Michael Updike recently got a chance to look inside the Polly Dole House at 26 East Street in Ipswich where his father and family lived from 1958-1970, because the current tenants were moving out. And he took the opportunity to snap a photo of the nut and washer in the summer beam that his father described in an essay for Architectural Digest, “John Updike: The Houses of Ipswich,” which Begley cites in his biography:

“In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the whole house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.”