Two Weddings, One of Them Inevitable
It was also a summer of weddings, that roiling, tumultuous summer, and I was to attend two of them. The first was the wedding I have described earlier, the wedding of Charlie Paris and Evelyn Shanahan: half the neighborhood was there because almost everyone knew Charlie Paris, ambitious, glad-handing son of a former alderman, and those that didn’t know him knew the Shanahans, whose tribe seemingly numbered in the thousands. It was, as I have said, a freewheeling affair, and it colored my notions of weddings for all time, so that over the years I have often been disappointed by the tameness of most of those I’ve attended. Not the least of my disappointments was the discovery that weddings open to children were few and far between.
The second wedding proved memorable in its own way though not as rich in strife, discord, and violence, real or potential. First, it had a greater personal significance, involving as it did my Uncle Mike, the indecisive bridegroom, and Lorraine, former spinster, now triumphant. This meant that my entire clan would be present once more, no matter what implications that had for the safety of the neighborhood. The Dorsey side of the family were of course invited, all of them, including several I’d never seen. On the Flynn side, shadowy relations going all the way back to third and fourth cousins were summoned to this grand gathering, and this meant there would be people attending who were known only to my grandparents, if at all. Grandpa Flynn, for example, was preparing himself to greet his storied Uncle Pete, the brother of my great-grandfather Flynn and a man my grandmother had once described as “a lightning rod to disaster.” When she had seen Uncle Pete’s name on the guest list, she’d made a little croaking sound.
“Peter Flynn? Oh, for the love of God, Patrick, Peter Flynn at the wedding of your firstborn?”
“He is my uncle, the last one left alive,” Grandpa had said, drawing himself up in a fine display of injured sensibilities.
“He is misfortune incarnate, Patrick.”
I had of course immediately asked Tom what she meant.
“Oh, Uncle Pete? Oh, boy,” he said in his way that said he knew stories and only some of them were fit for a boy’s ears. He yelled out “Uncle Pete” to Mike, who was lost in his normal half-hour ministrations in the bathroom.
“Uncle Pete?” Mike said. “Oh, boy.”
“Sit down,” Tom ordered, and I did.
“Okay, Uncle Pete, first off, is a good guy, nicest guy in the world…”
“Nicest guy in the world,” Mike called out through the door.
“But things happen to him.”
“Around him,” Uncle Mike corrected. “A building fell on him once.”
“Well, yeah, but let me tell the story myself. So things happen around him, wherever he goes.” Tom looked at me with raised eyebrows and repeated “Wherever. So a building fell on him once, and he fell into a well once, and one time he fell asleep in a museum and got locked inside for two days. When he was a boy in the Old Country, he was riding a cart full of sheep to the market town and it went over the side of a hill. Killed all the sheep.”
“But not him.”
“No, be a shorter story then, wouldn’t it? Anyway, so he survived the Great Sheep Slaughter, as somebody called it.”
“They had kind of a funny song about it,” Mike added, emerging from the bathroom smelling of aftershave.
“Anything bad happens in Ireland, they write a song about it. So automatically he’s got a reputation as kind of a screw-up, and then he grew up and left the Old Country, came here like all of ’em, like your grandma and grandpa, to see if they could start a life for themselves. Anyhow, Uncle Pete comes here, and he’s a walking disaster. He gets a job in a factory, the factory burns down. He gets a job driving a truck, he drives it into a wall over on Twelfth Street. He joins the Merchant Marine in World War I, and twice his ships get torpedoed and once his lifeboat hits a rock and goes down and now he’s what the other sailors call a ‘Jonah.’ When the war is over he goes into business and that’s a disaster, he invests money in all kinds of stupid things…”
“A place that builds wagons,” Uncle Mike said. “Everybody’s buying cars and he invests in a place that still makes wagons.”
“Then he becomes partners with a guy that’s gonna make pianos cheap, and this guy, he’s sixty-five and he falls for an eighteen-year-old secretary and they run off to Brazil or someplace, and Uncle Pete is left holding the bag.”
“Did he get to keep the pianos?”
“Weren’t any pianos, kid. The way he put it was, ‘The pianos were still in the planning stage.’” They both laughed and then Tom said, “So Uncle Pete is coming to the wedding.” He winked at me. “Your grandmother thinks in another life Uncle Pete was Job, you know, in the Bible? She thinks the roof’ll fall in on us if he’s with us for more than ten minutes. Well, big brother, your wedding is shaping up to be real entertainment.”
Uncle Mike gave him an insider’s look and said, “Guess who else is coming.”
“Who?”
“Seamus Corcoran,” Uncle Mike said, saying the name slowly and dramatically, the way he might have said “John Wayne” or “General MacArthur.”
Uncle Tom was clearly one-upped. He stood gaping at his brother, then wet his lips. “He’s not dead yet?”
“No. Dad thinks he might die at the wedding, but, no, he’s not gone yet. He’s gonna be there. We’re thinking of sitting him across from Ma. Him and Uncle Pete.”
“Who is Seamus Corcoran?” I asked.
“‘The Last Bold Fenian’,” Uncle Tom said.
“World’s oldest person,” Uncle Mike said.
“What’s a Fenian?”
“Don’t you know the history of your people?” Uncle Mike asked sternly, but I could tell he was having fun with me.
Tom shook his head. “Oh, Ma’s gonna croak. The Fenians, Dan, the Fenians were Irish rebels that fought the British. They wanted to make Ireland a free country. They had kind of an uprising. Over here, some of ’em invaded Canada.”
“Canada?” I said, for the connection eluded me.
“And they fought them over there, in the Old Country,” he said to head me off.
“In the Easter Rising,” I said, proud to show my knowledge.
Tom raised his eyebrows again. “No, kiddo, the Easter Rising was 1916, this…oh, this must have been fifty years before the Easter Rising.”
I plunged into calculations, fifty years before 1916, and gave it up almost immediately.
“They don’t teach math in that school?” Mike said. “You can’t get by without math, Dan,” the family accountant began.
“Hey, give him a break. It was in 1867, Dan. 1867.”
I felt the breath leave me: the oldest people I knew, Mary McReady and her slow-witted husband, were eighty or thereabouts. It was almost inconceivable that a person would still be alive in 1955 who had been old enough in 1867 to bear arms.
“He fought the British in 1867?”
“He thinks so. We don’t know.”
“How old is he?”
“Could be a hundred—nobody knows for sure.”
“He remembers the fighting,” Uncle Mike added.
“Ah, he could’ve seen a movie about it in 1920. Who knows?”
I chose to take a higher road and accept this ancient Gael as a hero who had taken up arms for his people. “Did they beat the British in a battle, the Fenians?”
“Not exactly. These weren’t Irish warriors, Dan, they were farm boys that somebody talked into fighting against British soldiers, so it didn’t turn out real well for them. I think most of ’em were killed or tossed into prison. Anyhow, Uncle Seamus Corcoran, who is your grandmother’s great uncle, is a thousand years old, and all he knows is he thinks he was a Fenian and he’s pretty sure there aren’t any other ones left.”
“So he is the Last Fenian,” I pointed out. I fell in lo
ve with the idea of Seamus Corcoran, of a person of my blood having been involved in something as romantic and desirable as pitched battle with red-coated soldiers. I couldn’t have been more impressed if they’d told me he was the last of the twelve apostles.
“That’s what he says, and God forbid anybody shows up wearing a red jacket.”
Uncle Mike chuckled and Tom reached over to pat him on the shoulder.
“It’s shaping up, big fella. Now if we can just keep Lorraine from changing her mind, we’re in for a good time.”
Uncle Mike blinked and a watery look came into his eyes as he pondered this heretofore unconsidered possibility.
“Just kidding,” Tom said. To me he added, “It’s your Uncle Mike we’re keeping an eye on.”
***
In the end, bride as well as groom showed up, the priest gave them no chance to back out, and the ceremony ended without incident unless one counts my Uncle Frank’s unfortunate venture into song: unaware that Mrs. Lonigan had launched into one of her great warbling solos, completely unconscious of the fact that no one else in the church seemed to think she needed any help, Uncle Frank opened his mouth and bellowed his version of “Ave Maria” into the stuffy air of the church, producing a stiff-backed silence in the congregation that he apparently took for awe at his song stylings. I looked up at him in wonder, for he was right behind me, eyes shut, nose pointed at the ceiling of God’s house, his hoarse voice bending, spindling, and mutilating one of the most beautiful of Catholic hymns till it sounded like the death rattle of a wild animal.
The second time through the refrain, my grandmother could take no more, and leaned back, threw a sharp elbow into his chest and silenced him, killing the final note in his throat, and with it Uncle Frank’s incipient singing career. To my knowledge, he never again ventured into the lofty climes of liturgical music, content instead to sing along with tavern jukeboxes.
The highlight of the ceremony itself was not the exchange of vows, usually enough to bring tears to most eyes, but the sermon Monsignor Roarke had prepared for this occasion. In length and complexity it resembled not so much a homily as a religious saga, a cleric’s version of Finnegans Wake or The Odyssey. As he spoke to the stunned gathering, his oration was punctuated by the sounds of bodies crashing to the floor as we took our turns at fainting.
Both the legendary Uncle Peter Flynn and the Last Fenian made it to the church, Uncle Peter occupying the back booth and peering nearsightedly at proceedings that had to be explained to him by a woman who seemed to be either his daughter or a caretaker, sent perhaps by the penal system.
Seamus Corcoran, on the other hand, terrible-eyed and only half-shaven, arrived with his son, the son himself seventy-five if he was a day and looking more like The Last Fenian’s brother than his offspring. Their entrance drew every eye, it would have been impossible not to notice them, for they entered in the very heart of the monsignor’s epic and proceeded up the center aisle of the church, all the while muttering irritably to one another about the lack of proper seating.
I marveled at this ancient Irish freedom fighter, having never in my born days witnessed a creature of such age, not even in the animal kingdom, nor seen a human being move so slowly. He scraped along the floor, never actually lifting his feet and covering ground at the same pace as the Wisconsin glacier. They made it to the front, stared blankly at the priest, turned around, and repeated their painful procession, and the Last Fenian could be heard asking, “Where the hell is everybody?” At last they made it to the back, where a young couple gave up their seats. Down the pew from me, my grandmother made a little mewing sound, as though in pain.
The couple having been joined in the eyes of God and man, we all repaired to the hall, Johnny Vandiver’s hall, of course, and occupied the selfsame tables we’d used one month earlier at the joining of the Shanahans and the Parises. In fact, there was little difference between the two weddings: the same bar selections, the same food, the same band, and many of the same guests, but I thought it was grand.
It was my party, the wedding belonged to me because it was my family involved, my uncle and of course Lorraine, whom I had long since come to think of as an aunt, even at the most acrimonious moments of their courtship. The big room was filled near to bursting with Flynns and Dorseys and Dunphys, though we’d lost Grandma’s brothers to the bar as soon as we arrived. Even my Aunt Teresa was there, released from her duties for the occasion. And for my grandparents it was clearly a great day. My grandfather went around patting people on the back and telling jokes, and my grandmother’s face was incandescent. I watched her smiling and chatting and waving—she wore little blue gloves to go with her first new dress in years—and eventually she caught me at it.
She gave me my own personal smile, patted me on the cheek with the gloved hand and said, “It’s a grand day. Finally we’ve married off your Uncle Michael. Now we’ve got to do something about the other one.”
Before I could agree, she got up to greet recent arrivals and I wandered off in search of trouble. There was apparently none to be had, at least not yet, and I settled for an orange pop from Uncle Tom and made a happy circuit of the hall, returning to the table when Vandiver’s squadron of waitresses brought out our dinner. Food there was in plenty, simple unimaginative wedding food—roast beef, chicken, and Polish sausage of uncertain provenance and strange color.
“Don’t eat the sausage,” Grandpa told me. “It’s gray.”
“Oh, don’t be telling him that. I’m sure it’s fine,” Grandma countered.
Grandpa shook his head. “There’s no meat that’s supposed to be gray. No gray sausages, not even for the Polacks.”
“Now keep still with that nonsense, Pat. Eat it all up, Danny, or the bride’s family will be insulted.”
I assured her I’d do my best, and I ate a little of everything except the sausage. I took some, cut it up and then buried it beneath a mound of mashed potatoes. I was in a hurry to be finished, to find Matt, to explore the hall and spy on grown-ups and observe their bizarre idea of a good time. Peering around the big room, hardly recognizing some of the adults in their unaccustomed finery, I spotted Matt. I asked to be excused and left, with my grandfather adjuring me to stay out of Vandiver’s saloon in the front of the hall.
On the other side of the room I greeted the Dorsey half of my family, joined up with Matt, and took off in search of adventure. All around us was evidence of a rare good humor, even Uncle Dennis seemed genial and clear-eyed, ruffling Matt’s hair as he sent us on our way with the admonition that it was high time we found a couple of nice girls and settled down. Almost immediately we found crisis, for it seemed that old Seamus Corcoran had met his end. He lay face down on the table and drooled, and it was several seconds before anyone realized that what would have passed for a coma in a younger person was simply a nap for the Last Fenian.
Not far from this scene we happened upon a similar tableau, in which several adults pounded on the back of the unhappy Peter Flynn in hopes of dislodging the sausage that had stuck in his windpipe. Happily, their lusty whacks freed the errant sausage and sent it rocketlike across the table, where it bounced off the bosom of a distant, equally aged female cousin. This was not to be Uncle Peter’s only brush with misfortune that day but the only one that put him in harm’s way.
Matt and I made a long circuit of the hall, mocking the grown-ups, shamelessly cadging pop from all manner of relatives and creating a minor nuisance. We talked of our hopes for the afternoon, wondered how late we’d be able to stay up, and hid from our respective guardians.
When dinner was finished, the band took over Vandiver’s stage, four neighborhood men, one armed with an accordian, all of them seemingly tone-deaf and devoid of any sense of rhythm, and their appearance precipitated a general migration from the tables to the dance floor. The band started with a ballad and then launched into some swing, and more dancers, the younger ones this time, ma
de their appearance. Once caught out on the floor, the dancers remained and the band mixed ballads to keep them there and the faster things to keep the party going. I saw my Uncle Tom dancing with a succession of partners, including the bride and my grandmother. The bar had reopened, and the point had arrived that comes to all weddings, when the music gets a little dramatic, the dancers become just a bit more intense, looking deeply into one another’s eyes and forgetting themselves. I remembered this moment from the Shanahan-Paris soiree and found it mildly amusing or repellent, depending on who the partners were.
I saw my uncle try to leave the dance floor, heading for the bar and suddenly returning, being pulled out onto the floor by a new partner, my Aunt Mollie Dorsey. For a moment I found this pairing odd, and then the possibilities presented themselves, forgotten possibilities I’d seen as far back as Christmas Eve. Just as they began to dance, the music ended but he made no attempt to leave. They talked, their faces close to hear over the noise, and then the music picked up again, a butchered version of a Tommy Dorsey tune with the accordian man now wielding a trombone, and they were dancing once more.
They moved across the floor and attracted notice: Tom was wearing a tuxedo, Aunt Mollie a pale yellow dress that did fine things for her coloring, and I saw that they looked somehow suited to each other: suited, and enjoying themselves. Like Tom, she was a born dancer, and it took no gift of imagination for me to forget that he was the younger brother of my mother, that she was my father’s baby sister. A circle seemed to form around them, other dancers leaving them space, and they moved into it, using all of it. They jitterbugged and improvised, and he swung her in the air and caught her as though they’d practiced the movement for months.
Beside me, Matt gave me a nudge and said, “Hey, he likes her. He likes Aunt Mollie.”
“No, the one he likes isn’t here. Her name’s Helen. She’s not here.”
“Oh,” he said, accepting my insider’s knowledge. I thought of Helen and wondered whether he’d be dancing with her instead, if she’d been invited. I was fairly certain he would, but he wouldn’t have been able to convince me he wasn’t enjoying himself right now. A couple songs into their dance they seemed to hit a new stride, their faces changed. They weren’t staring meaningfully at each other, but something had happened: for one thing, he seemed relaxed, and Aunt Mollie had a look in her eye that I’d seen once before, when she bandaged a cut on my knee, a look into which I read competence and confidence. I was watching them when I heard my grandfather speak.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 24