Grandma came up and hugged me as though we hadn’t seen each other four days earlier, and she thanked Uncle Tom for bringing me over.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Wouldn’t let him miss this. Wouldn’t let myself miss it.”
“Nice to see you, Tom,” the woman’s voice said again and this time I was able to place it, my Aunt Mollie, the youngest of the Dorseys, my father’s kid sister.
“Hi, Mollie,” he said. After a short pause, he added, “Merry Christmas.”
She was leaning against the big round oak table in Grandma Dorsey’s house of clutter and she seemed for the evening to have undergone a minor transformation from slacks and sweaters: she was wearing a dark green dress with a little gold pin of a Christmas tree, and lipstick, rare for her.
“You look sharp, both of you,” she said.
“You look real nice,” my uncle said, and I wondered what she made of the slight note of surprise in his voice.
Grandma led me into her cluttered living room and I made the appropriate noises about her tree, just a tabletop tree but hung to the groaning point with ornaments and bubble lights, wonderful bubble lights. On the floor below the table was a jumble of presents, and I stared at them till I thought I could spy one with my name on it.
Eventually we ate, all of the adults standing because there was no other way fifteen or so grown-ups could get at the tables simultaneously. I stayed with Matt and we each had a small helping of turkey and potatoes and approximately three hundred cookies. My uncle told me to go easy on the cookies and was set upon by Aunt Ellen and young Aunt Mollie for having no Christmas spirit. I filled my mouth with Grandma Dorsey’s cookies—her own version of pfeffernüsse, her butter cookies, sugar cookies, cookies frosted in half a dozen colors, gingerbread men and women and candied dates—and watched the grown-ups: Uncle Tom seemed to be enjoying himself with the women, though he kept his eyes almost exclusively on Aunt Ellen while Mollie watched him with a sly smile and I told myself I had no idea what was going on, and it didn’t matter.
Matt and I each drank the better part of a quart of orange soda and after we ate, Grandma led us and the other cousins, older and younger, over to the table with the tree, where she commanded her oldest son, my Uncle Gerald, to take charge of the passing out of presents. Someone had put a Perry Como Christmas record on my grandmother’s boxy record player and the noise in the room softened but did not disappear.
When Uncle Gerry came to my package, a heavy cylinder in silvery paper—“Feels like a mortar shell. Is that what you asked Santy Claus for, a mortar shell?”—I noticed that it was an exact duplicate of the one Matt was tearing at like a wolf on fresh meat. Around the room an unbroken row of smiling, sweating faces watched the kids open their gifts, and Uncle Tom winked at me when I caught his eye. My present was a set of Lincoln Logs, a big set, with Indians and a couple of frontiersmen, and it didn’t matter that I already had Lincoln Logs. You could never have too much building material for your toys. I grinned over at Matt, who beamed back, and as Uncle Gerry called out the names in a voice like the priest giving a blessing, we spilled the logs out onto Grandma Dorsey’s floor and began building.
The rest of Christmas Eve at Grandma Dorsey’s was a welter of noise and song and food smells and a half dozen minor disasters: someone dropping a glass of wine onto the plate of sliced turkey, one of my younger cousins bawling over something, my cousin Elizabeth being sick and throwing up strawberry pop on her Christmas dress. At one point I realized I hadn’t seen Matt’s dad, my Uncle Dennis, and I scanned the crowd, finding only Matt’s mom, my aunt Mary Jane. I heard my Uncle Tom’s laughter from across the room and located him, scrunched into a corner with Aunt Mollie. Someone had changed Perry Como for something faster, a big band with a lot of horns, and Aunt Mollie seemed to be dancing in place while my uncle talked to her.
I have no idea how long Uncle Tom kept me there, but we left to a chorus of voices saying “good night” and “merry Christmas,” and I fell asleep in the car before we went four blocks.
I woke in the morning to a quiet house, remembered the hot raucous party at Grandma Dorsey’s and for just a sliver in time my heart sank that it was over. Then I realized it was Christmas, and I was home, and wonderful things were likely to happen here as well, if on a less epic scale. I lay back and indulged myself for a moment, reliving Christmas Eve, and then I remembered my parents—my mother mostly, for it had always been she who woke me in the early morning to tell me we’d all just missed the visitor in the red suit. I remembered the way she’d watched me as I opened my presents, the look on her face, and my throat seemed to close. Somewhere outside my door I heard the slow scuffing of slippers and my grandmother humming in a low voice and I knew I couldn’t let her see me cry. I stayed there till I felt completely composed and then, allowing curiosity and youthful avarice full rein, clambered out of bed to greet the morning.
“Merry Christmas, sunshine,” my grandmother said. “First we have to see if Santa brought anything, and then we’ll have pancakes.” The house smelled of bacon and pancakes already, and her eyes begged me to be happy. I was glad to oblige.
It was a long day, quieter than Christmas Eve had been, and included the ritual savaging of carefully wrapped presents, a breakfast no one was much interested in, a long song-filled mass, the ritual playing with presents—that is, the scattering of one’s newfound wealth throughout the house, like Hansel leaving himself a trail to follow through the woods—and a Christmas dinner of great weight attended by a dozen or so of us: Uncle Mike and his girlfriend Lorraine, Uncle Tom, my grandparents, my Great-Uncle Frank, sober and serious-looking in a blue suit, along with his long-suffering wife Rose, Uncle Martin, and my Aunt Anne and her current boyfriend, a thin, quiet fellow named Roger who fawned on Grandpa and stole nervous glances down the table at Grandma, who clearly thought him beneath her daughter but held her tongue because it was Christmas. I found Roger fascinating, for I’d never seen a person whose face so clearly revealed the depths of his discomfort. The poor fellow couldn’t possibly know that he was to be the first of many young men whom the family found unworthy of Aunt Anne.
I rushed through dinner as I’d dashed through breakfast, in order to play with the new toys—the new Lincoln Log set, a set of plastic spacemen, a Gene Autry cap gun with its own holster, and the prize of the day, from my grandmother, a set of lead cavalrymen from England in a burgundy-colored box, lancers they were, with red plumes and gold helmets, and the grandest set of toy soldiers I’d seen in so short a life. I knew deep inside me that I’d have the heads off half of them in a week, and in six months you wouldn’t be able to tell they’d ever had lances, or even arms for that matter, but right now they were the gaudiest thing I’d found under my tree.
There were books as well, colorful books about history and a book of Greek myths, and one I’d gotten the night before from Aunt Teresa, the nun. It was a spellbinding book about children who became saints by meeting a violent end, utterly fascinating because of the blood and gore that the color plates captured so imaginatively. I played and read and snacked on the pies Grandma had bought from Heck’s bakery and the cookies Grandma Dorsey had sent along with us the night before, I drank far more pop than I had thought possible, and with one ear I listened to the adults in the next room.
Uncle Martin was proclaiming that Christmas had, as a concept, deteriorated rapidly in recent years, and Uncle Frank wanted to talk politics, and several members of the family were interrogating Roger, presumably on his goals in life but really on his intentions toward Anne, and it was clear from Grandma’s tone that she thought Anne had brought home an idiot. When their voices dropped to a low murmur I knew they were speaking of me, wondering and worrying whether it would all be enough to get me through my first holiday without parents.
“Poor little thing,” Aunt Anne said. “God knows what it’s like for him.”
“Heckuva thing at Christmas,” Uncle
Mike said, and I knew the lugubrious side of his nature had roused itself.
“For God’s sake, you talk like he’s dead instead of in the next room,” Uncle Tom said and my grandmother told him to watch his language. I decided this was as good a time as any to join the grown-ups, and so moved my belongings to a corner in the dining room, feigning complete disinterest in their talk.
Their later discussions were far more uplifting. My grandmother had had a glass or two of champagne, and quart bottles of Edelweiss and Meister Bräu had appeared on the table, leading to a turn in the conversation, to old family characters, including but not limited to the exploits of my Uncle Frank who, if these tales were to be believed, had done well to stay out of jail all these years, in spite of his long service as an officer of the law.
One of these adventures had apparently involved the transport, in the paddy wagon he drove, of a politician’s wife and a racehorse, though it was unclear whether the lady and the horse rode in the wagon at the same time.
Uncle Frank stared at his cigarette for a while and they discussed him as though he was not present, and he made no sound till they got to the story about the horse.
“It wasn’t how it looked, and that’s all I’ll say on the matter,” Uncle Frank said, which meant he was about to expound at great length. “A simple misunderstanding,” he added, which was also his explanation about a donnybrook at his own wedding and about a fiasco involving an abortive business deal involving a huge amount of rotting fish purchased down at South Water Street. I later learned this was Frank’s explanation of almost every kind of trouble he had ever made for himself. Uncle Tom pressed Frank for details involving a man Uncle Frank had apparently met in a bar, and one or the other had been wearing a dress though it was unclear to me which one, but Grandma said we’d have no talk of that at Christmas dinner.
They laughed and told one another story upon story, and Uncle Frank sat there sipping beer and muttering to himself. I heard him say “plagued by bad luck and a soft heart,” and this made them all laugh harder.
There was talk of my grandfather’s late brother James, who had managed to be sought by both the Irish police and New York’s finest, and then someone, perhaps Martin with his need to peer more closely at the world’s dark side, brought up his own younger brother Terrence, who had fallen to his death in a construction accident, and “the twins” as he called them, brothers named Emmett and Peter—one had died and the other, his inseparable companion, had simply disappeared. Grandma reclaimed her table and her holiday and forced a change in topic to the current generation and, fortified by most of a three-dollar bottle of champagne, began declaiming about the amazing length of time it took Irish young men to settle down. I stole a glance at them and she was staring at her sons. Lorraine, Uncle Mike’s girlfriend, found this amusing, but Mike studied the foam on his glass and Tom began fishing for his smokes.
My grandmother fixed her steely gaze on them and it came at last to rest on her favorite. He mumbled something to the effect that he hadn’t found the right girl yet, and she began to remonstrate with him about his fussiness when the world was absolutely overrun with nice girls. It suddenly seemed that for once I had something to add to an adult discussion, and I yelled out that I thought he should marry Aunt Mollie Dorsey. All sound died in that house.
I swear that the winter wind rolling up Clybourn Avenue and rattling the loose panes in our windows chose that exact moment to cease and desist.
I looked up to reassure myself that my entire family hadn’t been assumed into heaven like the Blessed Virgin and found them staring at me with facial expressions that varied from amusement (Aunt Anne’s) to shock (Uncle Tom’s). The silence stretched itself and threatened to settle in for the duration, and then my grandmother uttered a single word.
“Mollie.” She said it with wonder and amusement, said, “Mollie Dorsey,” and I heard the speculation there, and then she was looking at Uncle Tom, whose neck and cheeks had gone dark red. He was no longer staring at me, having seen a more immediate need to defend himself from frontal attack.
“What about her?” he asked. “She was there. The kid saw her last night at the Dorseys.”
“Of course he did. She used to go out with that Swede, didn’t she? Was he there?” It didn’t seem to me that there had been anybody there who looked remotely like a Swede, not that I would have known a Swede from an Apache, but I knew that Grandma already had the answer to this question.
“Now how do I know? I mean, I didn’t see him.”
Grandma looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“No, he wasn’t there.” She looked very pleased with me and I added, “I think he’s dead.”
Tom shot me a look rich in irritation and I heard Uncle Mike chuckle, but I didn’t care. I remembered how they’d looked, my Aunt Mollie and Uncle Tom, my favorite uncle and easily the cutest aunt if one did not count Teresa the inaccessible nun, the two of them tucked back in a doorway just a bit removed from the rest of the party. And I remembered he’d looked happy, and she’d been dancing, bopping to the music and smiling up at him. I saw no reason why they couldn’t be in love, why they wouldn’t be.
Uncle Tom said, “Now why would you say that? He’s not dead, that guy.”
“She’s a nice girl. And pretty, too.”
“Well, sure she is, Ma, but…”
“But nothing. For a time back there, before you went into the Service, I thought she was setting her cap for you but she was still a schoolgirl, a bit young, I suppose.”
“She’s not in high school now,” Uncle Mike said with a serious expression, and I understood from the look Tom gave him that Mike had decided to have fun with this. “Nice girl, too. Sense of humor, got a personality.” He looked at Lorraine. “Don’t you think?”
Lorraine nodded eagerly. “Oh, sure, lots of personality. She’s real nice. Smart, too, I think.”
“And how is she doing?” Grandma asked Tom.
“She’s fine,” he said in a monotone. Grandma did the eyebrows with him now and he added, “She’s a nice girl, I like to talk to her. We’re just, you know, friends.”
“Friends?” she said, as though this was an alien concept. “Friends. Not good enough for you, though.”
“It’s not that, Ma. I’m not getting mixed up with one of the Dorseys, I mean, it just wouldn’t feel…”
“Oh, who cares how it feels? It happened once, there was nothing wrong with it, God Bless both their souls…” Here she seemed to recollect me and caught herself. “She’s a nice girl, a pretty girl, for heaven’s sake.” She seemed genuinely irritated. “You’ve got your mind set on something else, that’s all. People always want what they can’t have.”
I looked down at my toys, not wanting to see whatever turn this would bring in the conversation, but apparently she’d said what she felt like saying. I heard her getting up and clearing the table, and then Tom dropping silverware in his haste to help her, and so to forestall her anger. A couple of minutes later all was normal, and the men adjourned to the living room to doze. I cringed as Tom passed me, but he patted me on the head.
Enemies and Allies
For all their stress and madness, the holidays hide things, they preoccupy us so intensely that we forget our life’s troubles. It is that first bleak stretch of January that often reminds us of the true nature of things.
The winter of 1955 promised to last forever. It pursued us on the streets and breached the walls of our houses, so that boilers failed, sinks coughed up water dark orange with rust, pipes froze. It seemed to me that I walked each morning bent over into the same gales that scoured Clybourn Avenue, stepped onto the same ice sheets and plunged over the tops of my boots into black water, stumbled over the same drifts that piled up on the corners. I was always cold, always arriving places tired from fighting through the thick snow on the sidewalks, it seemed that the Ice Age had come again. In the morning
s Aunt Anne or one of my uncles would march me up Clybourn. At the corner of Damen and Clybourn, we’d meet up with cousin Matt and his mom, and the adults would let us walk to school together.
School soon became a torment, not for any harsh treatment or difficulty with subject matter but from a kind of restlessness that seemed to come over me when the holidays were over. I drew constantly, and when I wasn’t drawing I was staring out the windows and wishing for the snow to go away.
And now I began to notice another pattern, one that I found most painful. The school day was rich in references to parents, and activities involving them seemed constant. In the first half of the year we had drawn Thanksgiving pictures of our family at dinner, and we’d made Christmas cards from construction paper and paste, and a tissue-and-coat-hanger wreath “for your mother,” the art teacher had said. These small injuries were offset by the imminence of Christmas itself, but there was no such balm for my feelings in the second half of the school year. I saw my schoolmates’ mothers walking them to school, heard the principal’s announcement over the loudspeaker of parent-teacher conferences, and listened to the art teacher wax enthusiastic about the Valentine’s card we’d soon be doing “for your Mom and Dad.” When we were to describe what our fathers did for a living, Sister Polycarp invited me to talk about Uncle Tom or my grandfather, and the other children seemed interested but I knew it could not be the same.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 12