enough to see it unemotionally or objectively for the first time. Before, he
had never felt solitary when surrounded by family members; now he expe-
rienced “a sense of mental loneliness.” There is no question that Dreiser
would have remained at Indiana a second year had it been possible, even if
his mediocre grades didn’t seem to warrant any more time there. Follow-
ing the last of his exams, he sat around in his room, wondering whether he
should linger on a day or two to savor “the spring and these last sweet days.”
Sartorially at least, he left Bloomington in as shabby a state as he had ar-
rived, lacking the spring suit other students donned and waiting beside his
old trunk for the train to take him back to the mean streets of Chicago.
–
Within three weeks of his return, Dreiser found a job in a real estate o‹ce
on Ogden Avenue at three dollars a week. This was the dubious business
venture of Andrew Conklin, whose first name was changed to “Asa” in
Dawn. (“Asa” Conklin, as Dreiser acknowledges in his autobiography, was
in part the basis for the father of the fated Clyde, the religious Asa Gri‹ths
who, with his wife, runs a storefront mission in Kansas City at the open-
ing of An American Tragedy. ) Having invested his last $500 in a Chicago
real estate market that was clearly booming, Conklin tried to conduct the
business while his wife ran their shabby religious retreat, equipped with “a
small organ, a set of hymn books, some chairs, a desk or rostrum, some
mottoes or quotations from the Bible, a picture of Christ or a map of Pales-
tine, or both.” With the foregoing, they “set up in religion for themselves.”29
Conklin also advertised his business, mainly a leasing agency, as dealing in
insurance and loans, but he had no money for either without an under-
writer, which he was unlikely to find.
Conklin was one of the thousands of Civil War veterans living on a slim
pension for “some alleged war injury.” He had no more idea of how to run
a business than the young Dreiser, who kept the “books” with a system de-
vised totally on his own. Yet there was a horse and buggy, and before long
Dreiser had secured, so he remembered, over forty houses and apartments
to rent and ten lots to sell. He also used the buggy to take his aging mother
out in the fresh air. During his working rounds, he met with all sorts of ad-
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 9
ventures and temptations, from women seeking to marry Dreiser oª to their
daughters to mothers who were more interested in the young man for their
own purposes. His feelings of sexual impotence began to subside. Mainly,
these flirtations involved older women, in their thirties or more, but the
match that almost completely cleared him of his sense of inadequacy was
with an Italian woman in her teens who nearly seduced him in the back
room of the real estate o‹ce. She promised to return to finish the job, based
he thought on his handling of himself, but she never did.
One day there appeared at the o‹ce a character right out of the pages of
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873). Colonel
Thomas Bundy, whose carte de visite claimed that he specialized in “Real
Estate, Mines, Insurance,” closely resembles Colonel Beriah Sellers of that
novel, which depicted the same post–Civil War greed in which Dreiser was
growing up. Reminiscent as well of Twain’s Duke and Dauphin, the two
frauds who sail the Mississippi in search of easy prey in Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn (1884), Bundy at first impressed Dreiser and Conklin as much as
Twain’s con men impress the runaway slave Jim—if not Huck. “Mr. Conk-
lin is a novice, I can see that,” the Colonel told Dreiser. The o‹ce needed
more furniture and rugs—a rolltop desk and chair as well as a railing to set
oª the bookkeeper’s area. And like Twain’s Colonel Sellers in his faith in
future railroad lines, Bundy saw nothing but prosperity ahead when a street-
car line was induced to pass by their soon-to-be-acquired properties. Young
Dreiser was at first a fellow optimist. Like the fictional Carrie, who in her
wild imagination far outspends the four-dollar-a-week salary she expects
from working in the Chicago shoe factory, her future creator at about the
same age immediately “had visions of a splendid salary, the best of clothes,
myself hobnobbing with successful people; theatres, restaurants, mansions,
money, girls!”30
Glibly claiming the publisher of the Christian Age in St. Paul as his
brother, the Colonel had been looking around, and now he had found the
perfect opportunity. Conklin was thrilled, and so was Bundy, who slickly
took advantage of such gullibility. Before a day had passed, he was sending
Dreiser out for “cigars, stationery, laundry he had left, saying I was to say
they were for Mr. Bundy and they were to be charged.” He ate at the best
neighborhood restaurants on Conklin’s credit as he pretended to advance
the real estate business, not even bothering to pay his landlady. Whether
all this is real as it is related in Dawn or partially a reflection of Dreiser’s
admiration for Mark Twain’s satire is a question to go forever unanswered.
But Conklin, Bundy & Co. soon floundered, and Conklin in his despera-
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 0
tion went so far as to accuse Bundy of stealing—to which the Colonel re-
torted, in either Dreiser’s imagination or memory, “What do you mean,
stole? Ain’t I a partner here?” Ultimately, Conklin lost his investment, sank
into debt, and died in 1891.31
In his defeat, Conklin resembled not only Asa Gri‹ths, but John Paul
Dreiser, who had failed at just about everything he tried after he lost his
mill in the 1860s. Now a largely pathetic figure at sixty-nine, he seemed to
have little to do other than try to keep up the spirits of his once energetic
wife. But that task was getting harder. Sarah showed signs of being ground
down—rather quickly. Before, it had been a rare moment when she had sat
down or rested, but now, on one of his increasingly rare visits home be-
cause of his road trips, Paul noticed that his mother was not looking well
and suggested that his sisters pitch in more on the housework. The only
existing photograph of Sarah, taken sometime in her last years, shows a
woman with her hair pulled tightly back from her rounded face (she weighed
more than two hundred pounds when she died). She gives just the glim-
mer of a smile— or perhaps it is the frown of life-long disappointment.
Eventually Sarah became bedridden and was under several doctors’ care
for weeks. In her weakening state, she seemed to fret most over her wan-
dering son Rome, even though he had so often disrupted their small-town
existence in Indiana. Frantic but futile eªorts were made to find him when
the end seemed certain. Dreiser was home for lunch on the day she died,
joining his sisters Mame, Theresa, and Claire, and brother Ed in their vigil.
When Sarah attempted to return to bed after being helped to the toilet, she
collapsed in Theodore’s arms as he rushed to her side, her weight bringing
them both to the floor. John Paul ran upstairs to her bedroom and “began
to blubber in a forlorn, exhausted, and uncontrollable way.” She died not
long after, surrounded by her husband and five of her children. Besides
Rome, Al and Paul were away from the house.
In fact, Paul was about to go on stage at a matinee in the city, and the
family didn’t want to distract him with news that would have been threat-
ening to anyone’s performance, but most certainly to that of Sarah’s oldest
son. (His mother would live again and again in his songs; already Paul was
moderately famous and had written “I Believe It for My Mother Told Me
So.”) When he returned home, he could only stare at his mother’s corpse,
stunned out of all words. Al had almost the same reaction when he came
home, mumbling that he just couldn’t cry and asking himself why. It ap-
pears that the boys in the family were more deeply aªected by the passing
of their mother than their sisters were. Yet both sexes knew in their hearts
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 1
what Dreiser himself felt and what Al expressed upon hearing from Ed that
their mother had just died: “Well, that’s the end of our home.”32
Her death at age fifty-seven on November 14, 1890, gave Dreiser, he said