In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  He looked around us at the congregation and let his amused gaze rest for a moment on the vexed face of his mother. “Oh, she’s getting worked up now. No Frank yet. He could be anywhere.”

  “And Grandma’s afraid Uncle Frank won’t show up?”

  “No. She’s afraid he will show up.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said, and he nodded.

  “‘Oh, boy’ is right, kiddo. Uncle Martin’s not here either.” He beamed and looked around the crowd filing into the church.

  Now, our long, painfully slow procession at an end, we communicants stood more or less straightbacked in our front pews and grinned at our families, and Mrs. Lonigan the organist was waking up the big organ in the choirloft. The principal, Sister Phillip, whispered to us to sing loud, and just as we were poised to launch ourselves into song, I saw my Great-Uncle Frank. I shot a quick look at Grandma, and the horror in her eyes told me she’d seen him. I saw Uncle Tom elbow Uncle Mike.

  Uncle Frank emerged from the church vestibule at the regal pace of a mourner at a state funeral, literally the sole person there who didn’t realize how plastered he was. Carefully, gingerly, head held high, as though he were in communion with the saints painted above the altar, he made his way into the church. He looked at no one, did not wobble over much, not even when he walked into the statue of St. Bonaventure at the back of the main aisle. Unfazed by this collision, he altered course slightly, marched up the aisle, found the correct pew, made the merest imitation of genuflection, entered the pew of his family, and proceeded to sit on my grandmother’s lap.

  She hissed, “For God’s sake, Frank,” and he let out a surprised, “Oh, is that you, Winnie?” in the voice of a man calling out to a friend at a Bears game, so that the entire congregation heard the exchange and cracked up.

  We were delighted at the diversion, and I acknowledged my family’s performance with a worldly shake of my eight-year-old head.

  “That’s my grandma’s brother,” I explained. “He used to be a policeman before they had guns,” and the kids nodded, impressed at his great age and grateful for his presentation.

  Beyond whatever damage he caused to Grandma’s purse, which had been on her lap, Frank engaged in no further violence, for he went directly to our flat after Mass, took off his shoes, and fell asleep sitting atop the burn hole in my grandmother’s sofa. The ceremony itself was uneventful: I did indeed faint from the heat, sometime during the endless sermon from Monsignor Roarke, who was possessed with a marvelous speaking voice but devoid of any sense of time.

  One of the girls also fainted, as did my friend Jamie Orsini, but I think he was faking. One of the fathers fainted as well, at least that was how it sounded, the great heavy thud of a large body hitting a hard floor, and there was a murmur of concern from the people around him. A few moments later Uncle Martin fell asleep and landed in the aisle, and Father Roarke talked on without losing his cadence or his train of thought.

  Afterward we stood out in front of the church while an endless succession of relatives took photos. A few feet from me, my Uncle Gerald Dorsey was taking a picture of Matt and his parents. After the picture was snapped, Matt’s mom gave Matt’s dad a look rich in malice, and I knew Uncle Dennis had done something wrong. He was sweating profusely and after a while I noticed that he was weaving slightly.

  “Your Uncle Dennis’s got a load on, huh?” Tom asked.

  “I guess so.” I hadn’t heard that expression but guessed what it meant.

  Tom patted me on the shoulder. “You gonna drink when you grow up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, afraid to tell him that I planned to adopt every habit he had, including tobacco, liquor, and dark-haired girls belonging to other men.

  He gave me a long slow look. “Look at your cousin.”

  Matt was staring down at the ground as his mother spoke urgently, angrily, into his father’s face. He stood in a peculiar slope-shouldered way, as though he were sick. I saw him shoot a quick look from his mother to his father and then look down again.

  “You decide to be a boozer, kiddo, okay, but don’t have any kids.” I caught the note of anger in his voice and looked up. My uncle stared at me till I nodded.

  Uncle Mike came up just in time to catch the tail end of our conversation. “You shouldn’t tell the kid that stuff.”

  “You think he don’t see? He ought to know.”

  I knew that Uncle Dennis had recently become a regular at the Riverside Inn, a development that made no one happy and had apparently brought trouble on more than one occasion.

  “Do you like Uncle Dennis?” I asked him.

  “When he’s sober, Dan, he’s a great guy, he’s funny, he’s got the gift of gab, he’s smart. He just shouldn’t have got married. Guy like that can’t do a kid any good.”

  We began walking to our car and I shot a last look over my shoulder at Matt. His parents were still arguing and he was watching them now, and when he caught my eye, he gave me a halfhearted wave.

  For the rest of the day I enjoyed behaving like a visiting duke. My grandmother baked a ham and a chicken and the long narrow table in her dining room was covered with side dishes and baskets of rolls. I was allowed a Pepsi with my dinner, and afterwards there was a chocolate cake from Heck’s Bakery. In the afternoon, my uncles and grandfather went out for “a beer” as they always put it, though they never seemed to settle for one, and beer frequently had nothing to do with it. My grandmother watched a movie with my Aunt Anne and Uncle Frank’s wife Rose.

  I made a little house for myself under the dining room table, setting the chairs on their sides to give the illusion of privacy and set up some soldiers behind a barricade of Lincoln Logs. As I played I found myself wondering about Matt, wondering what his day had been like. I hoped there was a dinner like mine in progress at the Dorsey house. I hoped his dinner would be at Grandma Dorsey’s, for it didn’t seem that his own house would be much of a place for celebration.

  A Tale of a Serving Spoon

  One Saturday morning later that May, I awoke to a somber house. My grandmother was in the kitchen performing her rituals, which on Saturday included a pot of coffee for my uncles, a pound of bacon, and what seemed to be a hundred pancakes. I dressed myself, then crept to the bathroom to slick down my hair and splash water on my face as my grandmother had taught me. I remember that a couple of her dark hairpins were lying on the sink; I held them up to my lip to see if a mustache would help me look like that most famous of all the world’s Flynns, “Cousin Errol.”

  While I was admiring myself I noticed a small reddish spot on the mirror. Soon I saw others, on the lip of the sink and behind the faucet, and when I looked down at the floor, I saw that someone had wiped it badly, managing to make dark orange smears below the sink. My first thought was that Uncle Tom had had a particularly harrowing encounter with his razor the night before, but I knew those cuts didn’t drip blood. Someone had bled here and been unable to hide it.

  When I went out to the kitchen, my grandmother greeted me with her customary, “Good morning, sunshine,” but wouldn’t look at me.

  “There’s blood in the bathroom, Grandma.”

  “Oh, that. Well. Sit down, your pancakes are ready. You can be first this morning.” I watched her turn four pancakes and realized that she wasn’t going to say anything more. Behind me, one of my uncles shuffled into the bathroom and I saw her dart a quick look in that direction. It was a worried look and something turned in my stomach. I stared up at her as she set the pancakes on my plate and then gave me four pieces of bacon.

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head and turned away, and a few seconds later just said, “Oh, there was some sort of a fight. They’re all just wild men nowadays, and there’s too much drink. If there’s a fight between these young bloods, then you can be sure there’s drink involved in it somewhere.”

  She pushed the Log Cabin syr
up container toward me and I unscrewed the cap from the tin cabin’s chimney and buried my pancakes and the bacon in a half-inch pool of syrup. I was in love with pancake syrup: when no one was around, I crept into the pantry and drank it straight from the can. I considered it my secret crime against the family. Eventually Uncle Mike shuffled in, refusing to look at anything but the table. When my grandmother saw him, she let out a groan and said, “For the love of God, Michael.” His right eye was monstrously swollen, a lump of tight purple flesh where there had once been a normal eye, the eye itself now reduced to a dark, wet slit. He also had a red mark on one cheekbone.

  “Does it hurt, Uncle Mike?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. It does a little.”

  “It’s good for ’im,” his mother muttered without looking at him.

  About five minutes later, Uncle Tom came in. A dark gash, almost black, split the bridge of his nose, and the skin around it was swollen, as was the left side of his lower jaw. He looked everyone in the eye, gave me a bright, “Hello, kiddo,” and patted his big brother gently on the back. He kissed his mother and ignored the angry look she gave him in response.

  She stared at them both for several seconds, then turned her back and resumed making their breakfast. A moment later she fixed me with a quick look whose meaning was unmistakable, and I got up and brought my empty plate to the sink.

  “Did you have enough?” she asked, in spite of the fact that we both knew I’d been dismissed.

  “Yes, Grandma.” I looked at Uncle Tom, who was stirring his coffee and looking as though he’d been caught at something terrible.

  “Does the cut hurt?”

  “Nah, it’s not as bad as it looks. I been cut worse.”

  My grandmother wheeled on them. “Yes, he has, he’s been cut worse, only he told me that was the last time! You should be ashamed of yourself, Thomas Flynn, and your brother that’s older than you, he should have more sense. I thought we’d had the last of this fighting after that night.”

  “Ma, this was nothing like that. Take it easy.”

  Predictably, she said, “I won’t take it easy,” which is what I have heard people say every time in my life someone told them to “take it easy” when they were upset. “I hoped that was the last time, that night you were drafted and you went out with that Billy Drey and got into that terrible fight.” She looked at me again. “They were in their best suits…”

  “Now he don’t want to hear about that.”

  She waved an angry hand in his direction and went on, unstoppable. “Your uncle was in a brand-new suit, a white summer suit, it was, and they got into a fight with some hooligans in that restaurant on Belmont, the Marquis Lounge it was, and they all got arrested. I had to go to the police station to get him, and there he was with blood all over his new suit, gallons of blood…”

  “You don’t have gallons of blood in a person, Ma,” he said, and I knew he made a mistake.

  “And that—that thing sticking out of your head, I don’t even know what it was…”

  “It was a spoon,” Uncle Tom muttered. He was looking down at his coffee and this made it seem as though he was speaking not to my grandmother but to his breakfast.

  She turned to me again and held an open hand out in his direction. “A spoon in his head, a big steel spoon that they use to serve you in a restaurant. What a sight for a mother: her son losing his life’s blood, and a serving spoon sticking out of his head!”

  “Ma, the kid don’t need to be hearing this.”

  She ignored him and directed her homily at me. “A serving spoon. And blood all over him, he looked like Dillinger when they shot him by the Biograph. That’s what I saw when I went down to get him out of the jail.” Abruptly, she showed him her back, though we could hear her continuing to mutter about the serving spoon. I was fascinated.

  “Did it hurt?”

  My uncle gave me a sour look. “What do you think? What do we send you to school for? Of course it hurt. If you had a little pin, like a hairpin, stuck into your head, it would hurt, wouldn’t it?” I nodded. “All right, then. Of course a serving spoon would hurt.”

  “Sure, it would hurt,” Mike agreed.

  I was unfazed by his anger. “How’d they get it out?”

  Tom sighed. “A doctor took it out. That’s what you have to do, a regular person doesn’t have the…”

  “The training,” Mike helped.

  “Right,” Tom said.

  “Danny, go out and play,” my grandmother said through her teeth, and it was not a suggestion.

  Still, I lingered, taking a long time in the bathroom, which had thin walls and a warped, ill-fitting door that allowed a person to experience passively any conversation in the kitchen.

  “A lot of brawling filthy drunkards,” my grandmother said in a growling voice I’d never heard before.

  “No. We weren’t drunk and it wasn’t a brawl. It was Dennis Lynch, he was in trouble. Some guys had him in an alley and they were working him over.”

  My grandmother was silent for a moment, then made a little “tsk-tsk” of pity and said, “Dennis again?”

  “Yeah. Three guys there were, Ma. And so Mike and me and Gerry Shea…”

  “Oh, him,” my grandmother spat. “I never liked him.”

  “Come on, Ma, you did, too. You told me he was a nice kid.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Anyhow, we’re coming back from the movies and we see these guys and they’re clobbering Dennis, so we jumped in.”

  “And they clobbered you,” she said, but her voice had changed.

  “No,” he said quietly, and there was an admirable certainty in his voice. “It looks like it, but you should see the other guys,” he said, and it sounded as if he was smiling.

  “They beat Dennis up pretty bad, Ma,” Uncle Mike was saying. “We took him to St. Joseph’s in Gerry’s car.”

  There was a long pause and I heard the sound of their forks scratching at the plates and my grandmother sliding the long thin spatula under the fresh pancakes. Finally I heard my grandmother sigh.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “Yeah, he’s all right,” Uncle Mike offered, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  “They didn’t break anything,” I heard Tom say, “but he’s marked up pretty good.”

  “The poor thing. He’s always in trouble, that one. Why in the world were they beating him up?”

  “Money, Ma, what else? He owes a guy money. Always owes some guy money. He gambles and then he borrows and he can’t pay it back.”

  “Should we loan him a few dollars?”

  “Ma, the kind he borrows and loses, we don’t have. And if he keeps borrowing it from this kinda people, they’re gonna find him in an alley some night and his borrowing days will be through.”

  There was a long silence and she said, “What kind of people?” in a quiet voice.

  “People I wouldn’t borrow money from. I don’t know who he owes this time, but he borrows and bets with that guy Pender who sits at the far end of the bar at Liquor Town. I wouldn’t do business with him.”

  “Will they be after the two of you now, these men?”

  “I doubt it. We didn’t, you know, give ’em our names and phone numbers. Far as they’re concerned, it was just three guys comin’ to help a guy, that’s all it was. It’s Denny they’re after, or his money, anyway.”

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “Nah.”

  “Michael?”

  “No, it’s better.”

  “‘Better?’ What’s better about it? It’s a nicer color than it was last night?”

  “Ma, it’s all right. Lemme eat in peace, for God’s sake.”

  “Watch your language at my table,” she snapped, but it was just for show, and I could hear in her voice that she’d accepted their explanatio
n.

  Later that week I saw Matt at Hamlin Park, and we made a circuit of the park, climbing the smaller trees and dashing across the outfield of the baseball diamonds to the irritation of the older kids playing softball. I wanted to ask him about his dad but it seemed like something that shouldn’t be discussed. Finally I just asked him how Uncle Dennis was.

  “He’s okay. The other night, though, he got a shiner and a fat lip from a fight.”

  We were in a small hawthorn tree, Matt looking down on me from a high fork in the smaller branches. His eyes were alight.

  “What happened? Somebody beat him up?”

  “No, somebody tried to. Two of ’em,” he said, beaming, “but my dad took care of ’em. My old man can take care of himself.”

  ***

  I didn’t know Uncle Dennis the way I knew my other uncles and aunts. There was always a distance to him, as though he had his mind on other things. On several occasions he took Matt and me to the movies, and once he took us to the parish carnival. He didn’t have much to say to us, though he frequently pointed out things to us that he wanted us to notice. One night he drove us down North Avenue after a movie, and pointed out a corner to us.

  “I had a paper stand there when I was your age, you guys.” We looked in vain for the stand. “Had to get up when it was dark and cold and be on that corner by five. You guys think you got it hard,” he muttered, and the faint smell of alcohol filled the front seat.

  “You know who one of my customers was?” We shook our heads on cue and Uncle Dennis smiled. “Bugs Moran.”

  “The gangster?” Matt asked.

  “That’s right, same one Capone tried to hit on St. Valentine’s Day, though this was, you know, years after that.”

  “Was he a nice guy?” Matt asked.

  “Oh, yeah, he was a class guy. He used to tip me a couple dollars sometimes, just for a newspaper that cost a couple cents. That’s the kinda spender he was. I like a guy that knows how to spend money. When you guys grow up, make sure you know how to spend a dollar.”