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 till 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 till 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 say. “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, till 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 somethi
ng’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 also 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 McReady 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 battle- wagons.” 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 McReady 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.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 2