CHAPTER 23
On a piercing June day in 1937 Evaline McAndrew boarded a train at Chicago’s Illinois Central Depot. She walked with her usual dreamy sway. The floor hummed under her feet, a marvelous feeling, like she was inside something living, something that owned her. Evaline loved trains. They were portals to her fantasies. When life wasn’t going well—and it was never really going all that well—she could hop aboard a train, any train, and start all over again.
Right now, Evaline especially liked the idea of starting over. She wanted to be a commercial artist, but so far the dark-haired twenty-five-year-old had mostly paid the bills in Chicago by posing for department-store ads. She had kind of a funny face for a model—heavy cheekbones topped by a wide prairie nose and a gummy smile—but that hardly mattered. “She wasn’t beautiful, but she was wonderful-looking,” recalled Ann Durell, a longtime friend and colleague. Durell got it exactly right. Tall and fluid, Evaline exuded an idealized Great Depression sexiness: elegant, self-reliant, satisfyingly cool to the touch.
Eliot noticed her right off. On his way to Minneapolis to lure that city’s assistant traffic engineer to Cleveland, he was sitting in the club car when her long legs scissored past. The legs folded into a nearby seat, dropping her torso—and her arresting profile—into view. He liked what he saw. Everything about Evaline—her makeup, her clothes, the expression on her face—was exactly how it should be. Eliot appreciated the effort she put in. He introduced himself. She reciprocated, polite but unwelcoming, as was to be expected. Eliot did not give up.
The timing was perfect. Evaline had bought a train ticket because she needed something more from her life. It wasn’t just her career prospects that frustrated her. She needed a spark. A thrill. A shock. She didn’t know what. She hadn’t been able to find it in big, bustling Chicago, to her surprise. She didn’t think she’d find it in Canada, her destination, but a visit to another country sounded like a good substitute until something better came along.
As the train got under way, Eliot and Evaline started talking. He wasn’t very good at intimacy in marriage, but with perfect strangers he excelled at it. He loved to drink in the contours of an interesting new face—and Evaline’s offered an intriguing mix of abrupt angles and soft curves. He loved discovering an active mind—and Evaline’s was so active she seemed on the verge of levitating. At the same time, this brash young woman found Eliot funny and suave, with crinkly, forlorn eyes that were somehow comforting rather than mournful. Mile after clacking mile the two good-looking infatuates leaned into each other, shoulder to shoulder, whispering and smiling. Evaline, smothered for months by an indefinable unhappiness, felt the angst lift and float away.
“Eliot and I talked a lot . . . looked at each other at the same time a lot . . . laughed a lot and kissed a lot when I got off the train,” she remembered.
That last part—the kissing—was cause for shame. Eliot Ness was married. And so was Evaline Michelow McAndrew.
***
Edna wouldn’t have been surprised to learn about her husband’s tête-à-tête on the train. She had long suspected he was fooling around. Beginning more than a year before with Eliot’s famous one hundred straight nights tracking down leads for the police-corruption investigation, the marriage had all but ceased to exist. He loved his work, and only his work. That was clear to Edna now. The job communicated something to Eliot that his wife simply couldn’t. Something about beauty in the world, how we created it but most often ignored it or turned it inside out. It was his responsibility to keep the world from getting too ugly. How could marriage—how could one woman—compete with that? Eliot’s dedication to his work was so complete that, early in his tenure as safety director, the Cleveland Press assumed he was single, mistakenly calling him the most eligible bachelor in the city. The newspaper’s error was at worst a technicality. Eliot worked long, hard hours every day, but he always had time for a smile and a compliment for the prettiest secretaries at city hall. By the time he returned home each night after another sixteen hours of intense work and flirting, he had wound down like a pull toy. On good nights, he would stretch out on the floor and read Arthur Conan Doyle or Shakespeare while listening to opera. More often, he poured himself a drink, or many drinks, settled into a chair, and zoned out. He always looked so lonesome sitting there, with his hair slightly mussed and his tie undone, but no matter how much Edna cajoled, she couldn’t get him to open up to her. She was heartbroken by her inability to connect with him anymore, her inability to be a true partner. She’d been heartbroken for years.
On top of the daily frustrations and disappointments of her married life, there was still personal danger for Edna to deal with, too, all these years after Capone. The investigations into police corruption had kicked up threats against the troublesome safety director. Someone even took a shot at Eliot with a rifle as he drove home one night. Just as he did in Chicago, Eliot refused to admit that the threats and close calls bothered him, but Edna could no longer match his stoicism. She worried for her husband’s safety, and for her own as well, stuck all alone every day in their little rented apartment. When Matowitz assigned Eliot a bodyguard for a time, Edna told a friend she didn’t know if she could take it much longer.
Eliot’s obsessive commitment to work—and his increasing interest in seducing other women—was broken in November when his brother Charles called from Chicago. Their mother had died of a heart attack. She was seventy-three. The next morning, Eliot and Edna packed up the car and set out for Illinois. It would be the first time in a long time that the couple had spent a significant amount of time together.
The trip would remind Edna how much she missed Chicago and her own family. The long drive back to Cleveland after the funeral must have been torture for her, and not just because she was leaving her native city again after little more than a day. It was because Emma Ness was a saint. Everyone had said so at the funeral, over and over. Now Eliot wouldn’t be able to think of his mother any other way. This was not a new problem. Emma had always had high expectations for her youngest son. In her eyes Eliot could do no wrong. He was the golden child. Edna, plain and socially awkward and far from golden, never could measure up. When Edna and Eliot arrived back in Cleveland, they learned that the city council had issued an official resolution of condolence for its public safety director. “WHEREAS, it is at a mother’s knee that the virtues of courage, honesty and straightforwardness are inculcated,” it began. The platitudes rolled on, paragraph after paragraph. Eliot was deeply moved. He pasted a copy of the resolution into his scrapbook, along with condolence letters from friends and relatives, pages of them. The letters and cards were sober proof that the woman who gave him more than anyone else, who gave him life and life lessons—the very moral code he lived by—truly was gone. The scrapbook, which he’d started keeping in college, offered no mention of his father’s death five years before.