In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  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 grandfather 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 till 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.

  A docile, patient woman who hummed more than she spoke—Grandma Flynn said this was the result of a lifetime of speaking to a wayward husband till she was breathless—Grandma Dorsey seldom had much to say to me beyond questions about what I needed and whether I was hungry. I learned early on that the answer to this latter question was always “yes” and it brought swift rewards unknown in the house where I lived. Later, one or another of my uncles or aunts on that Dorsey side might stop by to chat or see how she was, and she’d feed them, and on some nights there were three or four unexpected but perfectly welcome visitors in her kitchen, all of her issue. They were happy to see me, they thought I was just what she needed during the day to keep from going soft mentally, and they liked me, every one of them, but they had grown up in a crowd and most of them were in the process of creating their own, and I was not the center of the universe that I was in the Flynn house.

  Late that summer I began to see my cousin Matt at Grandma’s house on a regular basis. Aunt Mary Jane had gotten a job downtown at the Fair store, and so he spent most of his days in the care of Grandma Dorsey. Some weeks I was there more than once, and so Matt and I came to count on seeing one another.

  He was a handsome boy, blond and hazel-eyed and wild and cheerful, physically gifted where I was clumsy, confident where I was shy. He was adventurous and restless and I thought he was a sort of paradigm of boyhood. With his rough self-assurance, he seemed somehow older to me, so that I had found not only a perfect companion but an older brother. I wished I had his looks, his laugh, his voice, I became irritated with the clothes my late mother had burdened me with, for they weren’t like Matt’s. I wore saddle shoes to church and he had red gym shoes; he wore blue jeans—the first time I asked Grandma Flynn for blue jeans she said I’d wear them “over your grandmother’s lifeless corpse.” For his part, Matt thought I was funny: he was not verbally gifted, had trouble expressing himself at times, and had no memory for jokes. And if ever I was to meet a boy who needed to laugh, it was Matthew.

  I fed him jokes and one-liners I’d heard from Milton Berle or Sid Caesar on television and had him gasping for breath. I wished we were brothers, and once told another boy that we were.

  It w
as critical that he liked me: he was everything I wanted to be, and more than anything else, he had what I had already lost. He could pepper his conversation with indifferent mentions of his father and casual references to his mother. He had parents whom he saw every day, who took care of him and bought him things, and I didn’t quite believe that what I had measured up. I lived with old people, and no matter how I admired him, Uncle Tom was not my father, and I was already aware of their collective difficulty in anticipating the needs of a small boy. Once Matt made a reference to his mother and father fighting: he sounded angry with both of them, he spoke as though he hated his home, and I wondered what there could be about a home with a mother and father that would make a boy sound that way.

  Under Grandma Dorsey’s attitude of optimistic permissiveness, my days with Matt were an unending adventure. She had a groundless belief in our basic common sense and judgment. Also since there were two of us, she felt we were safe, and so we were allowed to explore “the block”—which we took as license to roam the entire North Side.

  We spent whole days in Lincoln Park, roaming the great sprawling park from north to south, from the prehistoric ridge of Clark Street to the lake itself. The park was a wilder, darker place then, with more trees and heavy clumps of dense bushes and undergrowth, and an enterprising child could find a thousand places to hide.

  Statues made their home in the park, it teemed with them, and we sought them out, puzzled over their names and then just clambered over them, LaSalle and Shakespeare and Linnaeus, Hans Christian Andersen and the great seated Lincoln behind the Historical Society. We threw stones at the ducks in the lagoon, tried to spook the zoo animals or their attendants, and once made off with the bucket of fish that were about to be fed to the penguins, then stood at the side of the lagoon and threw fish chunks at the young couples in the slow-moving rowboats. We crouched in the little underpasses and listened to the strange echoing sounds of our voices, climbed the high hill at the edge of the lagoon to visit the statue of General Grant; we hid in the underbrush to spy on lovers, tried to push each other into the lagoon, rolled in the grass.

  Children are fascinated with the dead, and so we always sought out the graves. The land for Lincoln Park had been reclaimed from cemeteries, the old City Cemetery and several others, and when these graveyards had been relocated in the nineteenth century in an attempt to put an end to malaria epidemics, a few of the unfortunate—or lucky, depending on one’s view of a corpse’s inalienable rights—deceased had been left behind. The city admits, now as then, only to three, though the park doubtlessly rests on the bones of hundreds of early Chicagoans of all races, particularly the poor.

  Foremost of these Abandoned Dead were the Couch brothers, Ira and James, resting for all time in the lone tomb left after this crepuscular relocation, a gray mausoleum just north of the Historical Society.

  We would creep up to the tomb—you could get at it then, touch it, climb on it, leave your initials, anything short of entering it to visit Ira and James, and it was always a high point of our park excursions. We worked feverishly to figure out a way to get inside but failed, though Matt was certain we’d eventually crack it. “When we get older, we’ll be smarter,” went his reasoning.

  The other dead man was said to be buried closer to Clark Street and now enjoys quiet celebrity due to a plaque indicating his presence in the nether regions just below the horseshoe pits: this second dead man was David Kennison, the last known survivor of the Boston Tea Party, who had lived more than fifty years after that momentous piece of public lawlessness to end his days in the swamp town at the junction of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.

  On occasion we entered the Historical Society itself and viewed with awe the reassembled cabin where Abraham Lincoln had spent part of his childhood, and the items taken from his pockets the night of his death. I was fascinated by these things and developed the belief, shared only with Matt, that if Lincoln’s former home and cherished belongings lived in this old building, then the spirit of Abe himself couldn’t be far away.

  From the park we would go to the big red-brick mansion where the cardinal lived and where, my cousin assured me, the pope stayed when he was in Chicago on vacation; we prowled shops and gangways in Old Town and ventured west across Orleans into the projects. I found these little treks with Matt almost as interesting as my Wednesdays with Uncle Tom, especially as there was an element of danger present in his company: Matt seemed to delight in antagonizing other boys, he could spot a group of kids on a street corner—white kids or black, it made no difference to him—and say something in five seconds that would have all of them chasing us with blood in their eyes.

  Once or twice they caught us, these unsuspecting boys, some of them several years older than we, and then Matt stunned us all by popping one of them in the mouth and taking off before anyone could react. He was quick and devious, and I never saw a sign of fear, though once a taller boy was getting the better of him and Matt, sobbing through gritted teeth, went so crazy, punching and clawing and kicking, that the older boy let him go and took off running. I was to see Matt fight a number of times as we got older, and to see his anger often, though rarely directed at me.

  Most of the time, though, we just explored that part of the city, from Old Town to the outer edge of the Loop, from the projects to the lake. Soon we took on followers, three or four of the kids from Grandma Dorsey’s block. They liked me well enough but were drawn to Matt: when he wasn’t bent on provoking fights with large groups of strangers, he was actually a good companion. Every group needs a child who looks beyond the normal activities and routines, who sees in odd things possibilities for recreation, if not criminal malfeasance, and Matt served in that capacity for us. He was not only adventurous but imaginative, and his peculiar obsession was with gates and bars and barriers, which he read as the adult world’s personal challenges to children, sufficient to generate an immediate and urgent need for transgression.

  We scoured the city, climbed roofs and roamed cobblestone alleys—most of the old alleys in those days and a good number of the sidestreets in Chicago were still surfaced with smooth red bricks that were picturesque but hell on car tires. We investigated porches and basements, jumped fences, and even broke into the odd building.

  Once we came upon a tall, weathered frame building that looked very much like a farm building, a relic perhaps of the days when that section of the city had been unreclaimed prairie. It had the big double doors of a barn and leaned to one side, as though gravity were about to tip it over. Matt took one look at it and decided it was a national treasure.

  “It’s a hundred years old.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell. The wood’s all gray, and they don’t build buildings like this no more. Let’s go in.”

  “We’ll get in trouble,” I said.

  He looked at me as though I’d drooled on my chest.

  “No, we won’t. The guy who owned this is dead, or he would have painted it.”

  This seemed airtight logic to me, and I told him I was in.

  The building sat on a corner lot, surrounded on both sides by what we always called “prairies”—unused vacant lots given over to weeds and prairie flowers sometimes four or five feet high, and thick as the bristles on a brush. Rabbits and mice lived in these places, and small snakes, you could lose or hide things in them, and Matt contended that a dead man had been found in one near his house but no one believed him.

  Grandma Dorsey had begun giving me my father’s old Hardy Boy mysteries, and I realized that I was poised at the onset of exactly the type of adventure that Frank and Joe Hardy seemed to have every week. Thus the locked doors of the old barn gave me no pause: the Hardy Boys were forever breaking and entering in the name of adventure. Besides, to this day I have no idea where we were but it was a strange neighborhood, and a crowd of small boys far from their homes quickly lose what little moral restraint they have
acquired. We bought Matt’s line of reasoning without hesitation. Rooting around in the high grass like a scavenger tribe, we found a rotten log and, using this as a battering ram, Matt and I and a boy named Terry Logan pounded at the ancient planking near the back of the building until it caved in with a dry crack. We pulled the shattered plank away and without hesitation crawled in.

  A billion specks of dust hung suspended in the bar of gold light from the hole we’d just made, and the rest was darkness. We were vaguely aware of a large dark shape in the center a few feet away but it wasn’t till our eyes had adjusted to the darkness that we realized it was a car. It was unlike any car I was familiar with, tall and boxy and odd, and I realize now that it was probably one of the old ungainly cars from the 1920s. More important to us than its strange silhouette were the thick cobwebs that hung from it and dangled from what few corners of the old barn we could see. Matt drew a finger through the dust along the door of the car, then looked up and squinted into the dark.

  “There’s something up there,” he said, and my heart sank but I followed him to the back, where we found a brittle wooden staircase that moved from side to side as the three of us climbed up. “Up” led to a loft that seemed to run along all four sides of the building. It was narrow and crowded with boxes and long or bulky objects that we could not see but which made each step an adventure. At one point Terry Logan almost fell out of the loft, and afterwards I could hear his fevered, terrified breathing.

  “Ain’t this a ball?” Matt asked at one point, and I almost laughed aloud at Terry’s unconvincing, “Sure is.”

  “Prob’ly spiders up here,” Matt said with undisguised joy.

  At the front we found a sort of window, matted with fifty years of dust and filth, which Matt kicked in after only a second’s moral debate, our earlier assault on the wall having made him a hardened second-story man. Sunlight, blinding sunlight, shot through the hole. Now that we could see around us, the barn lost none of its mystique: we could see old farm tools, ploughs and scythes and a pile of old wood-handled drills, and Matt thought he’d died and gone to heaven.