In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  “What does that mean?”

  He shot me a quick embarrassed look and said, “It’s just an expression, something I say, don’t mean nothing. Anyhow, he’s bored being a bachelor. He’ll be married before you know it.”

  “Do you fight with…your girlfriend?” It wasn’t the question I wanted to ask but it was something to lead with.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend, kiddo.” He shot me a quick look, saw that I wasn’t buying it and then just said, “This one girl and I, sometimes we fight, yeah.”

  I’d rehearsed half a dozen ways to say what came out next and it still came out raw and blunt: “What about you and your…that girl? Are you gonna get married to her?”

  I could see I’d managed to embarrass both of us, so I added a quick, “Never mind.”

  He stopped and gave me a long look. “No, it’s okay. I just don’t have nothing to tell you on that score. I don’t know if I’m gonna get married to her or somebody else.” He saw the questions in my eyes and shrugged. “This is something, I don’t know how to explain it to you. Maybe someday…”

  “When I’m older.”

  He laughed. “No, bud, when I’m older. Maybe I’ll understand it then, ’cause I sure don’t right now.” He patted me on the head and said, “In all the songs, they say, you know, ‘when you’re in love, the world’s great,’ and that’s true, but what they never say is when you’re in love with somebody, it’s the strangest thing you’ll ever feel. I think sometimes it’s close to being crazy, you’re half-nuts when you’re in love—you’ve seen how Mike and Lorraine act, you’ve seen your poor Aunt Mary Jane and Dennis Lynch. They love each other, those two, and they’re never happy. Don’t tell anybody I said that, but…see what I’m trying to say here?”

  “Yeah. I’m never gonna fall in love.”

  “Oh, you won’t get off so easy, kiddo. Nobody’s immune.”

  I wondered how he could be so sure.

  Other People’s Business

  I had to know my uncles’ lives, their personal secrets. I already knew more than I ought from the countless times I stood with my ear pressed to the cold wood of my bedroom door, or the evenings crouched under the dining room table, ostensibly playing with my toys and feigning ignorance of their talk but soaking it all in like one of Grandma’s yellow sponges. I was tireless, I was shameless. Having already established the precedent, I stole into their rooms like bad luck and rooted around in their drawers, their closets, the stacks upon stacks of shoeboxes piled in the back of these closets.

  I was never alone in the house for more than a short time and so learned to use every moment of opportunity—a long phone conversation, my grandfather’s naps. I found pictures, ticket stubs, notes, once a maudlin letter from Lorraine to Uncle Mike. I found the sentiments disgusting but was elated to have come across something so personal. In Uncle Mike’s drawer I also found a small stack of magazines featuring sparsely clad women in provocative poses. “Tomatoes,” I had heard Uncle Mike call these women once, in his baffling slang. Tomatoes.

  In the bottom drawer of Tom’s dresser I found a small stack of letters. They’d all apparently been sent to him in Korea. Two seemed to be from old girlfriends, one was from Mollie Dorsey, a cheery letter telling him how everyone was doing and how much they all missed him. It seemed so obvious I wondered what the point of writing it had been. One letter interested me most of all: it was from my mother. It was brief and to the point:

  Dear Tom,

  I’ve decided to stop reading the papers because they make me nuts. Dad says the talk is that there will be an armistice soon, because the Reds are losing too many soldiers. Ma is making me crazy: if you don’t come home soon, I may have to brain her. She really misses you. You should write her again and this time more than five sentences. There’s a present for you with this. A nice loaf of bread. Ha-ha, just what a guy who’s stuck on a cold hill in Korea fighting a war needs. But this bread is special!

  Stay safe.

  I understood their private joke, for I’d once heard my mother tell a friend about it: she’d sent him a large loaf of bakery bread, hollowed out to conceal a bottle of Jim Beam. Uncle Tom and his buddies had killed the bourbon on the spot, then they’d eaten the bread crust because they were half-starved.

  I folded my mother’s letter neatly, fought the impulse to pocket it, and put it back.

  Whatever I found in a drawer that was wearable, I tried out: I posed in Grandma’s long hall mirror in the accoutrements of manliness, trying to get some idea how I’d look at twenty-two. I was in love with their hats, it was a time of fine hats with wide brims and colorful hatbands, and I modeled every hat I found. In the drawer where Tom kept his underwear I found a jockstrap. Its purpose escaped me, but I noted the twin loops formed by the side straps and concluded these were earholes in a very odd sort of headgear—had someone come in at just that moment and seen me parading in front of the mirror with a jockstrap on my head, I would have been scarred for life.

  I played with their jewelry, tried out their razors, several times cutting my fingers so that I had to make up plausible lies to my grandmother. A cut on my chin proved to be a challenge to my mendacity but I got away with it. Unable to resist the many bottles in the crowded bathroom, I tried on small amounts of each, of Grandpa’s Clubman aftershave, his talcum powder, my uncles’ Old Spice aftershave and toilet water, and two kinds of hair oil—Mike liked Wildroot and Tom favored Vitalis. One day I decided to do something more dramatic: I mixed something from each bottle in a plastic bowl and splashed the resulting concoction on my face and hair.

  That night at dinner I sat at the dining room table like a man of the world. Each of my uncles frowned in my direction, and Aunt Anne was laughing. My grandmother came in sniffing at the air.

  “Good God, Danny, what do you have on?”

  My grandfather, his senses honed by a mid-afternoon nap, came into the room, squinted, wrinkled his nose in my direction, and told me I smelled “like a French hoor with no taste,” and Grandma told him to watch his language.

  But as fascinating as their things were, it was the private lives of these adults that I most needed to learn about, and I would not be put off, I was as inevitable as night. I assailed them with questions and shook off their blunt suggestions that I mind my own business. When they circled the wagons, I pried through my grandmother, who refused to speak of anyone else’s business, but I quickly learned she would open up if I spouted misinformation and seemed in need of setting straight.

  “I know the names of everybody’s boyfriend and girlfriend,” I announced one afternoon when we were out shopping. “Everybody except Aunt Teresa who can’t have one,” I added, and I saw that I had her attention. She listened, nodding and occasionally favoring me with an amused look, smiling at people passing by, and when I got to her boys, she stopped smiling. I mentioned Lorraine as Uncle Mike’s intended and she just said, “Ah, who knows about those two, sweetheart?” Then I announced that Tom had a secret girlfriend named Helen and my grandma looked away.

  “Indeed he does not. She’s not his girlfriend. He goes out with lots of girls. He doesn’t really have what you’d call a girlfriend. Where did you hear such nonsense?”

  “I heard him and Uncle Mike talking. He said she’s the one he wants, it’s what he said.”

  “He was just talking. They talk and they don’t mean half of what they say, especially about girls, young men talk a lot of nonsense about girls, and you’re not supposed to be listening to all of it.” She slowed down slightly and gave me a look of concern. “Do they talk about their girlfriends in front of you?”

  “No. I was in bed and I could hear them talking.”

  “Well…well, you need to be sleeping, not listening to your uncles talk their silly talk about girlfriends.” She made a snorting noise and said “girlfriends” again and then she was off and running about the subject closest to her hear
t: “They’re a couple of big ninnies, your uncles, and they need to be settling down with nice girls. Your Uncle Michael needs to sit down with Lorraine and talk some sense to her and forget about all these other things they argue about. And my son Thomas, who doesn’t seem to have the sense to come in out of the rain sometimes with his foolish notions, he should just pick a nice girl—he’s got his pick of anybody he wants, you know, he’s got dozens of girls that would be happy to marry him, and why not? He’s a fine boy and he’s handsome and he brings home a decent paycheck and he’s got a good future, he’d make a good husband and a fine father and who wouldn’t want him, so he should forget this nonsense about that other one.”

  “Helen?”

  “Yes.” Then she grudgingly added the name, “Helen.”

  “Is she bad?”

  “No, no, of course she’s not bad, for God’s sake. Hah, and it’s not the girl who’s bad most of the time, sweetheart. Anyhow…no, she’s not bad, she’s just…not right for him.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said with a special tone usually reserved for ending unpleasant discussions, but like much of what I heard in those days, it went over my head.

  “Why don’t you like her? Is she ugly?”

  “Oh, no. She’s…she’s quite a pretty girl—not like that Josephine he was with at the parish picnic, ugly as mortal sin, that one was,” she muttered. “She’s just not…for him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, they’re different, that’s all, they’ve got nothing in common.”

  “Is she Irish like us?”

  “I think they’re German, her people, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Of course it’s not. God made the Germans, too.”

  “We fought a war with them, right?”

  “We fought lots of wars with lots of people but when they’re finished, they’re finished, and these are American Germans. We didn’t fight them. Now give me some peace so I can keep my mind on my shopping. And when we’re through, we’ll go to the drugstore and get a cup of tea.”

  “Okay, Grandma,” I said, perfectly comfortable that she’d bought me off. “A cup of tea” was a euphemism. There might be a cup of tea consumed, but with it there would be a slice of cherry pie for her and a hot fudge sundae for me, even in the morning before I’d had a lunch. Shopping days, she always said, were different, not bound by the same rules of behavior as normal days.

  ***

  She was right about the women available to my Uncle Tom. I was to see him with a number of girls: there was a tall, good-looking athletic girl named Elinor, whom my grandmother fell in love with. Elinor was sweet and laughed easily and was known to be a great cook. Grandma called her “The Polack” but made it clear she thought Elinor was a prize for any man with his head on straight. There was a slim redhead that everyone said looked like Hedy Lamarr. I didn’t like Hedy Lamarr so I took a dislike to this girl, and for her part, she never had much to say to me or anyone else in the family. Tom came to a parish Christmas party with a thin blond girl named Estelle: she was well-dressed and polished-looking, and I heard someone say her family had money. Grandma pronounced her “homely as the day is long,” but didn’t say it to Uncle Tom’s face. There was also a short, chattery girl with very long brown hair named Nora, and Uncle Mike seemed to think she was the ideal mate for Tom because of her sunny disposition and her sense of humor, but Tom was uninterested in any of them—at least in the long run, he was interested in none of them. I thought this was unfortunate, for Elinor the Polack seemed a prize to me, too, and Nora brought me comics.

  Some evenings Grandma would make him tea and sit down with him in the kitchen and talk about these girls, and I’d sit up in the next room and memorize the details of his life. I’d listen for her to make the same tactical errors each time—the brilliant general of the many campaigns against my grandfather somehow disappeared in these dialogues with her favorite son, and she made mistake after mistake so that the whole thing was predictable. They were strange conversations to me, starting as whispers and quickly rising as they grew agitated, their talk peppered with quick exchanges and then marked by long silences as they sipped their tea and prepared to renew their respective assaults. She offered one opinion after another and he rebuffed her meddling.

  Gradually I began to notice that no matter what they spoke of, there was another topic in the late-night talks, something hinted at rather than stated. For her part, Grandma spoke only of the girls she approved of and Uncle Tom talked in the abstract about the kind of person he was looking for, but I knew who they were both talking about.

  In the other conversations I heard between them—I seemed never to be asleep when I should have been—my uncle spoke to her in a low voice of his plans for his life, his dissatisfaction with work at the dairy. He wanted to get away from it, to start his own business but he didn’t know what kind. More than once I heard him tell her he wanted to buy a tavern and she would tell him he didn’t need that kind of trouble.

  “A gold mine, Ma. A tavern’s a gold mine.”

  “Ah, they’re a world of trouble, too much liquor, too many drunks, people handling your money.”

  “I’ll handle my own.”

  “Then you’ll be there all the time, in a saloon, and that’s no good, either.”

  “Ma, what kinda businessman stays out of his own business?”

  “A smart one, if he’s in that business.”

  In spring that year the dairy sent him to New York for two weeks to be trained on new machinery. It meant a promotion, that he’d be doing something a little more interesting, and he was excited. The house was curiously silent without him and my grandmother seemed uneasy.

  “He’s fine, Mother,” Grandpa told her. “It’s not Korea with the Reds, it’s New York.”

  But New York was a great dark sore on the map where her brother Emmett had died, where her brother Peter had disappeared, and she would have been happier if Tom had been sent to Munich. When he came back I was sitting on the front stairs waiting for him and he laughed at me and handed me a box of toy soldiers, Romans with a chariot, and lions to eat the Christians.

  For the next few weeks he was rejuvenated. In the mornings he seemed excited, chatty and joking at breakfast, and he made a point of being the one who walked me the two blocks to Diversey where I met Matt. After work he came home happy, and I heard him mention that he might soon supervise a whole section of people operating the new machines. A month after his return, his union forced his employer to have my uncle train another man on the new machinery, a man with seniority. After he trained the older man, my uncle had to give up his job.

  The dairy owner hated the union. Two months later, he sent my uncle to Cleveland to be trained on another machine being introduced into the dairy business, and when my uncle returned to work, he was once again asked by the union to train an older man, then step aside and give up his new job.

  That spring, three of his friends found a small moribund tavern for sale on the far side of Riverview. They invited him to come in as a partner; he put up almost his entire savings and became part owner. At dinner on the night he made the announcement he received a mixed reaction. His mother frowned and said she didn’t like the idea of him getting involved in a tavern. He’d already taken Uncle Mike into his confidence, indeed, Mike had put in a thousand dollars of his own, and now Uncle Mike explained to her that this was a good opportunity for Tom to have his own business.

  She sighed and said, “But a tavern, boys. A public house.”

  Tom shrugged and said, “There’s ten thousand of ’em, and people are always gonna want more, Ma. It’s just an investment.”

  “Are you going to work there?”

  “Maybe I’ll help out once in a while, but I’m no bartender.”

  He took me to se
e it on his next day off. It was a low flat building not far from the river, and the heavy cagelike wire that covered the windows seemed to hint of past troubles. Paint flaked off the wooden eaves and doorway, and I could see that tarpaper was peeling off the roof. On one window was the name “The Riverside Inn.”

  “We didn’t buy the building, kid,” he said. “Just the tavern, just the business.”

  He took me inside and introduced me to Marty Polk, the partner who was tending bar. It smelled like all the other taverns I’d been inside, and to those odors had been added the smells of new paint and fresh varnish. It was smallish, with a handful of wooden tables and chairs and a straight bar that curved at each end. It was darker than most of the taverns I’d seen, so that it was night inside the bar. There was no dog in this one, no one who turned and greeted us as we entered, so that it seemed there was a distance between owners and customers.

  I didn’t like it, but for his sake pretended to be impressed, and honestly tried to imagine it on a Friday night, crowded and bustling and filled with working class people having a nice time.

  The tavern began to occupy a certain amount of his time: he filled in as bartender on occasion, made appearances on weekends when friends were going to drop by, and tried to keep an eye on what he jokingly called “the bankroll.” Once or twice I saw him when he came back from the Riverside Inn and he had a preoccupied look on his face.

  Of Madmen, Science, and the River

  I was walking home from school, distracted because I thought I’d lost my hat, rooting around in my schoolbag, and I caught myself about to walk into a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Tough boys from the public schools sometimes roamed the stretch of Diversey between the projects and the tracks, and for a moment I was afraid. The boy was tall and skinny and red-haired, straddling the sidewalk so that I’d have to stop or run into him. I recognized him then: his name was Rusty Kilgallen and I knew him to be in fifth grade at my school. He was rumored to be bright, willful, and a little crazy. His teacher, a youngish nun, seemed to think he was a budding genius. The verdict from at least one earlier teacher had been different: Sister Augustine had thought he was the antichrist.