by Tom Shroder
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 gran
dfather 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.