We pursued our errant dinner across the street, watching it weave in and out of traffic, and then it spotted the doorway to Liquor Town. A man was coming out and our chicken saw its moment, ducking inside before this portal to freedom could close. I realized we would be known by half the patrons, but Grandpa pushed on in, exhorting me to follow him. I felt that if Grandpa could handle the embarrassment, then I was his man.
Sure enough, we did know a number of the startled people lining the stools of the long bar. Several were friends of Grandpa’s, and there were even several women there, this being Saturday. They gave us a shocked look and then Grandpa galvanized them into movement.
“Help us catch that damn thing,” he yelled.
“You can’t bring that bird in here,” the bartender yelled.
“We didn’t bring ’im in, he come in by himself,” Grandpa pointed out, and when the bartender continued to protest Grandpa said, “Ah, pipe down.”
We pursued the bird into the back room of Liquor Town, where two sweating fat men made pizzas. There were more than a half dozen of us now, but the chicken was neither impressed nor cowed, it gave no hint of ever tiring, and the two fat pizza cooks chose to cheer it on, which seemed to give the bird renewed heart for the struggle.
In the end, perhaps from exhaustion but possibly from boredom, the chicken sought out the dark wedge of space between the two pizza ovens, a dead-end, and Grandpa stuffed it back into the box. Grandpa told me to follow him, and we went back out onto Clybourn. Then he set down the box and stood back, bent over with his hands on his knees. He was sweating, and a pair of red spots had appeared high on his pale cheekbones. He coughed, a long cough that took his breath for a time, but when it subsided, he was laughing silently. Inside the box, the bird was silent, motionless; then I saw the beak through the flaps, and soon one dark beady eye appeared to assess us and our intentions.
“What are we doing, Grandpa?”
He gave me an odd look. “I dunno. Maybe we’ll let it go.”
“But why, Grandpa?”
“Well, we’ve had so many adventures together, the three of us, seems a shame to kill it. I’ve come to think of it as an old friend. I think you’ve developed a fondness for it as well.”
I considered this for a moment. In all our time with the chicken, I hadn’t envisioned the probable end for this unhappy bird, and now that I could, it didn’t seem at all fair. Then I pointed out the problem with this notion.
“What about Grandma?”
“Ah, that’s a horse of a different color. She didn’t have no adventures, did she? No, she’d look at this stupid bird and just see a nice dinner, while you and I, we see a…a companion.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Ah, well, if she kills me, at least I’ll die with a clear conscience.” He bent over and pulled back the flaps of the now-tattered box. The chicken eyed him, then thrust its head out into the air like a feathered periscope and surveyed the street.
“You’re free, you stupid thing, you can go,” Grandpa said, “but stay away from the gray house up the street, that’s Old Lady Gorski, that old Polack’ll eat you raw.”
The bird sniffed at the air, then leaped out of the box and took off at a brisk but unpanicked, even dignified pace. We watched it marching off up Clybourn, in the general direction of the now-closed Riverview, and I had no trouble imagining the chicken finding its way inside the darkened park and living off old peanuts and popcorn and having a fine life for a bird once destined for a dinner platter.
Then we went back inside Liquor Town and my grandpa took me to the phone, put in a nickel, and let me explain the situation as I saw it: namely, that the chicken had escaped and had last been seen heading west, and that Grandpa was distraught. “Distraught” was his word, and I felt it to be a fine word for the circumstances though I had no idea what it meant.
“He’s what?” my grandmother asked.
I gave her the fine word again, then explained that my grandfather was even now sitting at the bar of Liquor Town, too mortified to come home, too shamed to face his wife without the dinner he’d been sent for. I didn’t actually feel this was a lie, for his discomfort was manifest, and we’d both seen her lose her temper.
She paused at the other head for a long time, then said, “Is he sober?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, though I wouldn’t have known.
“It escaped—you mean it was alive?”
“Yes.”
“What in the hell was he thinking about? How were we going to kill it?”
Grandpa had explained this to me: we were going to beat the life out of it with a hammer, though I now realize he was pulling my leg. At any rate, this was the explanation I gave to my grandmother, who then muttered predictable things about the proper use of a hammer.
She paused then, and for a moment I thought the line had gone dead. Then she sighed into my ear and said, “Tell the old fool to come home, and if he comes in with the drink in him, he’s as dead as the chicken would’ve been.”
As if reading her mind, Grandpa whispered, “Tell her I’ve only had one.”
“He’s only had one, Grandma.”
“One? I’ll give him one,” she said. Then she repeated, “One,” and told me to come right home.
He was silent on the walk home, and when we reached the porch I went up first and he struggled over the stairs. I could hear him panting.
“She’ll be waiting with a frying pan,” he said. “You have to protect me.”
The door opened, and instead of my grandmother in her battle fury, we were met by Tom. He was putting on a clean shirt, and the bloody pieces of tissue clinging to his face told me he’d also shaved. He looked from me to my grandfather, his eyes worried.
“I thought maybe you guys got thrown in the slammer. Dad? Anything wrong?”
Grandpa shook his head. “No, no, just…we had a long day, we had adventures, and I’m bushed. Didn’t we have adventures?”
He looked at me and I nodded on cue.
“We had a chicken but it got away. It was red, but I think it didn’t like the bus.”
He gave me the longest look anyone has ever turned my way, a look that assessed me and judged my mind to be feeble. I could almost read his mind, I am certain he thought my grandfather had gotten me drunk. Then he looked back at his father.
“It was alive?”
“Well, it’s how they start. They’re all alive to begin with, for God’s sake.”
“I know that. How come you were…”
I looked up at them and saw the new look come into my uncle’s eyes, and then slowly he began to laugh, that same laugh my grandfather had, a silent laugh where almost no sound escaped, so that the humor seemed even deeper, more profound, because it had rendered them speechless. Now my grandfather joined him, and Tom put an arm on his father’s shoulders and shook his head, and then Grandpa was patting Tom on the back.
“Time to face the music,” he said, and walked toward the kitchen. My grandmother met him in the doorway, blocked his path for a second, wrinkled her nose at him, and then he handed her his purchase.
“What in the name of God is this?”
“Oh, a holy statue for you, a lovely thing—St. Patrick, I think it is.” She stared at him for a second, then moved aside to approach me.
“Danny, are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Sure. I got hot dogs and cokes and cheese popcorn. And the man that sold Grandpa the statue thought it was God. Grandpa thinks he was an immigrant. And we had the chicken but it got away. I think it’s at Riverview unless Mrs. Gorski got it.”
She watched me without blinking or saying a thing, just shook her head, then moved back into the kitchen.
“Grandpa’s okay?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. I think he feels bad about the chicken.”
Tom nodded and we both listened to the voices from the kit
chen.
“For the love of God, where have you been all day?” She tried to sound irritated but succeeded in sounding worried. He answered her in a tired voice and I heard him cough. She said, “You need a cup of tea,” and began bustling around her kitchen to make him some tea.
She asked him something else and I heard him say he felt a thousand years old, and my uncle sat me down beside him on the sofa on the pretext of asking me to tell him about our adventures. I kept looking out toward the kitchen, and a coldness came into the pit of my stomach.
My grandparents were in the kitchen together for a long time, and when their conversation was finished, Grandma came out and gave me a tired smile. Beyond her, I could see my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table, looking toward the back window, drumming his fingers on the table.
She and my uncle exchanged a quick look, and then she put on a smile for my benefit. “Well, there’s no chicken for supper because of you two amadans, and if there was a chicken I wouldn’t have time to cook it. You have to pluck them, you know. So Tom, you call up the Chinaman and order chop suey.” She wrinkled her nose and feigned annoyance at the idea of chop suey—her catchall name for all Chinese food—being suitable for dinner, but she’d turned the occasion into a party and we all knew it: egg rolls and paper-thin wonton and food clever enough to disguise the vegetables.
Tom grinned at me. “Hey, hey, kid. Chop suey!”
I smiled back at him, perfectly willing to let them put this gloss on the evening.
Forty-five minutes later a skinny Chinese man came with our food. He stood and listened to Grandma’s complaint about how long it had taken. Through it all, he smiled and nodded, his lack of English manifest.
Uncle Mike showed up with his perfect timing for food and we spread it all out on the dining room table. Tom opened each container and Grandma peered in and muttered, “What in God’s name is that?” And then our Chinese dinner took for us its accustomed form: bathed in steam, noise, strange and wonderful smells emanating from the chaotic array of white cartons and small packages of waxed paper. Each of my family stepped into his role: Uncle Mike eating his methodical way through everything and Uncle Tom warning us there would be none left for the rest of us, my grandmother rhapsodizing over the shrimp in garlic sauce and declaring, “Oh, they’re grand, the Chinese people. They’re just grand.” Grandpa squinted at a small dark piece of meat and pointed out that the dog next door was missing. Aunt Anne showed up in the middle of everything, chattering about how cold it was for March, and they seemed all to be talking at once.
Lizards and War and Lost History
On cold Saturdays, I accompanied my grandmother to what we called “Lincoln Avenue,” the miniature downtown that spread out like the spokes of a grand commercial wheel from the intersection of Lincoln, Belmont, and Ashland. Half the North Side shopped here, some of them never in their entire lives entering the Loop with its more famous and pricey stores. The neighborhoods then were small cities, self-contained and self-sufficient: there was another centered around Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee; one at Six Corners; a couple more along Sixty-Third Street. We rode a trolley bus up past the wonderful marble façade of the Belmont Theater and into the heart of our “city,” and Grandma led me though Wieboldt’s, Goldblatt’s, and Woolworth’s.
She complained for most of the morning, about how it made her feet hurt and how hot it was in the stores, about the rudeness of people who nearly knocked you over without acknowledging your existence, about gouging merchants, unfathomably slow elevators, shifty people lurking in corners to snatch a purse, and the “hidden danger of the escalator,” which she believed to be an instrument of death.
She groaned and grumbled through every inch of it and I paid no attention, for I knew she lived for her Saturday shopping. She loved it, she waited patiently through five nine-hour shifts at the knitting mill for it, inside she was smiling through it all. She bought me candy and nuts, chatted with clerks and shoppers she’d never laid eyes on, cluck-clucked at the strangeness of it all, and wouldn’t have missed it for a papal audience.
A favorite spot was the bargain basement at Goldblatt’s, where cut-rate merchandise was piled high on long tables, bright-colored bait for the bargain hunter. She bought nothing here, content instead to stand a few paces away from the tables and watch expectantly as wild-eyed shoppers grabbed and clawed at the piles and the competition degenerated into a wild melee. We watched women tug at opposite ends of discounted underwear till it split, saw shoppers pilfering items from other people’s piles, even occasional acts of force: a woman throwing an ample hip into a competitor who had cut in front of her at the table.
Grandma Flynn would stare with a look of fascination and shake her head, occasionally murmuring, “Like wolves they are.” She looked down at me. “A lot of them are foreigners, you see,” she said in her rich brogue.
Once we saw two women in babushkas start fighting; we watched, rapt, as they tore at each other’s clothes and yanked the purchases from each other’s hands, and then my grandmother collected herself and led me away, muttering, “Well, now they’ve gone too far!” in a delighted tone that said she’d just seen the Dempsey-Firpo fight.
We looked at everything, it seemed, rode escalators and elevators and climbed stairs, and I knew the day could have only one possible end: we would find a couple of stools at the long lunch counter at Woolworth’s, and I’d watch the hot dogs sweating and blushing on the big rotisserie and I’d have to have one; she’d order a club sandwich and we’d both have cake for dessert, chocolate cake with icing an inch thick and to this day I don’t think I’ve ever had anything in its class.
The first time she took me by myself to Woolworth’s she looked around her as though something was missing. For a time we sat at the counter and she was quiet. Eventually she mentioned that she’d taken my mother there when my mother was my age. I looked away and nodded; I wanted to hear no more sudden references to my mother lest I shame myself by public crying. I was irritated with her.
Then one afternoon I came in from the alley and she was sitting alone at the kitchen table with a photo album. She was crying silently over pictures of her daughter. I think I actually took a step into the room on some vague impulse to comfort her, then stopped myself; I thought it would embarrass her. I backed out of the kitchen, returned to the living room, and made enough noise to herald the approach of the Fifth Army band so I could come back to the kitchen. She was wiping her eyes and smiling at me.
“Hi, Grandma.”
“Hello, sunshine,” she said. “I cut some onions before,” she said, and I nodded as I was expected to. After that I tried not to be irritated when she brought up the subject of my mother.
***
She was a farm girl, my grandmother Winifred Flynn, from just outside a town in Leitrim, a town named for a pig, a poor place from what little she said of it, it seemed that both sides of my family had come from poor places and generations later still made their lives in poor places. She had little interest in talking of Ireland, spoke of her family, though, the Dunphys, of a mother who had died young of influenza, of a whitewashed stone cottage full of brothers and sisters: seven had made the ocean pilgrimage to America, two had stayed in Ireland.
I’d heard the many tales of her brothers’ exploits, but as I grew older I was to put more pieces together, to ferret out what she did not give freely, and I found that there had been tragedy enough in her life for several. Of those seven who’d made that voyage between 1915 and 1921, four had survived their new country’s ministrations. The youngest, Terrence, was the unlucky lad Martin had spoken of on Christmas, who had died from a fall down an elevator shaft in 1926. Another, Mick, had died in World War I, at Château-Thierry. I heard her speak once of the unfairness of it.
“Hadn’t been here long enough to know the street names and they had him in the Army on a big boat going right back in the direction he come from. He w
as twenty years old and he wasn’t in America two years, and they sent him overseas and he was killed.”
Something about the vehemence in her voice suggested this brother, the only one spoken of with a nickname, had been her favorite. The four survivors were my grandmother, the troublesome Martin and Frank, and “the sad one,” she’d once called the last brother, the surviving one of a pair of twins. This was Peter. The twins had lived all their lives together, a pair of Irish bachelors who’d never seen their way clear to settle any farther into the new country than New York.
I had seen them once, long ago: I had a faint gray recollection of a pair of identical red-faced men who’d come to visit one Christmas when I was two or three, both of them quiet men who smelled of tobacco. The lost twin was named Emmett, and he’d died, this quiet uncle, and left his brother alone and disconsolate. Peter had notified the others of the brother’s death and then dropped off the face of the earth.
Grandma was a chattery woman who bustled about her house creating noise wherever she went, as though the silence offended her, but I knew she sometimes had a cup of tea in the afternoon or late at night, once the rest of the house had turned in, and sat at her table in her small kitchen and thought about her life. She was proud of her work at the knitting mill, it pleased her to work with wool as so many had done in the Old Country. She bought me sweaters at her employee discount and took obvious delight in the ones she herself had worked on. She rode two buses each way, worked a nine-hour shift, and still came home expecting to cook dinner, and I never heard her complain of the rigors of her life. More than once I awoke in the middle of the night to see her looking in on me. I had no idea how much of her time she worried about me.
***
On certain afternoons my curiosity about my family burst from me like an ill-timed belch and I peppered her with questions—sometimes taking her lead and asking about my mother’s childhood, her friends, what my father was like when he first came calling. At these times I felt a desperation to know everything I could about them, I felt as though someone had stolen my history. I was careful to pick times when she was in high spirits—as careful as I could be with a need for truth that sometimes made me feel as though I were carbonated.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 15