SEVEN

In 1925, Richard Henry Little was fifty-six years old—closer to John Kantor’s age than Mack’s, and an instant mentor and even a father figure to a young man who sorely needed one. He was storied and colorful enough to capture any aspiring writer’s attention—and he lived in the fast lane, a mode of living Mack found increasingly attractive. An “eccentric round-shouldered giant . . . never truly sober,” Mack called him. When Little died in 1946 his old paper wrote of him, “He was an Abraham Lincoln type in appearance, tall, gangling, and stoop-shouldered; a homely humorist whose vein was characteristic of his native prairies. Ben Hecht, who knew him well, once wrote: ‘He might have become another Mark Twain.’”

Before settling into the folksy sinecure of the Line O’ Type column, Little had covered the Spanish-American War, the uprising against American rule in the Philippines, the war between Russia and Japan, the Russian Revolution, and World War I. He was known for calmly remaining at the front lines when the shooting started and every other correspondent was sprinting for cover.

Not surprisingly, that nonchalance led to injuries: He was seriously wounded by shrapnel when embedded with a White Russian army unit battling the Bolsheviks.

“Life will have few charms for him until hell breaks loose again,” his hometown paper observed admiringly in 1920. But by that point Little was fifty-one, and still troubled by his injuries, so he became a theater critic, then took over the Line column—gathering around him a group of talented contributors who, given his preference for hell breaking loose, also became companions for wild, boozy nights of hard partying.

In short, he had all the qualities that would move Mack to veneration.

Except one: His prediction that the Trib would find a place for Mack widely missed the mark.

“My virtues as a possible sensation were unappreciated by the powers there,” Mack would later write. “I found myself twenty-one years old, with no great skill at verse, and a newly completed and perfectly frightful novel. I worked at one job after another, and wrote endless dirges and ballads for RHL’s Line-O-Type column in the Chicago Tribune.”

—

Yes, Little allowed him into his circle, and continued publishing small bits of his verse, but that wouldn’t buy a hot dog on Michigan Avenue. Mack found lodging in a slum apartment and nursed his wounds, both emotional and physical. He’d discovered to his horror that no publication in Chicago was overly impressed with his career as a cub reporter in Webster City and his radio appearance as a poet. The short stories he sent out with such hope all came limping home without so much as an encouraging note. And his leg hurt as much as his pride. After several operations, the thigh injury from the auto accident had never properly healed, the shattered bone had developed a chronic infection called osteomyelitis, draining pus steadily through a wound that wouldn’t close into bandages he had to change several times a day. He needed a cane to get around.

In one of the folders filled with clippings, I found a newspaper column in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune describing those early jobless days in Chicago. “The day came when young Kantor sat alone in his tiny, dingy room fearing immediate eviction, without money for food, with all job prospects exhausted . . . bandaging his ulcerating legs, trying to ignore his empty stomach and fearing the footsteps of the landlord. His only hope, at the moment, was that the mailman might bring some small check from a publisher. Finally, the mailman came and he did bring a letter [from his grandmother in Webster City]. Times were hard . . . , she wrote, and she was faced with imminent loss of her home . . . unless delinquent taxes in the sum of about $40 were paid. . . . ‘I believe this was the darkest day in my life,’ Kantor recalls now. ‘I believe it was the only time I ever thought seriously of destroying myself.’”

Possibly drawing a lesson from his father about the power of making friends in Chicago’s political structure, Mack wrote a letter to Anton Cermak, the president of the Cook County Board who would follow Big Bill into Chicago’s mayor’s office in 1931, only to be assassinated two years into his term at a political rally in Miami by an unemployed Italian bricklayer who was trying to shoot FDR instead. No copy of Mack’s letter to Cermak was in the files, so I don’t know if he used his father’s name to make an impression. But why else would Cermak have pulled strings to find a job for a twenty-one-year-old unemployed writer from an Iowa farm town?

The job wasn’t much—a surveyor’s helper at $35 a week—but it brought him back from the brink.

Tromping around the county holding a surveying pole was not the best job for someone with pus oozing from the open wound in his thigh. In the annotations, Mack said he actually enjoyed having a job that took him out into the open air, but ultimately the physical requirements simply proved too much, given his condition. Plus, he found alternative employment that would at least make nominal use of his writing talent: creating ad copy for American Flyer, the toy-train company then based in Chicago.

Employment of any kind, though he was still barely getting by, produced enough optimism for him to try to connect to life in the city. Looking to meet people his own age, he responded to an ad in the Tribune: “Wanted. Talented people to join drama group. Write Apartment O, 541 North Michigan Avenue.”

And by people his own age, I mean women.

Of his ensuing theatrical career, Mack said, “I pursued one babe after another.”

Based on what I’d seen, this was more than believable. In his letters to friends as a teenager he was frequently gushing over his latest crush, one after the other. A typical passage: “You sure ought to see her. Blue eyes and a wonderful complexion. Exquisite brown hair. I never knew her until the beginning of second semester, but the moment I walked into history class, I knew.”

I had to read the letter several times before I noticed the most telling point. The “brown” in “exquisite brown hair” was overstruck on his typewriter. Looking closely, I saw quite clearly that he had originally written “exquisite blonde hair” before he’d revisited his indelible impressions. Obviously, this great love wasn’t destined to last. In fact, in the annotations, Mack noted that when he left for Chicago in 1924, “I was in love again” with a different girl back in Webster City. Clearly, young Mack had an enthusiastic eye for ladies in the aggregate. Not an uncommon trait, but one that I shared and sometimes, when I found myself appreciating a passing feminine form fervidly to the point of rudeness, wished I shared to a lesser degree.

I had my first crush, and girlfriend, in kindergarten: Karen Harvey. We made a clubhouse in a storage room in my basement, collected rocks, climbed up on the roof of the shed, and pretended we were flying to the moon. There was nothing physical between us, but my attachment to her was passionate, unlike any friendship I had with a boy. When her family announced they were moving out of town, heartbroken, I went into my toy closet and collected some of my favorite plastic cowboy and Indian figures to hand to her as she left. After that came Eileen, then Erica, then Sherri, the physical impulse becoming more prominent as childhood bled into adolescence. I’d often assumed there was a spectrum of sexual drive and that I was on the high side, at times to my shame. In Mack’s unbridled enthusiasm for women, I realized I might be seeing my own, literally, as in a particular chain of twisting chromosomes passed through my mother that, in some unfathomably complex way, through the production or repression of proteins, resulted in that particular flame burning hot. I did some searching and discovered that, in 2006, Israeli researchers provided some scientific support for that idea: Test subjects who scored high on sexual interest questionnaires were more likely to have a particular gene sequence than those who did not. And this was just one of the hundreds (thousands?) of gene sequences that determine the brain chemistry involved in sexual desire. So clearly it would be possible to inherit an array of such genes, all tending in the same direction.

In any case, there’s no avoiding the fact that the male brain is the product of two million years of evolving the ability to recognize, and respond to, the visual clues of female fertility. One hopes it’s also evolved to recognize that women are far more than the sum of their parts. I’ve always admired men who never let a voluptuous figure make them forget that essential reality for even the briefest moment—if there are any such men.

Anyway, Mack wasn’t one of them.

By Friday, April 2, 1926, Mack had become a member of the cozy theater group—named the Graeme Players for their grande dame and director, Sigrid Graeme, who Mack described as middle-aged even though she was only thirty. Producing plays was the least of what went on in Apartment O. On most nights, it was more like a social club than an acting studio, and this particular Friday was no different. After a modest communal dinner of bologna, macaroni, and cabbage salad, the stalwarts were helping Miss Graeme paint her bathroom when the buzzer rang.

She said, “Somebody please go down and tell the visitors to go away!”

“I’ll get rid of ’em,” Mack said.

Predictably, some of the other boys said not to get rid of any good-looking girls. Mack needed no instruction on that point. He descended the five flights of stairs and opened the door:

“She was a trifle over five feet tall, dainty on her high heels, and she wore a maroon winter coat with gray squirrel trimmings, and a little aqua hat. Her face seemed made mostly of eyes . . . great gray-green ones.”

Much later, Mack would learn that Irene recorded her own impression of that first encounter in a diary she had been keeping for years.

It read: “Went to the Graeme Players, an amateur drama group, for the first time tonight. Met MacKinlay Kantor who writes for the Line O’ Type column. I had already cut out ‘Floyd Collins’ Cave’ and ‘Leather Gods.’ But he ran down to answer my ring wearing an old khaki flannel shirt and a black vest. Ugh.”

Apparently, I also inherited my grandfather’s fashion sense. Fortunately, his literary qualifications seemed to compensate in Irene’s estimation. I also noticed something else, something telling. According to Mack, “She neglected to write in [her diary] any more, soon after we met.”

But on that evening, Mack was unaware of either his own attire or the effect he would have on Irene’s future literary output. Getting rid of her was the last thing on his mind. He invited her in, warned her of the long climb, then gestured for her to precede him up the first flight “so I could have a chance to see if I liked her legs.”

He did. And at that moment, Mack trailing behind her, appreciatively, up the stairs, I became a distinct possibility.

—

Irene Layne was a commercial artist who had been laid off from her job and now was “temporarily” painting lampshades in a kind of assembly line of kitsch. She wanted to be a real artist. She came from a large middle-class Chicago family touched heavily by tragedy. Her mother had birthed seven children, one of whom died in infancy. When Irene was seven, despite warnings from the doctor, her mother got pregnant again. She died a week after giving birth, and the new baby girl died weeks after that.

I learned all of this from Mack’s account of their first date. Irene unaccountably felt she could tell him everything, even though she’d never talked about it with anyone before. Mack was struck by her openness and warmth. He fell hard.

He was twenty-two, and Irene was lovely, and had good legs, and it could have been that simple. But maybe there was something else, something deeper and more forceful even than a well-turned ankle that powered Mack’s need.

Deep into my research I came across a letter from him to his sister from that same time period that stunned me. He wrote of “a very startling July morning when a brusque German doctor told me that mother would do a very remarkable and unlooked for thing if she recovered.”

At first I didn’t know what he could be referring to. I had grown up knowing very little about my great-grandmother’s life, and less about her death. I eventually figured out that she had suffered permanent heart damage from childhood rheumatic fever, and had a near fatal cardiac episode more than five years before she died—just three months after Mack and Irene met.

“That knocked me cold,” he wrote to Virginia of getting news of the heart attack. “I was weak, yet stony, not knowing if the future held anything or not. Mother dead . . . No, I couldn’t go through it alone. Mother lay there in bed with her heart pounding away, fretfully yet energetically discussing plans for the future ‘as soon as I am up.’ You with your baby four hundred miles away. Grandpa and Grandma old and dependent. . . . No one to tell or talk to, but Irene.”

Irene, too, suffered—and something far worse than a scare. In early May, just a month after meeting, Mack and Irene returned from a date to discover Irene’s father, Charles, hurrying out the front door with Kenny, her fifteen-year-old brother—the youngest of her siblings and her favorite—bent over in his father’s arms, his face white and his big brown eyes wide.

They got to the hospital too late. The boy’s appendix burst, and he died.

Mack—who had already become a regular in the family home on Wilson Avenue and no doubt saw it as an omen that he, too, had grown up on a Willson Avenue (with two l’s) in Webster City—became a source of solace not just for Irene but for the whole Layne family. His warmth and humor had been welcome from the start. On his first visit, he sat for a more or less formal vetting by Charles, who worked on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a farm products broker. When Charles asked Mack what he was interested in, Mack answered, “Poetry, for one thing.”

Charles jumped out of his chair with excitement about their shared interest, exclaiming, “Poultry!”

They all laughed long and hard about that, and the memory of humor lingered even when Kenny’s loss extinguished all ability for joy, giving some hope of a world that offered feelings other than pain to anticipate.

So Irene had Mack to tell, and talk to, just as Mack had Irene.

By Friday, July 2, 1926, Mack had been carrying a wedding license around in his pocket for three weeks. Then, either the morning before or that very morning—“a very startling July morning,” the letter had said—he got the bad news from the German doctor.

He never said it directly, but the dates left little doubt: Hearing that his mother might be dying spurred him immediately to action. His recounting of that second day of July in a letter he wrote to his sister almost three months later made it even clearer:

“I was so worried about mother and feeling so blue, wondering if it was a wise step or not, and assailed by a thousand doubts.”

This letter was dated September, yet he was telling his beloved sister of his marriage for the first time, begging her forgiveness, and trying to explain why he had kept it a secret for so long: he had creditors who would look askance . . . Effie was in no condition . . . and other excuses that were equally unconvincing. I think the real reasons must have been that he was so young and unsure and frightened about making his private reality an actual reality. Frightened, mainly, of telling his mother, because he knew what she would say—thinking of his future, not wanting him to be so burdened so young. When he finally did tell her, her response was the temperature of a corpse stretched rigid in a morgue freezer. “I don’t know what to say. What is there I can say? You’ve told me that you are married. I suppose that’s it.”

The letter to Virginia was two pages long, age-darkened, stapled with a rusty bit of metal and torn around the edges. The typewriter used to type it had clearly been old in 1926, leaving letters smudged and unevenly struck, bleeding line to line on the close, single-space margins. As I read further, grasping what this letter was, I instinctively caressed the page with my fingertips and felt a chill run through me. It was just a letter, yet I felt transported through time, paradoxically present, in a sense, at my own creation.

It said:

I called Irene at noon and told her I would meet her when she came from work that night. . . . We walked east on Madison street, and stopped in a doorway between Michigan and Wabash. Everyone was rushing by from work—I remember seeing an acquaintance pass with some friends. It was a smoky warm evening with the sun bravely shining through a fog over the western buildings. We discussed whether we really ought to get married then. Irene was a bit doubtful, while I became more and more convinced—quite blindly—that it would be a good thing. We went over and ate at the Polly tea room. It is a very prosey inexpensive place with groups of chattering shop girls smoking all over the room. We ate on the balcony and I don’t think we ate a lot. There was cake for dessert, and I put a tiny piece of each of our cakes in a Melachrino cigarette box. We still have it, and you may like a crumb some day. It is probably turned to stone by now.

Then we walked up Michigan Avenue and took a bus at the library, riding north to Chestnut street, where we walked east to the big gray Fourth Presbyterian Church on the Drive. We went into the church office and told the young man at the switchboard that we wanted to be married, and went to wash up in the toilet rooms. When we came back, he informed me that one of the ministers would probably be around in about an hour. We couldn’t have waited an hour if the bishop himself was to have married us, and very nervously told the young man that it was all right—oh quite all right—but that would he mind if we were married elsewhere? He glared in a very un-Christian manner, but we fled. I shall not detail the extent of our wanderings over the lower North side on that eventful evening. We never knew how really rare ministers are. Like policemen, when you find one you don’t need him—and when you want one you can’t find him. At least in Chicago. We visited Methodist and Evangelical book stores in hope of finding a stray parson or two. We consulted the Red phone book and checked off those at nearby addresses. One was in a gloomy tenement. “I wouldn’t be married by anyone living there!” declared Irene. One was a woman minister. “I wouldn’t feel we were legally married by a woman minister.” And so Irene banned that, too. We waited half an hour in St. James Episcopal church—the holy of holies for Chicago’s rich—while an obliging janitor hunted in the study, bathroom and coal bin for the rector, who he assured us, would be back “pooty soon.” Well pooty soon came and he wasn’t back. The old rectum didn’t look so good after and we decamped.

I went into a Masonic Hall where a meeting was in progress, but the chaplain belonged to some other profession—plumbing I think—and was positive that he couldn’t do the trick in a sacred manner. A lot of the addresses proved to be those of Catholic priests, who weren’t eligible. Finally, we followed up a tip from some worthy and sought the Moody Bible Institute at Chicago Ave. and La Salle. The library was full of studious young people of all sexes and sizes. They hunted a fat, genial Mr. Lundquist out of his office. He was an ordained minister from Indiana, and hadn’t married anyone for ten years or so, but was certain he could do it. Our patience was at an end and our feet tired. Thus we were married by a wet Baptist. The witnesses were future missionaries to the cannibal islands. . . . Irene said “I will” at one vague, musty place where she should have said I do, so I’m sure we’re living together illegally. Then everyone shook hands, the witnesses signed, and I gave the minister an American Flyer envelope with three dollars in it—all I had—while we ran before he could open it and kick us where it would do the most good. . . . We ran over [to] the Graeme Players for an hour, and then home, and Irene had to give me car and bus fare. . . .

No persons were married—ever—under less auspicious circumstances, and none will ever be happier, I am sure.

On the last Sunday in June of 2014, three days short of the eighty-eighth anniversary of my grandparents’ impromptu wedding, my wife, Lisa, and I set out from our hotel in Chicago with the vague intent of finding the Moody Bible Institute, if it still existed. We had been married for more than a quarter of a century ourselves at that point, and I had seen enough in the Library of Congress files to suspect that we were indeed a couple that disproved my grandfather’s prophecy by being happier than he and Irene had been—but that’s getting ahead of the story. In any case, I’d been pondering the impulsive Friday night proposal in 1926, considering it a bristling example of youthful folly. Then I did the math. At exactly the same age, exactly half a century later, I committed my own impulsive union. That marriage, though it produced a beautiful child, struggled along for nine years before it ended. She had beauty, charm, and intelligence. We managed some good moments, tried ineptly, or impossibly, to make it work for the sake of the daughter we both adored, but I suspected from the start—from before the ceremony—that it just wasn’t right. I wasn’t ready to marry anyone.

During the most difficult moments, I often had cause to think about the nature of the twenty-two-year-old male brain, doomed to a false belief in its own maturity. When I tried to remember my state of mind, recall what I had been thinking, exactly, when I recited the marriage vows I had written myself, I had to confess that I hadn’t thought about it in any coherent way at all. I had simply lunged, trusting that if I didn’t look down, the lack of solid ground beneath me would somehow not be a problem.

Twenty-two.

But youth can’t explain why, ten years later, I proposed to Lisa only three months after we’d met, the same mad schedule by which Mack had proposed to Irene. We had been swinging in a hammock in my backyard, and it suddenly seemed absurd to me to behave as if she were anything other than the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I would argue that this time it was a vision, not an impulse, that compelled me. But maybe it was some genetic predisposition after all. The discovery of these parallels between my life and my grandfather’s were beginning to get a little eerie.

In any case, when I blurted my proposal there in the hammock, Lisa, then thirty-one, had the good sense to say, “Ask me again later.”

After a barely respectable interlude, I did. One year following our meeting we were married, not by a random wet Baptist, but by the mayor of Miami Beach, which was random in its own way. Now, twenty-seven years later, we were in Chicago on a warm, humid summer morning, hunting for coffee. Neither of us knew the town well, so we just walked down Michigan Avenue until we passed Millennium Park. The waterfront, with its sculptures and fountains and gardens, was in full bloom. I discovered later that, in 1926, it would have been an unsightly tangle of train tracks and parking lots. We turned right on Madison Street. Just a block in, we noticed the back entrance to a patisserie. Good coffee, good pastries, long line. When we finally got a table, I pulled out my phone and googled Moody Bible Institute. It was still there, I discovered, and not too far to the north, almost a straight shot up Michigan back the way we had come, on the other side of the river, barely a mile and a half distant. We decided to walk. As we made our way north, the warm air grew hot and sticky, and the streetscape stark, uninviting. I tried to picture my grandparents, giddy, scared, filled with joy and anticipation, walking toward the same destination, and the rest of their lives. For them it was a summer evening, not midmorning, so the hot sun wouldn’t have been a bother, as it was for us, and the world would have been set aglow in any case by the terrifying, exciting romantic adventure they were lost in.

Perhaps this slice of north-side Chicago we walked through would have been livelier, more fascinating, in 1926; or perhaps it would only have been so in my grandparents’ glittering eyes. As we approached a Gothic-arched side door of the Bible Institute, the place seemed deserted, but the door was unlocked. It opened into a small alcove with steps leading up to a locked glass door on which a sign read FIREARMS PROHIBITED.

No wet Baptists in sight.

I couldn’t guess which door Mack and Irene had entered, or where they stood when their improvised ceremony united them. I tried to feel some connection to this place, these bricks that were undoubtedly the same, this very mortar somehow tied to my own existence. I tried, and failed, to see anything more than a not-very-interesting building.

Back home in Virginia, I reread the letter describing the elopement and began to plot on a map the route my grandfather had described in such detail, starting at the point where Mack pressed his proposal. “We walked east on Madison street, and stopped in a doorway between Michigan and Wabash.”

I had a funny sensation, and thought, It couldn’t be. I searched for Toni Patisserie, where Lisa and I had begun the morning with a long wait for good coffee. I clicked on MAP and it materialized on my screen: the back entrance where Lisa and I exited our breakfast to embark for the Moody Institute that morning was a doorway, between Michigan and Wabash, on Madison Street.

If it was not the exact spot where my grandfather had proposed to my grandmother, it was within ten feet.