“That’s the one he should be chasing,” he muttered.
“Yeah, she’s just right for him,” my Aunt Anne said. “They look perfect together.”
From nowhere Aunt Ellen appeared, took a quick look at her little sister out on the dance floor and then back at us.
“Uh-uh. Forget about it,” she said.
“Why?” Anne asked.
“Because he’s got eyes for somebody else and she’s not waiting for somebody that’s not interested. She’s got plenty of guys.”
“Things can change,” Aunt Anne said.
“That won’t,” Aunt Ellen said. She smiled at Anne and added, “because men are stupid,” then winked at Grandpa and was gone.
Her certainty seemed to take something out of the moment, and neither Grandpa Flynn nor my Aunt Anne said anything more about the two dancers, but I saw that they watched all the same. After a while I scanned the room and found my grandmother. She was standing with a group of women her age, cousins and second cousins, ostensibly having a conversation with them, but her eyes never left her son for long, her beloved son.
After several more tunes, Aunt Mollie and Uncle Tom found themselves with new partners, and still others after that, and they seemed happy no matter whom they danced with, but I watched them, even when I was scouring the room with Matt, and I thought I saw something: several times, I thought I saw her look for him, and I caught him watching her from the side. He had that odd look in his eyes that I’d seen on Christmas Eve, the look of a man who has just noticed something.
The band slipped into a slight polka version of “The Irish Washerwoman.” Matt said, “This is where they all get crazy,” and I nodded agreement. My Uncles Frank and Martin appeared from nowhere, shoulder to shoulder in an impoverished, lead-footed jig, as though honor-bound to demonstrate the accuracy of Matt’s observation. The others gave them room, and took to clapping and cheering them on so that the old men were forced to continue. They shuffled and scuffed, arms stiff at their sides, eyes straight ahead in the formal style of the Irish step dancer. Uncle Frank’s face had gone a dark wine color, and Martin’s eyes were beginning to cross with his heroic effort, and we were relieved when the band stopped playing, and cheered the fact that they had survived their dance.
A new song started up and Aunt Mary stalked out onto the floor, her bony husband in a grip that made indentations in the back of his jacket. She led him more or less across the other dancers, moving with the inevitability of a cruise ship coming into port, of an iceberg, a cold front, and they succeeded in doing what nothing else had accomplished at this or any other wedding, they called forth silence.
My grandmother materialized a few feet from me. I heard her groan, “Oh, for the love of God,” and then I heard my grandfather cackling. After all, his Terrible Fenian had done nothing worse than pass out, while her family was providing entertainment on a grand scale. He cackled louder and winked at his friends across the floor, and she gave him a whack in the stomach but as far as I could see it did no good. Aunt Mary and her husband made a stiff turn like a three-master tacking before the wind, and then he dazzled us all by swinging her to him, then bending her ample form over his arm. We waited for him to collapse, or at least for his arm to break, but neither happened and the audience showed its delight when they finished.
Shortly after this memorable display, Matt and I followed a staggering gray-haired man into the men’s room to see if he’d do anything bizarre. What we found was a new drama: the staggering man was attempting to come to the aid of Uncle Peter Flynn, who was stuck into the commode. It appeared to us, in part from his profane tirade against those with boorish manners, that someone had left the seat up and the old man had come in without noticing, had dropped his trousers and lowered himself onto the throne and thereupon plunged into the opening, which seemingly fit his large hind end perfectly. The gray-haired man struggled to free Uncle Peter, but age and his condition required him to steady himself with one hand, thus leaving him with limited leverage. They groaned together like a Welsh choir and then Uncle Peter noticed us in the doorway.
“Here, you lads, come here and give us a hand, won’t you? I’ve had an accident.”
We approached and took his hand, Matt and I, and tried to pull but he was wedged in like a cork, and we succeeded only in irritating him.
“Oh, Christ, get me out of this thing. Pull, George,” he said, and the gray-haired man strained again. “Oh, my ass is freezing and that’s not all,” Uncle Peter said, and I shot a quick look at the ceiling: if he could become this stuck in a toilet, then perhaps Grandma’s worst fear might come true as well.
We gave him another pull, but Matt was starting to giggle, and the old man sent us for help.
“Go, go on with you, get some of the men, get your uncles in here, Thomas and Michael and…oh, I don’t know, those other ones, go on, get them,” he called after us. And when we were in the act of pulling open the door, he bellowed, “Keep still about this, now, don’t say anything, just bring them.” But outside a small crowd, drawn in by his great air horn of a voice, was already assembling.
We fetched my uncles and led them to the men’s room. All the way, Uncle Mike kept asking, “He’s stuck in the toilet?” and Tom just said, “Sure, where else?” Five minutes later, aided by a Greek chorus of perhaps forty men and a dozen boys, my uncles and their friends pulled Peter Flynn from ignominy. We had a brief moment when it seemed he would never come out, and there was talk of running to the drug store up Roscoe for a jar of vaseline, but eventually they had him out.
Matt and I were disappointed.
“I thought he’d make a noise,” Matt admitted.
“Like a popping sound?”
“Yeah. I hope my butt’s never so big I get stuck in a toilet,” Matt said, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.
We spent the last hour roaming around, talking, sitting on the stairs, spying. At last we returned to the big room and saw that people had resumed something like their everyday personalities. The older dancers had retired from the field, and Mary McReady was fanning her husband with a napkin. Aunt Mollie was on the dance floor again, dancing to a song and mouthing the words: her partner was a tall thin young man named Roy, whose sister was one of Lorraine’s bridesmaids. I scanned the room and found Uncle Tom. He was in a hearty conversation with three other men, but his eyes returned to Mollie more than once.
I said something to Matt and saw that he was watching something; I followed his gaze and saw his parents, my aunt and uncle. Aunt Mary Jane had an arm around Dennis’s shoulders and was speaking earnestly to him. Uncle Dennis had both hands cupped around a smoke, and he was staring ahead as though what she said made no impression on him. Matt glanced at me from the corner of his eye and saw that I was watching them. He looked casually around the room and then gave me a soft right to the midsection. I doubled over and he scampered away, and when I could breathe again I went off to hunt him down, and we played at one variation or another of this chase scene till the wedding broke up, which is to say, till the bar closed and the band came up with “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” back-to-back.
Aunt Mary Jane called Matt, and I watched him go shuffling off, head down, after his parents; his mother made her good-byes to people around her, but there was something frozen about her smile, and when they made their way to the door she was watching Uncle Dennis. For his part, Dennis looked straight ahead as he walked and spoke to no one.
They were intercepted at the door by Sister Fidelity. She smiled as she spoke to them, and her sister returned the smile, but Uncle Dennis barely acknowledged her. I saw her pat Matt on the head and give him something. When they left, she turned and looked me in the eye from twenty feet away, as though she could feel me watching her. I started to move away in embarrassment but she was faster than I was, habit and heavy shoes notwithstanding.
“A pair of serious-looking little boys I have,” Aunt Teresa said and tried a smile.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Did you young terrors have a good time?”
“Oh, sure.”
She started to say something and I could see her change her mind. In the end, she just said, “You and Matt are still good friends, aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I’m glad. He’s lucky to have such a good friend. My friend Sister Polycarp says you’re doing well in school.” Without warning, her eyes grew wet, and she said, “Your father…” and then she caught herself. “I’m sorry, it’s difficult for me to be at these family parties without remembering my…your dad. I’m proud of you. And I’m happy that you’re a good friend to Matthew. Did you like the party?”
“It was neat. I had seven pops.”
“Don’t tell your grandmother. Seven?” She looked mildly horrified. “Are you going to be sick?”
“I don’t think so, because I had cake, too.”
“Cake helps?”
“Sure. It soaks up the pop.”
She gave me an amused look, then produced a dollar for me from the hidden compartments of her habit.
“Good-bye, Daniel,” she said, and then she was gone in a swirl of black.
I called out good-bye to her and went to find my family. Uncle Tom was driving Mike and Lorraine to their new flat, and then he was going out. One of the groomsmen drove us home and I sat wedged between my grandparents, feeling inexplicably let down. My grandparents exchanged rosy opinions about how everything had gone, and the talk turned to the family eccentrics on both sides.
Grandpa ventured first onto this perilous ground, indicating that Frank and Martin had nearly outdone themselves this time.
“I was waiting for the two of them to come out wearing the lampshades,” he said, and compounded his error by chuckling with delight.
“Lampshades indeed,” Grandma said, and weighed in with “what a great amadan” Uncle Peter Flynn was. “Grown man getting his behind stuck in a toilet, at a wedding, for God’s sake. A man without the sense to come in out of the rain. We’re lucky the roof didn’t fall in on us.”
“Ah, it could have happened to anyone,” Grandpa said, but there was a note of doubt in his voice.
They were silent for a moment and then Grandpa filled it with a counterpunch. “I thought for a minute there your cousin ‘The Fenian’ was gonna die on us.”
She was too serene to be baited. “Ah that one, that old crazy man, he should be in Dunning. ‘Fenian,’ indeed. Asleep in his food, for the love of God.”
The Bold Fenian had been revived several times during the night, eventually carried off and driven home, along with his amazingly old son, by solicitous relatives. After a moment Grandma remembered how happy she was and added, “The poor soul. Ready for his reward. Whatever that might be.”
I nestled in between them and remembered how my uncle had looked dancing with Aunt Mollie. I remembered him watching as she left with a large group of friends, all of them going out somewhere. He caught her eye and she waved. He waved back, and when she was gone, he shook his head as though to clear it. I wondered what was wrong with his head.
A Trip to the Country
The next morning I woke to a gray day, heavy rain, and a chill wind blowing in from the lake. Everyone in the house seemed tired, quiet, preoccupied, even my grandmother. She put on Sunday airs, fussed and banged pots around her kitchen, made scrambled eggs and bacon enough to feed Ireland, and even forced herself to hum along with the music on the big yellow radio, but there was a slightly stunned quality to the performance. A son had left home, and I think she was having trouble believing it, even as she pointedly ignored his empty seat at the table. She seemed to be fussing over me more than usual, practically dragging me to the table before I was fully awake and then force-feeding me. A pile of eggs grew on my plate, and she began forking slices of bacon on top as though she’d lost count. Uncle Tom squinted at me.
“Did you enlist?” he asked.
“What?”
“Did you enlist? The last time she did this was when I got drafted. Is he going to Korea, Ma?”
“Good God, don’t even talk about that,” Grandma said. “Korea, indeed. He needs his food. He didn’t eat anything at all at the wedding. I watched.”
I knew she hadn’t had eyes for anything but the doings of her two sons, but I could tell this was no time for debate, and I began cutting divots in my mound of eggs as my family tried to muster conversation. They all spoke in low, congested voices as though fearful that they’d wake someone. Grandpa said over and over again what a fine affair the reception had been, and Tom made them laugh as he reminded them of Aunt Mary’s stone-footed tango.
Halfway through breakfast Grandma put her fork down and sighed.
“You all right, Ma?” my uncle asked.
“Of course I’m all right. I’m fine, I’m just tired.”
He looked at me and winked. “I think everybody’s tired. We had a little too much party and now we pay for it. How about you and I go someplace?”
“Sure.”
In the end we decided that the rain made it a perfect day for a museum, a day for dinosaurs and mummies. We made our way down the Outer Drive to the museum. The Drive curved past the Field Museum, creating the little illusion that the great Grecian building waited at the very end. My heart always started thumping at the sight. This was my place, a building overflowing with treasure to a small boy, with its own smell, never encountered anywhere else, that must have been a mixture of polish, the faint odors of taxidermy, and food smells from the cafeteria.
The same fighting bull elephants greeted the visitor as today, and we always stopped so that I could feel the piece of hardened elephant hide placed beside the exhibit, but inevitably we would find ourselves in the Hall of Dinosaurs, where time lost its hold and reality blurred. I never tired of this place with its massive skeletons on steel frames and the glorious Charles R. Knight murals overhead that took the viewer through all the ages of the earth. We had been there so many times that I’m not certain we actually looked at the individual exhibits and cases—it was enough to be walking slowly through them.
As always he took me to the cafeteria for a hamburger and a piece of cake. The hamburgers were passable if you put enough layers of ketchup and pickles on them, but the cake was worth the trip by itself, dark and moist and top-heavy with frosting.
“A kid baked this,” he would always say as he stuck a fork into his piece. “You can tell: no grown-up ever put this much frosting on a cake. A kid got into the kitchen and went crazy.”
We sat and ate our cake and he sipped the Field Museum coffee, which he contended was among the worst he’d experienced, and then I found myself blurting out, “Do you want to get married?”
He gave me a long amused look and then shrugged. “Yeah, I do. Your grandmother thinks I’m a confirmed bachelor. And sometimes I think it’ll never happen. Seems like something that would happen to somebody else but not me. But someday maybe that’ll happen. Why?”
My motives were perfectly clear to me and I saw no reason to hide them. “Because Uncle Mike got married and moved out.” To a place not far from his parents but not close either, and Grandma had said he was already looking ahead to another place, the ultimate goal of all of them, never realized by most, to own a home.
“And you think—what? That I’ll get married and move away too, right?”
“Yes.”
“So? Grandma and Grandpa would take care of you. You’d be okay. And Annie will be there for a while, she’s young…” He broke off, realizing he’d reminded me of a third person who would eventually leave me.
“I know.” I nodded energetically to hide the fact that my eyes were tearing up. I tried to say something casual, but a hardness had come into my throat
and I just looked away.
He put his hand on my hair and I hoped I wouldn’t cry.
“Listen, nobody’s leaving you yet. For one thing, we’ll still see Uncle Mike, you’d never get rid of him that easily, and now you’ll see him with his new boss, Aunt Lorraine. And I’m not going anywhere. You have to have somebody to get married to, and I don’t, and I don’t think it’s gonna happen soon.”
The disappointment in his voice distracted me from my own worries and I stole a quick glance at him. I was confused: I already knew all I needed to know about him and Helen, I knew what I’d seen that night at the Shanahan wedding. He was stirring the evil coffee and his unhappiness was clear. I bit back my impulse to ask him what was wrong with Helen and then fell back on safer ground.
“Grandma says lots of girls would like you.”
“She talks too much.” He kept on stirring the coffee and then said, “The thing of it is not getting married, it’s the part that comes before. Falling in love, that’s the hard part. Boy, talk about a pain in the a…”
“Is it hard to find somebody to fall in love with?”
“No. God, it’s easy. You don’t even have to be looking for it, it just happens. It’s a little like getting sick, you don’t know it’s happening and then you’ve got it. No, what’s hard, it’s hard to find somebody to fall in love with who’s also gonna be in love with you, that’s the thing right there.” I could think of nothing to say to that, I wasn’t even certain any of it made sense: I thought two people met and fell in love, both of them simultaneously.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 25