“Anybody can fall in love,” he said after a moment, “happens every day, but if you fall in love and it doesn’t work out for you, then you’ve got trouble.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t just fall out of love then. You’re in it, you got no choice. Some people spend their whole lives in love with somebody that don’t love them, or somebody that’s just not any good for them. And then their lives are a mess.”
“Like Aunt Mary Jane and Uncle Dennis?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and I thought I’d said something wrong and spoiled it all. Then he shook his head. “No, they…their problem is different. Dennis and Mary Jane love each other, they just have lots of problems, lots of trouble. And Dennis is the cause of…a lot of it, but he doesn’t run around. You know what I mean by running around?” He squinted at me and I just nodded, though I wasn’t at all sure.
“He doesn’t have girlfriends or anything like that.” He sipped his coffee and said, “You know who was smart? Your Aunt Teresa, that’s who. There’s the smart one. Smart and good-looking, and a nice girl, too, and she got out of all this mess by becoming a nun. Maybe that’s the answer, I should become a priest.”
Finally he was making sense, and I said so. “You’d be a good priest.”
He laughed and put an arm around me. “That’s great, I ought to tell your grandmother that one, but she’s liable to agree with you, so we’ll just let it drop.”
After that, we roamed the museum in silence till it was nearly empty and then left. Outside, the sky seemed to have lowered itself onto the city. The clouds were dark and full and seemed to be telling me that summer couldn’t last forever.
“Looks like a winter sky,” my uncle said.
“Yeah,” I said in disappointment.
He laughed. “I like winter. You’re so busy fighting it, you’ve got no time to feel sorry for yourself.”
Shortly after that he began going out more at night. Some of the time he was at the tavern, still more a source of trouble to him than income. He had stopped complaining about it but encouraged no conversation on the subject.
Other nights he seemed different, there was a new look in his eye, a suppressed excitement. He was filled with energy, he couldn’t sit still, he paced constantly when he talked, and laughed even more easily than usual. One afternoon Uncle Mike the Newlywed stopped by after work to visit, and after he’d had a cup of coffee with Grandma, Uncle Tom took him aside in the farthest corner of the living room, beyond even the range of my spectacular hearing, and they spoke in low tones. I couldn’t hear more than one or two words, but I heard Uncle Tom say “she,” and then his brother gave him a pat on the back and they headed back out to the kitchen.
As they passed my perch at the dining room table, I heard Tom say, “What have I got to lose, right?”
“Right,” Uncle Mike said, but without conviction.
July came in, and on a scalding Saturday early in the month, one of the hottest days I can ever remember, my uncle took me to a party at the home of a friend. I was excited: the place was “out in the country,” an unincorporated piece of Cook County, and the couple who lived there had a swimming pool. It wasn’t much of a pool, plastic stretched over a metal frame, no more than three feet deep, but it had a little wooden staircase to help people climb into it, and to a small boy it could have been Lake Huron.
Tom left the house in the morning “to do a few things,” and when he came back I came bounding out of Grandma’s house with my trunks and towel in a blue bowling bag. He was leaning against his big two-toned Buick with its metallic nostrils, and I could see that he was as excited as I was. It wasn’t till I was getting into the car that I saw he had a passenger already.
I fell across the backseat getting in and heard my uncle say, “He’s clumsy but he’s all we’ve got, so we keep him.”
“I think he’s adorable,” the passenger said. Though I’d never seen her up close, I’d recognized the dark hair and felt a thrill of insider excitement.
“Helen, this is my nephew Danny. Dan, this is Helen.”
I said, “Hi,” and found myself sticking out my hand. She laughed, shot my uncle a quick glance, and then took my hand.
“I’ve heard all about you, Danny. Your uncle seems to think you’re pretty special.”
“Don’t talk like that, you’ll give him a swelled head,” my uncle said, but he was grinning. He got in behind the wheel and they looked at each other in what I thought was an odd way. He was still grinning; the girl called Helen was looking at him with her head tilted slightly, squinting at him, but there was a brightness to her eyes as though she was on the verge of sharing secrets.
“Well, let’s go,” he said, and we were off.
They talked in what seemed to me a strange way, starting and stopping suddenly, and smiling a great deal. They traded stories about people they both knew, and several times they returned to some time in the past when they’d known each other, and then I recalled Tom’s comment to Uncle Mike at the wedding, that this young woman would have been his if he hadn’t gone to Korea. At one point she turned and smiled to me.
“The poor kid’s probably bored to death with all this grown-up talk,” she said, unaware how I absorbed everything they said to one another.
Eventually the city gave way to trees and farmland, and I lost all interest in the adults in the front seat.
At our destination, they introduced me to May and Ed McKay, “Big Ed,” my uncle called him, and it was clear they were fond of one another. I was somewhat excited to meet Big Ed myself, for there were certain similarities between the two of us: Big Ed was an orphan. What made him special for me was that he’d been sent upon the death of his parents to Boys Town, he had known the great Father Flanagan. I’d seen the movie with Spenser Tracy portraying the tough priest as a composite of General MacArthur and God, so that meeting a boy who’d called that place home was not far different from meeting Joe Louis. Ed held out his great flat hand to me and said, “Ed McKay.”
I planted my small one in it and said, “Daniel Dorsey,” and he laughed. He seemed enormous, a big-boned man with a large head and a round face who smiled constantly and had a habit of running one hand through hair like a wayward child’s. He towered over them all and made his wife look like a pixie. He patted me on the head, told my uncle I was “a polite kid,” and then he took me off to see his pool.
It might be fair to say that my uncle and his new friend ignored me for the rest of the outing, and certainly I was unencumbered by supervision. I spent most of the day putting together a sunburn that I have never forgotten, basking in the wonder of the icy water in the little pool and pretending I could swim. I held my breath and went between people’s legs, then burst to the surface in my best impression of a breaching whale.
While catching my breath I sat in the water and studied the overheated adults: perspiring faces, hair plastered with sweat, the faces going redder and redder as they drank their way through the steamy afternoon. My uncle and the dark slender Helen mingled with the guests, indeed they seemed constantly surrounded by people, all of them held in thrall by my uncle’s ability to tell a story and his great good humor, and most of the men stealing a look now and then at Helen. She was beautiful, in a dark red blouse that matched the lipstick and nail polish she wore, and I saw that Aunt Mollie was no match for her.
As the afternoon wore on, the heat became palpable, the sun shimmered off walls and eventually drove most of them into the pool, and Helen came out in her bathing suit: like her lipstick and nails, like the bloodred earrings, it was crimson going purple and she was magnificent. She was darker than the others, and it seemed to me that the heat had no effect on her beyond the single damp curl that clung to her forehead.
When she moved toward the pool I was startled to see her, she seemed almost out of place amid the other pale-skinned, sweating adults, espec
ially the men with their T-shirt lines where sickly looking skin met sunburnt forearms. I saw immediately that my reaction was not much different from the men’s: I could see a dozen of them at a glance, my uncle included, and they couldn’t take their eyes off her. Someone said something to my uncle and he laughed, but his look of pride was unmistakable, and I was delighted for him.
Later on there was food which I would have had no time for, had my uncle and Helen not forced a plate on me. They fed me ham and cheese and potato salad, and I encountered my first barbecued ribs, and when no one was watching I tossed the gnawed bones off in the direction of the woods, convinced that I was feeding wolves. They each gave me a bottle of soda and I took two more myself, but I could have run around the yard naked without eliciting comment from Tom and his girl. They still talked with the others, but gradually they drew off into a corner of the party and spoke with their faces close together, and my uncle had his arm around her. I saw her laugh, he seemed to make her laugh without effort, and I was glad to see he had this same hold on her that he had on all the rest of us.
I was sitting at the foot of a small tree, where I’d planted myself to enjoy my latest bottle of pop, and my uncle led Helen over and they sat a few feet away—“Where we can keep an eye on you,” Tom said.
But policing his nephew was clearly low on his list of priorities, for he soon turned his attention back to the dark-haired Helen.
“Great place,” I heard him say.
“I’d love to live out here, and have a house of my own, a big house with a yard.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Tom said.
Helen told him he didn’t understand, that he hadn’t gown up “in a crowded place with eight brothers and sisters and no money, no privacy.”
“We never had much of either of those things,” Tom said.
“I know you didn’t have a lot, but if you could see that place where I grew up, if you knew my old…my father,” she said, and I was certain she’d caught herself in case I was listening. “So that’s what I want someday, a place of my own, with whatever I want inside it, and I want privacy, I want room. Like this,” she said, and indicated Big Ed’s sprawling, unfenced yard with a smile.
“Everybody wants a place, everybody wants a house, and to be away from his goofy neighbors,” Tom said. “Who wouldn’t want this much room? But you’ll have what you want someday.”
For a moment she said nothing, and then when I thought they’d dropped the subject, she said, “Everything good seems to take forever. Don’t you get tired of waiting for things?”
“Yeah, I got real tired of waiting to get out of Korea. But there’s, you know, some things I’d wait a real long time for,” he said, and for some reason she laughed. She gave him a long look and he grinned at her. Then they both got to their feet, told me they were going to get something cold to drink, and to try not to drown.
As my two grown-ups forgot my existence, I played in the pool and explored the big unfenced yard, and eventually Big Ed decided I’d had enough of the sun and water.
“C’mon with me. My wife thinks you’re gonna turn into a prune if you spend any more time in this pool.” I laughed and followed him, watching the back of his big sweaty shirt. I wanted to ask him about Boys Town but shyness had my tongue. As we went inside, Ed called out to my uncle.
“Hey, Flynn! If you can take your bloodshot eyes off the beautiful girl for a minute…”
I heard people laughing and my uncle joined in, reddening slightly.
“Is it all right if I show him my, ah, what I got in the guest room?”
“Yeah, sure, that’s nice of you, Ed.” To me he said, “Don’t get any ideas, there, champ. Our house is crowded enough with you.”
I had no idea what he was talking about but I would have followed Big Ed from Boys Town into combat. He took me down the hall past the bathroom, then stopped in front of a closed door and motioned for silence.
“If we’re real quiet,” he whispered, “we’ll catch him by surprise.”
I thought he meant a dog, a big dog, perhaps, and my heart started beating faster. Big Ed watched me, milking the moment for all its dramatic potential. His eyes widened in a parody of terror and he pretended to be gasping for breath. He put his hand on the doorknob, gave me one last look, swallowed hard, said, “Here goes,” and threw the door open. His big body bent down and he yelled, “Get down, kid, he’s armed and dangerous!” and then I was following Ed breathless into the room. I waited for something to attack me and couldn’t understand why Big Ed was laughing so hard, and then I heard the room’s tenant screech. When I looked up, I saw a monkey in the overhead light fixture.
It was a big square piece of glass with a curved bottom and the monkey was sitting in the bowl of it, one skinny hairy elbow resting on the edge and looking from Ed to me with little jerky motions of his tiny head.
“A monkey!” I heard myself say.
“Hey, you’re smart—and here your uncle tells everybody you’re retarded.”
The little monkey was staring at me now and I felt myself grinning all over. I thought I’d never seen anything so adorable in all my born days, and then the little fellow was reaching down beside him into the light fixture.
“Look out, Dan,” Ed said.
The monkey came up firing, something small and dark, pellets of something, and I laughed.
“He’s throwing his food at us,” I said.
Ed grinned and said, “It used to be food, kid,” and made a high-pitched whoop as he ducked.
Now he had my attention, and I threw myself onto the floor as the dark missiles whizzed past my ear and struck the wall behind me at just about head level. I stayed on all fours and Ed, crouched down like a combat infantryman, looked back at me over his shoulder. He was laughing silently, his eyes tearing.
“You hit, kid?”
“No,” and I was laughing with him. Our mirth served only to irritate the monkey, who redoubled his efforts by throwing larger handfuls of his excrement till the air overhead was a hailstorm of monkey droppings.
“He’ll run out soon,” I suggested with a note of hope.
“Nah, he’s got a lifetime supply up there. He can keep us pinned down for a year if he wants to. One of us is gonna have to go for help.” I must have given him a puzzled look because he burst out laughing. After a moment he ruffled my hair and said, “I wish I had a kid.”
I wanted to point out that a monkey was far better in almost every way I could think of, but the hairy creature in the light fixture chose that moment to go into phase two of his offensive. He stood up with a little bouncing motion, turds in each hand, and screeched at us.
Big Ed grabbed my arm and pulled me behind an old sofa, the only real furniture in the room. Closer to the light fixture I saw a ladder, and there was a little wooden house of some sort, and I gathered these were the monkey’s playthings. Scattered on the floor were the brightly colored toys one would give a small child.
The monkey was howling indignation at us and I looked up at Ed for explanation.
“He wants us to come out and fight like men. I’m not brave enough. You?”
“Uh-uh,” I said, then raised my head over the back of the sofa to look at him. He glowered at us from his glass vessel, screeched and bounded down onto the ladder.
“He’s coming!”
“Nah, it’s all for show.”
“I’d like a monkey,” I said, and of course I’d never said a truer thing. I raised my head again, and found the little beast staring at me: I’d seen monkeys just like this at Riverview and at the zoo.
“Not this one, you wouldn’t.”
“No?”
“No,” he repeated, but he was smiling at his savage roommate. “His name’s Ollie. You know, like Kukla, Fran, and Ollie?”
“Sure.” I said “Hi” to Ollie but he just glared at me.
“He doesn’t answer to it. See, Ollie’s a squirrel monkey. You don’t want to get a squirrel monkey, partner. Get a spider monkey, they’re not as cute but they’re nicer. Or get a nice dog. Get a cat or a turtle. Want to look at a turtle?”
I didn’t, I wanted to stay there for the rest of the day with his wonderfully bellicose monkey, but I was a guest, after all. He took me to another room where he had turtles in a big tank, and it took me no time at all to decide that they were, in the single-mindedness of their inertia, almost as wonderful as the monkey, except that I might have trouble telling when a pet turtle was dead.
Eventually, my favorable impressions of Ed confirmed, we returned to the yard and I went on as before, filling myself with pop and cake and horrible things, then cavorting amid the adults. Across the yard I saw my uncle standing with his arm around Helen, and she was leaning a little bit against him. They both looked as though it was the most natural thing for either of them. My uncle came over once or twice to see how I was doing, and he asked if Ed had shown me Ollie, but for the remainder of the day, I could have been on the far side of the moon for all the attention I drew from Uncle Tom and Helen.
It was dark when we finally left the party. I was exhausted and my skin was beginning to hurt, and the night air chilled me. I slept most of the way home, occasionally regaining consciousness to ask if we were home yet. They talked, Tom and Helen, in low, flat voices, like exhausted conspirators, and I wanted to tell them they didn’t have to speak so quietly, that I was too tired to eavesdrop, but I didn’t even have the strength for that. I heard only a few things.
“I don’t want to talk about him, Tom,” she said.
“I don’t want to talk about that guy either. Some things I just can’t figure, though, and you and him, you’re one of them,” and I understood they were talking about Philly Clark.
“He’s not so bad. He’s a nice looking guy, and he’s smart—like you,” she added, and I thought this clever. “And he can be fun…”
“Yeah, he’s a million laughs.”
She laughed and said, “No, he’s not funny like you, but he can be fun. He’s got a lot of energy, he’s always got to be doing something, and that’s…that’s nice. It’s interesting.”
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 26