In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

At breakfast the next morning Aunt Anne announced that she was taking me to school, and then Uncle Tom cut her off in mid-proclamation.

  “Nah, I’m takin’ him. I’ll go in to work a little later.”

  And so I walked proudly up Diversey that morning holding my uncle’s hand. Tom kept up a stream of chatter till we got to school. He led me to the line where my friends waited. Children know when another child is in trouble, they smell it the way a shark knows his dinner is nearby, and so I was the center of attention.

  Uncle Tom seemed to be waiting for something, my teacher, I thought, but when the front door of the school opened, it was my aunt, Sister Fidelity, who emerged. She came down the stairs looking as radiant as one can look in a black habit and every eye was on her. When she saw me in line she broke into a smile and she made directly for me.

  She gave Tom a brief hug and I thought he blushed a little, and he smiled at her the way you’d smile when Ted Williams emerged from the dugout to sign autographs. Then she turned to me and gave me a longer hug.

  I stole a look at my companions and felt myself grinning. They were shocked speechless at this unearthly display of affection from a nun, at the fact that she knew me, that she was undeniably the most beautiful nun any of them would ever see in life. Then she led me a few feet away and asked me how I was doing, though it was clear she knew.

  “Are you here because I’m in trouble?”

  “I’m here because both my favorite boys are in trouble.”

  “Did you see my teacher?”

  “I did,” she said, and then before I could ask what they talked about, she added, “And I’ll see you after school. We’ll go for a Coke. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She led me back to the line and exchanged a few words with Tom. It was odd to see how shyly he spoke to her, how he seemed almost physically uncomfortable even though his eyes never left her face. Then the bell rang, they both waved to me, and I had to go into the school.

  It proved to be an uneventful day, but I passed it in great tension, almost at the edge of my chair, for I was just waiting for Polycarp to find something wrong with my work or my attitude or my looks, and I was by now half convinced that I was possessed by some impish spirit that sought to bring my ruin by making me talk when I was supposed to be silent.

  Then at the end of the day, Sister Polycarp came over to my desk.

  “I’d like you to stay for a couple of minutes after school.”

  “Yes, Sister,” I said, as though I had a choice.

  I watched my schoolmates marching out to freedom and felt the old knot growing in my stomach. Sister Polycarp asked me to take a seat up in the front of the room near her desk, and I moved while she made neat piles of the papers on her desk. The desk I’d chosen belonged to a classmate named Philip who had trouble seeing the board; I noticed that he had written his name in ballpoint pen along the edge. He would be in trouble for that.

  Eventually I realized she was looking at me. I folded my hands and sat straight-backed and, holding my eyes open as wide as I could get them, gave her my most earnest look of attention, tried to look like one of the bloody-faced saints in my book. Unblinking, she returned my gaze till I began to squirm in the hard wooden chair. Then she shocked me by laughing. It wasn’t a deep, loud laugh like my uncles’ but a soft, rueful chuckle, and then she looked out the window, rubbing her eyes and shaking her head. When she turned back to me, she was smiling.

  “Daniel, you look like a little maniac. Relax, and stop doing that with your eyes.” I did, and then she sighed. “Daniel, I have been trying to be patient with you. It probably doesn’t seem that way, but I have. Other sisters have different ways of providing discipline…”

  “Sister Augustine pinches,” I offered.

  Sister Polycarp blinked. “She pinches?”

  “Yes.”

  Another sigh, another, longer look out the window. “Well, she’s small and…”

  “Old,” I helped.

  This time she nodded. “Yes, she is very old. And old people have their ways, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  For a long moment she said nothing, and I studied her. At the time, all nuns seemed old to me but I recognized that Sister Polycarp was younger than any of the others. Bigger too, a hefty farm girl, from Minnesota, she’d once told us, with a chubby face and large brown eyes. We had no idea what color her hair was under the habit.

  “We’re not doing so well together, you and I.”

  “Because I’m bad,” I offered.

  “No, not because you’re bad. You’re not bad. You seem to be having trouble paying attention in class, and you have trouble being quiet. And…I don’t like the way the other children are beginning to think of you. They think you behave the way you do, like a clown who can’t quite keep up with the rest of the class, because you have no parents and don’t know any better.”

  “They do?” I felt my face going red.

  “I think so.”

  “Well, they’re wrong.”

  “Of course they are, but you seem to want very badly to become the class clown and troublemaker. I know that it’s hard for you to take school seriously, I know you’re probably not very happy right now. It is very bad to lose your parents, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and wondered why I felt like crying.

  “This is something I understand. Both my parents died when I was in grammar school. They didn’t even get to see me graduate, they never even saw me become a nun. And I was very angry at the entire world. I was angry at God.”

  “You were?” I heard the shock in my own voice.

  “Oh, yes, I was. As you probably are sometimes but don’t want to admit it. It’s all right, though, He’s got a thick skin. But I was angry, I was very irritated by all the adults that wanted to help me, and most of all I hated the idiot teachers in my school. I hated the nuns,” she added quietly. “I hated all the nuns.”

  I made a show of distancing myself from this notion, I put on a facial expression suggestive of extreme reverence, slavish devotion, near worship, then asked the obvious question.

  “Did they throw you out?”

  “No. Someone was patient with me. And I am trying to repay the favor. I’m also…” Here she faltered, and seemed uncomfortable. “I’m looking for some help. I have very little experience with smaller children, I was trained to teach the higher grades. I try to do a good job…”

  “But you do.” It was true: everyone liked her, though we sometimes made fun of her round, fat face and big body.

  “Well, thank you. But I still need some help sometimes. And if you and I are going to get along, we’re going to have to become partners. I need an ally, Daniel. You’ve probably noticed you’re not the only child who has trouble behaving in class.”

  This was true: a boy name Albert Martino was in many ways worse than I was, a boy named Henry got up and roamed around when he was finished with his work and she had to physically put him back in his seat, and one of the little girls frequently called the rest of us names. So I chanced a subtle nod here in tentative agreement.

  “Some days, Daniel, some days I need somebody I can count on to lead by his good example. I need you to do that, Daniel. I’m just not sure you can.”

  “Well, I think I can.”

  “Good. I would really appreciate it. Because you and I have something in common that other people don’t need to know about. And I know,” she began, and I thought with disappointment that she would tell me how proud my deceased parents would be, but she had a good hole card and she played it now, “it would make your aunt proud of you.”

  “My Aunt Teresa, you mean. You met her today…”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no, I didn’t meet her today. We’re friends, she and I. We met in college.” Sister read my shock in my face and gave me a small proud smile. “That’s righ
t, I went to college, just like your aunt. She used to write me letters from Guatemala. She’s a great person.”

  “Yes, she is,” and I was on the verge of telling how my uncles thought it a waste for Teresa Dorsey to have become a nun, but for once my instincts showed me the course of good sense.

  “If I can tell her that you’re settling down in school, it will be a load off her mind.”

  “Well, you can.”

  “Good. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. You like to draw, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ll have to find a little more time for you to do that.”

  “That would be real good.”

  “But now that we’ve had our talk, I’m going to expect you to try a little harder.”

  “I will.”

  “And also, what I told you about my parents? That is a secret, just between you and me.”

  I was too delighted to speak: life held few pleasures more thrilling than keeping a secret.

  When she let me go, I found my Aunt Teresa waiting for me outside. She took me by the hand and we went up to the drugstore on Ashland and sat on the glossy red stools at the counter.

  “What do you want to drink, Danny?”

  “A Coke, I guess,” I said without giving it much thought. She said she’d take me for a Coke and I was a literal child.

  She frowned. “A regular Coke?”

  I shrugged to cover my confusion. A middle-aged black man who sometimes manned the counter came over to see us.

  “This man here,” she said, “can make you a cherry Coke or a chocolate Coke or a phosphate—a chocolate phosphate or…”

  “Vanilla phosphate,” the man helped, “cherry phosphate, orange phosphate, lime phosphate, lemon phosphate, strawberry phosphate…” and they both laughed.

  In the end I settled on a chocolate Coke—the notion of chocolate syrup poured into a Coke was just perverse enough to capture my attention. My aunt ordered a vanilla phosphate and gave me a taste. It was like a very sweet cream soda, and I filed the knowledge away for a future order.

  “So you know why I was at your school this morning.”

  “To see about me and Matt.”

  She pursed her lips. “Danny, I told you a fib. I was actually there because three people I’m fond of are having trouble. The third one is my friend.”

  “Sister Polycarp.”

  “Yes. She’s a very dear friend, she’s just a wonderful person. She’s very kindhearted, and it may be hard for you to see your teacher this way, but she can be very funny, too.”

  It was true that Polycarp had a certain dry wit that she trotted out for us on rare occasions, but in general she was usually too intent on her work.

  “You were in school together,” I said.

  “Ah. She told you. Yes, we were. And you’d be surprised how smart she is, Danny. She’s just brilliant, she should be teaching in a college.”

  “Really?” Even from Aunt Teresa, this seemed a bizarre notion.

  “Yes. Anyway, she likes you very much, but teaching your grade is proving to be very hard for her. And I was really hoping the two of you would work everything out. She needs somebody in that class to be…she needs a very trustworthy boy. I thought maybe that could be you.”

  “It is,” I said without any doubt.

  “Good, if you two got along well, that would make me happy.”

  “Okay,” I said, for if she’d asked me to dash in front of the Ashland bus, that wouldn’t have seemed much of a sacrifice.

  When we were finished with our drinks she walked me all the way home, had a brief visit with my grandparents, and then left, and as she walked out the door, she winked at me.

  Young Men and Love

  On Friday nights I stayed up and watched TV with my grandparents, comedies and detective shows, and the Friday night fights. Sometimes my grandmother made popcorn. But the salient memory for me of each of those Friday nights is of my uncles going out.

  “Where are they going?” I would ask, and my grandmother would just say, “Oh, they’re going out, young men go out on a Friday.”

  Most of the time they went out together, but there were times when one or both of them had dates. I could usually tell when Tom had a date: there was a slight tension about him that I didn’t understand. He went out with a number of girls, frequently from beyond the known universe of the neighborhood, but it was understood by all those around him that some of his dates were with a girl named Helen, and I could tell these nights from the others, for he was unable to conceal his excitement. On these nights he sang while getting ready, he made jokes, he even managed to shave himself without suffering great loss of blood.

  I was always asleep when he returned, but some nights I would waken to hear my uncles speaking in that peculiar softened way adults speak late at night about their nights. It took me some time to understand what I was hearing: they spun great peripatetic narratives, they spoke in code, they said everything but what they wanted to say, and there seemed to be many unfinished sentences punctuated by soft laughter. One would ask something inane like, “How’d you make out?” And the other might say “I did, you know, I did okay.”

  “How okay?”

  “Real okay.”

  If something had gone wrong or the date proved to be a mistake, they reverted to recognizable English: “She’s not my type, she likes longhair music and stuff like that,” Uncle Mike might say, or, “A little out of my class, Mike,” Tom would say. I was baffled, unable to fathom anyone being out of Uncle Tom’s class, but he seemed unshaken by it.

  Eventually their conversations would turn to the two main females on their horizons. One night I heard them talking about this faceless girl called Helen; Uncle Mike muttered something about Philly Clark, and I realized who this girl was. I strained to hear more, to hear Tom’s explanation, but I couldn’t make out any more of it.

  They spoke, too, of Uncle Mike’s best girl Lorraine, a sweet-faced young woman who waited tables at a place across the street from Riverview. I’d once heard Uncle Mike say that he intended to marry Lorraine some day, but their relationship was marked by long periods of acrimony, when sweet-faced Lorraine would slam the phone down in Mike’s ear and refuse to acknowledge his existence if they met on the street.

  I witnessed one of these moments one Saturday afternoon when I was out with both my uncles. Lorraine was hurrying up Clybourn to her job and we were heading south to do some shopping. I could see Lorraine squinting at us, and her face quickly froze into an expressionless mask. When we were within earshot, Mike gave her a breezy, “Hello, babe. Got time for a cup of coffee?”

  She ignored him, nodded at Uncle Tom and just said, “Tom,” but favored me with the vague beginnings of a smile and said, “Hello, Danny.”

  “Hi, Lorraine,” I said, and a moment later caught a jealous look from her offended swain to my left.

  On several occasions I asked Uncle Tom about Mike’s trouble with Lorraine and he managed to make a muddy situation even more confusing.

  “Ah, kid, when men and women get together there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t they like each other anymore?”

  “Oh, I guess so. I think your uncle’s in love with Lorraine, but don’t tell him I said that.”

  “Then why do they fight?”

  “Because they’re in love and they don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. See, everybody’s different. Some people, they fall in love and they’re happy all the time, you never see ’em fight. Although I never understood people like that, because it’s not normal. Most people, they fight with the person they’re in love with. Maybe they think this is not the person they hoped they were gonna get, or maybe they thought their, you know, their romance was gonna turn out better. Now, some people, they fight
because they like it. Your Aunt Mary McReady, her and her husband been fighting for sixty years.”

  He laughed. “Sixty years, and old Joe’s never won one. And Aunt Mary loves it, she picks on the poor guy constantly, it’s like her hobby. Yeah, some people just like to have fights. But you’re probably not old enough to understand that, ’cause I barely understand it myself.”

  I thought about cousin Matt, and perhaps I didn’t fully understand his motivation, but I certainly could say I knew people who liked to fight.

  “So why do Uncle Mike and Lorraine fight?”

  “Beats me, but if I had to bet, I’d say it’s ’cause your uncle don’t really want to be married yet, and Lorraine…well, Lorraine comes from a poor family, see. Her dad died and she had to go to work all through school, so she’s a little older than other girls her age. That make any sense to you?”

  “I guess.”

  “And I kinda think she’s always hoping some guy is gonna come into the restaurant when she’s working, and he’s gonna take her far away from this whole neighborhood and all her troubles. And what she got instead is Mike. Which is not bad because he’s a solid guy, he’s a stand-up guy, she couldn’t want a better guy than your Uncle Mike. But she’s not sure what she’s got is what she wanted, or even if she’s got him. And I’m sure she gets impatient with Mike, he kinda drags his feet about whether he wants to get married, and you can’t do that with a woman, you got to fish or cut bait.”

  “You do?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And why does he drag his feet?”

  “Irish guys are never in a hurry to get married.”

  It sounded like a recipe for disaster to me. After a while I asked, “What’s gonna happen to them?”

  “They’re gonna get married.” He grinned at me. “They are, and they don’t even know it. Probably take ’em awhile to get around to it, but they will, and they’ll be fine. They’ll settle down and she’ll realize she’s got a good guy there, guy that’ll bring home a buck and doesn’t drink much and won’t run around on her. He won’t, I know that. He’ll be decent to her and she’ll have what she needs and if she wants to go back to school—see, she never finished—he’ll let her. And he’ll be happy.” Tom chuckled to himself. “Some guys, they think they want to be single but they just hang around with other guys on Friday nights and complain about how bored they are. And your Uncle Mike’s one of ’em. Half the time, you say, ‘Let’s go one more place, let’s go get a sandwich,’ and he’s the one that wants to go home. Goes home every time with nothing but the newspaper.”