Algren by Mary Wisniewski

original, but she had little confidence in her efforts. She had lost her father while a little girl and grown up in Milwaukee with her widowed mother, Laura, a deli worker; her Polish-born grandmother, Mary; and her older brother, Ted. When Amanda was a young teen, her mother had married a Polish immigrant named Stanley Piatek. They had later moved to Chicago. Though intelligent and bookish, Amanda hadn’t gone to college, and had come from what was still regarded as an exotic, backward peasant culture among the WASP and Jewishintellectual elite, more foreign and misunderstood than western European cultures like German or French. Arriving on the arm of a poet, she must have felt like an unaccomplished outsider at the rowdy writers’ gathering at the warehouse on South Michigan Avenue. She recognized in handsome Nelson another outsider, even if this was supposed to be his party.
    Amanda was a good listener, and she came into Nelson’s life just when he needed one. In the months after the party, they began meeting each other. They sat by the lake on warm summer nights and had long talks about books and family, while Chicagoans who had either been evicted or were just trying to escape the heat camped out on quilts around them. He was a good listener, too, with a focused, gentle manner. She told him of her lonely childhood and her discomfort when her mother had remarried. He called her “Mashya,” the whispery Polish diminutive of her name, so like the Russian nicknames for beloved women Nelson found in his favorite novels. Soon, Amanda and Nelson moved in together, sharing a series of rattletrap apartments, paying the rent with whatever they scraped together on odd jobs. They got married at City Hall on March 1, 1937—a week before Nelson’s twenty-eighth birthday. Nelson said the marriage was necessary because Amanda’s mother would not visit if they kept living in sin.
    It was a long, strange relationship that began in pity and ended in hatred. Nelson claimed later that there was never much of a physical connection between them, and he told her that he did not want children. Yet she held on tightly to him over the years, despite separations, despite Nelson’s cheating on her, slamming doors in her face, and trying to remove her from his life “finger by finger.” Nelson speculated later that she was seeking in him something that had been missing in her own childhood, a man to depend on and take care of her, and he was not that man. But Nelson was seeking something, too—he saw himself as homeless, and Amandarepresented home, someone with whom he could talk and listen to music, someone to help him get through tough social visits with his less-loved family members, someone he kept circling back to, despite numerous breaks. “She was just there for him,” said Art Shay. “She didn’t have much of a life.” When she was around, he felt crowded, irritable, and unable to work. But when she was away, he felt hollow and afraid, as if the “world had gotten too big and too dark.”
    Nelson was terrible at being married, and later reviled the institution as “simply distracting” and claimed he had divorced Amanda after three years, when they were really married for a total of twelve. He complained that marriage was incompatible with the life of a
real
writer, as opposed to just a hack journalist, and pointed to Dickens’s awful marriage to excuse his own failures. Nelson was an insomniac and had as little awareness of the divisions of day and night as a cat—napping for a couple of hours here and there, and then getting up to drink glasses of hot tea or coffee with sugar and to read or write, pounding away on a typewriter in the middle of the night. He would pace around constantly from room to room. He also was messy, leaving books and papers in tottering stacks, mixed with dirty cups. He could be warm and funny and generous—putting careful