In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  I was struck by his revelation, by any hint about his background, for Uncle Dennis was largely a mystery to the family on both sides. No one knew his family or anything about them, except that there had been many of them. When he first met Aunt Mary Jane, Dennis had just come back to Chicago from St. Louis. He rarely spoke about his childhood, never mentioned his parents. He’d been seeing Mary Jane for several months before anyone knew he was originally from Chicago, and longer still before he dropped hints that he’d actually grown up in the old neighborhood around North and Wells. I’d once heard Uncle Mike complain that Dennis had a way of changing the stories he’d told about his early life, as though he were reinventing himself. Nobody he talked to, Mike said, remembered a big family named Lynch around there.

  ***

  In June, when we’d all been turned loose on an unsuspecting populace for summer vacation, I began spending one or two days a week at Grandma Dorsey’s house. On the first of these days, I amused myself with Terry Logan and a couple of the other kids and waited in vain for Matt to show up. When it became obvious that he wasn’t coming, I asked my grandmother if he’d be here the next time.

  She turned away quickly and said, “Oh, I’m sure he will,” but her tone said something entirely different. I didn’t see him for the entire month of June, nor did I see anything of his parents. When I asked my uncles about it, they exchanged a quick look and Uncle Mike shrugged.

  “I don’t know if you’re gonna see him there for a while, champ. I think his folks made some kinda other arrangement.”

  “Why?”

  He looked irritated, and Uncle Tom stepped in.

  “I think it’s just more convenient for them this way,” he said, and changed the subject almost immediately.

  I was sitting in the dirt just outside Grandma Dorsey’s door. I had dug small trenches and filled them with my toy soldiers, and I was sitting there in the hopes that one of the other kids would show up and join me, bringing new blood to the battle. Grandma Dorsey was in the kitchen peeling onions and talking to Aunt Ellen.

  “Anything I’ve got, she can have, she knows that,” Grandma Dorsey was saying.

  “Mom, what they need, you can’t give ’em, and it’s not the money. If it was, we all woulda got together and come up with it. You know it’s not the money. Whatever we give them, he’ll find a way to spend. Money just…it goes through his hands like water, Mom. We give him money, he’ll gamble with it. He’s always got some goofy idea about making money, and it never pans out for him. He’s nuts.”

  “Oh, now, he’s not any such thing.”

  “Yeah, he is, and I could kill him for marrying her, and sometimes I’d like to give her a punch in the nose for…for falling for that crazy man.” Ellen was the oldest in her family, a widow at forty, with a house full of children; she was tall, tough, and good-looking in a humorless way, and I had the impression that she took care of her mother. “That broad doesn’t miss a thing,” I once heard my Uncle Mike say, and he was probably not far off the mark.

  “He doesn’t seem to have much luck, the poor boy,” Grandma said.

  “You make your own luck, Mom.”

  “Not always, you don’t. Some things just happen,” Grandma Dorsey said, and I was struck by how different she sounded. This was the voice of knowledge, of experience, not my sweet-tempered grandmother mouthing platitudes and homilies about life’s dangers and rewards, and it silenced Aunt Ellen for a time.

  At last she spoke again, quieter this time. “Mom, they’re too proud to come over. We won’t see them till they’re out of this jam. When Dennis has a buck in his pocket again, that’s when you’ll see them at your door.”

  “I’d like to see Matt, at least. They could bring him over sometimes,” Grandma Dorsey said in a soft voice, and Aunt Ellen growled, “Aw, Mom, come on.”

  It was weeks, perhaps months, before they saw him again, but I saw him the following week.

  There was a photographer in the zoo at Lincoln Park, stationed just outside the big brown building that housed the cafeteria. You could have him take pictures of you sitting on or standing in front of a stuffed bear. Terry Logan had just angered this man by slapping his hand across the camera lens just as the photographer was taking a shot of a mother and her little boy. The photographer, a thin man in suspenders, gave chase and we tore off in the direction of the big figure-eight–shaped pond we all called “the lagoon”—Terry and I and two German boys named Otto and George.

  The photographer probably gave up the chase within the first fifty paces, but a bystander with time on his hands had taken up the cause for a while and so we kept on running. We rounded the lagoon, went on past the dark, spooky little islands where Matt told us someone had once buried a dead body, and we didn’t stop till we got to the hill with the statue of General Grant on it. We scrambled up the hill through the dense underbrush that sprouted everywhere in Lincoln Park in those days. The hill was crowned by a high granite edifice that held the bronze general and formed a tunnel-like arcade with windows that allowed a view of the lake a few hundred yards to the east. It was a dank, shadowy place favored by teenagers with romantic inclinations, and we had found used condoms in the bushes around it. We made it to the top and, satisfied that the men had lost the interest or energy to continue their pursuit, collapsed against the damp wall to catch our breath.

  As we gasped and giggled at one another, I became aware that we were not alone. A few feet away someone sat in one of the big stone windows and watched us with his arms folded across his chest. I was spooked, and I poked Terry and pointed. The figure in the window was backlit but I could see that it was a child. He said nothing till all four of us were turned in his direction, then slid down onto the floor of the monument.

  “You guys are scared of your own shadows.”

  “Matt?”

  “No, Santa Claus! Of course it’s me, dummy. Who’d you expect?”

  He stepped toward us, coming out of shadow and into the light from the setting sun. I looked around the monument and saw no one else.

  “Who you with?”

  “Me, myself, and I. Who am I supposed to be with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked at Terry and the others. “I saw you running—what’d you guys do, steal something?”

  “No, Terry made the photographer mess up a picture.” We all laughed and Matt smiled at Terry Logan.

  “That one guy almost caught you, Terry.”

  “I know.”

  “I could see the whole thing from up here,” Matt said. “I come up here sometimes.” He gave me a little smile and I nodded. He folded his arms, and I saw things in his face, pride in this display of his independence, and something else, just the faintest hint of hostility.

  “What are you doing here by yourself, Matt?” I asked him.

  “Who am I supposed to be here with? I don’t need to be with anybody else, for Christ’s sake. I can go anywhere I want to. My ma calls in from work and checks on me, and then I can go anywhere I want, long as I get back home before she does.”

  “What if she calls again?”

  “She won’t. She only calls once, to see if I ate lunch.”

  He regarded us with a superior air and smiled. “I got to get back. I got a long ways to go. And you’re gonna be late, too, Dan. I think you’re already late.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. You’re late. See you guys.” He started down the dirt side of the hill, hands in pockets, and then stopped. “Hey, Danny? Don’t say nothing to anybody, okay? Don’t say you saw me.”

  “All right,” I said, not really knowing what difference it made but willing to keep his secrets. He nodded and kept on trudging down the hill.

  Death of a Dreadnought

  Having survived an entire year of my “second” life, I looked forward to that summer of 1955 the way a child sho
uld. It was to be in its way as full of incident as its predecessor had been. If someone had told me that, I’m not certain I would have believed it possible. The first landmark of that summer was a wake and funeral. I was already fearful of them, given the bleak circumstances of the first one I’d experienced, but this one proved to be different, for it marked the passing of my grandmother’s cousin Betty McReady, the unmarried one of the McReady sisters.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table having Kool-Aid when my grandmother took the call. She hung up the phone on the wall and looked at Grandpa.

  “Betty McReady died, Pat. God bless her.”

  Grandpa looked at her, raised his eyebrows and just said “God rest her soul.” When I asked what she’d died of, Grandpa looked at me and said, “Her great weight.”

  “Oh, don’t be telling him nonsense like that. For God’s sake, she most certainly did not die of her weight.”

  “Ugliness, then.”

  “Keep a Christian tongue in your head, Pat, for the boy’s sake. She was a grand old soul,” Grandma insisted, and eventually wore Grandpa down because he had long since learned which fights he could not win.

  The formal visitation took place at Larsen Brothers Funeral Home on Belmont. Uncle Tom brought me there, dressed in my sole white shirt and a clip-on tie that gouged my neck, and Grandma squired me around the room, where people fussed over how grown-up I looked. Then Uncle Tom led me up to the casket, where I viewed the deceased with great interest.

  My parents’ funeral was a blur to me still, a hectic, crowded tearful two days of terror and noise and sadness, and I really noticed very little of it, other than the way people all seemed to be watching me, and how different my parents looked in death. The wake of Aunt Betty was therefore an excellent occasion for a boy to experience the Irish interpretation of the funereal ritual. Freed from the dark restraint of actual mourning, I was able this time to watch and learn, and there was much to note. For one thing, her passing flew in the face of a widely held belief among her acquaintances that the McReady sisters couldn’t be killed. This notion was born of the fact that these two women had for eight decades ignored all the modern notions of health, exercise, proper diet, and kitchen hygiene and still managed to reach the age of eighty-one (Mary) and eighty-two (Betty). Mary was known to serve leftovers weeks after their original appearance on her table, and Betty became a cooking legend for her belief that if she found something in her freezer, it was good for soup. For this reason her soups were a cause for dread, morbidity lurked in each teeming spoonful, and one lived in terror of the moment when he might find himself at Betty’s table and see her coming with a tureen of soup containing animals and vegetables that had last seen the light of day when Roosevelt held the White House.

  It was believed by the more educated in the neighborhood that her freezer was a wellspring of meiosis and mitosis that had more than likely produced microbes hitherto unseen in the world. She once actually admitted to guests that she could not identify the meat used in a particular batch of soup, but that she’d “come across it in me freezer, so where’s the harm in it?”

  Grandpa said that food acquired immortal life once it reached Betty’s freezer, and he claimed he’d seen Mary scrape what looked like fur from a hunk of roast beef before carving it up for sandwiches. No one ever died of anything he ate at Betty McReady’s house, or at the matching table of terror in her sister Mary’s, but it was widely believed that this was because people ate sparingly at their homes, washed their meals down with scalding Irish tea to boil the bacteria alive, or doused them with unwatered whiskey to poison them.

  All the neighborhood waited patiently for the day when the tiny beasties would work their fatal magic on one of the rotund sisters. We watched them ingest everything in sight, and nothing happened.

  In the end, however, while Betty’s ancient system proved impervious to the unseen onslaughts of microbes from old meat and murky soup, her heart had given out. In death as in life, she was the subject of much talk, though now she elicited comment and conjecture of a different sort.

  There was, for example, much discussion of the peculiar demands of her funeral. I overheard my grandfather opining that she’d be an easy one for the Larsen brothers to handle, because her corpse was already preserved almost to the point of calcification. What he actually said was that “her innards are damn near cement by now,” and Grandma had told him not to speak disrespectfully of the dead.

  On the other hand, I learned that her weight presented certain challenges to the Larsen brothers, this according to the semi-hushed conversations I overheard in the funeral parlor. For one, they had some difficulty fitting her into the casket. For another, the clothing brought to the Larsens by Aunt Mary had not been worn by Betty for more than forty years, and there was some doubt whether the dress in particular had ever fit her.

  Her size evoked considerable comment among my uncles: “Where we gonna get pallbearers?” I heard Uncle Mike ask.

  “We can find six guys here easy,” Tom answered.

  “Six?” Mike repeated. “What six guys you know could carry Betty McReady and the box she’s in without one of ’em droppin’ dead?”

  “Okay, maybe we go with eight.”

  Uncle Mike shook his head. “Eight guys and a draught horse. Eight guys and an elephant, maybe.”

  “Hey, show some respect for the dead.”

  Tom nudged Mike with an elbow and they looked in my direction. I pretended to be interested in the deceased, and Tom suggested we go up to pay our respects.

  I spent several minutes studying the late Betty McReady and for years to come my impressions of the embalmer’s art were colored by this experience. In repose, her heavy features had given way to gravity, so that her face was both flat and enormous. Also, the combination of the natural stiffness that overtakes the flesh after death and the liberal application of powder and makeup had given Aunt Betty a look quite unlike anything I’d ever seen in a living being. I thought she resembled nothing so much as my grandma’s waxed fruit. I made this observation to Uncle Tom and he told me not to say that in front of Grandma. He suggested that we kneel down and say a prayer, and as we did so, Aunt Mary chose this moment to waddle up to the casket to have another look at her sister.

  “Ah, doesn’t she look grand?”

  “Sure she does, Aunt Mary,” my uncle said.

  She moved past us and the air was perfumed with the scent of mothballs. As always, she was in her heavy black coat—weather made no difference to her—a thick dense coat covered with dog hair. There seemed to be many kinds and colors of dog hairs on her coat, and I once commented to my grandfather that I’d seen her dog and he was black.

  “Ah,” he’d said, “those are from dogs long dead, Danny-boy. That coat hasn’t been cleaned since V-J Day.”

  Along with the black coat and its patina of pooch hair, she wore her hat: I cannot to this day remember seeing her without her pillbox hat, not even in her own home. It was black and flat and bore a single yellow flower that never moved, bent, nor swayed in the breeze, and as the years wore on the hat grew dusty and battered and misshapen. Now, as she leaned over to look at Betty, the hat opted for freedom and dropped onto the bosom of her sister. Mary immediately grabbed it back and jammed it on her head, unaware that the solitary flower had become entangled with the rosary clasped between the deceased’s hands.

  Aunt Mary turned to us and saw that she was caught by something. She spent a long moment trying to shake loose, during which a look of total befuddlement crossed her face. Then Mary tossed her head to free herself and the rosary came loose, swinging freely from the yellow flower so that Mary now seemed to have added a new ornament to the hat. The rosary moved to and fro like a beaded pendulum and the old woman was utterly unaware of it. She looked back at her sister, then frowned.

  “Oh, someone’s gone and taken her rosary, for the love of God. Nothing’s safe anymore
, people’ll steal the pennies off your eyes after you’re gone.”

  This last expression made no sense whatsoever to me and I was going to ask where the pennies were, but she was just warming up.

  “It wasn’t like this in the old days, people were honest unless they were trying to sell you something, and we didn’t have this communism. No communists then, or if we did have them, they kept quiet about their nonsense. And these murderers you have now, why we didn’t have anything like that at all.”

  I wanted to do something helpful, so I pointed at the rosary dangling from her hat. “It’s…” I started, then felt Uncle Tom’s hand squeeze my arm. “…gone,” I finished, and she nodded.

  “People will take anything that’s not nailed down.” She studied Betty’s serene countenance. “Ah, she’s at peace now, poor thing, her suffering is finished.” She turned a beseeching look on us.

  “She was so homely, poor thing, and look how they’ve fixed her up. Not that she’s a beauty now, of course—it’d take the hand of the Lord Himself to do that, but still…”

  I looked incredulously from Mary to the deceased, a matched pair if the Almighty had ever made one, and said nothing. Mary bent over, examining the work of the funeral home and nodding sagely.

  “There, you see?”

  I didn’t see at all. She appeared to be pointing to a large, terrifying growth at the point of her sister’s chin.

  “That mole? She used to have a long ugly hair growing out of that mole, and they’ve cut it off or shaved it or something.” She examined her sister, managing to look more like Betty than ever, and my uncle turned away and put a handkerchief to his face. He coughed earnestly into it but I wasn’t fooled. Mary waddled off again to greet newcomers, and Tom and I said a quick prayer for the deceased.

  After the trip out to St. Joseph’s Cemetery, we went back to Aunt Mary’s house, a small bungalow near Belmont and Kedzie. People had brought food, “enough to feed starving China,” Aunt Mary told us when we arrived, and so it seemed to me. There were cakes and platters of homemade cookies, a ham and a corned beef and a smoked butt, some chicken and cold cuts and all the various salad things, and four kinds of pop, including cream soda, which I had just discovered.