The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  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.

  EIGHT

  I got a very nitty-gritty view of my grandparents’ early marriage from a 1927 letter Mack wrote to Effie. After living apart for sever
al months following the wedding—ostensibly to keep their marriage a secret (from creditors and from family)—they finally dropped the charade and found themselves in a tiny walk-up apartment with two windows, one of which was painted shut, looking out on a dreary air shaft between buildings. At the end of the hall was the single bathroom shared by all the residents of that floor.

  Last night I did some necessary work here at the typewriter. Irene sits ironing while I pound the keyboard. This letter is being written at ten in the evening; when finished I shall get into bed while we read Under the Lilacs and eat our usual late evening lunch of popcorn and milk out of Japanese bowls I bought for ten cents each. . . .

  The French girls still tramp up and down the hall with towels and soap and more towels and soap, but have found their usual regime sorely shattered since I became publicly married, for Irene and I work the bathroom in shifts as they used to do, and they come tapping at the door, muttering in heathenish jargon and departing in disgust. . . . I sing the “Marseillaise” or “Mademoiselle from Armentières” most of the time as I wash in the morning for their especial benefit.

  This bare-bones ménage might seem a little grim, but for the newlyweds it was a heavenly improvement. One day at work, Irene, bursting with love, snuck into a stockroom to write Mack a letter that couldn’t wait:

  You are part of me—the sweetest most thoughtful lover and husband a girl could ever have. What does it matter that we’re a bit poverty stricken now? Some day we’ll look back at now and laugh and be happy over it all—and never think that I shall slave and save for you and be unable to keep up with you when the time comes—Ah, no, Adorable! You are saddled with me for life! . . .