the mining company, he said, he wanted to “instill a certain amount of humanity and appeal in publicity.”

Having read the McClure’s story, and other of Mack’s articles he said he’d obtained “never mind how,” John said he had been persuaded that Mack could accomplish that goal.

Mack told his father he was married now, and that his wife was seven months pregnant, and a move to Montreal would be too difficult and expensive.

“I’m prepared to meet all necessary expenses,” his father said—including paying for an obstetrician and the hospital delivery.

Mack still distrusted the man, but held on to a faint hope that he would finally come through for him. Given his and Irene’s (and Calliope’s) circumstances, the offer was too generous to turn down—even if it might be too good to be true.

As a hedge against the latter possibility, he told his father that they could come only if they had not only travel expenses there, but an open ticket back home, in case things didn’t work out.

Mack claimed to remember his father’s response verbatim. That’s hard to believe, but I do think he probably caught the essence of John Kantor’s unique cadence: “Very well, my son. If that is requisite to your peace of mind, all I can say is, ‘It shall be done.’ I shall send you the necessary funds immediately. Give my love to your beautiful mother. . . .”

The necessary funds—including the open return ticket—arrived in short order, much to Mack’s astonishment.

In Montreal, the next surprise arrived in the form of John Kantor’s wife—what number wife, Mack wasn’t sure. Either way, he hadn’t known his father had not only a new wife, but a daughter, Thelma. Thelma was a comely girl on the cusp of adulthood and about to be engaged—old enough, clearly, to have been an adolescent when Mack had visited his father in Chicago in 1918—and yet, he had never known of her existence.

Mack and Irene were put up in the Mount Royal Hotel, one of the most luxurious in the city, and the address for John Kantor’s business office. They had barely unpacked when the room phone rang. It was a woman identifying herself as John Kantor’s secretary, saying she needed Mack to bring her the return ticket so that she could enter all the information needed for the expense report. Mack was having none of it. He carefully copied every number that appeared anywhere on the ticket and took that piece of paper to the secretary. The ticket he taped to the back wall of the room’s closet, out of sight, and reach, of anyone who wasn’t over six feet tall and standing on a stool.

He never knew for sure if what he suspected was true, that his father had intended to confiscate the return ticket so that Mack and Irene would have no escape. But his suspicion that not everything was on the level was soon borne out in another way. His father kept postponing appointments to discuss Mack’s new publicity writing job; kept telling him to be patient, that these things took time to arrange. As the excuses piled up, it became clear to Mack that no writing job actually existed. He was ready to untape the return ticket from the closet wall and flee.

On one promise at least, John Kantor had made good: He’d found them an obstetrician, who confirmed that all fees had been paid in advance. Both Mack and Irene came to like the doctor, and trust him, so when he insisted that they could not safely travel back home until six weeks after delivery—a common belief of that time—they listened.

They were stuck, for at least a couple more months. When Irene complained she was going stir-crazy in the small hotel room, John arranged for them to move to a one-bedroom apartment. He even paid for yet another surgery to address the seeping wound on Mack’s thigh (it failed to improve the situation). But still without the promised job, Mack was dependent on the emasculating $25-a-week allowance. What reason his father might have had to lure them with yet another false promise, Mack could not guess.

In any case, now that he had Mack and Irene there, John didn’t see them much—always too busy with important meetings—except when he was parading them around town to social occasions, where everyone seemed to adore Mack’s father, almost bowing down before him. Sometimes, after yet another big fancy meal, one of the guests would sing a song or play the piano. Then almost inevitably, someone would beg John to recite a poem or a story, as he had done at some previous gathering. “Oh please, Mr. Kantor, you tell it so beautifully,” they would say. John had taken to responding to these requests with a preamble, noting that now that his son had achieved some notice as a writer of stories, people would ask him if he, too, wrote stories. “My answer is invariably the same,” John would intone. “I do not write stories, I live them.”

And then he would melodramatically recite some alleged experience of his as the assembled hung on his every word.

Earlier, I had come across a photograph that, absent context, was merely puzzling: a very young-looking Mack sitting glumly at the end of a long banquet table festooned with flowers and beaded lamps and lace as if for a society wedding. To his right, unmistakably, was Irene, looking similarly grim, but otherwise, at a mature twenty-three, astonishingly as I remembered her at a youthful sixty. Standing behind them, and filling the seats to either side of the long table, were an assemblage of elegantly dressed worthies—high collars, pearls, broaches—with pale moon faces all rounding at the camera, registering a range of expressions, from polite to blank to annoyed.

Now that I was learning about the stay in Montreal, that photo flashed in my mind. I dug through the box of photos until I found it and looked at it more closely: sure enough, in small white type—scratched on the negative by a professional photographer’s pen—it said, Dinner given by John Kantor for his son MacKinlay Kantor on occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday, Feb. 4th, 1928, Mount Royal Hotel, Montreal.

When I flipped it over, I noticed faint blue-ink lettering on the heavily stained back:

John Kantor tall dark haired man standing 3rd from left

Poor sad Mack at head of table

Poor sad Irene to his right

I.L.K.

I recognized I.L.K. as the initials in the gold monogram on the towels in the Siesta Key guest room I had stayed in as a child, which also happened to be my grandmother’s painting studio.

So the author of these notes knew for sure how poor and sad both Mack and Irene had felt that night—in the photo they look as if someone had just run over their puppy.

A man in his late forties stood behind Mack, his heavy-lidded eyes leveled at the camera with the emotionless focus of a shark circling its prey. The face had lost that lean, masculine definition that had been so compelling in younger days, his cheeks and chin filling with soft but still smooth flesh. But his hair, that relentless dark wave parting down the dead center of his scalp, made John Kantor instantly recognizable.

On the back of the photograph in ink of a different color, probably written also by my grandmother at a later date as a retrospective comment on the scene around John Kantor’s show table, it says: Horrors! What people! What a daddy!

Six days after the photo was taken, poor sad Irene Layne Kantor gave birth to the fetus called Calliope, who became Carol Layne Kantor, my mother.

—

After I’d spent the better part of a year shoveling through the material at the Library of Congress, I thought I had every significant piece of the puzzle of my grandfather’s life and it was only a matter of fitting them together.

But my sister kept urging me to fly down to visit her home in Atlanta and look through a dozen large boxes filled with photos and letters my mother had kept in storage for years, presumably ever since my grandmother had died in 1982. My mother died twenty-seven years after that, and my brother and I, left to our own devices, would have probably thrown them out, but my sister couldn’t bear to do it. Neither could she find time to take on the massive project of sorting through them all, so as happens with so many boxes stuffed with the precious mementos of previous generations, rendered increasingly opaque by the passage of time, they just sat in a dark closet, slowly disintegrating.

When I told my sister I would be working on this book, she peeked in the boxes enough to believe that at least some of the contents might be of interest to me. I doubted that. The Library of Congress curator who had organized my grandfather’s papers said she had sent a great deal of the material, either duplicates or irrelevant documents, back to my mother, and guessed that the boxes my sister had were filled with the rejects. But I couldn’t take the chance I was missing something important.

Feeling pressed to make progress on my writing, I made reservations for just a quick visit. My plan was to fly from my home in Northern Virginia to Atlanta one morning, spend the day going through the boxes, and possibly the following morning as well (if I found anything), then fly back to Dulles that evening.

The afternoon before the flight, when I sat down to print out the boarding pass, I was in for a shock. The departure time was 10:30 the next day, all right: 10:30 p.m. I had made the reservation hastily, simply assuming that any 10:30 flight would be a morning flight without looking closely enough at the itinerary. How I hate nonrefundable tickets.

Wanting to avoid several hundred dollars in change fees, I decided to go ahead with the tickets I had. Though I wouldn’t arrive until after midnight, I would still have much of the next day to go through the boxes.

Susan and her fiancé, Randy, gamely picked me up at the airport, then drove me the forty-five minutes to their suburban home, where she had thoughtfully stacked the boxes—big plastic bins—in the guest room. It was way past my bedtime, almost one a.m., but as the bins were literally stacked beside the bed, I decided to open a lid or two and just take a peek before turning in.

I didn’t sleep that night.

—

The most unanticipated result of my exploration thus far had been the size of the shadow cast by John Kantor. Through century-old newspaper accounts, obscure passages in obscure books, and my grandfather’s letters, annotations, and published memoirs, I’d been able to discover that my great-grandfather was not only a horrendous father, but the possessor of an unusual charisma and, in his own warped and minor way, even a historic figure. I’d seen no photos of John Kantor while I was growing up, and found none in the Library of Congress files, but had been able to form a surprisingly complete visual image of him from youth to old age owing to his habit of popping up in newspaper microfilm. And thanks to Mack’s phenomenal memory, and his writing skills, I had developed a vivid mental image of John Kantor’s personality as well—at least through my grandfather’s eyes.

But what I didn’t have and couldn’t find in the files at the Library of Congress was anything—save a lone notation in a children’s book—from John Kantor himself.

Which is why I gasped aloud when I saw the large overstuffed envelope, brown-spotted with age, marked in an antique-looking script: Correspondence from and concerning John Kantor.

Praying that the contents were in fact as advertised, I pulled out the first of the stacked envelopes inside. It was brittle, the once-white paper now a walnut brown with small tears around the edges and a large crescent moon torn from the side, but the address, “A. D. McKinlay, Webster City Iowa”—no street address necessary—was intact. The A stood for Adam, Effie’s father, John’s father-in-law, my great-great-grandfather. On stationery marked OCCIDENTAL HOTEL, EAGLE GROVE, the letter begins, “My dear father, will you please do me a favor and deposit at once with the First National Bank of Webster City ($15) fifteen dollars for me. . . . I regret much to ask you to do this for me but perhaps some day I will be able to return the favor. It is necessary you deposit the $15 at once. Please do this for my sake.

“I am yours obedient,” and there it was, the run-together signature with gigantic, showy initial letters and great descending loops on both the J and the K: JMKantor.

I had only to open the second envelope, also to A. D. McKinlay, postmarked 1903, to discover that the favor from his father-in-law had never been returned.

For an envelope 112 years old, it was in surprisingly robust condition. Inside were six rag-paper pages that began, “My dear husband . . .”

The letter was from Evalyn McKinlay, Mack’s grandmother, who was writing with obvious fear and loathing about an onerous “he” who was clearly John Kantor. I knew from another letter in the bin, dated weeks earlier, the circumstances that led Eva to be away from home and her husband in Webster City. Seriously ill with uterine cancer, Eva had been visiting Effie and John in Chicago to see doctors who had only grim prognostications. She had decided that instead of undergoing the risky surgery they proposed, she wanted to go home, possibly to get better opinions from doctors she’d known for years, more probably to die. But apparently, next to her fears about John Kantor, cancer was barely worth mentioning.

“He telephoned up a few minutes ago that I could not go home tomorrow for he did not get the money!” she wrote. Adam had sent her a bank draft for $44 to pay expenses for the trip home, which John claimed had never arrived.

He pretended he would get it for me. It’s my opinion that he has had it and spent it. I am so worried. I don’t know whether to say anything to him or not. He asked me last week if I thought you would loan him more money. I said you might, if you will pay him what you already owe him. He didn’t have much to say. How I hope that he has not gotten himself into a scrape. It would nearly kill Effie. . . . She thinks he is just most perfect. . . . She was very indignant when I told her you had asked her to come home. She said she loves her own home. . . . She does not understand John, I know.

Another antique envelope, this one dated several weeks later, confirms that John was indeed in a scrape. It was a letter from the offices of the Illinois Life Insurance Company, a personal note to Adam McKinlay from one of the company’s officers. It seems John Kantor had written numerous bad checks totaling $315, which sounds trivial until you account for more than a century of inflation: It would be the equivalent today of more than $8,000.

The letter presents a grim choice for Adam—either make good on his son-in-law’s fraudulent checks or watch the husband of his very pregnant daughter get carted off to jail:

The defense which Mr. Kantor makes in this matter is that he was hard pressed for money, and as you on previous occasions paid his checks at your end, he thought that you would in these several cases. . . . Mr. Kantor has without question committed a crime, which would place him in the penitentiary for a term of years, and while I regret to cause you any financial burdens at this time, I do feel that it is a case where the future of your daughter and her babies would suffer from the stigma and disgrace that attached to them and to you, her father.

One of Effie’s babies, Virginia, was then three years old, and the other would be born in less than two months and, initially if only briefly, be given John’s name.

That baby, who would become MacKinlay Kantor, was born in his grandparents’ home in Webster City, because John, fleeing the consequences of his accumulating misdeeds, had left his wife and daughter no choice but to return home shortly after Eva’s letter. When the baby was born, Eva got up from her presumed deathbed and said she had no intention of lying about when there was so much work to do. She lived, vitally, defying all medical opinion, for another twenty-six years before dying . . . of uterine cancer.

As I went through these envelopes from those first years of the twentieth century, I discovered that this was hardly the first—or the last time—Adam had faced cleaning up after John’s mess. Another letter dated two years earlier from another insurance company:

I advanced personally to Mr. Kantor $40 which was the payment of funds misapplied. Mr. Kantor has made repeated promises to return the money to me but has seemingly shown no effort to fulfill his promise.

Yet another insurance company, yet another letter on Adam McKinlay’s doorstep:

If you will guarantee the amount of Kantor’s indebtedness, I have faith that he is very sorry for what he has done and I feel sure that he will be a man and pay every cent he owes and never again write checks on banks where he has no money.

Ah, but he did.

From the district manager at John Hancock Mutual Life:

When Mr. Kantor came here, I investigated to some extent and learned of some acts of his that were not right, but he seemed to be in earnest and desired to establish himself here and make a home for his wife and baby. We talked with him very frankly, and also with the pastor of our Christian Church, and we decided to let the past be forgotten, and to support him as long as he lived a proper life. For a time he seemed to be right, but during the last month we discovered things in his way of living as well as in his manner of conducting business that could not be countenanced. . . .

We are hoping that this may be a lesson to him and that he may profit by this awful experience, and apply his splendid faculties and his wonderful natural ability in better ways.

All those second, third, and fourth chances, all those Midwestern rubes charmed into thinking John Kantor sincerely wanted to reform and make better use of his splendid faculties, eventually led—through Big Bill’s mobbed-up Chicago, through more and bigger scams, more serious scrapes with the law, and ever more remarkable resurrections—to 1928 and the overdecorated table in the Mount Royal Hotel, surrounded by sycophantic strangers supposedly in honor of Mack’s twenty-fourth birthday, but actually honoring only the sonorous, ponderous man with the center-parted tsunami of hair standing at the focal point of the photographer’s frame, looming above the gloomy youth at the head of the table.

Mack’s gloom would not last. Within days of the birthday celebration, a letter arrived from the nearly forgotten agent in New York:

I telegraphed yesterday but notice returned that you were no longer in Webster City but at the address to which I am sending this. I hope so because I am the bearer of good news. DIVERSEY is sold.

Mack immediately wrote home with the news.

Naturally I was pretty much bowled over. And Irene, who was making a new pie of green apples, was so overcome that I think she put pepper instead of cinnamon into the pie. . . . It’s only two or three hours since the letter came, and I’m still in a daze. When I consider movie rights, second serial and British rights, my head swims. But I have been able to figure out that it is very unlikely that I will make less than $15,000. . . . Don’t worry about my getting my hopes too high, but I’m just considering. At least everyone in the family won’t have to worry about eating next year.

Mack would soon be painfully reacquainted with the reality of the literary life. But allow him the explosive high of learning his first book had found a publisher. In the universal fantasy of aspiring writers, that long-dreamed of notice—“Diversey is sold!”—is the golden key to the gates of heaven, fame, fortune, possibly even a kind of immortality. When we imagine our book being published—our book!—we are imagining it will be like those books we grew up on, adored by the critics, imitated by the competition, worshipped by the masses. We are most definitely not imagining that it will join those endless Pyrrhic volumes whose indecipherable bindings fruitlessly wallpaper bookstores, libraries, and the dusty reaches of the neighbor’s den; those anonymous, sparsely read, already forgotten legions of books that will never merit so much as a footnote in the history of literature and remain about as significant a year after publication as a back copy of Dentistry Today—only less profitable.

But in that instant of bracing affirmative response—they don’t call it “acceptance” for nothing—every author-to-be has a Pulitzer Prize–winning best seller, a movie coming soon to a theater near you, and is the owner of a sprawling eccentric beach house with natural finishes, a bold-faced name in the celebrity magazines.

Mack wasted no time in this post-success world, hopping a fast train to Manhattan, five hundred miles to the south, and in a matter of hours found himself moving along the teeming sidewalks encased in a bubble of special status—picture the Good Witch of the North floating into Munchkinland—the new author on his way to meet with the person he would henceforth refer to as “my publisher.”

For my grandfather, that person was Tim Coward, a product of Groton and Yale in his mid-thirties who had been a tennis and squash star in college, and who had recently been elevated to president of his own publishing house after a modestly successful career as office manager and salesman for the Yale University Press and Bobbs-Merrill. Mack later said that the firm was funded with the $11 million fortune inherited by Coward’s wealthy wife. At the time, all Mack’s agent knew about the brand-new firm was that it had “unlimited capital.” And with that capital, astonishingly, Coward and his partner, James A. McCann, had chosen to make Diversey their first purchase.

Tim Coward’s real name was Thomas—an otherwise insignificant fact that would have indelible implications for me. He became one of my grandfather’s closest friends—so much so that Mack named his son Thomas after him, and called my uncle Tim—just like the original. I got the Thomas, as well, but by 1954 the “Tim” had worn off, along with my grandfather’s close relationship with Coward. Thank God for the fickleness of friendship, or I might be Tim, a name I don’t love, meaning no offense to the memory of my uncle.

Though Coward-McCann would survive in various incarnations into the 1980s, and in later years would publish John le Carré, Edward Albee, Jack Kerouac, Alexander Woollcott, Muriel Spark, Kate Millett, and William Golding, during Tim Coward’s time it was a middling publishing house whose most notable author, aside from my grandfather, was Thornton Wilder. Tim Coward did not make much of a lasting impression in the publishing industry, as such things are measured. The only Thomas Coward recognized by Wikipedia is an unrelated English ornithologist, and even an aggressive Internet search of the publisher’s name comes up blank, save for a mere sentence here or there in a thin smatter of esoteric books. You can learn, for instance, that he had a somewhat sophomoric poem (appropriately) in the 1917 Yale Literary Magazine (I swore I’d be/True to myself. Let others have Life’s praise!) and that he was among a bevy of publishers pursuing Eugene O’Neill when the great playwright’s original publisher went bankrupt in 1933: “After an exchange of correspondence, O’Neill had [Coward] fly down for an overnight visit. An affable, gentlemanly product of Groton, Yale and the squash courts, he charmed both the O’Neills, but his book list, which they received only after they had invited him, was disappointing.”

That “disappointing” 1933 book list, by the way, would have included my grandfather’s first three novels.

But in 1928, Coward-McCann had no list at all. I enjoy thinking of my barely twenty-four-year-old grandfather making his way to Coward’s brand-new office, still in that bubble of specialness, on what was then called Fourth Avenue but is now Park Avenue South in midtown Manhattan. It would have been freezing in midwinter, but in my mind, it is a sun-warmed fall day, as it was for me on my first visit to a publisher, floating in that same bubble, the city spinning in its endless variations, a pageant for my personal entertainment, or better yet, a movie set in which I was the principal actor. For a writer, the scenario is the height of romance.

I found a wonderful letter from this time—wonderful because of when and where it was written: in Coward’s outer office on that first visit in early 1928. Mack had been left alone for a few minutes, and pinched some Coward-McCann stationery to write Effie a note bristling with naive exuberance:

Dearest Mother,

Only time for a few lines this afternoon. Am sitting here in the publisher’s office while waiting to have the matter of Canadian royalties thrashed out. . . .

Thus far I haven’t taken a taxi anywhere but have found my way through this vast roaring maze all alone, and feel very proud of myself.

Canadian royalties! It sounds rather grand, but in practice, no doubt, amounted to very little. Yet there he was, an author now, hobnobbing in the world capital of publishing. That same day, he’d had his first experience with book editing.

“Both of the regular publisher’s readers criticized my novel vigorously when it came to the ornate prose . . . one was almost violent on the subject,” he reported. The other reader “enjoyed some of the passages as poetry at least,” but still wanted to cut many of the sections Mack himself referred to as “interlarding.”

“I can still remember the icy thrill as I read her summing up. . . . ‘I’m not one hundred percent certain. In criticizing these passages . . . I may be just as stubbornly having the nerve to pass judgment upon a work of true genius.’”

Did someone mention “genius”? That was my grandfather as I had thought of him, firmly focusing on the latter possibility. The nerve of that woman.

I remember my mother telling me that he once threw such a vicious fit about a copyeditor suggesting an alternate positioning for commas that Coward sent an all-staff memo commanding that under no conditions should Mr. Kantor’s punctuation be questioned. I discovered more than one of those in-house warnings in the files. Here’s one alert sent to copyeditors at The Saturday Evening Post: “He can scream like a banshee if you change a title or delete a phrase or sentence which he particularly values.”

But to be fair, every writer faces the dilemma of how much to be swayed by the opinions of others—including their editors. How can you be sure that a suggested change isn’t simply a nod to convention, missing, blunting, or entirely undermining the point of something you’ve thought about far more carefully than anyone else?

I had never read Diversey. I didn’t even own a copy of it until I fished through those boxes at my sister’s house and found a frail red hardcover first edition, signed by Mack to my parents on an apparently random date in 1949. Why would he present the book twenty-one years after publication? I wondered. And then I took another look at the date and something clicked. My mother married my father when she was twenty-one. Doing the math—that would have made it 1949, the year of the inscription. In fact, stretching my memory to near the breaking point, I recovered a hazy recollection that my parents’ anniversary had been June 12—which meant their wedding had been just a few weeks before Mack wrote the inscription in the book.

So this was a belated wedding present? But why Diversey? Had the bride’s dowry included the complete works, signed by the author?

It took me a few days of head-scratching before I realized the obvious: Diversey wasn’t just any piece of Mack’s oeuvre—it was the book begun at precisely the moment he discovered Irene’s pregnancy, and sold just days before my mother was born. In Mack’s mind, Diversey and Layne were practically twins.

I began reading, not expecting much—both because it was a first novel and because it was dated by a stretch of nine decades. I surprised myself by enjoying it from the opening page. The reviews called it the first realistic portrayal of Chicago gangsters—which, if true, would be quite a thing to be first at. Diversey was not only first, but remarkably prescient. Eight months after publication, in the very neighborhood where the book’s main action takes place, six gangsters and a mechanic were murdered in what became known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Diversey was ahead of its time in another way: The gangster characters were neither especially smart nor pure evil. They were human-scale—they joked, could be genuinely friendly when they felt like it, and were very much like the multidimensional, somewhat comic gangsters of those modern masters—Elmore Leonard or the Coen brothers. The hero/writer wannabe—obviously a self-portrait of the twenty-something Mack—had some depth and complexity, as did the office girl who became his love interest. Their relationship was sufficiently hard-boiled to avoid an aftertaste of saccharine. Interesting things happened, violent things happened, and I found myself eager to know what would happen next. The writing had a freshness, an originality and muscularity that still worked in another century—lush, but not embarrassingly so. His impressionistic description of a Chicago summer night really was poetic: “The wine of the evening was bitter fever in their mouths. . . . A bright limousine crowded with the giddy young fumed past them, some girl waving. An old-maidish woman with a tiny purple hat limped brazenly among snarling cars.”

I found it amusing, and revealing of both the author and the times, that the book’s triumphant climax involved the young writer turning his experience with Chicago’s gangsters into a poem and getting it published in the daily paper.

“The gang wars! There was a steel which could take the edge he gave it, quivering like a stiletto under a staring sun. . . . They’d read it. Vast, troubled mobs in street cars, or libraries he might never know. . . . A sewing-machine salesman in Mattoon, Illinois. A thin-legged girl riding the El. . . . Bridal couples, retired farmers, violinists, domestic science teachers.” The list of all those who would be wowed by his poem goes on and on. Was 1928 the last moment in American history a young man might dream of conquering the world through poetry?

In classical terms, a gang hit, followed by publication of the poem, was the peak of the rising action in the book’s plot. The denouement that followed was more subtle, more intriguing. Our hero had spurned his girl for being too working-class, and then came to regret it. The girl had gone off to lick her wounds, and better herself—even learning to speak with a higher-class accent. It ends on a night when he is alone in his room, longing for her, while, unknown to him, she is walking toward the corner of the street where he lives, Diversey Street, of course. The final words, refusing to tie things into a neat bow, are: “She felt childishly nervous. . . . Her eyes watching the bright toes of her shoes beat evenly against the cement, and never knowing until she got there whether she’d turn in, or keep on going north.”

I looked for the ornate prose that had triggered alarm in the publisher’s office but it didn’t leap out at me. Possibly that’s because the most egregious examples had been excised in that long ago editorial meeting: Mack said he struck a bargain with Coward—he would keep five of the red-lined sections and let go of the rest. My best guess is that this description of the big-city newsroom may have been one of the five purple passages he kept: “A sleepy monster, shaking ink off its mane, yawning and stretching. Whining a little. . . . A bent ‘boy’ with sateen sleeve protectors hobbling back and forth from the brass maw of a shining tube. . . . Beneath that floor, the roar and rumble of breathing steel mammoths. Hairy men, sopped with pitch, running along steel shelves. Broad cylinders spewing out, faster and rumble, fasternrumble, fassenrum, fassenrum, rum, rum, rum, mmmmmmmmm—”

At that first meeting, Coward took Mack to the Yale Club for lunch. Ironically, I had been taken, under similar circumstances when my first book sold, to the Princeton Club. Less than a third of a mile separates the two. Back then especially, New York publishing was all very Ivy League. I knew exactly what Mack meant when he wrote to Irene: “Somebody pinch me. Irene, truly this is how it feels to be sitting, ready for lunch with your publisher in New York City. I thought it would happen. We both dreamed it would happen. . . . But—But—this is how it feels. . . .”

It is, as a friend always reminds me, that magic moment, post-acceptance and prepublication, when all is yet possible.

Judging from Mack’s reaction to that lunch, the conversation over the white-linen tablecloth was upbeat, even triumphal. This was the book that would launch not only Mack’s writing career but the Coward-McCann company itself. Over multiple martinis, or perhaps rye whiskey—whatever 1920 literary types drank to excess at the Yale Club—Tim told Mack that Coward-McCann would push sales of Diversey to twenty thousand copies “if he had to go out and sell it himself.” Every cent of Diversey’s profits would be invested in advertising; “we’ll get it all back on your next book, and the one after that.”

“There’s no doubt I’m hooked up with a wonderful bunch,” Mack wrote, “and that in a few years from now we will all be on easy street, if such a place there is.”

—

Easy Street had to go first through Montreal. On February 9, Irene went into early labor. Mack, back from his hiatus in New York, installed her in the hospital his father had paid for, and things proceeded slowly enough that the doctor assured him he had time to go meet his father for a meal. Mack had issued John an invitation, his treat, feeling “overcome with a sense of obligation,” despite the false job offer. But lunch went badly after his father asked him what he intended to name the baby if it was a boy, an obviously sore subject considering Mack himself had briefly been named John. Mack said Kenny, after Irene’s beloved dead brother.

“Did I understand you correctly?” John huffed.

“That’s right.”

John “sat in embittered silence . . . then glared at me with contempt as he got up slowly. ‘There will be another John Kantor in this world if I have to make one myself,’ he declared, and stomped out.”

After my mother was born—a native Canadian, a fact we had always chuckled over with no understanding of the circumstances—Mack made sure Irene was resting comfortably and the baby blanketed warmly in the nursery, then walked to the hotel to inform his father, in conference as usual, of the blessed event. Mack stuck his head in the door and kept the news to a single sentence. He went to the American consulate to reassure himself that Carol Layne would still be able to choose to be a citizen of the United States—she could go either way when she turned twenty-one, it turned out. Realizing he hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, he stopped at a cafeteria for a plate of hot food, then returned to the hospital.

Before he even entered the room he could hear Irene weeping.

Mack felt himself plunge into that black pit that is always waiting for us. He imagined a small casket, a tiny hole in the ground . . . until Irene managed to gasp, “He was here!”

“God almighty, who was here?”

Irene gulped and stammered through her tears until she got the story out. She had been asleep. When she awoke, John Kantor loomed high above her, chewing an unlit cigar. He plucked the cigar out and glared at her. “So you have a baby girl,” he said coldly. “I know that, I was informed. Your husband is brokenhearted.”

Mack wrote, “My father had given me many vile moments, but this was the first time I ever actually thought of killing him.”

He half limped, half jogged back to the hotel, his fury driving him forward over the complaint of his bum leg. He interrupted his father in the midst of another meeting, and voice seething, asked to talk to him privately. His father refused to dismiss his associates—“Whatever you have to say you can say in front of these gentlemen.”

Mack wrote: “In the middle of what might be called my discourse, he turned to the other men and said, ‘I could wish that my son had my own voice, which has been compared to that of the great actor Boris Thomashefsky. But instead he talks more shrilly, like his grandfather McKinlay.’”

Mack’s words burst from him in barely controlled fury. “My grandfather McKinlay is a poor old man, weak and crippled. All he has left to him is his reputation for unclarified honesty. I have in my possession some letters which he received in 1901, 1902, and 1903. There are receipts as well, for monies which he paid out in bail, or in making good on bad checks signed by another man.”

As Mack spoke, John Kantor sat there making faces, then broke into crude mimicry of his son’s speech in a whiny, nasal tone.

Mack turned to leave. “At a cry from my father I looked back to see him bursting into glee, his face demoniacal as he beat his fist on the desk. ‘By God!’ he cried, ‘how I love to burn him up.’

“This was my last scene with him then, nearly the last that I ever had.”

The new family fled Montreal with a wailing baby and a total of $30, not counting the $10 Canadian bill in Irene’s purse. A cabbie dropped them off at Irene’s childhood home in Chicago, collected an exorbitant fare, then took off with Irene’s purse—Canadian bill and all—still in the backseat. They would have to start their career as parents with $20 to their names.

Mack hustled downtown and managed to sell ideas for some short crime fiction to True Detective magazine at a cent a word. He then solicited an assignment for a slightly more lucrative sketch for College Humor for which the editor had specifically requested “purple language.” Mack had never thought of himself as a “hack writer,” but now he would have to find a way to fit that into his self-image—at least until Diversey came out and produced that $15,000 he was expecting.

All my life I’ve heard the story of my mother’s infancy, of the dirt-poor apartment in which her poor mother struggled to keep a semblance of peace so that Mack could tap out the stories that might keep them in baby food, while diapers hung on a line above his head and dripped on him as he worked. In its awful purity, this tale always seemed like a fable to me. I heard it as one might hear “In my day, I walked three miles to school uphill in the snow.”

But now I knew the specific reality of the moment; that this was their first apartment as parents in an iffy north Chicago neighborhood with hookers and street kids loitering on the sidewalks, a third-floor walk-up with a hole-in-the-wall kitchenette, a crib improvised from three chairs tied together and one cramped bathroom, the tiny sink the only venue for washing the diapers, which they tried to dry on the fire escape until they discovered that the unsavory pair of gangster’s molls who lived above them liked to drink out there and didn’t bother going inside to pee. Having nowhere else to string that infamous laundry line, Irene placed it above the small dining table—which also happened to be the lone surface that could accommodate a typewriter.

One day Mack came home—if you can call the dump they inhabited home—from making the rounds of editors downtown to find a silver-haired man cooing over baby Layne as Irene made tea. This was Joseph Kantor, my great-great-grandfather, the grandfather Mack barely knew. When the subject of John came up, my grandfather remembers his grandfather saying, “So you hate your father . . . that is too bad, but nobody should blame you. Jan (he pronounced it Yan in a still thick Swedish accent) was always so.”

Joseph, a slim, modest, courtly man descended from multiple generations of rabbis, blamed John’s propensity for selfishness and self-aggrandizement on a pampering, overindulgent mother, and an inclination since childhood to build himself up in the eyes of others by lying. He said that when John was barely ten he disappeared one day and was finally found down at the docks, surrounded by a crowd of rough laborers listening to the little boy tell outrageous lies.

Mack walked the old man back to his tiny apartment. Joseph dug through some papers and pulled out official-looking documents written in Swedish and pointed to his name, Joseph Kantor, which was all Mack could make out. “You cannot read it,” Joseph admitted, but he wanted him to know that the papers said that Joseph Kantor was empowered to sell clothing and other merchandise to the Swedish royal household.

A lot of good that did him in Chicago.

“Again he donned his threadbare blue topcoat—brushed until the seams stood out—and walked me to the corner,” Mack wrote. “I spoke once more about my father, but Grandpa Kantor was musing in abstraction. . . .

“‘Who? Yan?’ he spat. ‘Bah!’”

Two months later, Joseph Kantor was dead.

“He suffered no pain at all,” Mack wrote in a letter to his mother. “I for one have not shed a tear. The vision of a lonely old man, living in a single room and bereft of his companions of earlier years, with sons in whom he could put little or no trust, is much more painful than the thought of that same man serenely asleep.”

I assume that, despite the state of their relations at this point, Mack wrote some consoling words to his own father, because John wrote back in a rare mood of humility, thanking him and Virginia for their “words to comfort and cheer some weary, tired, worn-out soul.”

He went on to deliver a mini-sermon (ever the phony preacher) on the commandment to honor thy mother and father, concluding on a shockingly uncharacteristic note: “I try to be good and to so live that in my life I will reflect honor and credit upon my parents. I have not succeeded and perhaps I will not succeed, but I hope that you, my children, will benefit from my shortcomings, learn from my frailties and so strengthen yourselves so that where I’ve failed, you will succeed.”

Future letters would not be so self-denigrating.

—

It must have been after four a.m. that morning in my sister’s guest room that I came across a thick envelope addressed to my grandfather, care of the Layne family in Chicago. The multipage letter inside it, typed on posh, personalized Mount Royal Hotel stationery, was dated March 28, 1928.

No doubt, Mack would have tried to brace himself before opening the bulging envelope, but even so, he couldn’t have anticipated what he would find on those three single-spaced pages.

“This is written to my son,” John Kantor begins. “So there will be no misunderstanding I am sending a copy of this to his Mother and his sister. . . .

By the time this reaches its destination, Mack will be gone from Montreal, and in leaving he has committed the most refined cruelty that has ever been done to a human being. If he had planned for twenty-four years to do what has been done, it could not have been done any better and yet I do not blame him at all. For Mack is a paradox. In some things he is extremely brave, in other things a dismal coward; at times a spine as stiff and rigid as Cleopatra’s needle and then again, as weak and limber as a thread; in a few things unselfish, in most things the most selfish person I have ever met . . . a real ingrate . . . a conglomeration of ideas without any substance. . . .

For almost twenty-four years, through no fault of his own, he caused a void in my mind and soul which only he could fill. He came to fill it, he did fill it completely and then unfilled it, dug out the tree he had planted, roots and all, creating an emptier, more dismal, more hideous emptiness than ever before. Weak, volatile, melancholy hypochondriac. . . .

This gush of self-pity goes on for many more paragraphs. All largesse lavished upon Mack and Irene during their stay in Canada is itemized: the luxury hotels, the dinners, the apartment, the hospital stays . . . “at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars, all trampled underfoot because his wife cried and said she was lonesome. My God!”

John even suggests that Mack owes the sale of Diversey to him: “Mack, conduct a little investigation now and find out just how you got that contract,” he says between parentheses.

Finally, he compliments himself for his restraint. “I feel I could write a lamentation greater than Jeremiah’s but have studiously avoided anything that would smack of asking for sympathy.”

Despite these grievous wrongs, he says to Mack, “I would be glad to hear from you often. Under no circumstances do I wish to hear from Irene, directly or indirectly.”

He signed it, “Lovingly and sincerely, Daddy.”

My grandfather did not include an account of receiving this remarkable document in his autobiographical writings about this period. Perhaps he just tossed it in some box where he kept all those other letters, the ones from 1901, 1902, and 1903, and tried to forget about it. In time, other letters from other unhappy acquaintances of John Kantor would add to that cache.

Those letters would reside together, in various containers, over the course of three generations. For decades, they had been as good as lost among the fading context of lives ended, and well on the way to being forgotten. Given my grandfather’s penchant for broadcasting his feelings about John Kantor—“I hated my father with the hate of hell!”—I couldn’t explain why he’d never sent these envelopes to the Library of Congress curators—who surely would have recognized their importance—with the rest. But as my plane lifted off from Atlanta, barely ahead of a tropical storm that would shut down the airport, I had those same envelopes tucked securely in my carry-on (“I have in my possession . . .”). I wondered what John Kantor would have thought if he could have had a vision, as he stuffed those tightly packed pages in the envelope, of the circuitous journey they would make, in whose hands they would end up, and for what purpose they would be used.