Kitabı oku: «In the Castle of the Flynns»

MICHAEL RALEIGH

In the Castle of the Flynns

Dedication

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

Title Page

Dedication

Pictures

The Darkest News

The Council

I Discover Adult Supervision

Another Tribe Altogether

Riverview

Uncle, Hero, and Film Critic

High Art and Baseball

New Year, New Troubles

A Tale of Two Fir Trees

Christmas 1954

Enemies and Allies

The Roaster

Lizards and War and Lost History

A Cold Week in March

Nuns and Reckonings

Young Men and Love

Other People’s Business

Of Madmen, Science, and the River

First Communion, Against All Odds

A Tale of a Serving Spoon

Death of a Dreadnought

Tough Guys

Two Weddings, One of Them Inevitable

A Trip to the Country

Dog Days

Unraveling

Brain Fever

Runaway

The Announcement

Labor Day

Aftershocks

Epilogue

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Pictures

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

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

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?”