In the Castle of the Flynns
Michael Raleigh
This is the story of a young boy saved from unspeakable despair as he is embraced by Irish love. 'An amazing book, a troika of laughter, love and loss.' Malachy McCourtThe year is 1954, the setting a vibrant Chicago neighborhood.Daniel Dorsey learns at the age of seven the intimate meaning of death when his parents are killed in a car crash. Taken in by his extended, at times mad, and always tender and caring family, Daniel learns that even the deepest sorrows and hurt can be healed.Now grown and looking back on those years, Daniel recalls his bouts with grief and fear of abandonment as he learns to adjust to his new surroundings amidst his oddball family. It is a time of wakes and weddings, conflicts and romance. Above all, it is a time when Daniel comes to understand both his own loss and the dark places in the lives of his loved ones.In the Castle of the Flynns is a poignant, often hilarious story of hope, passions, and unforgettable memories.
MICHAEL RALEIGH
In the Castle of the Flynns
Dedication (#ulink_f01a172b-5c23-565b-81fb-1a765e2b6a59)
In Loving memory of Catherine Raleigh McNamara
For the Raleighs and the McHughs: this is not their story — but it could have been
Contents
Cover (#u806c9ddc-0f33-5197-8732-7cf3a3f607b2)
Title Page (#u48dee83f-9b71-5c1f-a999-d8816f81e09d)
Dedication (#ulink_eab4bda9-1a56-58ca-9344-fb749588f4f0)
Pictures (#ulink_cd2acafa-7fb3-5aee-889e-9f7295cefb58)
The Darkest News (#ulink_52d4003b-7235-55d8-8b09-04ff5b175670)
The Council (#ulink_f35fc9c0-d755-5068-be05-1fd8b0765adc)
I Discover Adult Supervision (#ulink_193c8c6f-51cd-5500-91ea-58fc3d1d09b3)
Another Tribe Altogether (#ulink_4c387ade-50d2-5ad2-881b-dd2922b088f4)
Riverview (#ulink_edcf47b4-4a50-568e-880d-138fce330368)
Uncle, Hero, and Film Critic (#ulink_2178e535-cf8d-58ad-b029-f5f8c9ebbc9b)
High Art and Baseball (#litres_trial_promo)
New Year, New Troubles (#litres_trial_promo)
A Tale of Two Fir Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas 1954 (#litres_trial_promo)
Enemies and Allies (#litres_trial_promo)
The Roaster (#litres_trial_promo)
Lizards and War and Lost History (#litres_trial_promo)
A Cold Week in March (#litres_trial_promo)
Nuns and Reckonings (#litres_trial_promo)
Young Men and Love (#litres_trial_promo)
Other People’s Business (#litres_trial_promo)
Of Madmen, Science, and the River (#litres_trial_promo)
First Communion, Against All Odds (#litres_trial_promo)
A Tale of a Serving Spoon (#litres_trial_promo)
Death of a Dreadnought (#litres_trial_promo)
Tough Guys (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Weddings, One of Them Inevitable (#litres_trial_promo)
A Trip to the Country (#litres_trial_promo)
Dog Days (#litres_trial_promo)
Unraveling (#litres_trial_promo)
Brain Fever (#litres_trial_promo)
Runaway (#litres_trial_promo)
The Announcement (#litres_trial_promo)
Labor Day (#litres_trial_promo)
Aftershocks (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Pictures (#ulink_8104f082-3c52-55c5-aedf-ea1cdd03c93a)
I keep the photographs together always. They are framed now, my two family portraits, but wrinkled and faded from my youthful inattention: had I known what they’d someday mean to me, I’d have shown them better care. The first is a studio portrait, on a thick sort of cardboard, of four people: my parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Dorsey, my infant brother Johnny, and me. At the time of this photo, I was a few months short of my fifth birthday. Within the year Johnny would be dead of rheumatic fever. Two years after Johnny, my parents would be dead as well. It is a stiff, posed photo, and I can see my smile beginning to give way to boredom or gravity. I have studied the photograph over the years, looking for some hint that this family already sensed its impending fortune, some dark suggestion of unhappiness in the eyes. I have found none: the faces in a photo reveal only what the subjects hope. Any deeper message is probably in the imagination of the beholder.
The second picture is quite different. I have come to think of it as The Photographer’s Nightmare. Taken in 1955, the year after the death of my parents, it is crowded, unfocused at the edges, as if distracted from its purposes by the raucous, manic behavior of several of its subjects. The lighting is uneven, one of the people has turned his head just as the photographer snapped his little button and, as a result, appears to have two faces attempting too late to blend. A person is entering the photo from the right, almost as if he has come to visit from an adjoining picture—a role he was to play in my life. The people in the photo are singing, singing badly and very loud, and the ones in the back row, the tall ones, are leaning to one side so that it appears they’ll lurch on through the glossy white margin holding the picture together. Even from the old black-and-white I can tell they’re red-faced and noisy and sweaty, and several of them, exactly the ones I would expect, have had too much to drink, and not for the last time. There are either ten or eleven people in this photo, depending on whether one counts the blurry figure dashing in from the right. These are the Flynns. I think of the first photo as a portrait of my original family. I think of this one as a photograph of my life. I doubt if a day ever passes that I don’t look at it for a moment.
In the center are my mother’s parents, Patrick and Winifred Flynn. They are flanked, surrounded, overwhelmed on all four sides by family, including their children: Anne, Michael, and Thomas—my uncles and my aunt. My late mother had been the eldest daughter. Her name was Betty. Entering the photo from the right, a running blur, is my cousin Matthew Lynch, not a member of this family at all but of the even larger Dorsey family, my father’s people. I was of course a Dorsey, but for reasons I will explain, I lived with my mother’s people. The two families had been close even before my father married my mother, two sprawling clans originally from the same neighborhood, from Old Town, the area of old streets surrounding what is now called Cabrini-Green, streets named for writers—Goethe and Schiller and Scott—but full of working-class people. My mother’s family had later moved on and planted themselves in a four-block area around Riverview Park. Cousin Matt is in the picture because the Dorsey family was also in attendance on this day: the Paris-Shanahan wedding, involving families known to both sides, so that for the first time in my limited experience, everyone I knew in life, every single blood relative I had on earth was collected in one place for something other than a funeral: uncles and aunts, cousins, second-cousins, great uncles and great aunts, both pairs of grandparents. The place was Johnny Vandiver’s Hall on Roscoe, a tottering frame hulk just behind Vandiver’s tavern and the obligatory venue for weddings in the neighborhood.
I once heard my Uncle Tom say, “You never forget the first time,” and I think he had something else in mind, but it is also true of weddings: this one was my first, and it is forever imprinted on my memory. For one short day, all the women I knew were dazzling, the men, at least ’til they hit the bar, looked like slumming royalty. The air was close with perfume, aftershave, hair oil, the acrid smell of dry-cleaned clothes and the scent of mothballs that clung to the older people. I reveled in the noise, the food smells, the bluish cloud of tobacco smoke that hung just above the tables, the discordant music from a toothy accordion player and his trio of failed musicians.
For the better part of four hours, I was on my own, unsupervised, unchecked, unnoticed, the one child there without parental guidance, an unknown quantity, and I roamed the hall and its fusty corners and dank back stairs like a stray dog. I imagined that I was a spy, an army scout, I played games with my cousins, wrestled with Matt ’til the grown-ups threatened to throw us both out in the street, talked with an endless succession of solicitous adults who wanted, as always, to know how the Local Orphan was getting on.
But mostly I skulked about and observed how adults in that far-off time after a pair of wars let off steam. What I saw was—to an eight-year-old—glorious. For a good part of my youth, it was to color my understanding of what went on at wedding receptions: the best man went toe-to-toe with the boyfriend of one of the bridesmaids; a woman became intoxicated and began undressing to music until her husband dragged her off the floor; a gray-haired man replaced her until his horrified daughters hauled him away; a teenager threw up on the dance floor. A pair of strangers appeared along the far wall, just a couple of party-crashers, and the groomsmen escorted them out to the street without ceremony.
At a rear table, oblivious to the existence of the rest of the world, I saw my uncle Joe, my dad’s brother, and his wife Loretta in one in their endless series of fights, hissing and growling like a pair of well-dressed cats, their faces two inches apart: by the end of the evening they would both be drunk, wrapped around one another, and he’d be staring at her as though he’d discovered Helen of Troy on his lap.
Out in the hallway, in a blind corner near the coatcheck, I came upon the evening’s centerpiece: my uncle Tom in a deep clinch with a dark-haired girl I didn’t know. She was a slender girl with very white skin, and the thin straps that held her dress up seemed to be coming down. I watched them clamp mouth on mouth and wondered how they could breathe. As I stared, it suddenly came to me who this girl was, a one-year-old family mystery had been cleared up for me, and I understood that there was an element of danger present.
When I went back inside, my grandmother buttonholed me, round-faced and matronly in a new permanent and a dark dress with small white dots. She had doubtless been looking for my grandfather, who was almost certainly in Vandiver’s tavern out front, or perhaps Dunne’s saloon up the street, but she was willing to settle for me.
“Are you having a nice time, Danny?”
“Oh, sure.” And of course I was: thus far the wedding had presented me with violence, humor, drunkenness, jealousy, and my first experience of sex, dimly understood but fascinating. “Can we go to another wedding next week, Grandma?”
She laughed. “Oh, not next week, sweetheart, but soon enough. Maybe both of your uncles will finally settle down with a nice girl.” She said this without much conviction and scanned the big smoky room in search of either of her sons. Tom chose this moment to enter with the dark-haired girl, who had thankfully pulled her dress back up.
I stole a glance at Grandma. Worry softened her face, and her dark-eyed gaze followed her favorite child across the dance floor. We both watched Tom take his leave of the girl with a little wink, and Grandma allowed herself a little snort at the girl’s expense, accompanied by a brief wrinkling of the nose to show her disapproval. I wasn’t sure why she would disapprove: I thought the girl was wonderful.
Eventually I rejoined my cousins and we trooped around the hall, weaving in and out of trouble and managing to be in all the best places: the groomsman and the jealous boyfriend went at it not ten feet from us, and the aforementioned teenager threw up just as we were passing by. Toward the end of the long night we kids all split up and went back to the tables where we belonged. Matt stayed with me for a while; we sat down at an empty table a few feet from his parents, Dennis and Mary Jane. They were arguing, and I could tell by the way he watched them that this was nothing new. When he saw that I was staring, he smiled at me and began talking about the trip they were taking to the Wisconsin Dells the following weekend. When his father got up and staggered away from the table, Matt gave me a little whack and said he had to go. I told him I’d see him around.
A little while after that we took our picture. It took some time to set up: my grandmother wanted her two brothers in it, my great uncles Martin and Frank, and this was no small undertaking, for we had to send out search parties. Eventually they found Martin in the tavern grumbling and making dire predictions of the end of the world to anyone who would listen, and Uncle Frank’s wife Rose found him asleep in his car—he came in blinking and licking his lips, and his hair stood up on one side where he’d been sleeping on it. You can still see it in the photo—he looks as if he’s modeling a new hairstyle, and one of his eyes is not completely open. My grandmother was relieved to hear that he’d been asleep in the car, which meant that the community was safe.
They all seemed happy, my grandmother had also located Grandpa and he was still coherent—and we crowded together and attempted half-heartedly to accommodate the poor photographer. He was a beefy man with a matted shock of hair and ill-fitting clothes. He chain-smoked and his shirt had come out of his trousers, and he had had a long hard day trying to squeeze dignified photographs out of that sweaty, unrestrained gathering. Somewhere at the periphery I could hear someone singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and then all of them picked it up and I thought the photographer would run outside and throw himself in front of the Damen Avenue bus. Aunt Anne was running her hands through my hair and they made me stand right in the center of them all. Someone, one of my uncles, was patting me on the shoulder and they were howling away like cats on the back fence.
I was laughing, at what I couldn’t have said, and if you had told me my life would be frozen at just that moment in time, that I would enter the next world feeling just as I did then, I would have counted myself lucky. I had probably begun to understand that they all belonged to me, and I to them.
The photographer snapped his picture and muttered something and then asked us to stay for one more, something had gone wrong, and as he pressed his button anew, someone bumped him from behind, and this last time just as he took the picture, Matt bolted into the camera’s field.
The fat photographer straightened up, said, “That’ll have to do,” and I heard him add “goddammit” under his breath as he waddled away with his camera, trailing cigarette ash and shirt-tails behind him. Shortly after that troubled photo session a fight broke out over a coat, and the police were called. I thought my heart would burst.
I rode home with Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike was driving, hunched over the wheel as though the car crowded him. He was big and heavily built, and had the red hair of Grandpa’s people. Tom was dark-haired and dark-eyed like his mother, and a relatively small man, though I couldn’t see it then. They muttered to one another in the voices they usually used when they didn’t want me to hear, but I did, I always did, and I knew they were talking about Tom and the girl.
“Playing with fire, Tom. It ain’t gonna work.”
“We’ll see.”
“And Philly, he finds out, he’ll come looking for the both of you.” He pronounced it “Da bota you.”
“I can’t do nothing about that.” A moment later Tom added, “He don’t appreciate her, he don’t appreciate what he’s got. If I hadn’t had to go to overseas, she’d have been mine. I’m gonna take her from him.” Tom said this last with the same tone of absolute certainty he’d used after the death of my parents, when he’d told me that they were all going to take care of me.
“Be careful,” Uncle Mike told him, and then sighed. He sat looking out the window and shaking his head.
I waited what I thought to be a respectful moment and then asked, “Are you gonna marry the lady with the black hair, Uncle Tom?”
“Jesus,” Tom muttered. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You don’t miss anything, do you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, this is between the three of us. About that lady—whose name is Helen, by the way—it’s too soon to be talking about that kinda thing. Besides, nobody can tell what’s gonna happen in the future. Now crawl back in your hole and go to sleep.”
I nodded, my suspicions confirmed: this was the mysterious Helen whose name I’d heard whispered among the family.
“Just be careful,” Mike repeated. “He’s nuts, that guy.”
“Yeah? So what? So am I,” Tom said quietly.
I was delighted to hear his intentions. I wanted him to marry the dark-haired girl, I wanted him to have anything he wanted. Just as he was his mother’s favorite, he was mine: he was handsome and funny and brave and a war hero, and in the absence of a father, I was convinced Tom had hung the moon.
The Darkest News (#ulink_dee1ae1c-3613-5c77-80c7-681a500a2c73)
For much of the time, though, I associated Tom with bad news, it seemed that he was always the one delegated to give bad news, and on a June morning in 1954 that I will never forget he had given me mine. He had dropped down on one knee to get closer to my level—I’d been playing on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, and I’d already come to expect any adult dropping down on one knee to give me a serious talk about something: it had been my mother’s habit. He gave me a nervous half-smile and put a hand on my shoulder.
I wanted to run away, for I sensed what was coming: something had happened to my parents, to both of them. I’d spent the night at my grandmother’s and it was clear that something catastrophic had occurred. My parents had gone out on Friday night and had not come back to pick me up, and then I’d woken during the night to hear my grandmother sobbing in the kitchen and my grandfather trying to calm her.
In the morning she woke me with a forced smile and a stricken look in her eyes and then made me pancakes in an empty kitchen—my grandfather wasn’t in his accustomed place, sitting facing the window and filling the air with the blue smoke from his Camels. My grandmother hardly spoke to me during breakfast except to ask if I wanted more pancakes. After five I was full, but she kept making them. I remember that they were perfect, not a one of them burned or irregular. In a lifetime of making pancakes for me and the others in her family, that was the only day I can remember when she hadn’t produced at least one pancake the color and consistency of my school shoes. I watched her silent form and saw her wipe her eyes several times. At one point she stopped and just leaned on the stove with both hands, and I knew what had happened but said nothing, as though I could fend off this evil, undo it, perhaps, if I could but refrain from speaking of it.
My uncle came in just as I’d gone into the living room to play. I remember that he stood with the door half-opened, as if he might leave again, and then he went out to the kitchen. I heard my grandmother begin to weep, and then Uncle Tom came in to see me with the look of a fighter who has just barely beaten the count. Uncle Mike was behind him, big-eyed and looking stunned.
“How you doing, kiddo?” he asked, and didn’t even fake a smile.
“I don’t know,” I told him, and I didn’t.
He looked off past me for a moment and then got down on his knee. “Something happened. A bad … a bad thing, kiddo.” He broke off and looked away again, and this time he made a faint gasping sound. He seemed to be searching for the words, and I beat him to it.
“Something bad happened to Mommy and Daddy.”
He blinked in surprise and then nodded. “Yeah. They were in an accident. And they died. They went to heaven.”
“I want them to come back.”
He looked away again and shook his head. “No, they … people don’t come back. Once they been to heaven, they … they don’t come back.”
“How do you know they’re dead?”
He shot a panicked look at his brother, saw no help, plodded on alone. “I was, you know, I was out there.”
“I won’t see them?”
“Not ’til you get up there, to heaven.”
“I wanna go now.”
“You can’t, not yet, anyways, you got to …”
And then I let it all out, and I have no clear recollection of the next few minutes, except that I sobbed against his jacket ’til his shoulder was wet, and I could hear them all crying, all of them except him. He just hugged me. I had a sudden feeling of terror that was somehow balanced by the fact that the accident hadn’t taken him as well. Up close, he smelled of Old Spice and Wildroot Cream Oil and I had always wanted to smell like him.
I remembered our crowded apartment up the street on Clybourn, a cluttered flat above a shop where they repaired radios and fans and had them lining the windows, and I saw myself alone in the middle of it. They were all gone. I was seven years old and they were all gone.
“Where am I gonna live?” I said into the cloth of his jacket, and he patted the back of my head.
“You’ll be okay, Danny, you’ll be all right.” Then, after a brief hesitation, “We’ll take care of you.”
They attempted to keep the details from me but it was all they talked about, every telephone call was about this terrible thing, and I soon learned how they had died: a head-on collision at the intersection of Belmont and Clark. A drunk teenager had tried to beat the red light on Belmont, the worst and final mistake in his young life, for the collision had killed him as well. My father was dead when the ambulance arrived. My mother, thrown from the car, had died on the way to the hospital.
On nights when sleep came slowly, I lay in bed quaking with a child’s rage at them all, at my mother for leaving me, at this dead boy for killing my parents, at my father for what seemed his incompetence—the news bore frequent accounts of other accidents whose victims survived, and I thought he should have been able to save himself, or at least my mother.
There had been a brief, tearful wake for my brother Johnny that I can hardly recall. My sole surviving image from it is the horror of my mother, beautiful and disconsolate in a plain black dress—there is nothing so terrifying to a child as the sight of a parent crying. But my parents’ wake was my first real experience of the rituals of death. They all tried to keep me from it as well as they could—my grandmother was convinced it was harmful for me to see both my parents in their caskets—but Uncle Tom insisted that I be present for some of it, and I was glad. I had a brief moment of elation when I approached their twin caskets: I was going to see them again. And I knew it was them: Uncle Mike had made a brief sortie into theology while they were getting me dressed, explaining about souls and spirits but it all sounded like gibberish to a seven-year-old boy, and he gave it up almost immediately. These two figures in the caskets were my parents, it was them but life had left them. I raised a hand to touch my mother’s fingers, clasped around a rosary of my grandma’s and then I stopped.
“No, go on,” I heard Uncle Tom’s voice. “It’s okay, they’re your parents, nobody else’s.” He let his eyes linger on his dead sister’s face, wet his lips, and then stood back to let me by.
I touched her fingers and they were cold and the skin felt strange, rubbery. I moved over to my father and he felt the same, and for some reason I was consoled by this, that they were experiencing this thing together. I had a momentary urge to climb in with them, as I’d climbed so often into their bed. I wanted to talk to them but was self-conscious. In the end, I knelt down and said an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary,” and stared at them for a while, ’til my uncle put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on, Dan, some of your cousins are here.” In the background I could hear my grandmother crying and talking about me.
I watched their reactions as they entered, the Flynns and Dorseys, saw how they embraced one another like old friends and then watched their faces fall as they remembered the enormity of this double dose of the world’s trouble. More than once I saw them peer in disbelief at the twin coffins at the chapel’s far end.
On the far side I saw my Grandma Dorsey in the protective embrace of her beautiful daughter Teresa, or Sister Fidelity as she was now—widely viewed by the two families as both saint and eccentric because she had already achieved two rare states in life: she was a nun just returned from working in the foreign missions, and she had gone to college.
As nearly as I could understand it, going to college was an odd thing for a girl to do, and the other—“Joining the Lord’s household,” as Grandma Flynn put it—put her on a different plane from the rest of us. In an Irish household one could come no closer to sainthood than to become a nun; it did not bring the glory and neighborhood celebrity conferred on boys who voiced the determination to become a priest, but it was viewed in a different way. Seminarians played ball and boxed, priests went to ballgames and even liked a shot of Jim Beam now and then, but a girl who went into the convent renounced the world, even the neighborhood. We didn’t understand them and so they took on a special place in the pantheon, like astrophysicists.
For the rest of it, I was glad they’d let me come, for as near as I could make out, a wake was a family party done up in dark clothing: every relative I had on earth was there, three generations of Irish immigrants, and half the neighborhood. There were even black people, three women and a young man who had known my mother from the big A&P where she worked. They spoke to my grandparents and I saw that both my grandmothers were glad to see these black people, but Grandpa Flynn seemed uncomfortable with them. Grandpa Dorsey was dead, so there was no reaction from him.
All around the long room, wherever I looked, I found adults gazing at me with sad eyes or simple curiosity. My cousin Jeff, five years older, widely read and worldly, explained my situation to me.
“You’re an orphan now.”
“I am?”
“Yeah. Your parents are both dead, see.” Here he gestured to the caskets, lest I forget the cause of the gathering. “So they’re all kinda sorry for you, and you’re interesting to ’em.” He shrugged as though this made no sense whatsoever, and then added, “It’s neat to be an orphan, though.”
“How come?”
His mouth made a little “o” and a faint gleam of excitement came into his eyes as he warmed to his task. “Well, you’ll probably get more presents and stuff on your birthday because they feel sorry for you. When’s your birthday?”
“March 27.”
“Oh.” His face fell. “They’ll probably forget by then. Act real sad when that time comes. Christmas, too.” I assured him that I would do whatever was necessary. He thought for a moment and added, “Don’t eat. They always think something’s wrong when you don’t eat.”
I looked to the front of the room where the Dorseys stood to one side and the Flynns to the other, and visitors and mourners stopped to speak to them all. While the adults were thus occupied, I joined my cousins, especially Matt, and did what children have always done at wakes, namely, played tag, explored the funeral home, and invaded the privacy of other families in mourning.
There was a second chapel in the building, and a wake in progress in this one as well, and we stole in and stared at the deceased in that one, a man named Albert Schuss, according to the sign at the entrance—and I can no sooner forget his name than the occasion when I learned it—a shrunken-faced old man whose funeral clothes bagged on him. We compared him with his wife, a short fat lady who sat a few feet from his casket, and decided that Albert’s wife had precipitated his demise by refusing to share her food. For her part, Mrs. Schuss was pleased to see us: she seemed to think we were distant nephews.
When we returned to the proper chapel, I found myself caught in the dour gaze of Grandma’s brother, my great-uncle Martin. Despite their humor and love of song, the Irish have a tendency to moroseness, indeed they revel in it; some would say the pursuit of lugubriousness is a national mission no less important than the cause of Irish Freedom, and there is in each Irish family one person who gives himself over fully to the development of this ancient and honored Celtic trait. Uncle Martin’s long solitary life had given so fine an edge to his fatalism that his presence at a party was feared, like snow at Easter.
Not a cynic so much as a professional grumbler, he believed—so I had learned both from eavesdropping on my relatives and from Uncle Martin’s unprompted ruminations—that the world had come steadily unraveled since the days of the ancient Greeks, that most of the miracles in the Bible were exaggerated or sanitized—for example, he believed that Moses had indeed parted the Red Sea but that the ensuing flood had killed not only Pharaoh’s Army but a good portion of the Israelites, in particular the aged, the slow, and the obese—and that the earth would be hit at any moment by a comet.
Now he stared at me as though I had been found wanting, and when I met his gaze he jerked his head in the direction of the caskets.
“Not much of a wake, is it.”
“It’s not?”
“Well, it’s fine for the way they do them now.” He gave me a sad look. “Ah, you’re too young to know the difference. In my day, we had wakes. We knew how to give the deceased a fitting send-off, you see. That’s the purpose, after all, to show the dead what you thought of them. My father’s wake lasted four days. This was in the Old Country, of course, not here in the land of the Income Tax and the Board of Health. At least if we had a Board of Health, I never knew about it. We held our wakes in the home of the deceased.”
I shot a quick look in the direction of the caskets and tried to picture them in Grandma’s house. This seemed inexpressibly bizarre, and he read my expression.
“Oh, now, we didn’t keep them there forever, lest they go a bit ripe on you, but we showed them their proper respect and after you got used to the fact that they didn’t say anything, why they were lovely company. And this provided the mourners with an opportunity to speak their feelings to ’em, you see. They’d relax with a bit of nice whiskey and work up the nerve to talk to them.”
“To the dead people?”
“Well, who else? But here in America where we’re supposed to be free but still wear the yoke of servitude, why it’s against the law to hold the wake of your kin in his own house, and would you mind telling me where the sense of that is?”
I couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t really want to be interrupted. He went into the next stage of his soliloquy, growing wistful.
“It wasn’t always this way. We had our freedom at one time. When I first came here, in 1911, there was no income tax. There’s a godless idea, lad, taxing the workingman’s wages. Then there was Prohibition.” He snorted, then paused for the sake of drama and nodded to me. “Prohibition, that great evil that fell upon the land, and we all fought it, all the people, it was grand how we all rose up.”
His face grew serious, he could have been speaking of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Post Office or of Charles Parnell, but I believe he was remembering the days when he and my grandfather had attempted to sell gin concocted in the family bathtub, and a thin, cloudy whiskey that Uncle Frank had devised in the garage behind his rooming house, Uncle Frank’s commercial ambitions unfettered by the fact that he was a policeman. It was this ill-advised venture into the world of business that earned Uncle Martin the title of “The Old Reprobate” from my grandma, his sensible sister. He was “The Old Reprobate” and Uncle Frank, who seemed to bring disaster or violence wherever he went, was “The Great Ninny” to his sister.
“It would peel the skin off your arm,” I’d heard Grandma say about Uncle Martin’s bathtub product. “It would melt your eyeballs. People nearly died of it.”
“Oh, they did not,” Uncle Martin would say, and Grandma would just say “Billy Fahey” and nod confidently.
Uncle Martin would swallow and look away with a nervous light in his eye, and eventually say, “That was just a coincidence: he always had a bad gut.”
Once or twice I’d heard them argue this way and she’d mutter about the repulsiveness of drinking something brewed in a common bathtub. When he said it was just fine, she’d say, “Do you drink your bathwater then, Martin? What would our mother have said?”
This would end the debate: the mention of their mother, dead under the sod of County Leitrim more than thirty years, was enough to silence any argument, bring quiet and calm, and I’d heard how my grandmother once, when they were all young, had stopped a fierce brawl outside the drugstore up on Clybourn by this magical incantation. No one else ever brought her up: the use of their mother’s name seemed a trump card available only to Grandma.
Uncle Tom rescued me from Martin with a wave. I went and stood beside him and watched him greet people, even people he didn’t remember. Among these people was a wizened woman I’d never seen before who nodded to us and moved on into the funeral parlor.
“Oh, Christ,” Tom said.
“Who is that lady?”
“Nobody knows, kid. She just shows up at funerals.” And in truth, during the course of my life I was to see her at a dozen or more funerals, her presence always both amusing and vaguely reassuring to me, like a tired but beloved joke.
The high point, if there could be said to be one at a funeral, was the appearance of the MacReady sisters, both of them, including Betty who had long been rumored to be dying. She did not seem to me to be dying or even contemplating it: like her sister Mary, she was hugely rotund, talkative, loud, and aggressive. They were a year apart yet so remarkably alike that they were often referred to in family circles as “the twins,” though I once heard Uncle Mike refer to them as “the battlewagons.” The reference had confused me.
“Oh, here we go,” Mike said.
Tom nodded and I heard him mutter, “Okay, this is just what we needed.”
The MacReady sisters marched together into the funeral parlor, followed at a respectable distance by Joe Collins, Mary’s confused-looking husband—said by my uncles to be the stupidest person in the United States—and Uncle Mike muttered, “The fleet must be in, ’cause there’s the Iowa and the Missouri,” and I could see the resemblance to twin battleships, as they steamed through the mourners and forced a parting of the crowd. They wore matching, tentlike blue coats and twin pillbox hats—Mary’s was adorned by a single dangling flower, while her sister’s had none. In addition to their sizable presence, they brought noise to my parents’ funeral, like a benign wind, and I saw amusement and anticipation on many of the faces around me.
My grandfather exchanged a quick happy look with my uncles, Grandma rolled her eyes (they were her second cousins) and the sisters fell upon the happy crowd, engulfing one and all in their massive embrace. They spoke at the same time and in loud barks, chattered and called to people across the parlor, and the wake grew festive in spite of itself.
When I least expected it, they turned to me and I heard Uncle Tom whisper, “No matter what they do, smile. And don’t try to outrun ’em.”
I did as I was told, though it was difficult. They both reminded me of the loud, mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. They squeezed me, savaged my hair, patted me on the head, picked me up, and, inevitably, kissed me, leaving my entire right cheek dripping and lipstick-covered. I shot a glance at my cousin Matt and his wide-eyed horror confirmed my worst fears of how it had looked. Aunt Mary gave me another squeeze and just when I thought my breastbone would cave in, she let me go. The sisters then went on up to the caskets where there was a tense moment as they put a shoulder into one another for space on the kneeler, causing some to fear an outbreak of fisticuffs. Eventually they came to some amicable division of space and proceeded to sob quietly together. Joe Collins stood a respectful distance behind them and looked uneasy.
“Why does Aunt Mary’s husband walk behind her all the time?” I asked Tom.
“He knows it’s safer back there.”
Toward the end of the evening I fell asleep in a chair and Tom took me home and put me to bed.
The following morning they took me to the funeral. At the funeral home the priest led us in prayers, and when they closed my mother’s casket, Grandma Flynn gave in to her grief and sobbed so heartbreakingly I thought she’d die there. It was the deepest, truest expression of grief I’d yet seen in life, and I was horrified. People moved to comfort her but Aunt Anne, my shy, slender Aunt Anne, just shouldered her way to her mother and put a consoling arm around her. Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike stood on either side of me and took turns murmuring, “It’s all right, people cry at funerals,” but for the rest of the day I wondered if my grandmother, too, was going to die. A few feet away, Grandma Dorsey stood red-eyed but quiet, flanked by my aunts Mollie and Ellen, and looking small and very old.
At some point they all found people to greet and I found myself standing apart from any of them. I looked around the big, crowded parlor of the funeral home and realized my Aunt Mollie was standing a few feet away, watching me.
She smiled but like most of the others she had been crying and her cheeks were still wet, and she had a tissue crushed into one hand. I didn’t know what to say to her so I waved, and she came over and hugged me.
“It’ll be all right, sweetheart. It just doesn’t seem like it right now.” She gazed from me to the casket where her favorite brother lay and just shook her head.
After the mass, I rode with my uncles to the cemetery and watched as they gave Grandma Dorsey the flag that had been draped over my father’s casket in honor of his Navy service. When we were done there, we all returned to Grandma Flynn’s house and I experienced my first true Irish wake, that is to say, I attended a party. There was food enough to supply the Chinese Army, and liquor, and my grandmother counted herself lucky to have a home after my cousins and I were finished with it.
But it was to survive this and many other traumas in its time, my grandmother’s house, just as it had born the hurts of wind and weather, and a small fire that had given some wayward self-taught architect an excuse to tack on a questionable extension: a piece that seemed to butt itself into the rear of the big house as if the two had collided. No matter how one viewed it, my grandparents’ house was a singular place, unlike anything else in the neighborhood, a great rambling, drafty, flaking mass of wood that had come together around the time of the Chicago Fire, a frame beehive of rooms and closets and corners, turrets and cupolas and porches, a house that time had passed by. But it sat boldly at the corner of Clybourn and Leavitt and gave itself airs beside a triangular lot owned by someone else, a patch of land given over to weeds and insects and the occasional mouse. My grandparents did not own it, but rented it from a former neighbor who had moved to Evanston.
Whatever its age and tortured provenance, it was the biggest house on the street. A recent repainting in bone white had left it a gleaming relic, and I thought it palatial. At times I played out on the wide porch and pretended it was a castle, and in my imagination, I named it the Castle of the Flynns, and it became a tribal stronghold replete with dungeons and moat and battlements. My grandfather once told me it was haunted, and on more than one summer night I peered into darkened rooms in hopes of espying a ghost.
And on the day of my parents’ funeral, this Castle of the Flynns was assailed from all sides by the two families and their retinues.
My grandfather cranked his Victrola and played fiddle music and after a few shots tried to dance to it. Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin joined him, but my grandmother stopped them when Frank fell over a table and just missed sailing out the open window. A bit later an argument erupted between the MacReady sisters, so that I thought they might wrestle, and my grandmother commissioned her brothers to intervene, which they did by dragging the massive ladies out onto the dining room floor for a primeval version of a fox trot. The four of them bumped and lurched around the dining room like continents colliding, and the rest of us, Dorseys and Flynns, perhaps from relief that we hadn’t been asked to dance with them, formed a tight circle round them and clapped.
The rest of the evening was marked by loud talking, they all talked at the same time, and by their music, which they insisted on singing with, and by smoke, they smoked, all the men and half the women, Luckies and Chesterfields and Camels, unfiltered, of course, for a filter was something in a car engine.
By eleven o’clock the last of the guests had been bundled into cars or cabs and the house grew quiet at last. It was the latest I’d stayed up in years, and I fell asleep on my grandmother’s living room sofa.
The Council (#ulink_90b98e91-ce9f-54bc-938a-e496a8c099e3)
Two days later some of those guests reconvened at Grandma’s house, for what could only be called a council, involving a dozen or so of my relatives—Grandma and Grandpa Flynn and their three surviving children, and about half of the Dorseys, including Grandma Dorsey, her bachelor son Gerald, her son James and his fiancée Gail, her daughters Ellen and Mollie and of course Teresa, the nun.
The subject of the council was me, not that anyone said it in so many words, but they all gave me long looks when they clomped in from the wooden porch, as though getting a fresh fix on me, reminding themselves what I was all about. For the first time, I saw that I made them uncomfortable, and several of them looked away quickly when our eyes met. My excitement at seeing all these adults and being at my grandmother’s house was soon dampened both by these uneasy glances and by the mordant atmosphere both sides brought to this table. The wake was over, this was life. I was a reminder, after all, of the deaths of two beloved young people, and it had already dawned on me that I was something of a burden, perhaps even a liability.
If I had any doubt what this meeting was to be about, it was soon dispelled when my grandma herded them all into the yellow-painted kitchen and told me to stay in the front of the house and play. She gave me a little wink and a bottle of Pepsi—a clear bribe, and the fact that it came without a glass meant it was an afterthought: she was nervous. I waited a respectable thirty seconds or so to give them a chance to get started and then crept into the dining room and crawled under the table, from where I could hear ninety percent of their conversation.
It was a tearful meeting, and once or twice I heard raised voices, always quickly hushed by Grandma Flynn barking out, “Hush up, will you, the boy’ll hear you!” in a voice that would have been heard in the second balcony at Chicago Stadium.
Their talk wandered as they tried to avoid the inevitable, but ultimately Grandma grabbed them and pulled them back to earth. In the end it was decided that no single one of them could be expected to carry this new weight.
On the Dorsey side, Aunt Ellen had three of her own, and her husband, my Uncle Roy, was dead. Uncle Gerald was a confirmed bachelor, Mollie was still single, James was about to marry, and my Uncle Joe and his wife Loretta had their hands full—they had Bernie and his sister Dorothy, and David, a child with cerebral palsy, and I now learned that an orphan was considered a similar sort of burden, for I heard someone say “they have trouble enough already.”
When Matt’s parents—my Uncle Dennis and Aunt Mary Jane—were mentioned, I heard my Grandma Flynn quickly say, “Oh, no, no, the poor things.” Someone agreed that they were in “money trouble,” but I had heard a different kind of trouble in my grandmother’s voice, my first intimation that there was something about Matt’s house that I knew nothing of.
In the end it was decided that they would all share the responsibility. I would live with the Flynns. On certain days of the week, my Grandmother Dorsey would take care of me; on other days, I’d be in the care of Grandpa Flynn. On weekends, my Uncle Tom would help out, as would my Uncle Mike. The married ones expressed their determination to do what they could, to take me out to spend time with my cousins on occasion and give the others a break. I was to live, though, with Grandma and Grandpa Flynn, which also meant with Uncles Tom and Mike and Aunt Anne.
There had been some talk of my moving in with Grandma Dorsey and, had the deal turned out differently, I might have had an entirely different life, for Grandma Dorsey was a quiet, passive woman worn down by decades of life with the late Grandpa Dorsey, a difficult man who had led his family through disasters beyond my ability to comprehend.
I had heard more than one remark proposing beatification for Grandma Dorsey by virtue of having survived life with Grandpa Dorsey, or, as Grandma Flynn put it, “for not putting an end to that one and tossing the body in the river.” It was clear to me that, had Grandma Flynn been espoused to Grandpa Dorsey, it would have been a short, stormy marriage, and would have ended badly for the husband.
That night, as I went to bed, I said a small prayer of thanks to God for making me so popular that my relatives felt they had to share me. Half a dozen of them were still out there in the yellow kitchen, relaxed now that a decision of sorts had been made and most of them had dodged this strange new bullet. They cracked open a couple of quarts of Sieben’s beer and chatted. The talk turned to the two young ones they’d just buried, and once or twice I heard their voices break, but eventually my uncles took over with funny stories about my mother and father, and then it sounded like a party. I sat up on one elbow and listened to it all. Their voices were reassuring to me: I was literally surrounded by people who would take care of me.
It proved to be the only night in a period of almost five months that I felt reassured about anything. By the following night, when the “conference” with its party atmosphere had already begun to blend into the blurred tangle of recent events, the new terror that I’d come to know at bedtime had returned. I cocooned myself in the covers, burrowed beneath the fat old pillow I’d inherited—it had been my mother’s, Grandma told me—and wept. The night after my parents had died, I’d fought sleep for hours, convinced that if I closed my eyes I’d die during the night. Each night the fear returned, and though I gradually came to realize I wasn’t going to pass away in my sleep, I became convinced that I lived an unprotected life, that I had lost a sort of mystical shield afforded to each child at the outset of life, and that the love of these grandparents, uncles, and aunts was a poor substitute for the genuine article.
During those first few weeks I spent a great deal of time in small dark places: closets, darkened rooms, under tables. I drew pictures of my parents, dozens of them, scores of them each week—pictures in pencil and pen and in crayon, pictures of my parents and me at the park, at the zoo, in Wisconsin Dells where we’d gone the summer my baby brother Johnny had died, at Riverview, at home eating dinner. I crawled under my grandmother’s table and drew them obsessively, and one day when I came home from a walk with my grandfather, my Uncle Tom was looking at them with my grandmother. Her eyes were red and she was shaking her head. He looked at me curiously, and I realized he wasn’t concerned with the implicit sadness in the drawings.
“You drew all these, Danny?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know you could draw. Can your friends draw like this?”
I shook my head. His reaction puzzled me: it was a well-known fact in school that no one drew as well, but no one ran as fast as Jimmy Kaszak, and Theodore Renzi could play the accordion. As an afterthought I mentioned that Michael Neely could draw airplanes but not people. He nodded.
“You draw what you feel like drawing, kiddo, but next time you draw something besides your … you know, besides people, let me see ’em.”
“Sure,” I said, and thought no more of it.
Sometime later, I saw a movie on television about explorers in some jungle place where there were still dinosaurs. These were particularly inept explorers, inasmuch as the dinosaurs stomped, chewed, or gored the majority of them, and I fell in love with dinosaurs on the spot. Aunt Anne took me to the crowded library that occupied one wing of the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse and I took out all the books on dinosaurs, then spent the rest of that week drawing them. One evening I found my uncles passing my drawings back and forth and shaking their heads.
They noticed me simultaneously.
Uncle Mike frowned up at me. “You trace these, right, Danny?”
“No. We don’t have any good tracing paper.”
“Freehand he does ’em all,” Tom said. “Freehand.”
Uncle Mike’s gaze went from the drawings to me again. “Seven years old and he draws better than I do.” I didn’t see his point: anyone drew better than Uncle Mike.
A scene from that time stands out. I was drawing at my grandmother’s kitchen table and my Uncle Tom was sitting across from me nursing a cup of tea. He twirled the cup gently in the saucer as was his habit, occasionally glancing at my drawing, once or twice shaking his head as my picture took shape and color.
“You’re good, kiddo. That must be fun,” he said, and I remember looking up at him in surprise. He caught my look and just said, “Takes your mind off things, I bet.”
I nodded but just to please him. For of course it took my mind off nothing, I could draw and pay almost no attention to the drawing or the process. I went back to my picture, secretly watching Tom as he sipped his cold tea and stared off into space, thinking about whatever it was he wished he could take his mind off.
The first weeks were awkward, filled with moments that frightened me, that made me wonder if the whole group of them together would be competent to do what my mother had done largely unaided. I needed haircuts, shoes, new summer clothes, in the fall I’d need school pants, shots for school, I’d outgrown my winter coat, and none of them seemed to have a clear idea where or when to provide these things—I once overheard my Uncle Tom and Grandma trying to figure out the best place to buy my clothes for the upcoming school year.
“I know she liked Wieboldt’s better than Goldblatt’s,” my uncle said in a musing tone.
“But Goldblatt’s has cheaper clothes for the little ones,” Grandma pointed out. “I used to take her there and we’d watch the old ladies in the babushkas fight over things in the bargain basement, she thought that was so funny.” She sounded as though her voice was about to break, and he said “Ma,” in a pleading tone, and then she was herself again. “But she wouldn’t go to either of them for shoes, I know that. You can take him to Flagg Brothers, or Father and Son.”
They had little conferences about everything, I caught them talking about my clothes, my playmates, about who would take me to the zoo or the movies or a ballgame, and the little talks always ended with one or the other of them making assurances that everything would be taken care of, that they’d do the best they could. But their efforts were not reassuring to me: they had no idea how my mother and I spent my summer days, they’d have no clue about my daily schedule when I came home from school, no notion that I went over to Jamie Orsini’s house at least once a week, and that my mother and I went to the library at Hamlin Park on Wednesday afternoons, and at times it seemed that the loss of my parents had also robbed me of all the little things that had made up my life. I watched their awkward attempts to do what was needed and grew furious with them all.
One evening after dinner I hid in the farthest corner of my room and cried. My grandmother found me and wanted to know what was wrong, and I felt foolish explaining that on warm nights like this one my mother would take me for a walk and buy me a Popsicle from a little man with a pushcart.
Uncle Mike loomed in the doorway behind her, looking concerned and puzzled. “You want a Popsicle, pal, is that all? Is that why he’s crying?” he asked, and I hated him.
I don’t know what I did or said, but my grandmother just shook her head.
“No, no, it’s not the Popsicle. It’s the … it’s what he did, you know. It’s the walk and the Popsicle.” She got up and tried to brush wrinkles from a lap rich with them. “The walk and the Popsicle and his mother is what he misses. Well, I wouldn’t mind a walk and a Popsicle. Come on, sweetheart,” she said, holding out her hand. Tears were beginning to form at the edges of her eyes, but she blinked at them and cleared her throat, as though she was about to deliver one of her orations, but all she said, in a tired, preoccupied voice, was, “I like the banana ones.”
One night I woke with a bloody nose, and before I’d cleared the sleep from my eyes there were all ’round me in a terrifying Tolstoyan death scene, a wall of my adults, Anne and Tom and Mike and my grandfather, all of them looking as though they were watching an execution.
“Oh, God,” Aunt Anne said, as though she’d seen God.
“Bejesus,” Grandpa said, “will you look at that.”
“There’s blood all over the bed,” Michael pointed out, and my Uncle Tom was telling me to take it easy when I thought I already was taking it easy, and then my grandmother shouldered her way through the circle and took me by the hand.
“Whattya think, Ma, does he need a doctor?” Uncle Tom asked.
“For the love of God, it’s a bloody nose, not cancer. It’s no more than all of you had, and more than once.” Reassured and delighted by the attention, I grinned at all of them and thought my uncles might faint.
On another occasion, after a movie and ice cream with Uncle Tom, I began vomiting in his car. My mess was bright red and chunk-filled, and I wondered if I would die of it.
“Jesus Christ,” Uncle Tom said, and gave a hard jerk on the steering wheel that sent me flying into the door of the car. He drove me directly to the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I was born and where I would now, apparently, die, and carried me in with a wild-eyed look of panic that had me on the verge of tears.
A man sat on a chair, holding one injured hand in the other, and a worried-looking couple stood at a desk, waiting, I believe, to have a baby.
A harried nurse put a hand on my head, muttered, “No fever,” sniffed at the mess on my shirt and gave my uncle a look that might have drawn blood.
“Pop,” she said. “It’s pop, and God-knows-what-else.” She eyed me and said, “What else?”
“Popcorn and a Mounds bar and Raisinettes. And ice cream.”
She gave Uncle Tom the evil eye again and said, “You’re not his father, are you.”
It was a statement rather than a question, and Tom just shook his head, then said, “Uncle.”
“Figures. I can tell you don’t have kids yet, Charlie.” She disappeared into a side room, emerged with a wet towel and cleaned me up. Then she told Uncle Tom, “Take him home, give him lukewarm water or apple juice or a little applesauce.” Then she looked at me. “Next time this guy takes you to a movie, don’t eat so much junk, you hear?”
I Discover Adult Supervision (#ulink_ba317eae-2e95-576a-93c8-3156faea04d4)
My grandmother ruled the Castle of the Flynns, but of all of them, the person who was to become my caretaker, putting his unlikely mark on me during that uncertain first summer without parents was not my grandmother, who still worked five days a week, but my grandfather, forced by a bad heart to take an early retirement from the streetcars. I had little idea what “a bad heart” meant, though I noticed that he walked slowly and liked a nap in the afternoon, and it seemed these might be the manifestations of such a condition. Nor did I see significance or connection in his frequent coughing and the pack of Camels that never seemed far from his hand.
In hindsight I feel a special compassion for him: it was to him that the task fell of acclimating me to my new life. My grandmother worked at a knitting mill on North Avenue “for that pirate, that buccaneer,” as she called her employer—correctly predicting that he would one day take his mail in a cell. My uncles both had jobs, Aunt Anne worked as well and was little more than a teenager.
Thus it transpired that my initial baby-sitter/playmate/surrogate parent was my grandfather, Patrick Flynn. Not that he was new to my company: for a time my mother had worked and Grandpa Flynn had occasionally been my baby-sitter then as well. He was a tall, sad-faced man who asked little of life and whose quiet mien disguised his sense of humor. He walked with one hand in his slacks pocket at a stately pace, like Fred Astaire in slow motion. When he pulled a face or wanted to be comical, he could make himself look like Stan Laurel, and I told him so frequently. He was fifty-eight the year I moved into their home, though in the photographs he looks older.
It was from Grandpa Flynn that I learned about buses and streetcars, boxers and baseball players, of the age and breadth and complexity of the city beyond Clybourn Avenue. He was fond of Irish music, and sometimes on cool afternoons I sat beside him in the living room as he put his old hard plastic 78s on the black Victrola in the living room and gave the machine a few cranks. Frequently these were humorous records, most of them recording the continuing adventures of a man named Casey: “Casey at the Doctor,” “Casey at the Dentist,” etc.
At other times, he listened to music, music filled with fiddles and tin whistles and pipes, and if the mood hit him, he danced, though his dancing wouldn’t have been obvious to an outside observer, for he shuffled his feet slowly, with no hope of keeping time with the music. He also grinned a great deal, which is actually how I knew he was dancing. When he was truly filled with the music, he would yank me to my feet and make me join him, going in slow motion through the steps ’til I had a vague idea what I was supposed to do. He taught me the jig, at least his abridged version, and something called a hornpipe, which he said was a sailor’s dance.
He was also a natural storyteller, that is to say, a shameless liar. He related tales from his youth and embellished them ’til they shone like the Greek myths, narrated the unlikely adventures of his brothers-in-law Martin and Frank and made them seem like Abbot and Costello. He spoke of the Old Country and filled me with fascination and terror: fascination when he told me of half-human selkies and the “little people” who, he contended, lived no farther from his native village than I lived from Riverview; terror when he spoke of ghosts and banshees and undead entities that populated the moody landscapes and roamed the gray skies—Ireland seemed to hold more unearthly beings than people. He also spun outrageous tales of his own indigent boyhood, the tasks to which his hard-working parents had set him on their farm or, when he was having fun with me, “on the fishing boat out on the wide ocean, in all harsh weather,” though a glance at the map would have told me Leitrim’s water was primarily bogs and rivers, and the odd small lake.
He claimed that the Irish had less food than anyone on earth, less even than the Chinese for whom we prayed in school, and were reduced to eating little else but potatoes, though the English were said to have worse notions about what one could eat: he claimed they were fond of the white, mushy fat on bacon and that they ate it uncooked, with yellow mustard.
“Which,” he would say, “explains a great deal about them, you see.”
I see now that he was a simple man. Left to his own designs he would have passed his leisure listening to his records or roaming the city on streetcars to the very end of time, stopping for the occasional shot and beer in a cool, dark neighborhood tavern, and watching baseball or boxing on television—which he considered the great wonder of the age. Nuclear power did not impress him and he would have thought the computer the spawn of the devil, but television seemed to him the nation’s gift to the man without means.
In our now-permanent association, we found we had things to learn about each other. There were times when he liked to listen to the news on the radio and did not want to be bothered. If I came babbling into the room at such moments, he would wave an impatient hand, always holding a cigarette, commanding me to be silent, and I would slink back to where I came from, my feelings bruised. He soon learned that when I was in the midst of one of my all-day drawings, filled with dinosaurs or knights in bloody battle, I was reluctant to join him on one of his long bus rides, and at first he took this personally.
We also had to learn how to communicate. Once in a while, when he didn’t want to talk to certain callers, he would ask me to answer the noisy phone in the kitchen, and he wasn’t very specific about what to say.
One morning when he was listening to his music and I was drawing at the dining room table, the phone rang. He looked up at the wall clock and said, “That’s Gillis, that crazy fool. Eleven o’clock and he’s drinking.” Gillis was a loud drunk, as annoying an adult as I was to meet in my childhood, and my grandfather didn’t much relish the thought of an afternoon in Gillis’s company. So he had me answer the phone.
“What should I say, Grandpa?”
“Tell him anything. Just tell him I’m not here. And tell him I’m not going to be here—for the foreseeable future.” He seemed pleased with this last part and laughed to himself.
I found this message puzzling and didn’t for a moment think Mr. Gillis would accept it, especially from a boy not yet eight years old, so I manufactured a more logical reason for my Grandfather’s inability to come to the phone.
I took a deep breath, swallowed, picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”
It was Mr. Gillis, and he asked for Grandpa.
“He’s dead.”
“What?” the voice squawked into my ear.
“He’s dead.”
“But I just saw him yesterday.”
“He died today.”
“What did he die of, for God’s sake?”
“Ammonia,” I said with confidence, for I had heard of many people dying of ammonia, and my grandmother always warned me that this killer illness would take me if I didn’t wear a hat on cold days.
Mr. Gillis was speechless, and I took the opportunity to say “Good-bye,” and hang up on him. When I told Grandpa what I’d done, he was as speechless as Gillis, and then he began to tell me what an outlandish thing I’d done. When he recounted the moment to my grandmother and Uncle Tom that afternoon, he laughed himself breathless, laughed ’til he’d started one of his long coughing episodes. I couldn’t have been more confused, but I enjoyed the boisterous moment after dinner when a delegation from Miska’s tavern came over to pay their respects and make inquiries about my Grandpa’s sudden passing.
Several weeks later I was left alone in the house on an afternoon when all the adults were working and Grandpa, who had been coughing more than normal, had to go in for mysterious medical tests. There was no one to watch me, and my grandparents gave me instructions in the most urgent tone that I was to let no one into the house, no one, “Not even the Pope,” my grandfather said, ’til one of my uncles came home. I took this injunction as I took all things verbal: literally.
I sat calmly in the silent house with the chain on the front and back doors, holding onto my instructions like a remnant of the True Cross, and drew a large, elaborate picture on my special drawing paper.
And when my Aunt Mollie Dorsey, pressed into service as a last-minute baby-sitter, knocked on the door, I refused to let her in. She certainly wasn’t the Pope, and my instructions were clear. She was a sweet-tempered young woman with an unusual sense of humor and a laugh to match, high and joyous, and when it became clear to her that she would not cross that threshold ’til an adult Flynn came home to let her in, she settled herself on the porch and we had a fine chat through the locked door.
Several times that afternoon I heard her burst out laughing though I could not have said what was so funny. I kept her there for two-and-a-half hours and had to spend the greater part of the next two days listening to both sides of my family giving one another different versions of the story. The consensus seemed to be that I was a good boy but bereft of plain sense, and one had to be careful what one said to me.
On the whole, though, the time I was to spend with Grandpa that first summer without my parents provided me with some reassurance: we did the same kinds of things we had always done together, nothing had changed, at least about these times. My days with him tended to the nomadic: as a retired streetcar conductor, he was entitled to a lifetime of free rides on any of Chicago’s transportation systems, whether El train, streetcar, or bus, and he seemed to know every single driver or conductor we ever met—they all called him “Pat” or “Irish.”
Sometimes we rode the troublesome trolley buses that ran hooked to a dark tangle of overhead wires: a trolley that came loose from its wire could snarl the traffic to all the points of the compass for a half hour. On our rides, we took a window seat near the driver. Some of them would let me have stacks of unused transfers and the transfer punch they used, and I’d sit and clip and punch away ’til I was covered in bus-transfer confetti, all the while listening to Grandpa and the old-timers joke and trade tales of the old days, of blizzards and great storms that shut down the city, and fights, and men with razors and guns.
We scoured the city: he took me down to Haymarket Square where he knew a Greek who ran a produce company, and they fed me strawberries while they talked. Sometimes we went to visit his friend Herb, an embattled instructor at the Moler Barber College. This was a small institution on West Madison Street that took in young men of dubious dexterity, ostensibly to turn them into barbers. Sometimes Grandpa got a haircut or shave, and on rare occasions he let them cut my hair, though my grandmother would raise hell with what they did to my head. These were, after all, young men who merely wanted to be barbers.
My mother had still been alive the first time Grandpa had taken me to the barber college for a haircut, and the nervous young barber-in-training had shorn me too close on one side. I was amused by the bizarreness of it but my mother had shrieked when she saw me.
“Good God,” she’d said. “What happened to his hair?”
“It’s only a haircut,” Grandpa said.
“It’s all bare on one side. My God, Dad, what did they use, an axe?”
“They’re just young fellas learning, and it only costs a dime there,” he argued.
“Oh, honey, they butchered you,” my mother said, looking at me ruefully. I was puzzled by her reaction: my religion books were peopled by monks with tonsure, and I fancied that I resembled the Norman knights in my book about England. I also wanted to tell her I’d gotten off easily: while I was there, another incipient barber had cut a man’s ear with the straight razor and made him howl with the clippers.
Sometimes Grandpa took me to Hamlin Park and watched me play, sitting on a long bench painted a sickly green and chatting with men his age. At such times I believed the world was overrun with old men. When it rained, we settled for a visit to his friends at the firehouse on Barry, and they let me climb all over the pumper truck while they shot the breeze.
He was not perfect. In a family burdened by a love of drink, he was as troubled as any, and as the terrifying prospect of endless leisure opened its dark maw to him, he had developed a more urgent need to drink, even though such a course was bound to involve him in almost constant conflict with my grandmother, which contest he would necessarily, inevitably, lose.
He took me to taverns and bought me cokes with maraschino cherries in them, and little flat boxes of stick pretzels. When she came home from the knitting mill, my grandmother would ask me what we had done all day and I would announce that we spent the whole afternoon in a saloon, and she would upbraid my grandpa in a shrill voice.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in a tavern, Pat? You have to take the boy into a tavern? What on God’s earth is on your mind, taking him into those filthy places?”
Her tone troubled me, as did her obvious anger with my beloved Grandpa, but what was most vexing was her sudden renunciation of taverns, since I knew the two of them went on occasion to a tavern on a Saturday evening and more than once I’d heard them come home singing.
One night he stayed out later than usual, and when he returned, his face was flushed and he was sporting a ridiculous-looking smile and a gash over one eye. He had fallen on the sidewalk. She took him into the bathroom to clean him up, assailing him all the while with her opinion of the low estate to which he had fallen. She called him names, questioned his sense, and generally laid down a barrage of verbal artillery that had my head spinning, and I wasn’t even the object of the assault. When he’d been patched up, he made his way to the kitchen and sank onto his accustomed chair, where he lit up a Camel and stared out the window, drumming tar-stained fingers on the table as Grandma continued the evening’s homily. Finally, he turned and squinted at her and caught her in mid-sentence with “Bejesus, woman, will you shut up!”
Of all the many avenues open to him, this was not his best. I would have pretended to collapse on the table, for example, or claimed stomach trouble and scurried back to the bathroom. But he told her to shut up. And she hit him with a pan. It was a large black cast iron skillet she used for bacon and eggs and to create the little lake of rendered lard that was required before she could make chicken or pork chops. She took hold of it in both hands and whacked him on top of his head.
Amazingly, it made a loud “bong,” as if this were a scene in a Popeye cartoon. He winced, rubbed his head, and puffed on the cigarette. She replaced the pan and left the room, red-faced and teary with anger. For the rest of the evening they said nothing to each other, but after they put me to bed, I was aware that they sat together in the living room watching a show with Julius LaRosa, one of their favorites.
She was vigilant about my budding morals and questioned me about the places where Grandpa took me. Often we went to visit what she called “his cronies” in the neighborhood: a blind man named George who fed me caramels that he kept in a bowl in front of him. I was fascinated by George, for Grandpa had once told me that George had lost his sight in the ’20s when a hoodlum had tossed acid in his face. The attack had been a mistake, the acid meant for another man. We also visited a little round Italian man in the projects named Tony. He made his own wine, either in his tub or in the basement, and frequently sent a bottle of it home with us as a sop to Grandma. And we went to taverns.
He considered himself something of a sharpie but was no match for her. Once when I was perhaps six, after we’d spent a lovely afternoon in a cool, dark tavern, him watching the ballgame and me playing with the saloonkeeper’s new litter of dalmatian pups, he coached me on what to say to Grandma’s interrogation.
“Don’t tell her we went to a tavern.”
“But we did.”
“Oh, sure, but you can say we visited Gerry. We did see Gerry, didn’t we?”
“Yes. He was in the tavern.”
“There you have it.”
And so, when she came home from the knitting mill, she asked me what we’d done and I announced that we’d visited Gerry. “Did you go to the tavern?” she asked, and when I said, “No,” she quietly asked if I’d been able to play with the new Dalmatian puppies at the tavern, to which I answered, “Yes, I got to play with them all afternoon.” It was this and similar experiences which taught me that in this lifelong contest, he might hope to outlast her, but he was no match for her as a tactician.
At times, to avoid dragging me into godless places, my grandpa took to bringing home his liquor, usually pint or half-pint bottles of wine or bourbon. When finished, he would hide the bottles, and it was his choice of hiding place that sometimes made me doubt his sanity. An empty bottle might find itself under the cushion of the big red armchair in the living room, or under one of the sofa cushions, or behind a vase on a shelf in the dining room, and once he hid his spent bottle inside the body of the Victrola.
It is plain that on some level he intended her to find the bottles—“Dead soldiers,” he called the empties—that they were his shiny glass emblems of defiance, a skull-and-crossbones trail to show he was still running his own life, when of course illness and boredom had taken it over. So she found his little bottles effortlessly, and each discovery produced a scene that might have been scripted.
“What is this?” she would say, holding the bottle by two fingers like a dead rat and staring at it as though she’d never seen one before.
“Oh, now what does it look like?” he would mutter, looking at the television.
“You’ve been drinking this poison again.”
“No,” he would say. “That’s an old one.”
“I reversed the cushion on this chair last week, and this filthy thing wasn’t there then.”
“Well, I don’t remember when I drank it. I’m not even sure it’s mine,” he would say with a shrug.
“And whose is it, then? Mine?”
And my grandfather would turn to me and give me a long, slow squint, and this would set her off.
“Oh, for the love of God, you know very well it’s not his,” she would say, and march off to the kitchen, and then it was her turn to mutter, a couple of people who had learned to communicate both directly and indirectly after thirty years of unarmed conflict. “A moron I’ve chosen to live my life with,” she would say, “an amadan I’ve got for a husband, without the sense to come in out of the rain, pouring poison down his throat and dragging a tiny boy along with him.”
There would follow the sound of the bottle being tossed violently into the garbage can.
“A brainless idiot I’m joined to for life,” she’d say loudly.
Still facing the television screen he would mutter something like, “A little drink never hurt anybody I know,” and she would hear it, as she was intended to, the softness of his voice notwithstanding, and this would launch her like a missile into a short but violent burst of anger and general name-calling, a performance that would in Shakespeare’s day have earned her the title of Village Scold.
And then she would be all right. A few minutes would pass, marked by the sounds and smells of Grandma putting dinner together, and after allowing her a short while to calm down, my grandfather would call out, “What’s for dinner?”
“God knows you don’t deserve one.”
“Probably not, but I’d like to know anyway.”
“Pork chops and boiled potatoes.”
He would nod, pleased with the answer, and I would nod along with him. She was making good things, and that meant she wasn’t holding a grudge.
Good things they were, always, she could cook anything and make it taste like food on a picnic, but it was not necessarily the menu a doctor would have put together. The salient characteristic of my grandmother’s cooking was lard. “Shortening” she called it, but it was lard, lard from a can the size of a man’s head, thick and white with the consistency of new-poured cement, and when it had melted into a pool an inch thick in the big black skillet, she would drop in the pork chops, or the chicken, or the hamburgers. If necessary, she cooked eggs in it, though she clearly felt that the ideal medium for the cooking of eggs was the grease from a half-pound of bacon.
She wasn’t trying to kill him: she was just a farm girl from the simplest part of the old country, where a breakfast or dinner that “stuck to your ribs” was more than a colorful expression. Once I saw her drop my grandfather’s toast in the bacon grease. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but she left it there and when it was soaked through, she slapped it on his plate.
“A little grease makes your insides work,” she once told me, thus giving me the notion that lard was the culinary equivalent of a good thick motor oil and suggesting to me that Grandpa was probably healthier than he looked. For his part, however, the old man frequently claimed that after one of her breakfasts he often lost the feeling in his lower legs.
A typical dinner was chicken or pork chops, potatoes, sometimes soup, a vegetable. And jello. In the years we were together she served me jello perhaps two thousand times, and it was always lemon: perhaps she found the color soothing, or had heard lemon jello had magical properties, so that was what we had. With dinner they split a quart of Meister Bräu, and indulged in the fantasy that this small quantity of beer was my grandfather’s “ration,” ignoring the fact that he’d put away a half-pint of Jim Beam earlier in the afternoon.
She made me drink milk, except on Saturdays when she gave me Pepsi-Cola. Fried pork chops, boiled potatoes, green beans, lemon jello, Pepsi. To this day, if I’m served pork chops I expect it to be followed by lemon jello, and I can’t think of any of these things, can’t taste them, without thinking of my grandmother.
Each morning when I awoke she was already up and dressed for work and tending to the needs of “the two simple-minded children that live in my poor house.” She made us sandwiches for lunch, wrapping them in a thick waxed paper, and fixed “eggnog” for him in a tall glass. It appeared to be sugar and a raw egg in a glass of milk, and after it had set a while, the contents separated into layers. Grandpa would hold it up to the light and peer at it, then shake his head.
“Oh, look at that, would you? Something in there’s moving.”
Then he would stir it and drink half of it down at a swallow, gasping afterward.
“Is it like the eggnog we have at Christmas?” I asked him once.
“Good God, no.” He stared at his eggnog and spoke in a stage whisper, “She tries to poison me.” Then he pretended to have a brilliant idea. “Here, Danny-boy, do you want it?”
I told him I had cereal, and I did, multi-colored balls of cereal that went soggy in milk and dyed it the colors of spumoni ice cream. In any case, I had no need for this glass of milk with disgusting elements of raw egg floating around in it. For his part, he seemed to find my little soggy bits of cereal repellent, and frequently I’d find him grimacing as I fished for the last shapeless bits swimming in the now-colored milk.
After she went to work, I’d play or read and he would smoke Camels at the kitchen table—a practice that seemed to be a male responsibility in most households: my uncles all did it and I remembered seeing my father sitting at our kitchen table smoking and staring out the window.
In the afternoons we went on our trips, and when we came back, he would settle in under the glow of a couple of snorts and take a short nap. As he slept, I would explore the house, unfettered by an adult hand. I went through my grandparents’ drawers and studied old photographs, read old mail, explored the dark recesses of Uncle Tom’s closet and the dresser where Uncle Mike kept magazines with pictures of girls without clothes. I understood that these magazines had something to do with sex and that I mustn’t look at them, and so I rooted them out like a termite on old wood. I went through my uncles’ pockets in search of scandal and found loose change, scraps of paper, work-related notes, receipts. I crept into the pantry and drank Log Cabin syrup straight from the little tin chimney atop the painted cabin, I spooned honey straight from the jar, I tried wine, which I found acridly repulsive, purloined hard candy from a hidden jar, stuck a greedy finger into the raspberry reserves and, finally, I sank my exploratory fangs into the wax fruit on grandma’s living room table. It was, like most wax, tasteless, and I was surprised that anything so colorful as her wax peach could be so bland. I tried to smooth out the toothmarks and set the peach back in the bowl, then bit into the wax grapes, in case the peach had been set out as a decoy.
Eventually, she was to find the tooth marks, and it happened when I was in the next room, in the dining room, where I had covered the entire dinner table with my toy soldiers. From the corner of my eye I saw her bend over the glass bowl and freeze and I shot her a quick glance. She was holding the wax peach and staring at it open-mouthed. Then she glanced from it to me with the look that she’d probably have used if I’d told her I’d gone dancing naked down Clybourn. In the end, she replaced the peach, bite marks down, and said nothing. As she walked into the kitchen, she was shaking her head.
And on another lazy afternoon in my company, my grandfather set fire to the couch.
He had nodded off with a Camel between his tobacco-stained fingers and I was playing a few feet away on the living room floor with my soldiers. I had noticed the cigarette but was still convinced at that stage of life that adults normally knew what they were doing. A while later, I saw that his hand had dropped down and loosened its grip, and the cigarette was now directly on Grandma’s sofa, her lovely flowered sofa, the prize of her living room, the cigarette coal in the center of one of the cushions. As I watched, the cigarette burned a small hole into the cushion, and then the hole grew a bright thin orange glow, and this tiny layer of fire began to eat at the sides of the hole ’til it was the size of a baseball.
I began to get nervous—not for my own safety, for thought I could outrun the fire, but for Grandpa’s: I feared that my grandmother would kill him. I remember the growing panic in my heart and then I went over to wake him: it took me several minutes and when I finally got him to open one eye, I pointed to what his wayward cigarette had done.
He bounced up like a cartoon character and stared at the burning circle for a moment, and then said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m a dead man.”
Then he began to beat at it with his hands. He could do that, beat out fire with his hands, because of something that had happened to him all those years of standing in the open doorway of a streetcar in the cold. He’d lost some of the feeling in his fingertips, and I’d seen him put out matches and unused cigarettes by casually squeezing matchhead or coal between thumb and forefinger. Now he beat at the offending flame and sent me for a glass of water, and I had to go twice because I spilled the first glass on my shirt.
When the fire was out, the room heavy with the acrid smell of wet, burnt cloth, we sat there on either side of the accusing hole. My grandfather coughed and made an irritated gesture of waving away smoke that I couldn’t see. Grandpa didn’t speak, he just kept sighing. Finally, we got up and he flipped the cushion so the hole was hidden. Then he looked at me.
“Don’t tell your grandma, or we’ll both be dead men.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were here.”
“But I don’t smoke.”
“It won’t make a bit of difference. She’ll say you were my accomplice. We’re in this together. If she finds out, there’ll be no corner of the earth where we’ll be safe.”
For weeks my grandfather attempted to hide the problem from her by the simple expedient of sitting on the sofa whenever she was home. He spent hours at a time in that one spot, as though he’d become melded to it. I tried to hold up my end of the bargain, planting myself on the sofa when he left it unguarded, but eventually she wore us down.
He was in the bathroom and I was on the wounded cushion, and she came in and announced that she needed to reverse the cushions. She asked me to get up and I feigned first deafness and then an ignorance of English, and she finally grabbed me and pulled me off the sofa. I made it as far as the door to my bedroom before I heard the sudden gasp that told me she’d found the hole.
For a moment it seemed that the power of speech had left her: she made a strangled squawking sound, like an aggrieved duck.
“Oh, what’s he gone and done now? I’ll brain him,” she said between clenched teeth, and then touched the hole as though she could heal it with her fingers. She let the cushion drop, then turned slowly to look for one of us, and found me. Her voice had snared me in the doorway and paralyzed me like wasp-sting, and I found myself uttering silent prayers to St. Joseph in his function as Patron Saint of a Happy Death. I wasn’t holding out for a happy passing, just a quick one, and then she advanced across the room like Rommel’s tanks. Her eyes, normally a soft brown, were red. No, they were glowing.
“You did that to my sofa?”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “I don’t even smoke!”
And then she smiled. “Ah,” she said. That was all she said, but it was a lot. She said “Ah” the way Hannibal probably said it when he caught the Romans at Cannae. She said “Ah” and I said a prayer for the lost soul of my grandfather.
He came out of the bathroom humming, and when he saw the hot coals in Grandma’s eyes the song died young in his throat. He looked from her to me, understood what had happened, wet his lips, and prayed for sudden eloquence or the timely intervention of the Deity.
Their conversation, if anything so one-sided can be called that, is a blur to me, though his mistakes were apparent even to a seven-year-old—the first was the old “What sofa?” routine, the second, his attempt to look puzzled, which instead made him look very stupid and seemed to vex her all the more. She rained invective on him, mixing insults with expressions of disbelief and frequently invoking Jesus or Mary or the other saints, including St. Jude whom she addressed as the Patron of Lost Causes since she was “certainly married to one.”
Much of this oration was English though there were a few words in Gaelic, and when she was done, he was pale and I could have sworn he was shorter. She left the room and went into the kitchen to bang pots and pans together, and he sank onto the armchair, pulled out his smokes, thought better of it, and jammed them back into his pocket.
I asked him if he was all right. He looked at me with his mournful Stan Laurel eyes and shook his head. “My life is over.”
She refused to eat with us that night, waiting ’til we were done before entering the kitchen. The next morning, she made and wrapped our sandwiches for lunch and fixed his eggnog and said nothing ’til she was leaving. At the door, she gave him a long look and said, “Burn a piece of my furniture today, Patrick Flynn, and we’ll need the priest.”
My grandfather just nodded and looked like a man who’s received the governor’s pardon. For several weeks after that, she found no empty liquor bottles in the dark recesses of her home, and he kept his visits to the tavern down to the minimum necessary to sustain life.
More than once I heard them arguing over his cough, his smoking, and there was a different tone to these fights. My grandmother seldom raised her voice in these discussions, my grandfather sounded frustrated rather than irritated, and they kept their voices low, as though these times were somehow private.
Gradually I came to understand that my grandfather’s afternoon naps, especially those after a couple of drinks, provided me with an almost perfect freedom: nothing woke him at these times, and it was a short jump from my rummaging through the drawers and cupboards of the house to the realization that I might do more. Shortly after the incident with the couch, I went out alone. I slipped out the back, left the screen door resting against a shoe, and went out into the alley that ran behind the house.
It was a narrow filthy place of cracked pavement with wide holes that collected a brownish oily water after a hard rain and bred mosquitoes. Garbage spilled out of small metal cans and fed mice and, on more interesting occasions, rats. We were just a few blocks from the river, and the neighborhood drew them, and on that first foray on my own, I found a dead one. I poked at it with a stick, gingerly as if it might revive itself. The body was already stiff, and something made me plunge the stick into it.
From the alley I made my way through the neighborhood, pausing at the small playground across from my house, delighted that I alone was unaccompanied by an adult. When I noticed a woman on a bench frowning my way, I left.
I was probably gone no more than twenty minutes, but I felt I’d been adventurous, I’d done something on my own, I had a secret. And when I returned to find Grandpa still sleeping, I experienced a sudden feeling of excitement, as though I’d won a victory over him.
I did little on these excursions but wander the neighborhood, and I returned each time filled with the sense of my own cleverness. Most times I stayed where I was supposed to be, but on certain afternoons I seemed to need the adventure and its attendant risks and rewards.
Most of all, I delighted in this secret that I kept from all of my family.
One evening my grandmother returned from the drug store and fixed me with an odd look. She said nothing to me but later I heard her whispering in the kitchen to my Aunt Anne, and when I went to bed that night she told me I must always make certain someone knew where I was.
Another Tribe Altogether (#ulink_a000baa5-2faf-52f4-afd3-9f7cf1493409)
My father’s clan, the Dorseys, were a tougher sort of people than my mother’s, having survived not only a greater degree of poverty, but life with Grandpa Dorsey. Though I knew they were my family, I thought of them as Matt’s people, and the Flynns as mine. They lived, the better part of them, clustered around Old Town, a neighborhood already aging at the time of the Great Fire. The Dorseys had been there since the turn of the century, when a teenage John Dorsey, my grandfather, had first come up from Peoria to make his mark in the big town, working first as a laborer.
He met and married my grandmother around 1909 or 1910 when both were in their early twenties; they settled somewhere around Division and Sedgwick, married and raised a brood straight out of a Victorian novel, eleven children in all. At one time, all of them were shoehorned into a basement flat on Goethe. Two of her children had died young; a daughter had been born severely retarded and was in a sanitarium, and no one spoke of her.
There was more than twenty years difference in age between the oldest child living, a daughter named Ellen, and the youngest, my Aunt Mollie (Grandma Dorsey had given birth to her at the age of forty-three, and people spoke of Grandma as though she were fecundity personified).
Grandpa Dorsey’s death at sixty-six from a heart attack had come as a surprise to no one. If anything, people were awed that his perennial abuse of his body and occasional consorting with people of a dark, hard type hadn’t put endmarks to him long before this. He was said to have been quick-tempered, ambitious, smart, flighty, a dreamer; tireless, cocky, irrepressible, a Good-time Charlie trying to hit one of life’s trifectas.
All my life I was to hear tales of him. He’d had his own construction business at twenty-two, a fleet of three dozen cabs on the eve of the Depression, he owned a pair of buildings on Wells Street—all of this gone like dandelion fluff within two years of the crash. He got up onto his feet almost immediately, there was apparently no job he wouldn’t take to make a few nickels: his later résumé would have read like a litany of all the day-labor jobs available in the country.
I don’t know what kind of money it would have taken in the Depression to raise a house of nine children, but whatever it was, Grandpa Dorsey didn’t have it, he was never able to climb back to where he’d been. They moved almost every year between 1932 and 1941, frequently to avoid an eviction. On one occasion he coldcocked the sheriff’s man coming with the papers, just to buy them time to drag their belongings up the alley to another place.
I once listened to Uncle Gerald reminiscing about the whole bunch of them, spread out in a long line from their old flat to the newest one, usually no more than a block away, moving from Scott to Schiller, Schiller to Goethe, Goethe to Evergreen, Evergreen to Wells, damp basements to drafty storefronts to attics turned overnight into housing by a couple of men with saws and hammers; a procession of Dorseys, the eldest carrying boxes, bags, and cheap furniture and the youngest pulling toy wagons filled with the family’s possessions.
They were perennially poor, their home always crowded; their luck seldom held for more than a year, their lives made complicated by the mercurial nature of the person at the head of the household. I remembered him vaguely as a man with an energetic manner who spoke to me as though he had seen so many like me that he didn’t have much time to be impressed—which, in fairness, was true: he’d seen enough of his own. What I remember most about Grandpa Dorsey was his eyes: they were unusually bright, almost feverish, as if he couldn’t wait to get on with his next adventure in life. Many things about him fascinated me, not least of which was the fact that he was the sole adult who took no particular interest in me. He died about the same time my brother did.
My Grandma Flynn found it hard to speak of Grandpa Dorsey without a little snarl of contempt creeping into her voice, and my uncles spoke of him in terms that mixed wonder with disapproval. No one could explain clearly to me where his fortune had all gone, but gone it was. I once heard Tom and Mike talking about him in that low murmur adults resort to when they’re being secretive but too lazy to whisper, and it seemed to me that they were hinting that gambling was at the bottom of some of it, and what he hadn’t lost on the ponies and the fights he’d lost to the Depression. I did not yet fully understand the Depression, nor do many people, in my estimation. As nearly as I could understand, the Depression was for some the equivalent of a hurricane that blows up along the coast and knocks people’s lives and fortunes into the drink. My grand-father had apparently been a victim of this sort of bad luck, and had compounded the tragedy by creating more of his own.
I have wondered about him often through the years, not because of any closeness between us—there was none to speak of—but because of the mark he left on my hard-luck Aunt Mary Jane, and through her to my cousin Matt. I’d heard them say that Mary Jane had “a heart of gold and not as much sense as God gave sheep”—Grandma Flynn’s words. Grandma also once said that Matt was “his grandfather come back to try life one more time,” and the note in her voice said that this was something that boded well for no one.
But once or twice a week I stayed with Grandma Dorsey. I loved my visits there—she expected even less of me than the other side of the family did, and since she wasn’t working in a knitting mill she had time for other things: that is to say, she baked. She was a short, rotund woman, much older than the grandparents I lived with, who had at some early, difficult time in her life with John Dorsey decided to take a sunny view of the world. That world had done its best to shake her loose of this notion, but she persisted in her humble happiness. She delighted in a house crowded with people, and she loved to cook. She baked constantly and in large amounts and very well. She hummed when she baked, snacked on the dough, tossed odd scraps of it and failed cookies to her dog, a great unwashed collie named “King,” and filled her kitchen with smells that I don’t expect to encounter again ’til the afterlife.
At this time she was already in her late sixties—it was hinted that she’d even lied about her age to Grandpa—and the rearing of her small army of children plus her adventures with Grandpa had worn her down, so that her idea of childcare was what a modern educator might have called “unstructured.” In short, she didn’t really know what to do with me, and often didn’t know where I was. Her most common recourse was to provide me with surplus kitchen utensils and send me outside to dig for treasure. The flat was the ground floor of a red brick building on Evergreen right next to the El tracks: her “yard” was the dank muddy expanse beneath the steel skeleton of the tracks. It was frequently muddy, and it was into this material that I dug and tunneled, frequently producing great mounds of black dirt that I later turned into forts and buildings that she marveled at.
Her apartment bore the scar tissue of a long, crowded life, and to an inquisitive child, it was a place of delight, a packrat’s nest. I’d once heard my father tell my mother that Grandma Dorsey hadn’t thrown away anything since the turn of the century, and this seemed a bald statement of fact: her flat was a jumble of furniture and knickknacks and improbable objects that either she or my late grandfather had found reason to keep, including toys, magazines, jars, boxes, bottles, tin cans, and for some unfathomable reason, bottle caps. She also seemed to have coasters from every saloon her husband had ever frequented, and I played with these in great stacks.
It also smelled. Like most children, I did not mind the world’s smells, not yet having developed the finicky notions of the adult world, so that today when I encounter those smells, the odors of damp, rotting plaster, ancient wood, primeval wallpaper, dirty rugs, I am nostalgic. These were the smells of a happy place, a place further associated in my mind with her baking, with the odd old toys she was always dragging out of a closet for me, with the generally hedonistic experience of being a seven-year-old boy unutterably spoiled by his grandmother.
I would play on the floor of her small musty living room or crowd her kitchen table with homemade lead soldiers that had belonged to my father and his brothers before him, and from time to time she’d steal a glance at me over her shoulder as she baked or cooked—often she’d make soup or stew or spaghetti sauce enough to feed half a dozen people, with the understanding, no, the hope that one or more of her brood would drop by.
A docile, patient woman who hummed more than she spoke—Grandma Flynn said this was the result of a lifetime of speaking to a wayward husband ’til she was breathless—Grandma Dorsey seldom had much to say to me beyond questions about what I needed and whether I was hungry. I learned early on that the answer to this latter question was always “yes” and it brought swift rewards unknown in the house where I lived. Later, one or another of my uncles or aunts on that Dorsey side might stop by to chat or see how she was, and she’d feed them, and on some nights there were three or four unexpected but perfectly welcome visitors in her kitchen, all of her issue. They were happy to see me, they thought I was just what she needed during the day to keep from going soft mentally, and they liked me, every one of them, but they had grown up in a crowd and most of them were in the process of creating their own, and I was not the center of the universe that I was in the Flynn house.
Late that summer I began to see my cousin Matt at Grandma’s house on a regular basis. Aunt Mary Jane had gotten a job downtown at The Fair store, and so he spent most of his days in the care of Grandma Dorsey. Some weeks I was there more than once, and so Matt and I came to count on seeing one another.
He was a handsome boy, blond and hazel-eyed and wild and cheerful, physically gifted where I was clumsy, confident where I was shy. He was adventurous and restless and I thought he was a sort of paradigm of boyhood. With his rough self-assurance, he seemed somehow older to me, so that I had found not only a perfect companion but an older brother. I wished I had his looks, his laugh, his voice, I became irritated with the clothes my late mother had burdened me with, for they weren’t like Mart’s. I wore saddle shoes to church and he had red gym shoes, he wore blue jeans—the first time I asked Grandma Flynn for blue jeans she said I’d wear them “over your grandmother’s lifeless corpse.” For his part, Matt thought I was funny: he was not verbally gifted, had trouble expressing himself at times, and had no memory for jokes. And if ever I was to meet a boy who needed to laugh, it was Matthew.
I fed him jokes and one-liners I’d heard from Milton Berle or Sid Caesar on television and had him gasping for breath. I wished we were brothers, and once told another boy that we were.
It was critical that he liked me: he was everything I wanted to be, and more than anything else, he had what I had already lost. He could pepper his conversation with indifferent mentions of his father and casual references to his mother. He had parents whom he saw every day, who took care of him and bought him things, and I didn’t quite believe that what I had measured up. I lived with old people, and no matter how I admired him, Uncle Tom was not my father, and I was already aware of their collective difficulty in anticipating the needs of a small boy. Once Matt made a reference to his mother and father fighting: he sounded angry with both of them, he spoke as though he hated his home, and I wondered what there could be about a home with a mother and father that would make a boy sound that way.
Under Grandma Dorsey’s attitude of Optimistic Permissiveness, my days with Matt were an unending adventure. She had a groundless belief in our basic common sense and judgment. Also since there were two of us, she felt we were safe, and so we were allowed to explore “the block”—which we took as license to roam the entire North Side.
We spent whole days in Lincoln Park, roaming the great sprawling park from north to south, from the prehistoric ridge of Clark Street to the lake itself. The park was a wilder, darker place then, with more trees and heavy clumps of dense bushes and undergrowth, and an enterprising child could find a thousand places to hide.
Statues made their home in the park, it teemed with them, and we sought them out, puzzled over their names and then just clambered over them, LaSalle and Shakespeare and Linneaus, Hans Christian Andersen and the great seated Lincoln behind the Historical Society. We threw stones at the ducks in the lagoon, tried to spook the zoo animals or their attendants, and once made off with the bucket of fish that were about to be fed to the penguins, then stood at the side of the lagoon and threw fish chunks at the young couples in the slow-moving rowboats. We crouched in the little underpasses and listened to the strange echoing sounds of our voices, climbed the high hill at the edge of the lagoon to visit the statue of General Grant; we hid in the underbrush to spy on lovers, tried to push each other into the lagoon, rolled in the grass.
Children are fascinated with the dead, and so we always sought out the graves. The land for Lincoln Park had been reclaimed from cemeteries, the old City Cemetery and several others, and when these graveyards had been relocated in the nineteenth century in an attempt to put an end to malaria epidemics, a few of the unfortunate—or lucky, depending on one’s view of a corpse’s inalienable rights—deceased had been left behind. The city admits, now as then, only to three, though the park doubtlessly rests on the bones of hundreds of early Chicagoans of all races, particularly the poor.
Foremost of these Abandoned Dead were the Couch brothers, Ira and James, resting for all time in the lone tomb left after this crepuscular relocation, a gray mausoleum just north of the Historical Society.
We would creep up to the tomb—you could get at it then, touch it, climb on it, leave your initials, anything short of entering it to visit Ira and James, and it was always a high point of our park excursions. We worked feverishly to figure out a way to get inside but failed, though Matt was certain we’d eventually crack it. “When we get older, we’ll be smarter,” went his reasoning.
The other dead man was said to be buried closer to Clark Street and now enjoys quiet celebrity due to a plaque indicating his presence in the nether regions just below the horseshoe pits: this second dead man was David Kennison, the last known survivor of the Boston Tea Party, who had lived more than fifty years after that momentous piece of public lawlessness to end his days in the swamp town at the junction of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.
On occasion we entered the Historical Society itself and viewed with awe the reassembled cabin where Abraham Lincoln had spent part of his childhood, and the items taken from his pockets the night of his death. I was fascinated by these things and developed the belief, shared only with Matt, that if Lincoln’s former home and cherished belongings lived in this old building, then the spirit of Abe himself couldn’t be far away.
From the park we would go to the big red-brick mansion where the Cardinal lived and where, my cousin assured me, the Pope stayed when he was in Chicago on vacation; we prowled shops and gangways in Old Town and ventured west across Orleans into the projects. I found these little treks with Matt almost as interesting as my Wednesdays with Uncle Tom, especially as there was an element of danger present in his company: Matt seemed to delight in antagonizing other boys, he could spot a group of kids on a street corner—white kids or black, it made no difference to him—and say something in five seconds that would have all of them chasing us with blood in their eyes.
Once or twice they caught us, these unsuspecting boys, some of them several years older than we, and then Matt stunned us all by popping one of them in the mouth and taking off before anyone could react. He was quick and devious, and I never saw a sign of fear, though once a taller boy was getting the better of him and Matt, sobbing through gritted teeth, went so crazy, punching and clawing and kicking, that the older boy let him go and took off running. I was to see Matt fight a number of times as we got older, and to see his anger often, though rarely directed at me.
Most of the time, though, we just explored that part of the city, from Old Town to the outer edge of the Loop, from the projects to the lake. Soon we took on followers, three or four of the kids from Grandma Dorsey’s block. They liked me well enough but were drawn to Matt: when he wasn’t bent on provoking fights with large groups of strangers, he was actually a good companion. Every group needs a child who looks beyond the normal activities and routines, who sees in odd things possibilities for recreation, if not criminal malfeasance, and Matt served in that capacity for us. He was not only adventurous but imaginative, and his peculiar obsession was with gates and bars and barriers, which he read as the adult world’s personal challenges to children, sufficient to generate an immediate and urgent need for transgression.
We scoured the city, climbed roofs and roamed cobblestone alleys—most of the old alleys in those days and a good number of the sidestreets in Chicago were still surfaced with smooth red bricks that were picturesque but hell on car tires. We investigated porches and basements, jumped fences and even broke into the odd building.
Once we came upon a tall, weathered frame building that looked very much like a farm building, a relic perhaps of the days when that section of the city had been unreclaimed prairie. It had the big double doors of a barn and leaned to one side, as though gravity were about to tip it over. Matt took one look at it and decided it was a national treasure.
“It’s a hundred years old.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell. The wood’s all gray, and they don’t build buildings like this no more. Let’s go in.”
“We’ll get in trouble,” I said.
He looked at me as though I’d drooled on my chest.
“No, we won’t. The guy who owned this is dead, or he would have painted it.”
This seemed air-tight logic to me, and I told him I was in.
The building sat on a corner lot, surrounded on both sides by what we always called “prairies”—unused vacant lots given over to weeds and prairie flowers sometimes four or five feet high, and thick as the bristles on a brush. Rabbits and mice lived in these places, and small snakes, you could lose or hide things in them, and Matt contended that a dead man had been found in one near his house but no one believed him.
Grandma Dorsey had begun giving me my father’s old Hardy Boy mysteries, and I realized that I was poised at the onset of exactly the type of adventure that Frank and Joe Hardy seemed to have every week. Thus the locked doors of the old barn gave me no pause: the Hardy Boys were forever breaking-and-entering in the name of adventure. Besides, to this day I have no idea where we were but it was a strange neighborhood, and a crowd of small boys far from their homes quickly lose what little moral restraint they have acquired. We bought Matt’s line of reasoning without hesitation. Rooting around in the high grass like a scavenger tribe, we found a rotten log and, using this as a battering ram, Matt and I and a boy named Terry Logan pounded at the ancient planking near the back of the building until it caved in with a dry crack. We pulled the shattered plank away and without hesitation crawled in.
A billion specks of dust hung suspended in the bar of gold light from the hole we’d just made, and the rest was darkness. We were vaguely aware of a large dark shape in the center a few feet away but it wasn’t ’til our eyes had adjusted to the darkness that we realized it was a car. It was unlike any car I was familiar with, tall and boxy and odd, and I realize now that it was probably one of the old ungainly cars from the 1920s. More important to us than its strange silhouette were the thick cobwebs that hung from it and dangled from what few corners of the old barn we could see. Matt drew a finger through the dust along the door of the car, then looked up and squinted into the dark.
“There’s something up there,” he said, and my heart sank but I followed him to the back, where we found a brittle wooden staircase that moved from side to side as the three of us climbed up. “Up” led to a loft that seemed to run along all four sides of the building. It was narrow and crowded with boxes and long or bulky objects that we could not see but which made each step an adventure. At one point Terry Logan almost fell out of the loft, and afterwards I could hear his fevered, terrified breathing.
“Ain’t this a ball?” Matt asked at one point, and I almost laughed aloud at Terry’s unconvincing, “Sure is.”
“Prob’ly spiders up here,” Matt said with undisguised joy.
At the front we found a sort of window, matted with fifty years of dust and filth, which Matt kicked in after only a second’s moral debate, our earlier assault on the wall having made him a hardened second-story man. Sunlight, blinding sunlight, shot through the hole. Now that we could see around us, the barn lost none of its mystique: we could see old farm tools, ploughs and scythes and a pile of old wood-handled drills, and Matt thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
“This place is great, this is unbelievable. These are from Civil War times I bet.”
“Maybe older,” I suggested, and we had a brief three-way debate on whether there had been a Chicago before the Civil War, with the others insisting that there hadn’t been, and me holding to a position that Chicago was even older than New York.
Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up very close by. We scampered down the staircase, and I was struck by a wave of terror that did not abate even when I tumbled the last three steps and landed on my back with Terry Logan on top of me. Matt was already out the hole. When we emerged into what seemed to be a sun that had moved closer in our absence, we saw a man staring at us. I have since seen shock on many faces, but never, before or since, have I seen shock so perfect, so total, as this man watched three small boys issue from his property through a hole of their own making. His mouth was open and his eyes unnaturally wide, and when he finally spoke, his voice was just a whisper.
“You little bastards!” he said, and then I heard Matt giggle and knew our adventure was entering a new phase. Matt headed through the prairie, instinctively seeking an equalizer for the man’s long legs and finding one in the thick weeds. Terry and I followed with our hearts battering through our chests. I was by turns horrified that my life was about to end in a foreign place where no one knew me, and delighted that we were having an adventure which involved a potentially violent adult who rained profanity on us with a vigor I’d never before experienced. This man had none of the imagination I’d noted among my uncles and some others, but the vehemence with which he cursed us was admirable and made one overlook his lack of a vocabulary.
As I ran through weeds head-high, I could hear the man behind us, panting and still cursing, and I realized I was laughing, and so was Matt. Then I fell. I caught my foot in the tangled stems of the weeds and went down, certain that my life had come to a sorry end. For a while I lay there, holding my breath and peering up at the blue sky with one eye, expecting the tall weeds to part at any moment and reveal the drooling, maniacal face of the cursing man, who would then kill me. He tramped heavily through the grass, gasping now, and then I heard a heavy thud and a groan.
For just a frozen moment in time I lay there wondering if this was the first manifestation in my young life of that most widely debated of creatures, the Guardian Angel. Had my personal angel grabbed the Cursing Man by an ankle, or given him a hard push to send him face-first into the weeds, or just created a sudden and short-lived hole for the Cursing Man to step into? For a second I worried that My Angel had struck the man dead, but even in my nascent and often bizarre theology there was little place for the concept of Guardian-Angel-as-Personal-Assassin. Whatever had happened, I was grateful and eventually remembered that the continuation of my life depended on my escape. I bounded to my feet and took off.
Matt and Terry were waiting for me at the mouth of an alley a block away; Terry was saucer-eyed with fright and Matt had gone pale under his constant sunburn, not because he’d been afraid of being caught himself but because he’d envisioned going home to tell my grandmother he’d gotten me killed or sent to prison.
“Hi, you guys,” I said in my breeziest manner.
“Did he get you?” Terry asked.
“Nah. I got by him without him seeing me. I fell though,” I added, feeling that I had to account for my tardy arrival. Matt gave me a look that mixed relief and disapproval, and we all made for home at a brisk trot.
Later that day I tried in a circuitous way to find out whether Matt believed in angels. It was a mistake. He stared at me for a moment with a look halfway between skepticism and irritation.
Then he said simply, “There’s no angels. I don’t believe in none of that. That’s make-believe.” Something in his face and tone told me that his angel had had more than one opportunity to show up, and hadn’t.
Riverview (#ulink_b99c6b19-019b-552b-83a0-d45609a7cf7f)
Looking back at the summer of 1954, my first summer with my grandparents, I can see all the stages but I am unable to make out the seams, as one time blends into another, but I’m certain that within a month of trial-and-error they’d managed to resurrect as much of my old routine as could be expected.
In the afternoons I played with a boy up Clybourn named Ricky or my schoolmate Jamie Orsini. My days were full, each one reflecting the determination of the adults around me to make up for what they saw as a great yawning hole in my life, and I have little recollection of afternoons spent moping or mourning.
I seemed to have inherited many more layers of supervision than I thought necessary, and that unlike my late mother, who was willing on occasion to let me walk up the street to a playmate’s house, my grandparents tended to believe I’d been abducted if I was gone for more than two hours. I sometimes overheard them fretting over the gloriously rudderless Tuesdays I spent at Grandma Dorsey’s in Matt’s company. As I was to learn later, they feared Matt’s influence on me, and they spoke often of Grandma Dorsey’s “frailty,” though in truth she was solid as an anvil, just not particularly adept at the supervision of small boys.
My nights were another matter: once they were all asleep, all shut up in their little cells in the hive, I lay in bed and told myself I was a lost boy, a child without family. I reminded myself that they all slept in rooms where they’d slept for years, that I alone was a newcomer, and I felt alien and unguarded. I listened to the sounds in my grandparents’ house, sounds probably not much different from the sleeping sounds and night noises of my late parents’ home, the sounds of creaking wood and loose windowpanes, a cat mousing under the porch, and transformed these simple night noises into ghosts and bats, and danger on two legs. The street sounds were no better, the wind roared and the high calls of the nighthawks unnerved me, and cats fighting sounded like babies left out in an alley.
Sometimes I caught snatches of conversation from people walking home from Riverview or a night in a Belmont Avenue tavern: in the isolation of my dark little room their voices seemed louder than they probably were, harsher, even threatening, they were coming up the stairs for me and I’d have no time to wake someone. For the first couple of months with my grandparents, I stayed awake so long at night I was able to convince myself that I never really slept. Once I made the mistake of sharing this remarkable fact with my grandfather, who simply raised his eyebrows and said I seemed to be sleeping when he came in to check on me each night.
A new fear came to me, for having been visited early on by death, I had come to be obsessed with it. These dark moments in the middle of the night soon accommodated a new worry, that my new family would all die as those before them had.
The first time this thought struck me, I fought it down, but it returned on other nights and soon took on a knotty logic. I had more than once entertained the notion that the loss of my parents was in some way a punishment. At first I could not have said what I was being punished for, though I believe such notions are common to children who suffer a sudden tragedy. I was in some way a bad boy who had been found out and punished. This early feeling of guilt subsided in the face of my more practical concerns and worries about my new life, but now, in the middle of these solitary nights, it found me once more and terrified me. It seemed clear and logical that my family, grandparents, uncles, and aunt, would all perish as my punishment for the many bad things I had done. And where my previous notion had simply been that I was “bad” in some nebulous way, I now saw myself as a child turning to evil. I saw a boy who crept about the house and went where he was told not to go, opened drawers belonging to adults, sampled what he liked in the pantry, and even stole out of the house on his own. I saw a boy who had joined in with his wild cousin to do things for which swift punishment was merited, a boy who broke into barns and climbed roofs, and I saw worst of all a boy who had begun to feel and then to demonstrate in strange ways his anger at his relatives. Such a boy, it seemed to me in the middle of the night, such a boy could expect a terrible punishment. On more than one of these occasions I cried and prayed to God not to take any of them unless He planned to take me as well. In the mornings I vowed to change, but my plans for the defeat of evil were always thwarted by stronger impulses. Gradually the fears and feelings of guilt left me for a time and I thought I was through with them. In reality, they were simply growing tentacles and horns.
In the evenings we often went out as a group, whoever happened to be home, setting in place patterns that would last for summers to come. We went to Hamlin park and had ice cream bars and Popsicles or to church carnivals, or best of all, to Riverview. To Riverview, the ancient amusement park that sprawled along the river in the heart of the old neighborhood like a walled country of smoke and noise and seemed to be telling me, “Here anything can happen, and it probably will.” It was unlike anything I was ever to see again, part amusement park, part dance hall, part circus, acres upon acres of wooden hills and towers that always seemed too frail to support the metal cars, trains, and rockets they carried, let alone the raucous crowds who squeezed into them. To a child’s eye, it was the whole gaseous adult world writ large: noisy and smoky, the air thick with tobacco smoke and cooking smoke and burnt fuel and steam, cotton candy and popcorn and women’s perfume and the dense mystery of odors that wafted from the beer garden. Attractions were found here to show up the sentimental, the silly, the dark side of the world.
There were rides to terrify the hardiest of street boys, fun houses and parachutes and nearly a dozen roller coasters: the Bobs, the Greyhound, the Silver Flash, the Comet, the Fireball.
And noise, always noise, the clackety racket of the coasters as they pulled stolidly to the tops of the hills just before dropping fifty or sixty feet to the undying terror of the riders, music, laughter, the happy background screams of the people dropping through the sky on the Para-Chutes. Men yelling to one another, kids shouting, the sideshow barker with a voice like a klaxon that reached you long before you could see him.
There were reminders here, too, of my parents: we’d come here often, and one summer my father had worked the gate, two nights a week, to make extra money. On those nights, we got in free, and I felt like a minor celebrity.
In the summer, Riverview took over a child’s consciousness. It lay at the place where Clybourn Avenue dead-ended just before the river, and when the sun was high overhead I could see the park up the street, shimmering in the whitish glare like a magic kingdom, something that might be gone in a high wind.
On hot dull afternoons, my friends and I lay under the trees in Hamlin Park and spun lies and folktales about the rides: that a boy had died of fright on the Bobs, that a man had pushed his wife out of the Greyhound, that lovers had taken a long suicidal dive from the topmost car of the Ferris Wheel, that a child exactly our age had tumbled from the Comet and been sliced like summer sausage beneath the coaster’s wheels.
We repeated overheard fragments of adult conversation, embellished them, improved them, stretched them to their proper size and gave them new form: fights became brawls, muggings became murders. A purse snatching became robbery at gunpoint. None of us had yet been allowed to go into the Freak House, and so it too became fodder for our imaginations: the “tallest man in the world” became ten feet tall, the fat lady had to be rolled into the park, the fire-eater farted flames. Matt said there was a child inside who was actually half-wolf, and my own contribution was the two-headed man, whom I claimed to have seen any number of times. I said he looked like Buster Crabbe, on both of his faces.
And on the hottest nights it seemed as if my entire world had conspired to show up at Riverview. I entered with my family and promptly ran into friends, neighbors, cousins, other uncles and aunts, schoolmates. Everyone had ride coupons they didn’t need: I had extras of the Ferris Wheel and the neighbors up the street always seemed to have extra coupons for the Greyhound or the Comet, and I never tired of riding them. But more than the free coupons, I learned to watch the crowd for familiar faces, to wait for the old creaking park to pull its little surprises on me.
To a child obsessed with his place in the world, Riverview sent me constant reminders that in fact I’d inherited a great tangle of family that could pop up anywhere, and that my neighborhood literally had no end. One night my uncles took me and I was delighted to see Grandma Dorsey and Aunt Ellen and her children; another time I was standing in line waiting to get on the Bobs when someone slapped me on the back of my head. I spun around to find my cousin Matt grinning at me.
On still another evening, an unearthly shadow seemed to fall upon me, only me of all the people standing in line for the most nightmarish coaster of them all, the Bobs: I turned to find my Aunt Teresa, now Sister Fidelity, beaming down at me. I was intimidated by the good sister, blood ties or no, not only by her billowy habit but by her lovely face as well, and I didn’t want any of the other kids to see me talking to a nun. I smiled and wished that I had a hole I could crawl into, or that her new assignment among the poor on the West Side could begin immediately. A few feet back, I could see two of my schoolmates, eyeballs bulging, their schoolboy assumption being that I had done something wrong and that a nun had come all the way to Riverview to bring me to justice. She asked me how my summer was going and then admitted that she didn’t like to ride a roller coaster by herself.
“If I die,” she said, “no one will be able to tell Grandma Dorsey.” I knew I would never die on a roller coaster, but I had no such confidence in the constitution of a nun, and so I allowed her to ride with me. We spent the minute-or-so of terror howling and laughing at one another. On the second hill I thought she’d lose her habit but it didn’t budge. After that, we went on the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and became fast friends.
Poised in the topmost car as the great Ferris Wheel took on a fresh load of passengers, nothing around us but a sky bleeding purple, we chatted, this nun just back from the Lord’s Missions in Guatemala and I, and for an adult she made incredible sense.
“This is my favorite place in the whole park, Danny, the top of the Ferris Wheel. From here you can see your whole life spread out down there. I can see where you live, and I can almost see my mother’s house over on Evergreen, and I can see the houses of all the people for miles.”
I agreed with her that this was a wonderful place, and she nodded happily, then surprised me with her next question.
“Do they make you feel like an oddball?”
“Who?” I asked but I knew who.
“Your family—well, mine, too. Our families, then. Do they make you feel a little strange?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I was unsure how to answer: she was an adult, after all, and Grandma Flynn had once said she was the smartest one on either side of the family, though the men had been unwilling to go so far.
“They make me feel like one of those poor souls in the freak show,” she said.
“Are they poor souls? Will they not go to heaven?”
She laughed. “Of course they will. Maybe sooner than a lot of us. Anyhow, we’re different from the rest of the family, you and I. I’m different because I became something … something not so strange but people don’t understand why a girl does it, and so they’ll never again treat me like a normal person. I’m not a member of the family anymore, I’m a nun. My first Christmas back home after taking my vows, my own brother Gerald was calling me ‘Sister’ like I’m some character out of the Lives of the Saints. I could have brained him.”
I blinked here and gave myself away.
“You want to call me that too, don’t you? When I’m home with my family, I’m Teresa. Aunt Teresa to you.”
“What does Uncle Gerald call you now?”
“Nothing. He’s afraid to call me ‘Teresa’ and he knows I’ll do him an injury if he calls me ‘Sister’ again. He always was a little slow,” she said under her breath, but I heard her anyway.
“And you’re different because they can’t quite bring themselves to treat you like any other small boy. You’re a special problem for them, and they’re going to treat you like one. Just don’t take it to heart. Don’t think you’re a special problem. None of it is anyone’s fault, that’s the thing to remember.” I must have shown some reaction to this mention of fault, for she turned toward me, but she had misunderstood. “They all … they all mean well. You’re a lucky boy to have so many people love you. Just don’t let them drive you crazy.”
“I won’t.” We’d begun our slow descent now, and she was quiet for a moment. “Are they nice? The people there?”
“The people? In Guatemala, you mean? Oh, sure, they are, they’re grand. You’d like them—they’re like the Irish.” This seemed to strike her as a fine joke, and she put her head back and laughed, and I found myself chuckling along with her.
When the ride was finished, she patted me on the head and asked after Grandma Flynn.
“She’s fine,” I said without thinking.
“Oh, Lord, no, I’m sure she’s not fine. She’s lost her daughter, and they were great friends, your mother and Mrs. Flynn, great friends. Be very good for her.”
“I will.”
She nodded, then looked away in distraction, and I remembered that she had lost a brother. After a moment she fished a half-dollar out of some secret compartment in her habit.
“You’re a nice boy, Danny. I enjoyed our rides together.”
“Me, too, Sis … Aunt Teresa.”
“Well done. Here.” She handed me the fifty-cent piece, made a brisk turn on her heel, and walked off, tall and handsome and self-assured, ignoring the many curious faces that took a moment to gawk at her. My Uncle Tom had once remarked with a rueful note that it was “too bad that one became a nun.” Uncle Mike had simply said, “Yeah, what a waste,” and though I didn’t understand what either of them meant, I knew I liked her, too.
In Riverview I entered a tiny porthole into the adult world. I was a watcher of people, I studied strangers the way I eavesdropped on my uncles, and the rickety old park rewarded me with dark glimpses into the behavior of the species. I saw fights there between older boys and once between two very drunken men outside the beer garden. They were both fat, both bleeding from scalp cuts that exaggerated their injuries and made the scene wonderfully lurid. The police came rushing over from the little police station inside the park and collared them both. As they pulled the men away, someone clapped, whether for the action of the police or the quality of the fisticuffs, I wasn’t sure.
There were other tensions in the park. I always stopped to watch at the place where you tried to make a man in a cage fall into a tub of water by hitting a target with a thrown ball. The men within the little cage were usually black, the ones outside were white, sometimes cocky young ones with good aim, but usually older men, sweating, grunting drunks. The black men sat on little perches like dark-skinned birds and laughed at the efforts of their tormentors. The more the men threw and missed, the angrier they became, muttering threats and racial epithets at the black men, who responded with loud doubts about the white men’s manhood. Once as I watched this little two-headed rite of racist hostility, my grandmother grabbed my arm and yanked me away. Behind me I heard my uncles chuckling at the scene, then a loud shout as one of the black men went into the drink.
On a humid night toward the end of that first summer, I was patrolling with my cousin Matt when we came upon a scene that struck me as something from a movie. Two groups of young men had come upon one another, four or five on a side. One group included my uncles, Tom and Mike, and a pair of their friends. The other group was led by Philly Clark. Perhaps someone had put a shoulder into someone else in the crowded midway, perhaps there had been a choice remark tossed over a shoulder. Something had already happened, I couldn’t tell what, but it was clear from the way the men had formed a pair of facing lines, and from the way they all watched Philly and my Uncle Tom, that these young men all expected trouble.
We moved closer ’til we could see the angry faces—some were angry, though a tall thin guy behind Philly looked nervous, and my Uncle Mike simply looked like a man who has found himself in an unpleasant situation out of his control. In truth these two groups had faced each other before over other matters. From opposite ends of the neighborhood, they viewed each other as rivals, for jobs, for girls, for status. Matters usually crested during the summer, for both groups fielded baseball teams that faced each other in the various men’s leagues in the parks. There had been individual fights, and at least one group effort.
I had heard Philly Clark’s name in my grandmother’s house. My uncles talked about him and my grandmother had called him a “hooligan.” From what little I’d been given, I pieced together that there was trouble between Philly and Uncle Tom, part but not all of it over a girl. At that time, I knew no more about her. More than this, they detested each other. Philly was tall and handsome, had been a star athlete at Lane Tech and, it was said, was well-connected, and not only because his father was a precinct captain.
Now, he stood just a couple of feet from my uncle, head thrust forward belligerently. He was speaking to Tom, pointing to emphasize his words, and his finger seemed to come within touching distance of my uncle’s face. Tom stood back on his heels and looked up at him—he was four or five inches shorter than Philly. He had an oddly satisfied look on his face, as though the whole scene was amusing him. If it was, he was alone in his amusement.
“Oh, boy,” I heard Matt say. “They’re gonna fight!” We moved closer so that I could make out some of Philly’s words.
“I stay away from what’s yours, you keep away from what’s mine, you got that?”When my uncle said nothing, Philly poked him in the chest with the finger. “You got that?”
Tom ignored the finger. “How can she be yours if she’s with me? Answer me that, Philly.”
“She ain’t gonna be with you, not ever, not if you want to live a long time. You got that?” Philly jabbed him again with the finger, and I thought he might throw a punch. My uncle just took a half-step back and looked at Philly’s hand.
“You tired of that finger?” Tom asked. He sounded very calm. “You tired of that nice shirt, those slacks, those fancy shoes?”
“Oh, tough guy, I’m terrified,” Philly said with a mirthless smile.
“No, you’re the tough guy, everybody shits green ink when you walk by, but if you don’t step aside and let me pass, I’ll give you enough trouble to last you for a while.”
“I can take you, Flynn.”
“What’re you, sixteen, Philly? You still think the girls like a guy who can knock somebody around. Now get out of my way or you’re gonna wish you had.”
A long moment passed as Philly considered whether to take things up a notch. People can smell a street fight coming, and a small crowd had formed around my uncles and the other men.
“I kicked your ass before, Flynn,” Philly said so that he could be heard over the park noises.
“Long time ago. Ancient history, kid stuff. And you never wanted to fight me in a ring.” Tom grinned at him. “Tony Zale gave Graziano a rematch, Philly.”
“Oh, you’ll get a rematch all right,” Philly said, but he was moving away, giving Tom a path.
My uncle walked straight ahead, looking neither left nor right, and his group followed him.
“Just remember what I said, Flynn,” Philly said to my uncle’s departing back. Then he and the others broke into a little circle, chattering all at once. One of them was patting Philly on the back, but I could see Philly Clark’s eyes, and I saw that the big handsome man in the good clothes had lost face.
Later that night as we walked the two blocks to my grandparents’ house, my uncles muttered to one another about the incident and I kept a respectful silence. Uncle Mike was urging Tom to be cautious.
“Watch your back door with that guy,” I heard him say.
Tom’s voice was so low I almost missed his answer. “I ain’t worried about Philly. Jesus, Mike, I was overseas, people tried to kill me over there, for Christ’s sake. What’s that punk gonna do to me?”
“Just be careful, is all I’m telling you.”
“I got no interest in a beef with Philly Clark. I couldn’t care less if I can take him or he puts my lights out. I just wanta take his girl away.”
Uncle Mike growled in irritation and seemed to give up. I thought that made it my turn, so just as we reached our house, I tossed in my two cents’ worth.
“Are you gonna have a fight with that guy, Uncle Tom?”
They both spun around and Uncle Mike looked irritated.
“You’re not supposed to listen to our conversations,” he said, but Uncle Tom looked amused.
“How’s he supposed to do that, huh? We’re both jawin’ away like he’s not here. He supposed to put gumballs in his ears, or what?”
He paused at the broken gate, hands in his pockets, looking calm and confident. “No. I don’t fight with street trash no more, I’m retired, like Joe Louis. That guy gives me any lip, I’ll sic you and your cousin Matt on him.” He shot a quick grin at me and then led me into the house. My grandmother, after her perfunctory mutterings about how late they’d kept me out, put me into bed. I was exhilarated by what I had seen, and bothered by it as well, with its hint of potential danger for yet another of my loved ones, and the one I already prized most. I went to sleep that night daydreaming about a heroic encounter between my uncle and Philly Clark, and in my version, the big man in the fancy clothes took a fearful drubbing from my uncle to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers.
A later version, edited and refined many times, had my uncle lying temporarily stunned on the ground as I administered an incredible beating to his assailant.
Uncle, Hero, and Film Critic (#ulink_7f73be3e-8828-55b8-a300-0b6579fe5f50)
I was baffled that my uncle had an enemy, that any adult would harbor hostile feelings for him. The moment that Tom had broken the news to me about my parents, he had moved into the center of my universe. This was no dramatic shift in my feelings: he’d long occupied a spot just behind my parents in my pantheon of adult heroes. It was a natural spot for him: my father had been a quiet, reserved man uncomfortable with noise and childish craziness. My father worked two jobs and had little time of his own, but Tom had been a frequent visitor to our house. Tom was outgoing and charming, and what was more amazing than anything else, he seemed to find me good company. “He’s found another little boy to play with,” my Aunt Anne kidded. Early on, before I understood the concepts of family and relatives, I was fond of telling anyone who would listen that my uncle was “my special friend.”
None of this changed when I moved into my grandparents’ home. I looked forward to the moment when Tom returned from work, and though he never showed irritation with me, I know that I followed him through the house like a stray dog, assaulted him with my questions and news of my day, and hung on him like a second skin.
He worked at the Borden Dairy in what was always called “The Old Neighborhood,” over near Grandma Dorsey’s flat. Once Grandpa Flynn took me to visit him at work and he gave me little bottles of chocolate and strawberry milk. In the evenings he went out with his friends or with my grandfather, sometimes to watch a fight or a ballgame at one of the countless taverns in the neighborhood—there seemed to be one on every corner, adults apparently drank their way through life—and at other times I knew he was going out, inexplicably, with girls.
His personal routine and habits fascinated me: he listened to music a great deal, sang when he was working on a task around Grandma’s house or drying the dishes for my grandmother, and at times I caught him talking to the singers on Grandma’s yellow radio: “Sing it, Frank, show ’em how it’s done,” he’d say to Sinatra. “Ah, you’re beautiful, Peggy,” I heard him tell Peggy Lee, and then he caught me watching from the next room, and grinned. “She gives me fever, kid,” he told me, and I was embarrassed. And when Rosemary Clooney invited him to “Come on to My House,” he’d laugh. “Oh, I’ll come to your house, all right, Rosie.”
Sometimes at night my grandparents would turn on the big GE in the living room and listen to the Barn Dance or Tennessee Ernie. “You’re turning into a couple of old hillbillies,” he’d tell them, laughing, but he liked the fiddle music and the sad songs, and after my many hours listening to Grandpa’s Irish music, his songs of lost loves and country, I could hear the similarities and thought it was all Irish music. Tom even sang along with some of these country singers. He’d get serious when the girl singers sang their sad stories: “I’d take care of you, Honey,” he’d say.
I felt sorry for the sad girls, I wished they could meet my uncle. He didn’t have anyone special that I could see, and after the incident at Riverview I shared Uncle Mike’s hope that Tom would forget about the unnamed girl I’d heard them talking about. Whoever she was, she meant trouble for him, one way or the other.
Once I saw him break into a jitterbug to Grandma’s big yellow kitchen radio. They’d told me about his dancing—Aunt Anne told me he was the best dancer in the neighborhood. “Oh, he’s grand,” Grandma agreed. The dancing part made me uneasy. It was one thing to sing in the kitchen, but I wasn’t sure a boy was supposed to like dancing, let alone excel at it. But it was fascinating to watch him and, in the end, I decided that if Uncle Tom liked it, there had to be something in it. I tried it myself once, alone in the kitchen with the music, and fell over one of the kitchen chairs. Grateful that I’d had no audience, I decided it wasn’t for me.
It was also through his example that I learned the rewards of reading in the bathroom. He was fond of reading in the bathtub—no, that doesn’t come close to it: he was unable to get into the tub without a paper or magazine. Once when my grandmother upbraided him for the time he took in the tub—“You’ll get pneumonia,” was one of her arguments, “You’ll get your death of cold,” and, “It’s bad for your skin to soak so long in warm water,” were others—I heard him play his black ace: he told her that this was the result of Korea.
“I sat up there on that hill, Ma, and I thought about getting out of there like anybody else, and I thought about you, Ma, and I wanted to be warm and clean someplace, I wanted to be home. But the thing I kept thinking about was a hot bath. A hot bath. And I promised myself I’d never hurry through one again—just in case … you know, in case I get sent back to Korea.”
“Oh, God forbid!” she muttered, but she left him alone after that.
Also—and predictably—he read on the toilet. I learned this one morning on his day off, the morning that was to keep him forever associated in my mind with blood. I was in the living room rifling through my box of lead soldiers trying to find enough men with heads to make a squad and he emerged from the bathroom looking like a leper. Tiny pieces of tissue were stuck to his face and blood seeped through each one. He seemed unmoved by this predicament.
“Hey, Butch. You got some comics around, don’t you?”
I must have been staring, for he repeated the question and I responded with another.
“What happened to your face?”
“What? Nothing happened to me … Oh.” He laughed, a short little bark. “I cut myself shaving. It’s nothing. Some day you’ll be able to shave and then you’ll get all these little cuts on your face.”
“Do they hurt?”
“No, but if I’m not careful, I could lose enough blood to die.”
“You could?”
“Nah, I’m just kidding.” He surveyed the living room for a moment and a tiny patch of bloody tissue came loose and fluttered down to the floor like the last red leaf of autumn. If I close my eyes I can still see him coming out with a dozen patched cuts, looking like something out of an old Ed Wood movie—The Bleeding Men from Outer Space, perhaps, or Attack of the People with Open Sores.
“So how ’bout some comics? Man needs some reading material when he sits on the throne.”
“He does?”
“Sure. Some things you should never be in a hurry for. Going to the can is one of them.”
“They’re by my bed.” In the tiny half-room at the front of the house where I slept, I had just enough room for my bed, a small dresser, a toybox and two cardboard cartons, one for my soldiers and the other for my comics. I had hundreds, I bought them constantly or people bought them for me and I never threw them away: at the Certified on the corner of Barry and Leavitt they sold old ones without covers, three comics to a pack for a dime.
I had Archie and Walt Disney comics, Superman and Blackhawk and the occasional bloodthirsty war comic like G.I. Comics, horror comics I didn’t even understand and nearly fifty Classics Illustrated—all purchased by my grandmother lest Archie and Jughead cause an atrophy of my young brain.
Tom disappeared with his leprous face into my room for several minutes and I heard him exclaiming at my collection. He emerged with the Classics Illustrated version of “Ivanhoe” and told me he could be found “in the library.” From that day on, I seldom spent more than five minutes in the bathroom without one of my comics, his purloined habit becoming my custom for life and occasioning many fierce debates between me and my grandparents, who contended that I now took half an hour to do thirty seconds’ business.
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