THREE

So maybe John Kantor’s villainous nature hadn’t been as greatly exaggerated as I’d always assumed.

I went home and stood on a chair to get to the high bookshelf, where a dozen of my grandfather’s books had stood untouched since they were placed there fifteen years earlier—a transfer from yet another bookshelf where they had long stood similarly undisturbed. They were, not surprisingly, coated in dust. I knew that he had published a book about his childhood, and that it had been titled But Look the Morn, but I couldn’t find it until I got close enough to smell that oddly unique odor of old books gradually disintegrating. There it was. Upon close inspection, what appeared to be a blank blue spine actually had a few specks of gold ink still upon it. The letters they once delineated were unrecognizable, but beneath it I could barely make out the subtitle: The Story of a Childhood.

I took it down and opened it carefully—the binding was fragile, beginning to separate from the yellowed pages. On the first, blank page there was that familiar, legible, but not prissy left-slanted handwriting: To Layne, Bill, Mike, Tommy, Susie, Charley and Buster—Love, MacKinlay Kantor.

I smiled, remembering suddenly how it had amused us that he never signed his books Dad or Grandpa or Mack, but always with his full name. “Because they will be more valuable that way,” my mother explained—which seemed a funny way to look at it. Layne was my mother, Mack’s daughter, whom he had always called Layne-o, from the refrain to a song he used to sing to her when she was a fussing baby and he was trying to write: “Layne-o, the bane-o of my life.” (It really stuck: Even to my brother and me, she was never “Mom,” always Layne-o.)

Bill was my dad, a New Yorker of German Jewish descent who was in the building business with his father in New York City. Mike and Susie were my older brother and younger sister; Charley (I would have spelled it “Charlie”) and Buster were my Lassie-lookalike collie and mustard-colored tabby cat. I could have dated it from the roster of pets alone. He’d signed the book in 1964, though it had been published in 1947. Maybe he thought at twelve, ten, and eight, the three of us kids were now old enough to read it. I never did.

Finally, exactly a half century later, I began to read.

It didn’t take me long to find a mention of John Kantor. Ten pages in, Mack describes the circumstances of his birth. “I had a grandfather who was angrily engaged in losing the tiny fortune which it had taken him nearly forty years to accumulate. I had a grandmother adjudged to be dying of cancer. I had a father adjudged by society as a pompous and treacherous scapegrace. I had a three-year-old sister, and a mother who lay in childbed without security . . . her young life torn into ribbons. . . .”

Even so, he wrote, Effie Kantor joked during the prolonged and difficult delivery. In the political debate of the day between those who supported expansion of the nation to the limits of the continent and those who favored consolidation, Effie declared herself—huffing and puffing between contractions—a passionate adherent of the expansionist cause.

When that expansion allowed a new infant into the world, “They put me into a wicker basket and called me John,” Mack wrote. “Not for long, thank heaven.”

On his birth certificate it says his name is Benjamin McKinlay. The Benjamin he rejected outright—except as a joke name used with old friends. The McKinlay he altered as he entered adolescence to MacKinlay, because he thought it looked more authentically Scottish with the added a. (Despite the fact of my middle name—which happens to be MacKinlay—I have never thought of myself as having a Scottish origin. My guess is because my last name, and my father’s heritage, was less complicated—German Jewish all around—that’s how I identified. Also, I never had any definite picture of that Scottish connection until I discovered it on a “find-a-grave” website: Mack’s maternal great-grandfather, my great-great-great-grandfather, had been born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, in 1828. The entry, along with a photograph of his substantial tombstone, noted that William McKinlay had been a carpenter and lumber dealer, and one of the founders of the tiny Iowa town of Epworth.)

Of the non-Scottish side of his family, MacKinlay, with an a, wrote: “My father had ‘run away.’ That was what people told me, though it was not the literal truth. Rather, my mother had left him, driven by practical and economic necessity. . . . It seemed simpler, if definitely unjust to the father, to tell the child that his father had run away. I had a mental picture of him, running as I ran, a specter cloaked and featureless, scampering past the edge of the garden.”

I was shocked to learn that “abandonment,” the bedrock of the Bad Father story I had always been told, may not have been pure, literal truth. But Mack had no doubt that it was at least abandonment of all responsible behavior. Effie met John as a student at the nearby Drake University in Des Moines. It was a small Christian college, where John, avowing himself to be a recent convert to Christianity whose wealthy Jewish parents had disowned him as a result, must have created quite a splash. Physically imposing, well over six feet tall with a wild effusion of black hair, he would have appealed especially to a young girl like Effie, whose sharp mind and adventurous spirit would have been excited by John’s exotic origins, foreign-tinged accent (he had been born in Sweden to a long line of Jewish rabbis originally from Portugal), and fluency in five-dollar words.

Effie married John in 1899, barely twenty. A photo of her in her wedding dress suggests why she might appeal to someone who could have had any number of women. Thick, dark hair braided down her back; dreamy eyes under perfectly arched eyebrows; a flawless complexion shaped by high cheekbones and punctuated with a pert nose and Cupid’s-bow lips.

The wedding took place in Webster City. The humble McKinlay home had been tricked up with flowers on the mantel for a small reception. John’s parents were not present. He had lied about their wealth—they were immigrants who had never even regained the modest status they’d enjoyed as merchants in Sweden.

It was only the first of an unending flood of lies he would tell.

From the moment of those wedding vows to 1904, the year of Mack’s birth, “their story would not bear repeating,” he wrote. “[It was] an ugly montage of lost jobs, new jobs, American Beauty roses never paid for, scrofulous hotel rooms, jail doors opening and closing and opening again, baffled tearful trips back home to Webster City, furniture dumped out on sidewalks, letters, telegrams—and always check after check written by my grandfather, checks written with a crabbed hand.”

In fact, I would discover, it was immensely worse than Mack knew. Surely, if he had ever become aware of the story printed on the front page of The Webster City Tribune on January 3, 1902, there would have been some trace of that almost unbelievable account in the thousands of bitter comments he made about his father throughout his life. But in his lifetime, of course, that small-town newspaper was neither digitized nor searchable. Nothing he ever said or wrote in any of his autobiographical writings or in the scores of letters in the Library of Congress files that refer to John Kantor suggests that he ever knew about this:

JOHN M. KANTOR’S UNIQUE CAREER

J. M. Kantor, the young man who was arrested at St. Paul on Christmas Eve . . . on a charge of having swindled the Des Moines Life Insurance company out of several hundred dollars, has . . . enjoyed an illustrious career before landing in the Polk county jail. In fact Kantor has just come back [to Drake University, where several years ago] he wooed and won one of the most beautiful girls in the university, who is now his wife. But a few weeks [ago] Kantor is said to have deserted her and her baby daughter and started for Minnesota with a young woman of prominence. . . . Efforts to carry out this plan have been foiled, but when arrested in St. Paul . . . Kantor is said to have been engaged to [yet another] young woman . . . and about to marry her.

The abandoned wife—one of the most beautiful girls at Drake University!—was my great-grandmother Effie, and the baby daughter was Virginia.

The story, which fills half the front page, continues to sketch an astonishing chain of events. After enrolling in Drake in 1897, “claiming to be a converted Jew,” John said he wanted to enter the Christian ministry. He took Bible and oratory classes, and impressed his teachers as bright, but lazy. Early in John’s academic career, a liveryman complained to faculty members that John had hired a horse and buggy for the day, then abandoned it in a neighboring town without paying his bill. When confronted by the faculty, John denied the claim and insisted he was being persecuted because of his Jewish origin.

The faculty decided to accept his word that it was a misunderstanding fueled by prejudice.

Before his studies were complete, John applied for ordination as a minister. He was turned down for insufficient qualifications, but managed to persuade a small-town Iowa church to hire him as a pastor anyway. He brought Effie and Virginia there to live with him, but the job lasted barely three months until dissension among his flock forced him out for mysterious reasons.

The young family returned to Webster City, where John occasionally delivered sermons at the church there, which the newspaper said were received enthusiastically as “eloquent and convincing.”

He also sold insurance, but instead of giving the premiums to the insurance company, he pocketed them, leaving those he’d sold policies unprotected. When he thought one company might be catching on, he switched to another.

When not cheating his customers and insurance companies, he played poker—“a fiend for card playing and a most clever player,” the newspaper said.

On one insurance-scamming trip out of town, the local minister was so impressed by John, he not only purchased the bogus insurance he was selling, he invited him to give a guest sermon at his church that Sunday. On Saturday night, John convened a poker game with a group of fellow traveling men. “They continued their sport until 5 o’clock in the morning, when Kantor had cleaned up the whole crowd. . . . It was then Sunday morning, and Kantor . . . stated that he guessed he would stay up and be ready for church. . . . About 10 o’clock Kantor emerged from the hotel, smooth shaven and well dressed, and walked to the Christian church, where he is said to have preached a sermon worthy of a more eminent divine.”

Afterward, he claimed to have received a telegram urging him to return home immediately because Effie was ill. He told a traveling companion with family in town that he’d already sent all his money home to his wife and was in need of an emergency loan for travel expenses. His trusting companion vouched for John to his father, a well-off farmer of that town, who agreed to lend them money to pay their hotel and livery bills, with enough left over to fund a trip back to Webster City. But when the young friend awoke in the hotel the next morning, John was gone, the money was gone, the bills still unpaid.

In Webster City, the story said, John had “made many friends among some of the leading citizens, who but recently have discovered that their friendship was misplaced. For some time past residents of Webster City have been predicting that the young man would land in jail, so that the news of his arrest was not a great surprise. The McKinlay family is well known and respected in Webster City, and they have the sympathy of everyone there.”

When John’s misdeeds seemed at last about to catch up with him, he took off, stopping first in a town just north of Webster City, Eagle Grove, where he bought a train ticket for himself and “a young woman to whom he had been devoting himself during a stay [there].”

The girl’s uncle, who happened to be a conductor on the very train John and his lady friend boarded, discovered them together and “invited her to return home with him.”

John continued on to Minneapolis, where he “worked his insurance graft among the Scandinavian farmers of Minnesota so cleverly” he was not discovered until nine weeks later.

“When arrested on Christmas Eve, he was about to take part in a festival chorus in St. Paul and it is stated upon good authority that he was engaged to a St. Paul girl.”

Of all these riotous facts, the most amazing of all is the dateline. These events occurred two years before Mack was born. Obviously, despite all the completely impossible to ignore evidence of John’s spectacular perfidy as both a husband and a man, Effie took him back, at least for a time. One thing Mack never learned—and I certainly won’t figure out—is why. She obviously saw and read the front page of her hometown paper—how awful must that have been?—not to mention, suffered the gossip of a very small, close-knit, conservative, churchgoing town. Was John’s eloquence so great that he somehow managed to persuade her it was “all a big misunderstanding,” just as he had persuaded Drake University officials that he was the victim of a bigoted livery owner instead of the perpetrator of petty larceny? Did her passion for this exotic, handsome, eloquent, and decidedly nonboring lover overwhelm her common sense? Was she so afraid of being left alone with a small child that even a lying, cheating, no-good husband was better than no husband?

I can only imagine it was some calculus involving all the above.

In any case, a heavy burden fell on Effie’s father, who not only had to bail out his daughter’s husband again and again—make good on an endless series of bad checks, provide restitution for business deals reneged on, literally bail him out of jail—but he had to put up with the inevitable small-minded, small-town whisperings. Adam McKinlay, a miller who was suffering through a downward financial spiral due to ill health and a changing world, also had to negotiate the public humiliation. He was a difficult figure to love. I found an obituary Mack wrote for him, in which you can assume he was being as positive as possible: “A taciturn man, he did not move easily in political and business circles. The bright time of his life ended when the prairies were fenced, and telephone lines began to lace from grove to grove. Honor, integrity, silence, poverty, respect—he had these and only these.”

When Effie’s marital association threatened that respect, it triggered something in him. While in a drugstore, Adam overheard a man saying loudly that the McKinlay girl had “married a nigger,” which clearly referred to the olive-skinned John and was meant and taken as an insult. Adam was a small man, but toughened by a lifetime of lugging heavy sacks of grain and incited by humiliation. He decked the offender with a single rage-fueled blow. According to Mack, Adam never let Effie forget her role in his sacrifice, both of reputation and money, remaining bitter and passive-aggressively accusatory the rest of his life.

John came back, long enough at least to plant the seed that became my grandfather, and then he was gone again. (On Mack’s birth certificate, under residence of father, Webster City is written in ink, and crossed out. Above it is written Chicago, Il.) Mack didn’t even know that much. Where his father was and what his father had been doing since his disappearance remained a mystery.

Effie had kept some pictures of John, but never showed them to her son.

“I didn’t know what he looked like,” Mack wrote in But Look the Morn, “but I began to hear about him. . . . He was tall; he had swarthy skin and kinky black hair.”

His absent father lived only in playmates’ taunts; a swirl of tense, quickly hushed comments; and his ill-informed imagination, until one night, when Mack was six, the phone rang. “Chicago is calling” is the way his grandmother put it, her hand over the mouthpiece, her eyes round with alarm.

Effie talked first, then Virginia. “I watched entranced from the sofa,” Mack wrote. “The room seemed resounding with a strange presence.”

After an interminable stretch of suspense, he was summoned to the phone. He had to stand on a chair to reach the handset on the wall. His mother prompted: “Say hello.”

Mack squeaked out the greeting. Through the earpiece emerged a basso profundo. “Hello there, sweetheart! . . . Do you love your Daddy, sweetheart?”

Mack wrote: “Through all the years I can hear the fatuous rumble, the oily conceit of his voice. ‘Daddy loves you, sweetheart. Daddy wants to send you something. What do you want your Daddy to send you?’

“I did not know what to say. This was not real, it was all an imagining and a mistake, a peculiar contrivance of nightmare. The great black voice blurting inside the sweaty receiver . . . father . . . I did not know. What should one ask of a father whom he had never seen? . . .

“‘How would you like to have a bicycle? Do you want your Daddy to send you a bicycle?’

“I whispered, ‘Yes.’ And then as the magnitude of this proposal flashed upon me, I yelled it at the top of my lungs: ‘Yes!’

“‘I will send you a bicycle tomorrow.’”

This is the one part of the story I had been told many times; the single fact that, in my mind, had stood for my grandfather’s childhood: Every day for months he would wait and wait for the delivery truck carrying his bicycle, until it became a joke among the older boys.

A year later, in 1911, Mack was still wondering if one day a bike might appear when instead three train tickets arrived, one for Effie, one for Virginia, one for him—all to Chicago, courtesy of John Kantor. I would learn from my uncle Tim’s book, My Father’s Voice, that, ironically, John Kantor somehow ended up suing Effie for desertion after she’d given up following him on his crooked trail. He’d won a divorce, remarried, and was now separated, awaiting a divorce from his second wife. Hence the spasm of generosity in sending train tickets to his first wife and daughter, whom he’d decided he missed, and the son he’d never met. Effie, then thirty-two, must have had misgivings about the implications of those tickets, but she had been living with her parents, cleaning bedpans as a practical nurse, and working as a cashier at the Webster City grocery store—all for a pittance that was pathetically necessary to keep the economically strapped household from utter destitution. Plus, her children desperately needed a father. And, Mack would later say, in spite of everything, she was still drawn to the man.

Mack and Virginia and Effie all boarded the train for Chicago—the tickets John had sent were not for a private first-class compartment, so they all crowded into a lower bunk.

When they arrived at the ornate Chicago station, while Effie and Virginia sat waiting quietly on a bench, Mack squirmed away to stake out a spot halfway down the grand staircase leading into the station. “Presently I saw an erect man with a fleshy face. . . . He wore a tailored tan topcoat, a black derby hat, and carried a beautiful cane . . . The man saw me and began to smile. His eyes were large, tender, rather swollen. His mouth was small for such a big face. Beneath the brim of the stiff hat I could see a wealth of kinky black hair. He halted on a step below me. He said, ‘Were you looking for someone?’ I whispered, even while I knew that this was he, ‘I’m looking for Mr. Kantor.’ As I spoke, he picked me up in his arms and bore me up the rest of the stairs, laughing.”

For the rest of the short visit, Mack soaked in the unfathomable grandiosity of this man who was his father.

“I was tremendously impressed by the obsequious attitude of the [taxi] driver . . . by the way in which a doorman at the theatre came speeding forward to open the taxicab door. . . . He entertained lavishly and tipped munificently. His advent in a restaurant sent waiters and captains scurrying in frenzy.”

I smiled when I read this: all those grand entrances in a black limo chauffeured by liveried drivers, all those obsequious maître d’s. . . . Mack’s father hadn’t ever given him that bicycle, but it appeared that he had given him something else: a desire to impress with the trappings of wealth.

The ability to indulge that desire would not come easily, or quickly. Remembering that first meeting with John Kantor, Mack recalled that his father took him to a magnificent theater, replete with gold drapes and sparkling chandeliers. But Mack had eyes only for the snack concession. He asked his father—intoxicated with the luxury of having a father to ask—if he might have some candy. His father made a great show of selecting the largest, most opulent-looking box of chocolate in the display, a large purple box of “sumptuous creams and oblongs of nougat.”

Mack kept this quickly emptied box in a sideboard for years. Year after year, “I would open the box and push Virginia’s paper dolls aside in order to sniff the perfumed comfort of the past—a comfort which I felt for one solid week in 1911, but which never came to me again until I had built it with my own hands and beneath my own feet.

“Often Virginia and I have discussed that fabulous week,” Mack wrote. Effie never told them directly, but “constructing the few shreds of evidence” they’d retained in their memories, they concluded that their parents had been flirting with the idea of a marital reconciliation that quickly stalled out. Something about the tenor of John’s lifestyle, so opulent and outwardly successful—Virginia watched in disbelief as her father bought Effie a black silk gown with a hundred-dollar bill—must have not rung true in Effie’s ear. Something about the loud, ostentatious crowd that always surrounded him made her feel uncomfortable and shabby.

Or maybe she found she couldn’t persuade herself to, once again, trust him.

On what would be the last day of the visit, Effie and Virginia went off with a lady introduced to Mack as Aunt Bessie. Mack was to stay with his father. When the ladies were gone, John smiled at him conspiratorially and said with his lingering Swedish accent, “Now I will take you to see the most lovely woman in Chicago.”

Mack was sure he must mean Effie, but when John said this woman lived in a fancy hotel, the Sherman House, he grew confused. “Her name is Miss Tucker. She knows that I am bringing you, and has some lovely toys for you.”

“The thought of toys put power into my feet,” Mack wrote. They walked rapidly through the clamorous downtown streets, Mack’s small legs pumping to keep up with his father’s giant stride. As the hotel appeared, Mack flagged slightly, wondering if the disappointment of the promised bicycle would be repeated.

It would not: Miss Tucker was big and blond, wearing a dark dress covered with flashing sequins. “There was a vitality and vibrance about her.” And more important, she indeed had marvelous toys for him, unique toys: a revolver in a leather holster, a papier-mâché trumpet with working keys to finger. Also, candy.

Miss Tucker turned her back on her cocktail-sucking guests and took Mack aside to assure that his plate had been filled abundantly with items from a rich buffet, including sumptuous slices of ham and bright red wedges of tomato, which she pronounced toe-mah-toe. She told him that she had a son, just his age, and pinched his cheek.

Lost in this whirl of improbable events, Mack had no idea how much longer they remained there. When his father finally led him away, he said, “Miss Tucker is a very lovely and accomplished woman; she is a very, very dear friend of mine.”

She was twenty-four in 1911, more handsome than pretty, with a broad face, smoky eyes, flared nostrils, and a full, womanly figure (she would soon become notoriously large). She was altogether an imposing young woman who could appreciate the strapping six-foot-two John, nine years her senior. And they had something important in common: They had both abandoned their children to pursue outsize dreams of glory. That son that was just about Mack’s age? He was back east, living with relatives.

Only much later did Mack discover that his father’s very, very dear friend was already, when he met her that day, a star—a singer two years past a show-stealing turn in the Ziegfeld Follies and at the heady beginning of a nearly sixty-year career of enduring international fame performing as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker.

—

The following year, 1912, Effie traveled to Chicago, this time leaving the children with her parents, for what turned out to be a final attempt at reconciliation. She never discussed this trip, and when Mack was grown she said only that “things hadn’t worked out” and that she had spent much of her time away with a friend in Wisconsin. But when she returned to Iowa, she bore gifts from John to the children. He sent Mack a baseball uniform with a catcher’s mask and mitt. Mack hated baseball, was never any good at it, or at any games involving a ball.

John also sent a children’s fantasy book written in 1895 called The Kanter Girls. He no doubt had bought it for the coincidence of the name, and the volume’s margins were filled with pompous fatherly exhortations in John’s hand. On a page in which the girls discussed a ring that made them invisible, enabling them to sneak around to hear what their friends said of them in their assumed absence, John wrote: One thing my little girl should not do.

It is difficult to describe the impact of realizing that all these revelations, proffered so elegantly in But Look the Morn, had been sitting ignored on my bookshelf my entire adult life. Compared to the sketchy, scratchy details available in notations in census books, or birth, death, and marriage records available on Ancestry.com, this was like stumbling on King Tutankhamen’s tomb, its abundance of gold and bejeweled artifacts glimmering in the first light of four thousand years. But Look the Morn was not only a moment-by-moment account of life-altering events, it was literature. Whatever I had thought of my grandfather’s writing, I had not expected to be so impressed—as a professional editor. What I’d expected was to be put off by overly ornate sentences puffed up with unproductive hot air. The language was ornate, indeed, but lovely, original, precise, purposeful. Opening to any page, I encountered writing that was at least eye-catching, and sometimes breathtaking. Recounting a visit to the grain mill his grandfather managed, he described jumping into a wagon full of oats “gleaming like metal where the sun blanched over it, and showing silvery lights in the squat shade of my body. I dug my hands deep into sandy luxury; rivulets of kernels slid down through the gaps in my overalls; oats were warm and spicy, prickling my skin. . . . I lay back upon the pile and felt the kernels biting my scalp.”

As I transcribed those words, my fingers pressing the keyboard in the same location and order in which my grandfather had pressed them some seventy years earlier, I almost felt as if I were following the pattern of an earlier lifetime. The sensuousness of the language, its liveliness and originality and ability to make a reader feel an experience rather than merely hear about it—it was all that I strived for in my own work.

And the book’s impact went beyond the fine writing, resonant in the way that all good writing can seem personal to the reader. This was personal.

That Kanter Girls book? It had resided in my house, had been read to me by my mother when I was small. I loved it, despite the fact that the lead characters were girls, because of the magical nature of the world they could enter at will, to which they alone had the key. I knew only that my mother had also been read the book as a child. It never occurred to me, until I arrived at page 129 of But Look the Morn at the age of sixty-one, that one of my first enthralled literary experiences had come through a volume passed down from my grandfather and my mother from the actual, flesh-and-blood hand of John Kantor.

That book, and the catcher’s gear, were the last contact—letters, gifts, or support of any kind—conveyed by John to his children for five years. In the spring of 1917, as America entered the First World War and prices for everything spiked, threatening to sink the McKinlay household, Effie in desperation wrote to John, asking for financial help.

This episode did not make it into But Look the Morn. It took him another twenty-five years to publish part two of his autobiography in a book called—cloyingly, I always felt—I Love You, Irene. I am looking at the book now, realizing that this is probably the first book he ever signed, individually, to me. To Tommy—Love—MacKinlay Kantor. Beneath that, in script surprisingly like my own right-slanted scrawl: I love you, Tommy—Grandma Irene.

Given the title, I’d always thought it was a book entirely about my grandparents’ courtship and marriage. I’d never realized it was simply a continued narrative of his life, picking up after childhood and going through to the publication of his first novel at the age of twenty-four. I learned at the Library of Congress that he’d written much of I Love You, Irene years before its 1972 publication. The book had originally been titled The Maples Were Our Gods—a reference to his naturalistic, animistic leanings and rural upbringing—and, later, In Russet Mantle Clad—a continuation of the line from Hamlet, used for his first autobiography: “But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad. . . .” It was the Bard’s way of invoking sunrise—in other words: the morning wearing a red cloak. In the Library of Congress papers, I would discover funny exchanges indicating that Mack’s editor and agent both justifiably hated that title. Something presenting as a love story had greater appeal, they argued, than what to modern readers would be a virtually incomprehensible reference to russet mantles.

Reading the book for the first time, I learned that Effie’s desperate plea to John for support in 1917 resulted in an immediate promise that both Mack and Virginia would henceforth get a twenty-five-dollar-per-month allowance—the first checks enclosed.

Mack, the magic of the Chicago visit now thoroughly tarnished and his view of his father as a fraud uppermost in his mind, protested loudly. If they needed money that urgently, he shouted, he’d quit school and get a job. At thirteen.

Instead, “our family was summoned to Chicago. . . . The suggestion was that matters could be ‘talked over’ and perhaps some plans prepared for the education of us children.”

Mack did not wish to see his father at all. “He seemed a remote if imposing bully who had made Mother unhappy and had disgraced us flagrantly.”

Nothing but vague promises, never fulfilled, would come of that journey to Chicago. But Mack got an even clearer picture of his father. By 1917, John had a job working for the Chicago headquarters of the Moose Lodge, recruiting new members. But he was clearly living beyond the means of that legitimate pursuit.

“He loved to live expensively—choice cigars, tailored suits, diamonds, suppers at luxurious restaurants. He scarcely ever drank liquor of any kind; rarely would he order a bottle of beer. I think he feared that liquor might cause him to lose the deep-voiced dignity in which he elected to be swathed.

“But he gorged himself on rare fruits, oysters, cold cuts, thick steaks. At thirty-eight he was growing fat, despite his height . . . and the excellent physique which Nature had given him. He would seldom walk a block if he could ride.”

Mack later figured that his father’s lifestyle could be attributed to his being somehow involved with Chicago politics and real estate. But he said he never bothered to follow his father’s career in any detail. Which left a mystery: How had John Kantor escaped a small Iowa town ahead of grasping creditors, irate business associates, and the law in 1904 only to appear in Chicago in 1911 slinging $100 bills around, and becoming a literal fat cat by 1917?

It was, alas, another mystery I didn’t see much hope of solving—John Kantor died sixty years ago, and the activities of a small-time hustler didn’t seem likely to be recorded in any permanent record, if they had been recorded at all. But as it turned out, I was wrong about a key part of that equation: John Kantor wasn’t all that small-time.

—

Internet search is an astonishingly powerful tool—but it’s tricky. I found that simply putting “John Kantor” into search engines produced little of value—if I scanned through the many John Kantors on Facebook and the pay-to-see “white page” listings, I eventually could find, among a handful of living people by that name, a simple listing of my great-grandfather’s birth and death dates, 1878–1954 (which turned out to be wrong! He died in 1956), and the names of his parents and children. And his middle name, which I hadn’t known. Martin.

That was helpful.

A full-name search for “John Martin Kantor” brought up a digital copy of something called To-morrow Magazine from 1905, opened to a full-page ad for “The Spencer-Whitman Center Lecture Bureau,” asking interested parties to send for a free circular presenting “Speakers, Subjects and Dates.”

Beneath that there was the photo of a young man labeled: John Martin Kantor, Manager.

In the only photo I had yet seen of John Kantor he had been sixty, expensively dressed, imperious but wary, tired and jowly, with a blooming double chin. Here, he was just twenty-seven. I was looking at a face with notable similarities to my own at that age: high, prominent cheeks; long nose, slightly down-turned at the end; wide, dark eyes and a narrow mouth; all beneath his unique signature, that swelling bulge of kinked hair rising on either side of a center part like ocean waves about to break in opposite directions. He was striking at least, possibly dashing, leaning forward in a high-backed club chair, his hands casually clasped together, a hint of a smile on his slightly parted lips. He wore a suit and a shirt with an open collar—put-together, but relaxed, confident, inviting.

Somehow, just one year after he’d left—or fled—Webster City for the final time, leaving Effie to care for their toddler and bear their second child alone, he’d become the poster boy and manager for some kind of high-concept speakers bureau.

It turns out that the Spencer-Whitman Center was a short-lived experiment in semiradical thought created by the founder, publisher, and editor of To-morrow Magazine, a self-made philosopher named Parker Sercombe. In 1905, the periodical, subtitled A Monthly Magazine of the Changing Order, announced the creation of an institute for the “society of advanced thought and rational ideals, devoted to human growth and intellectual expansion,” to be housed in the decaying mansion where Sercombe lived and assembled the magazine. It was a place for freethinkers to gather, a turn-of-the-century forerunner to the California hippie mecca Esalen Institute—even down to the suspicion that the institute advocated “free love.” There was enough of a whiff of ferment emanating from the place that, before Sercombe and his adherents got chased out of town, it attracted visits from the likes of Carl Sandburg, H. G. Wells, and Jack London.

And there, in the middle of it all, my great-grandfather John had somehow inserted himself, not just as a lecturer, but as speakers bureau manager.

Featured in that January 1905 issue, right below the account of a lecture advocating the education of children based on the principle of “non-interference with the natural, inner development of the child,” there again appears John M. Kantor, who presented, according to the author of the article, “one of the most interesting discussions we have ever heard.”

The subject?

Was I hallucinating? I looked again. Still there:

“Graft and Grafters.”

“Mr. Kantor very cleverly and entertainingly talked of grafters, political, religious, educational; a grafter, in short, being any one who sacrifices his opportunity to be steadfast in the ways of truth, and acts or pretends to think contrary to his highest conceptions for the sake of ‘what there is in it.’”

This was an amazing, amusing find, but hardly the end of it.

I’d plumbed the “John Martin Kantor” search results and found nothing more.

Then I started adding other, possibly relevant terms to the John Martin Kantor search. I began with the simplest thing I could think of—dates. I put in the name and added 1906, then 1907. . . . Still nothing of significance.

Then I tried adding 1910.

Up came an inside page from The Rock Island (Illinois) Argus from August 29, 1910:

NEW HEAD OF GRAND LODGE

Today’s session opened this morning at 10 o’clock. . . . The business of the meeting was the election of officers of the grand lodge. . . . The contest for office was warmly fought by the various delegations present, and much time was occupied in the balloting. S. Willner of St. Louis was elected first supreme vice commander and John Martin Kantor of Chicago was elected second supreme vice commander.

God. “Supreme vice commander.” Mack would have hooted about that.

The lodge in question was the Order of Knights of Joseph, a supposedly nonprofit organization of the early twentieth century whose goal was to sell insurance, and cemetery plots, to immigrants.

All three of these items—insurance and cemetery plots and “warmly fought” elections—would appear as a recurring theme in John’s crooked career. Insurance, I already knew about. The other items would soon snap into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

First of all, politics. The lodge election was a warm-up, a light workout.

—

By 1915, John was making appearances in far more consequential political news. I found a reference to him in a 1930 book on Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson—perhaps the most corrupt mayor of any city in American history—recounting the election of 1915, when Thompson first grabbed the city’s top job by bringing down his opponent Robert Sweitzer. The book’s author, John Bright, describes how Thompson drummed up support with the help of rabble-rousing ward heelers, who would say whatever was necessary to scare up votes—scare being the key word.

“Among these the most sedulous was John Kantor,” Bright wrote, “a man possessing the fetching and imposing appearance of the popular orator, and plenty of enthusiasm for Bill’s cause. Announcing theatrically (in the proper locality) that he was of the Jewish faith and hence stood for racial equality, he would assail Sweitzer for his injection of the religious element into the campaign. Bearded Hebrews, grubbing for a living in the Maxwell Street markets, with the Cossack’s lash still stinging upon their backs, were not difficult to persuade to vote for William Hale Thompson, Zionist and Friend of the Jew.”

Even as he was pandering to his fellow Jews’ fear of discrimination, John was fanning racial hatred in other venues. News accounts reported that John turned heads and votes when he charged that, as county clerk, Sweitzer had granted a marriage license to the African American boxing champ Jack Johnson and his white fiancée, a deed that John cast in the most manipulative possible terms. Sweitzer, he charged, “permitted the black man to marry the white woman, and tore to pieces the heart of [the fiancée’s] little mother.”

“Kantor labored so zealously and effectively,” Bright wrote, “that he was rewarded both politically and socially by Thompson, becoming a close friend of Bill and his wife for the years following.”

One news story described John as “the tall, curly-headed” personal associate of the mayor who made more pro-Thompson speeches “than any other spellbinder in the organization.”

In those years, Thompson became open allies with Al Capone—who made huge cash contributions to the campaign—Bugs Moran, and other gangsters as they executed a virtual mob takeover of the city. Two portraits had places of honor on Thompson’s office wall: Abe Lincoln and Al Capone. Thompson maintained that the FBI G-men were a bigger threat to Chicago than the gangsters. During elections, explosions had a way of going off outside precincts favorable to his opponents. In his final campaign in 1928, sixty-two bombings took place leading up to the primaries and at least two politicians were killed.

Late in my research, looking through my mother’s papers, I came across a remarkable photograph—a tintype actually, with an image imposed ghostlike on the mirrored surface. I found it in a manila envelope along with a sixty-year-old letter addressed to my grandfather, care of The Saturday Evening Post. It was from the office of the State of Illinois Auditors of Public Accounts, signed by a man named Leslie P. Volz, who had read a story Mack had written for the magazine. “Someone told me,” he wrote, “that you are the son of an old friend of mine, John M. Kantor, who was one of the top orators in the successful campaign of William Hale Thompson for Mayor in 1915. He contributed greatly to Thompson’s election by the force of his arguments. . . .”

The photograph, he said, was taken at a ceremony celebrating the collection of more than one hundred thousand signatures from voters pledging to vote for Big Bill. Dead in the center of a crowd of maybe a hundred people on a flag-draped grandstand is Big Bill himself, standing tall, belly bulging against his white vest and coat, a small American flag flying from a stick in his right hand. The scene behind him on the crowded platform—police wearing those old-fashioned Keystone Kops–like star badges, women in flowered hats, potted ferns, and flowery wreaths—looks astonishingly similar to the famous cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Just to Big Bill’s right, one man stands out, second only to the mayor. He’s wearing a bespoke suit and holding a white hat to his heart, his large heavy-lidded eyes fastened intently on something just offstage, the amazing profusion of wavy, center-parted hair tumbling over his forehead, and a big cigar clamped in mid-sneer in the left side of his mouth. John Kantor.

His reward for services rendered went beyond lavish dinners and hunting trips with the mayor—he began to show up in news stories as a city “real estate expert.” Less than five months after the election, The Chicago Tribune ran a story accusing him of offering to bribe the Board of Education to pay a vastly inflated price for a piece of property in exchange for a cut of the profit. The story quoted a board member speaking about John Kantor:

“He has a beautiful voice. He could gather a group of pedestrians around him at the corner of the city hall, and after using up a few minutes in oratory he would have those fellows shelling out for the first installment of payments on the ‘hall.’”

Apparently, John weathered the bribe allegation, and he wouldn’t have to work so hard for his commissions in the future. The Chicago Tribune would eventually expose the long-term scam in which Thompson and his cohorts cheated Chicago out of $2.25 million—more than $50 million in 2015 dollars—by charging fake expert fees on city real estate projects.

In early 1917, just months before John would send train tickets to Effie and the children, a Chicago Tribune story began: “It became known in the city hall yesterday that John Kantor, a ‘real estate expert’ . . . politician, and a close follower of Mayor Thompson, will provide the windup for the . . . graft inquiry before the grand jury. To his astonishment and that of his friends, Kantor was served with a grand jury subpoena to appear. . . . He will be the last witness before the state asks the Jury to vote approximately fifteen indictments late today.”

In a 1954 memoir, Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of The Chicago Tribune, said that phony real estate expert cronies of Thompson got $1,500 a day for work that had always paid no more than $50 a day. One of Thompson’s “close personal friends” netted $600,000—the 2015 equivalent of $14 million—over two years’ time. Much of that money was kicked back to the Thompson organization, but there would be plenty left for the personal enrichment of “close friends.”

McCormick didn’t say that particular friend was named John Kantor, but it may well have been.

—

Mack never knew about the ongoing real estate expert graft scandal—which exploded just months before his visit and would linger for years, ending without any convictions—but now that he was thirteen, he could make his own judgments about his father. This visit, he was less impressed and more wary, especially since John seemed intent on treating Mack more like another bauble to show off than a loved son.

It was a particularly vulnerable time for him to begin with. Not long before they’d left Webster City, Mack had found himself living a nightmare. Among the group of paperboys delivering the morning news around Webster City, the most socially awkward was an innocent, lonely child named Charley Morean—Mack and the others called him “Chink” for the odd slant to his eyes. They all sneered when Charley put a naive classified ad in the paper that said: “WANTED. Boys to join a boys’ club. Inquire of Charles Morean.”

The next time Mack ran into him, he said scornfully, “Well, how’s the wonderful boys’ club doing?”

Charley got a hurt, bewildered look on his face, missing the sarcasm. “They didn’t come,” he said. “I waited and waited, but nobody came at all. I had the wienies all bought, and everything.”

“If a stone cornice had fallen from the roof of the building above,” Mack wrote in I Love You, Irene, “I could not have felt more crushed.”

To make up for his thoughtless cruelty to Charley, Mack began insisting that he be included in his group of friends. They did in fact become close friends, and were in the Boy Scouts together. On a July morning in 1917, Mack and another friend bicycled out to Charley’s farm to fetch him, then they all went into the nearby woods to hunt butterfly specimens (“an enormous black butterfly drifted above horsemint weeds like a runaway handkerchief of velvet”). They ate lunch on the bank of a river, then went swimming in a quiet stretch of water.

The three sunned on rocks in the middle of the river, then began to swim back: “When my hands began to touch bottom I stood up in shallow water. . . . Chink was still out in the middle of the river, and he was making dreadful sounds. He skirmished and flapped, his hands were splashing aimlessly, his mouth seemed pulled half below the surface . . . [and he was making] a croaking and gobbling noise, as if he cried in a foreign language.”

Mack thought “any boy ought to know better than to pretend that he was having trouble. . . . I heard my own short laughter rise and die, and Herbert’s laugh did the same. Suddenly we knew that this was truth.”

Mack was closer and got there first. He tried to approach Charley from behind, as instructed by the Boy Scout handbook, “but he whirled around as I reached him, and his eyes were nearly shut, and his face looked like the face of an utter stranger. . . . A great claw seized me above the left knee. It clamped as the arm of an octopus must clamp. . . . Under we went, and down, and down, deep, deep. Silver lights came bursting inside my skull.”

He kicked free from his friend’s panicked grip and lunged for a floating piece of wood to use as a life preserver, but Charley sank and disappeared.

The boys ran for help. They had to run a long way. When they finally roused some adults to search the river, all they could hope for was to discover a boy’s dead body.

Mack couldn’t look away when they found him. “I never saw anyone look so thoroughly soaked. It was as if that long-ribbed body could hold nothing but water within it . . . like a little girl’s doll lost in a garden pool.”

It was barely two weeks later that Mack found himself in Chicago, following his father’s towering stride (his father loomed a full foot above him, a five-foot-two late bloomer at thirteen). Once again it was to a hotel, but this time to luncheon with a table full of his father’s cronies.

They had barely settled at the table when John said, “Son, tell these gentlemen about the drowning of Charley Morean.”

“Again silver lights would burst in my brain, and my tongue would seal against the roof of my mouth. Dully I’d gasp, ‘I . . . just don’t . . . want to . . .’

“Dad flashed a look of contempt from his handsome brown eyes. Then settling himself in his chair, he turned to the others, beginning the tale to suit himself. ‘Boys my son had a very, very dear friend, out in the rustic village where he lives. Charley Morean was his dearest friend. . . .

“‘One day a few weeks ago, the children went swimming in the old swimming hole. . . . My son attempted to go to the aid of his chum, but Mack had not been properly instructed. . . .

“‘Son, show these gentlemen the lesson which I have taught you. Show them what you will do the next time you encounter a drowning person.’”

Quaking with suppressed rage, humiliated beyond comprehension, Mack forced himself to demonstrate what his father had pedantically insisted was the proper response to a panicked swimmer: a firm punch in the face. He clenched his fingers, lifted his fist. . . .

In that moment, Mack wrote, he thought his father the cruelest man who ever lived.

—

Effie, Mack, and Virginia returned to Webster City with nothing to show for their visit but the memory of too-rich meals crowded with John’s loud companions, and for Mack, the still-searing humiliation. But it wasn’t over. The next summer, a telegram arrived from John to Virginia:

“You and Mack are to take the noon train to Chicago on next Monday and Daddy will meet you. I am very lonely for my darlings and shall take this opportunity to express the great affection for my children and try to make up for unhappy years which have passed. Give your mother my love. Tell her my sins have been sins of omission and not sins of commission. Kiss your wonderful grandmother for me. . . . All my love to my dearest daughter and son.”

Mack had learned not to trust his father’s promises—of affection or support—but John’s proposition was difficult to turn down. John offered to put all three of them—Effie, now an underemployed thirty-nine-year-old single mother; Mack, fourteen; and Virginia, seventeen—in a one-bedroom apartment on Sheridan Road, near the lake. This time it wasn’t an effort at marital reconciliation. John was married again, but separated and living with yet another “very dear friend.” Effie and Virginia shared the bedroom and Mack slept in a converted sunroom. John provided Effie with a small allowance and paid the rent on the apartment from the proceeds of what appeared to be a legit job, and an impressive one at that: chief fiscal agent for the Consumers Packing Company—a food processing and shipping concern. Mack enrolled in a large-city high school, a severe culture shock, but having a father, one who was around and not the subject of snide remarks and gossip, served as compensation. Despite his bitter experience, Mack allowed himself to believe.

For the first few months, John visited often, though not to spend the night. He chatted, played games, told elaborate ghost stories in his magnificent bass voice. He talked about his hunting trips with Mayor Thompson and other influential friends. Effie kept his favorite snack, boiled potatoes and sour cream, ready in the small icebox for when he’d stop by. Effie later said of those visits that John seemed like the boy she first knew in college, the charming young man she thought she had married.

Then the ferocious Chicago winter descended. The sunroom turned dark and gloomy. John’s visits dried up, the potatoes turned rancid, and the rent checks disappeared.

When Effie prodded John, he’d curse the incompetence of the postal service, his office staff, the landlord, swear he’d dispatched the check and would get to the bottom of the delay.

The landlord remained remarkably patient—deferential perhaps to Mr. Kantor and his political connections—but when the weeks built one upon another and still no check appeared, he became insistent. Mack was dispatched to the Loop on the El train, to the Otis Building and the grand offices of the Consumers Packing Company.

He’d made the trip before to discover his father behind a big desk, puffing cigar smoke and assurances. This time would be different.

As Mack told the story in the unpublished manuscript pages of In Russet Mantle Clad, when he arrived at the offices a riot was in progress: cameras flashed and newsmen pressed toward the uniformed police guarding the inner sanctum of his father’s office. Mack pushed through until he got to the open door. A strange man with a badge, wearing a cheap suit John Kantor wouldn’t be caught red-handed in, sat in his father’s chair.

Mack said who he was looking for, and the man said, “Well, kid, you came to the wrong place,” and directed him to the U.S. Marshal’s office in the federal building.

“No need to hurry,” the man smirked. “I guess he’s going to be there quite a while. He’s been arrested for fraud.”

—

The Consumers Packing Company scandal is an obscure piece of twentieth-century history now recorded only in the scratchy microfilm images of newspaper pages. But in 1917 and 1918, it was huge news, a shocking revelation that fraudulent stock sales could destroy the lives and savings of ordinary people literally sold a bill of goods by grifters disguised as corporate suits.

By recruiting janitors and office clerks and other ordinary folks to peddle shares of Consumers Packing Company stock to their friends and neighbors in a kind of pyramid scheme, in less than a year the company had managed to sell more than $800,000 (equivalent to $13 million today) worth of stock, which was actually worthless. The photographs of full warehouses, loaded trucks, rolling train cars, and impressive ledger sheets shown to prospective buyers were fictional. One front-page story featured a waitress who lost her life savings of $631 by investing it in the fraudulent shares, persuaded by photographs of facilities actually owned by other companies and false assurances that the stock was backed by the government.

At the center of it all, the man identified in the news stories as the stock sales manager was John M. Kantor. He was the one who had recruited the little people to do his bidding, guaranteeing them that the shares would produce dividends of 16 percent a year, lies they passed along to the marks, who handed over their Liberty Bonds and the paltry contents of their bank accounts.

After he was arrested that day when Mack went to look for the missing rent check, John Kantor was held in the county lockup on $30,000 bond, which was eventually paid by three men identified in the newspaper as “saloon keepers.”

The case was tried by Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the man who two years later would be recruited to restore the tarnished image of professional baseball after the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal. Eventually, some of the officers of the fake company were sentenced to seven years in Leavenworth, and others were fined from $1,000 to $10,000.

John got off with a $5,000 fine, with the stipulation that he remain in jail until it was paid.

Mack was later told that, when he had managed to raise the money and make the payment, John’s first move was to take the judge to lunch.

By then, Mack, his mother, and his sister were all back in Iowa. They didn’t hear from John again for years.