In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  And she would sit endlessly stirring her tea and conjure up a time that I never knew. Uncle Martin had once called her “the family shanackie,” and it was true there was a lot of the storyteller in her. She was the custodian of the family’s tales and she took care with them, filled them with color and life, and I could see all of it. If she loved a story, she took her time with it, drew it out, and gave it its proper length and attention, and that is how she told me of the courtship of my parents.

  They’d met, my mother and father, in the old neighborhood when both families lived on the same crowded block of Goethe in Old Town, then as now a place where poor families danced on the edge of disaster a stone’s throw from the mansions of the rich. Childhood acquaintances, then, a dark-haired Irish girl and her tall skinny neighbor boy, just two of the neighborhood mob of children of that earlier time when most families, especially the poor, had many children. Eventually the Flynns had moved away, settling near Riverview, the Dorseys had clung to their little “patch,” and my mother and father had not seen each other again until they were teenagers and the country was just months from its entry into the Big War.

  “She didn’t see your father until one day in 1940. She was working in the A&P on Ashland. Afternoons and Saturdays, she worked there. He came in for milk and saw her for the first time in years. That’s what she told me, anyhow,” Grandma said, and her voice took on a musing tone that told me she wasn’t certain about the truth of this. She paused and I looked up and saw that she’d forgotten me as she wrestled with this memory. Then she gave a shake of her head like a dog shaking off water and returned to the moment.

  “The first time they went out, he spent all his money and after he brought her home, he had to walk all the way back up Clybourn Avenue to the old neighborhood, too proud to ask for a dime for a streetcar, and it started raining before he was halfway home.

  “They went out all the time, sometimes a whole group of them, boys and girls together.” She nodded and I could tell she approved of this whole group thing.

  “When the war came they were already talking about getting married and I told them they were daft, she was seventeen, for the love of God! And then the war came and he went into the Navy.” She couldn’t conceal her relief at this development. Then she added, “We’ve got pictures, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ve got all the pictures he sent back from the Pacific, we’ve got him with his friends and playing ball with the other sailors and in his white uniform and the dark blue one, too, one for summer and one for winter. And we’ve got him with the lizard.” A quick look of horror and revulsion crossed her face.

  “Have you seen that one, with that…thing in it?”

  “Yes,” and of course I had, for it was my favorite, my late father posing with the corpse of the largest lizard I ever saw, before or since. Like Betty and Mary McReady, The Lizard was in its own way a family legend. My father and The Lizard had made each other’s acquaintance on Guadalcanal, where The Lizard had made his home in the bush just outside their camp. From what I’d been told, The Lizard proved a difficult neighbor, breaking into the camp food supply and spending its nights making unearthly croaking noises, becoming thereby an object of even greater animus than the enemy troops. My father had mounted a short, clever campaign against the beast, eventually trapping and killing it, making himself a hero to his fellows, even if he never saw action.

  In her mind’s eye, Grandma studied the picture of my sunburned father standing hipshot and windblown on a low hill with some of the other men grinning behind him, and next to him the unfortunate lizard, trussed like a primitive trophy to a sort of tripod. My father smiled into the camera. The dead lizard gazed off in the general direction of New Guinea, stoically reflecting on its fate.

  Grandma shuddered and took a sip of her tea to calm herself. “They say God makes all the creatures of the world, but I can’t believe he made that one.”

  “I want to see one.”

  “Oh, Good God, you don’t want to see something like that. I’m glad I never saw one of those things. He said the islands are full of them.”

  “Was he a hero in the war?”

  She started to shake her head and caught herself. “Oh, well, they were all brave, you know, but some of them didn’t get into the fighting.” She was obviously disappointed not to have anything better than the lizard for me, and then she brightened.

  “You could ask Grandma Dorsey, she’d know more about it. After all, he wrote her letters all through it. Not as many as he wrote to your mother, of course. A great letter writer, he was, he’d send her pictures and postcards, jokes, words from songs. He did that a lot, sent her the words from songs that reminded him of her.” She shot me an embarrassed look. “It’s what people do when they’re in love.”

  I nodded. I’d heard this before from my mother. I had been watching a movie: Dorothy Lamour was singing in one of the Hope-Crosby road movies—“Moonlight Becomes You” was the song—and she’d come into the room where I was watching it. She stood looking at Dorothy Lamour for a moment with a strange, moody look on her face, and when the song was over, she’d smiled at me.

  “Your dad sent me the words to that song when he was overseas.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, we were in love, that’s why. Someday you’ll do stupid things for some pretty girl.”

  “No, I won’t,” I remember telling her.

  ***

  The following Saturday my grandparents were invited to an anniversary party and I was to spend the day at Grandma Dorsey’s house. I made a mental note to get hold of my father’s letters, to talk to Grandma Dorsey about his wartime heroism.

  “About the war?” Grandma Dorsey said to me.

  “Yes. But not about The Lizard. I know about The Lizard.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “It was bigger than a man. It was like an alligator.”

  I nodded and held my tongue. I’d looked at the picture again and learned that the beast was perhaps four feet long, not even a Komodo dragon, but if Grandma Dorsey remembered it as an alligator, if she remembered it as a brontosaurus, I wasn’t going to disabuse her of such a colorful recollection.

  She was kneading dough for biscuits of some sort, and paused with her chubby fingers embedded in it. “I don’t think he was in any of the fighting. Your Uncle Gerald was in the fighting at Midway because he was already in the Navy when the war came. And Joe was there at the end when there was all the fighting in the Philippines.” She looked at me and I tried to seem knowledgeable about the conflict. “But your father wasn’t in the fighting. He was on the Tulagi, that was his ship. The only thing he was in was, you know, that time with the big lizard…and, oh, that one big fistfight.”

  “Fistfight?” I straightened up at this, my head already aswim with visions of my father duking it out with the Japanese soldiers.

  She shook her head sadly. “With the marines. It was the sailors from the Tulagi against the marines on Guadalcanal. Such silly things they did when they were bored. At least they didn’t kill each other in the fight.” She paused and then added, “I don’t think they did, anyway.”

  I sat at her table and she fed me bits of the dough and then made me bacon and eggs. I watched her shuffle about her kitchen and bathed in her serenity, my peaceful grandmother whom I had never seen cry, even when she stared at me and told me I was the spitting image of my dad when he was eight.

  It wasn’t until years later that I learned about Grandma Dorsey’s life, not just the poverty and uncertainty of it all, but the other things she’d seen: a baker’s daughter from Missouri, coaxed across the big brown Mississippi to marry the mercurial John Dorsey, who’d dragged her through times she’d never dreamt of.

  It was well that she bore him so many children, for she’d buried two of them early on in her life, one an infant girl. The other had been a boy named Edward. H
e’d died of pneumonia during an uncommonly harsh winter more than forty years earlier. Edward had died in his sleep, in bed with his brothers, in a cold crowded flat on Scott Street. He would have been her eldest if he’d lived.

  Later that afternoon she called me into the house and I saw that she had a shoebox waiting for me on her jumble of a kitchen table. She watched me shyly, and when I opened the box and saw the letters and photos I grinned at her and she nodded, satisfied.

  Many of the photographs were duplicates of those I’d seen already, or similar shots, but a handful were genuine treasures, photographs of my father as a boy. Whether from their tenuous existence at the very brink of poverty or a large family’s simple lack of interest in such things as cameras and photographs, the Dorseys didn’t seem to have many photos of the early days, so that I’d seen few pictures of my father’s life. His very existence before meeting my mother seemed something to be imputed from stories and testimony.

  But here were photographs of him as a boy, a blond boy who squinted into almost every picture and amazingly had done some of the very same things I did: went to picnics, posed at Lincoln Park, stood in line at Riverview, swam in the lake, and buried his brothers in the sand. In one picture he posed in front of the Belmont Theater flanked by two extremely pretty girls, and it took me several seconds to understand that I was looking at my Aunt Mollie and their stunning sister Teresa, just short of her taking of vows. One photograph I picked up and studied repeatedly: my father at eighteen or nineteen, at a wedding, possibly in his first suit. He stood in front of St. Bonaventure Church with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other hanging at his side, grinning at the camera with exactly the look I’d seen in photos of my Uncle Tom Flynn, a look I came to understand as an archetype of life, the grin of the cocky young man who believes the world is his oyster.

  Eventually I turned my attention to his letters and forgot all about photographs, for here was my father’s voice.

  The letters to his mother were as carefree as the young man in the photo, a boy’s recounting of his adventures, and I was too young to see that this was his way of easing some of her many terrors—half the people she knew were in the service, including all her sons. The letters included jokes and funny stories, and his sentences sang out with self-assurance and confidence in the future:

  “Don’t let anybody tell you we’re going to lose this War, Ma, because we’ve got them beat. Before you know it, I’ll be sitting in your kitchen asking what’s for dinner. I swear I haven’t had a good meal since I enlisted. Navy chow is not so bad but it’s not like what I’m used to. I tell all the guys my ma’s the greatest cook in the USA. Of course, they all think their ma’s the best. Then I tell them what you cook on a regular Sunday, and what you make for Christmas, and that shuts them up.”

  I read several more like that one, convinced that my grandmother was probably wrong about his service record, that if I read far enough I’d discover his acts of bravery in the face of the enemy, of great ships shelling one another at point blank range. And a couple of them did report on battles, he wrote of listening on night watch from the deck of his ship to some distant battle between battleships and cruisers, tense and frightened, and not knowing how the battle went till the early morning reports of American victory. I read on through his reports from the Pacific, his funny stories and hearty greetings to his mother, until I found one at the bottom of the box that was quite different. It was written to my Aunt Mollie, his favorite, and though the opening paragraphs spoke with easy bravado, the second half of the letter was more honest, and must have been unsettling to both writer and audience.

  “I tell you, sis, sometimes it makes me crazy thinking about what’s going to happen. In the daytime, when we’re all busy doing our jobs on the ship, there’s no time to worry, and it seems like everything’s gonna be fine. That’s when I’m sure I’m coming home to you and to Ma and to my Betty. But at night, when it’s too hot to sleep and you can’t keep your head from doing funny things to you, I think to myself, doesn’t every guy here think he’s coming home, and every guy all over the war? Isn’t every one of them sure he’s going to be the guy that makes it home? But we can’t all make it home. That’s the thing, sis. And if I make it back, will Gerry and Joe and Jim? So what’s the chances that all four of us are coming home? That’s what I mean. When I think about that, it makes me crazy. This whole war makes me crazy. But everybody here is in the same boat. Ha-ha, in the same boat, get it?”

  I laughed at his small joke, for the letter had been written aboard the Tulagi, and told myself of course they’d all made it home from the war, the four Dorsey boys, and I almost said to him, “You made it and so did your brothers, Daddy,” but my grandmother was in the room. Then I noticed the date: August 1944. On the day he’d written it, he’d had less than ten years to live. For perhaps the first time in my life I had a glimpse of him not as my father but as a young man with a life of his own, and dreams, and troubles on his horizon. And for the first time the sorrow I felt was for him. Something seemed to make my heart beat faster, and I put the shoebox aside and read no further.

  I told myself I wanted nothing more to do with these old photographs and letters of the dead, but when it was time to go, I asked my grandmother if I could take some pictures with me.

  “Oh, sure, that’s what I put them out for, Danny.”

  I took most of the photos of my father, and at the last moment, his letter to his sister.

  ***

  I found Grandma Flynn’s photograph album and the big box of the later ones, pictures that had never made it into an album. I took the ones I was looking for and spread them out in a long straight line across the brown oak rectangle of the dining room table, starting with a picture of my mother as a young schoolgirl and adding to it one of Grandma Dorsey’s pictures of my father at the age of twelve or thirteen. Then I set down a shot of the two of them at the zoo, another at Riverview—his arm around her waist now and a different look to him, something older in the eyes—a picture of them with half a dozen or more people at a picnic, a group shot at the beach, a picture of them with two other couples at dinner in Math Igler’s, where the waiters wore lederhosen and sang to you, then a shot of my mother sitting on the hood of a great hulking Dodge while a couple of girlfriends looked on, another of her and the same girlfriends dancing down Clybourn for the photographer.

  After this I set two pictures of my father, one of him in his Navy whites, standing on Clybourn Avenue and appearing to talk to the photographer, and the picture of him and The Great Lizard. Then a photo of my parents in their wedding clothes, another of them at the reception, my father’s eyes already going glassy with drink, then the two of them with me, and a tremor of panic began to replace my curiosity. I lined up half a dozen pictures of them with me, and the panic became a small hard knot in my stomach. I added more pictures of my parents with me, then a single photograph of me and my small brother John. I wanted to finish the whole project with a picture of me by myself, but when I lay the photo down on the table I hated the way it looked, with no hint of my family in it, only me against a dark brick wall. I took it away and just stared at the line of photographs from one end to the other, breathing faster, and I’m certain that I was about to cry, so that I never heard my grandmother come in.

  I had no idea how long she stood there watching me, but gradually I became aware that I was no longer alone in the room. When I noticed her I gave a start, looked quickly at my row of pictures and wanted to hide it, to sweep it all onto the floor, but she’d seen it. Her eyes said she understood exactly what I was doing.

  “Grandma likes to look at the pictures too, sunshine. We’ll look at them together tonight if you want.”

  “Okay,” I said, still embarrassed, irritated with her for intruding into this moment, but when the time came that night to look at the pictures together, I was glad for her company.

  A Cold Week in March

 
Eliot called April the cruelest month, but he never had a March like mine was to be. Looking back, it seems to have been a month of rain, of cold mornings and low dark skies promising to burst, and it seems to have been a month that brought me nothing but trouble.

  At night I fought sleep and my old fears returned. I lay in bed and conjured up the worst horrors life could send my way, told myself I probably deserved no better. They would die, these people I loved, one at a time or all at once, by accident, fire, or act of a vengeful God—the method changed from one night to the next, but in the twisted logic of the solitary dark, the result seemed almost certain to me. They would die as a logical consequence of the incorrigible, truly bad child I seemed to have become. In no time, these night terrors fixed themselves on the most logical candidate for death, the one I already understood on some level to be dying.

  School became unbearable. Whether it was the long winter or my situation, I don’t know, but I could no longer concentrate on my work, and I began having trouble with math, I began forgetting my homework, and I became once more a cause for disruption in Sister Polycarp’s class. At odd times I would look up and find her watching me even as she spoke to the class about a lesson. I thought she was looking for opportunities to punish me. Toward the end of the month, just before my birthday, I gave her several.

  She sent a sealed note home to my grandparents about my missing work and my behavior, and I threw it away without opening it. When she asked me about it, I lied and said I’d delivered it to them. She frowned and said, “They were supposed to sign it.”

  I had no answer to that and she gave me a second note. I opened and read this one, which said very much what I expected it to say. Having opened it, I could not reseal it, and so threw it away as I walked home. A boy who was walking behind me picked it up and began running toward me, thinking I’d dropped it, and I was forced to run from him till he gave up pursuit.