The point is, the church isn’t allocating the money needed for the upkeep of the headstones. The lawn mowers ride right over them, and now they’re dropping down. I imagine the Dead gasping for air, as if their sinking headstones were their mouths. The grass is greedy; it wants that space.
But still, I wanted to find Hinky Dink. Let me explain.
My grandmother Henrietta was the eldest of seven girls, all born in Chicago between 1894 and 1905. Her father, Michael Ryan, died in 1906 when Henrietta was twelve years old. Of her seven sisters, only two married—Henrietta and her sister Marion. The other sisters became lifelong, dedicated (and unmarried) public school teachers. After Henrietta’s father died, her mother became known as Papa Ryan. Pictures of her reveal a sturdy and stout, Jane Darwellian–type of matron. (Jane Darwell was an actress in many John Ford films; most famously she played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.) The point is that she had that meaty, weary look. (She’s starting to show up now and then when I look in the mirror. What is she doing in there?)
One day my grandmother and I were together at her house in Spokane. I was in my twenties by then and already living in Los Angeles. Henrietta opened a book and out floated an obituary from the Chicago Tribune, dated November 12, 1938, for John “Bathhouse” Coughlin. The obit described his life as a politician, and also described his political partner Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who was an alderman of the First Ward. Henrietta told me that Hinky Dink took care of their family financially after her father died. She described Hinky Dink as a cousin. Or she might have said “like” a cousin. I saved the obituary and I have appreciated particular phrases. For example, “Coughlin rose, like a florid Phoenix, from the ashes of the great Chicago fire.” A phoenix! And when describing his political partnership with Hinky Dink, it reads, “They were free handed alms givers and made many friends. They formed a Damon and Pythias political team within the Democratic Ranks.” Damon and Pythias! You don’t read references like that in the paper anymore.
When I asked Henrietta how her father died, she made some remark about how, after having seven girls in a row, his hair turned white and he died. We laughed, yes—how terrible to have seven daughters. But now I regret that I didn’t ask, “Ha, ha. No, really. What happened?” Later I learned that Hinky Dink’s district contained most of the gambling houses and brothels. In fact, both Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John owned bars. They gave away free drinks to anyone who voted for them. Once alcohol was outlawed, the National Crime Syndicate gained momentum and power, which culminated in Al Capone being in charge. (Oh, you Christian temperance ladies, what were you thinking?) The point is, that was the end of Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John.
I learned that one of Hinky Dink’s closest friends was a police captain in charge of the First Ward. His name was Michael Ryan, and he pointedly turned a blind eye to all the unlawful activity flagrantly taking place in his district. His career ended in disgrace. This may or may not have been my great-grandfather—every tenth Irish guy in Chicago seems to have been named Michael Ryan.
My cousin Catherine Twomey (a descendant of Marion, the other sister of my grandmother who married) is the one who has found out all this information about our family and it was she who took me to see this crypt at Calvary Cemetery. The crypt has five of the sisters, as well as their parents: Michael Ryan and Mary Donohue Ryan. And Mary’s mother: Mary Collins Ryan. They all came from Limerick, Ireland. There are others buried there, too, for example, Hannah Hanley, who was a cousin (or she might have been “like” a cousin). Hannah lived for 102 years, from 1826 to 1928. Catherine found an article in the Chicago Tribune about Hannah on her one hundredth birthday. In the article, Hannah described coming from Ireland, in her forties, and getting a job as a housekeeper in New York City, on the Upper East Side. One day when she was sweeping the front steps she heard people in the streets yelling about something. She was told that the president had been shot—President Abraham Lincoln. Somehow Hannah Hanley ended up living with Papa Ryan, and my grandmother and all her sisters, here in Chicago.
Henrietta used to tell me how the family would go to Calvary Cemetery as an all-day outing. They boarded the trolley downtown and took a picnic lunch. They laid down blankets and ate and lounged alongside their buried relatives. There were others doing the same thing, a common way to spend a day. They got to know the descendants of the deceased in nearby tombs. When I visit our family’s crypt, I think about Henrietta standing there, and the other people who were visiting buried loved ones, who are now probably interred alongside them. These people were all religious and ostensibly had faith in an afterlife, and they were deeply connected to the reality of death. Today, while many people do not believe in an afterlife (I am among them), people seem much more disconnected from the fact that they’re going to die. (I hope I am not among those.)
When I adopted Mulan I became much less interested in my family’s history. In fact, I felt it bordered on unseemly to develop deeper interests in my ancestry, when Mulan won’t have that opportunity. My general attitude is that people live and move around, they fall in love and create kids, there are economic and environmental upturns and downturns, people move and shift some more. I see all of us as on a river, floating along, bumping into one another.
A couple of years ago, Mulan was doing a social studies section on immigration. She was asked to write an essay about the recent immigrants in her family. She became really interested in the project. She asked for stories and both Michael and I told her some things. Her interest was poignant and touching.
She didn’t include my father’s family, by which I mean Henrietta’s family, the story I just recounted. I will print her essay here.
IMMIGRATION IN MY FAMILY
by Mulan Sweeney Blum
This is how my family came to America.
My mother’s maternal great Grandmother, Katherine Ibach came from Odessa, Russia, at the age of eighteen. She came because her mom died and her father remarried, so Katherine left and went to America. She got a job as a maid in South Dakota. There she met Joseph Schatz who was also from Odessa, Russia. They had eleven children, and they spoke German at home. (Their ninth child was named Marie. She was my mom’s grandmother.) They were Catholics who’d moved from Germany to Russia because Russia offered free farmland. But when the revolution in Russia started happening, they wanted to get out of there and come here to America.
My great grandfather, on my mother’s side, was named Tom Ivers and he was born in Dublin, Ireland. He almost died at age eight during the Easter Uprising in Dublin because a bullet went right over his head while he stood in line for bread. At age fourteen he got in a fight with his dad and so he snuck out onto a boat that he thought was going to London. But it turned out that the boat was going to South America! They made him work on the boat when they found him. After two years in South America, he took another boat to New York City. He sold newspapers on the streets. He got into construction. He went to Yakima, Washington, to build a dam, and then he met Marie, who was working in a factory canning fruit.
On my dad’s maternal side, my great grandfather Marcus Manna left home in Warsaw, Poland, at age twelve because his father thought he should leave the ghetto to make a better living. He had seven brothers. First he went to Basel, Switzerland, where his brother Max worked in a hat factory. He got Marcus a job there. When he was seventeen he went on the S.S. Lincoln ship to New York in 1913 and went through Ellis Island.
My dad’s grandmother, Fannie Rosnoff, was born in the Ukraine, in Russia. She came to America when she was two years old with her mother and three other siblings. Marcus and Fannie met on a picket line in New York City. They were striking to get better pay. Marcus became a union organizer.
I came from Guangzhou, China. I came because I was adopted. I am the newest person to come to America in my family. I was seventeen months old when I was adopted by my mom, a single woman who lived in Los Angeles. Then she married my dad, Michael, who then adopted me. We moved here because my dad has
a business building scientific instruments in Evanston, Illinois.
I laughed when I read about myself: a single woman who lived in Los Angeles.
I was so thankful to her teacher and school, because I hadn’t thought about how Mulan is an immigrant, and she is from a long line of immigrants, and that this fact connects her to my family as surely as genes do.
I enjoy going to the Calvary Cemetery in Evanston just as much as I enjoy going to Holy Cross Cemetery in Spokane. I like to walk where my relatives walked. I like to look at landmarks and buildings that my ancestors looked at. I like to rub my hands across the wood pews in the churches where my family worshipped, knowing that it was likely that, at some point, they sat right there, too. It causes me to have that numinous feeling that C. S. Lewis wrote about—a sense of awe, and a sense of being suspended out of time.
My family’s ancestry is riddled with people showing up out of nowhere. Children who came from Ireland whose birth dates make it impossible for them to be the siblings they claim to be, or just extra people who show up, like Hannah Hanley did, and live with families for years and years. I think this is common of all families.
I recently learned that paternity is misattributed in the human species at a rate of 10 percent. This surprised me. In fact, the 10 percent figure is the low estimate! Just think of it—10 percent of the population believe someone is their biological father who is not their biological father. That really sealed the deal for me—these stories I have learned, it doesn’t matter if they are of people to whom I am actually related. It doesn’t matter if Hinky Dink is a cousin or “like” a cousin. They’re all people who influenced people who influenced me. Their stories of triumph and tragedy, struggle and loss, lie in the peat bog of my psyche. Because of this, those influences—like ingredients in a soup—will have an impact, subtle or strong, on Mulan.
There’s a sculpture here in Chicago on the South Side, in Washington Park, that perfectly portrays the way I imagine our ancestors. It depicts one hundred people of all ages and types in a state of movement before a still figure who is watching them. It’s called The Fountain of Time, and it was inspired by Henry Austin Dobson’s poem “Paradox of Time,” which has these first lines:
Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, time stays, we go.
When I went on an Architecture Foundation tour of Calvary Cemetery last October, I told our guide, Mary Jo, that I had some kind of connection to Hinky Dink Kenna. She insisted that I stay after her tour. She said we could find his headstone together.
As we searched, Mary Jo pointed out John “Bathhouse” Coughlin’s large mausoleum. She told me he died fifty thousand dollars in debt, but he had already built his lavish memorial. We scrounged around in the grass and found Hinky Dink’s gravestone, which was small, and like the others nearby, sinking under the grass. We even had to pull back the grass to read his name. Mary Jo told me that when Hinky Dink died in 1946, he had more than a million dollars in the bank. He left instructions that his relatives use $33,000 to create a beautiful memorial grave site. But they didn’t. They kept the money and got him an $85 headstone instead.
Okay, so maybe Hinky Dink was not such a wonderful man. Or maybe his relatives were the horrible ones. Who knows? (I think the lesson is that, if you want a big memorial in the cemetery, you should build it before you die.)
My mother and I spoke this morning and she told me that she’s going to bury Bill in the same grave with Michael, my other brother who died. I guess you can bury two people in one plot at that cemetery. They will be near my father’s grave. He died in 2004. My mother already has her plot next to his. My mother said, “Julia, you should get a plot. This is your chance to get into some real estate in Spokane.”
When I was young, my father used to listen to a record of Brendan Behan reading autobiographical stories. Brendan Behan was an Irish storyteller, playwright, and activist. My father said Behan had died of “the Irish disease” and I swear to you that for many years I thought he meant storytelling, not alcohol. I think my urge to perform, and specifically to perform true stories from my own life, is my way of coping. Just like alcohol is for some people.
But the storytelling urge is not particular to the Irish. It’s in everyone. In fact it’s how our brains, every single one of our brains—not particular to any ethnicity—makes sense of the world. We tell ourselves how it all went, how this happened and how that happened and how it could happen in the future. Just like I’ve been doing intensely for this entire month.
I wanted to be alone, but I am actually always alone. I can work harder to keep the quiet flame of solitude burning inside me, so I don’t get too burned-out doing things for others. I like to do a lot for people, and then be adored for my efforts. I get annoyed when I’m not appreciated enough. I want an audience, even at home. Also, I think I’m in some deep competition with my mother. Showing her, or maybe God—that fellow I dismissed so many years ago—how competent I am. How well I can run/decorate/manage a house and family. I think my mother was in some kind of competition with her own mother, too. Maybe all women do this to some degree. I guess in the end, if it’s not one thing, it really is your mother!
In the end I’ll probably be buried in a plot at Holy Cross Cemetery. Life is both short and incredibly long. Who cares if the table is set properly or the cat vomit is wiped up? Okay, stepping in the cat vomit would be really gross. It seriously needs to get wiped up, people.
But, as my Nemesis reminded me so pointedly, “Hey, lighten up, lady. It’s a beautiful day.” Recasting her as Papa Ryan makes her quip less toxic.
In fact, loving and wise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Tomorrow They Arrive
It will not always be summer
Build barns.
—Hesiod
The heat wave has abated. It’s only going to be 87 degrees today. The weather this summer was frankly a bit frightening. I’m not sure what’s in store for our future climate. From what I’ve read, the future is so bright we’ll have to wear shades (but not exactly for the reasons that Timbuk3 wrote those lyrics).
This last spring I came home one day from the lake and said to Michael, “The water was the most amazing blue, a blue I thought was possible only in the Caribbean. And clear, too, so clean and clear, I could see right through it. I was so moved by its beauty.”
Michael said, “Oh, that’s because the zebra mussels, originally from Russia, have infested the lake and eaten all the algae. It’s causing mass death and destruction for the indigenous water animals in the lake, but, yes, a by-product of this catastrophe is that the lake is a brighter, lighter, clearer blue.”
“Oh,” I said, my beatific smile turning into a grimace. It reminded me of when I first moved to Los Angeles and found the sun setting to be especially magical, the sky turning such a deep orange. Then I learned that the thick pollution was dramatically enhancing those gorgeous sunsets.
Tomorrow I’m driving to the airport and picking up Mulan and Michael, who are arriving at nearly the same time, in the early afternoon. They are coming from opposite directions, Michael from Switzerland and Mulan from California. For me this seems to enhance the impact of their arrival. My anticipation is high, and I can’t wait to get my hands on both of them.
In the next month we’ll go on our family vacation, to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle, and then on to Bill’s funeral in Spokane. This month seemed to do its trick. I already don’t want to repeat this long month’s journey into night again next summer. I’m sated. The itch has been scratched.
Thinking through this whole family experience has made me feel less attached to places and things, and more invested in experiencing being with people I love. Mulan will never be younger than she is right now, and neither will I, and neither will Michael. This house will have other families living in it, long after all of us are gone.
I feel I am in the grip of something I helped create, but which now owns me. I remade my world by assembling
this family, and now this family has remade me.
My brother Jim said it most bluntly many years ago. He called me, exasperated, when his twins were about four years old. He said, “Julia, I was hoodwinked! The girls are so hard, they are trying to kill each other every minute, they need so much. Tammy and I are at the end of our rope. Everyone said this was going to be so meaningful and fun and that is utter bullshit. It’s misery. And yet, I really, really, really love them so much. Which means I am totally and royally screwed!”
When I became a mother, I had no idea that my concern for my own child’s welfare would make me a lifetime hostage to fate. But now I am and what can I do? I have to just ride the wave that I have agreed to surf on. It’s come at much higher costs than I ever thought, but it has deep rewards.
Mulan recently asked me if I thought her biological mother was alive. I said she probably was. I told Mulan, “I think about her every day.” It’s true. I wonder about this woman who gave me this fantastic kid. I wish she knew her daughter was thriving. I feel sad that she doesn’t get to see her beautiful child’s face, which probably looks much like her own.
Mulan said, “I don’t think about her that much. Maybe once a month.” I loved her candor. Someday Michael, Mulan, and I will go back to China and see the neighborhood in which Mulan was found. When I think of that, I think of us as such a small random unit, passing through this life together in a big, unforgiving, frightening, unpredictable, beautiful, luxurious, breathy world.
Acknowledgments
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother Page 18