In the Castle of the Flynns

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.