In the Castle of the Flynns

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

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.