In the summer of 1912 I was sent from Stockholm by my father to work for an elderly uncle who was a pharmacist in the town of Winslow, Indiana. The nature of my job, a junior pharmacist, required a license from Indiana’s Board of Health, and since the board had a system to monitor such things, my father paid to have forged a certificate of academic completion stating that I’d finished my studies at the University of Jena with honors and that I was entitled to practice pharmacy in “all regular and known nations.” Counting on the unlikelihood of an inspector being able to tell a real certificate from a forgery, I was soon dispensing medicines in Winslow and taking cues from my uncle concerning my new life in America.

And such cues were not hard to follow. My uncle was a passionate lover of cocaine and had situated himself in such a way that he supplied nearly all the nearby interested parties—the brothels of Fort Wayne and Muncie in particular— with the drug. Thus it was no small thing for me to be the nephew of Johannes Lundquist, a man who, even in his seventies, was known as a great voluptuary and eroticist.

I lived then in a small room behind the kitchen in my uncle’s house. My aunt had decorated it especially for me, as she told me several times when I first arrived from Sweden, although my uncle found the decorations upsetting. Even though he had accumulated quite a bit of money over the years and the decorations were clearly not very expensive, my uncle hated anything to do with the world of homemaking, and he became particularly outraged when this kind of effort was expended on behalf of a male.

In defense of my uncle, I will admit that the decorations were unusual in that they were astonishingly feminine. My aunt had no children of her own, and while such efforts on a younger person’s behalf might logically have helped with some emotional desire on her part, it was evident that what she had most wanted was not just a child but a daugh...