“He’s got a lot of money,” Tom baited.
“That’s not it. He knows what he wants in life.”
“How about you?” Tom asked, but she didn’t answer him.
They fell silent for a time and I must have dozed off. A while later I woke up and she was talking about something else, apparently a trip of some sort, and she said something about not being able to decide. After a pause, I heard my uncle say, “Sometimes you got to stop thinking about it and just make up your mind. That’s what you got to do.” And it seemed to me that he was talking about something other than a trip.
After a long moment of silence, he added in a joking tone, “Anyway, I saw you first!” and she laughed.
I was sick that night. I threw up—I was later to tell people I’d vomited more than fifty times—but it was probably closer to four or five. I was sick, exhausted, and hurting from every part of my body that had been exposed to the sun: my back, my chest, my ears, my face, the part in my hair and my eyelids, the tops of my feet and the backs of my legs. I hurt everywhere and all at once, and I couldn’t breathe properly. From hours of holding my breath under water, my chest hurt and I was unable to draw a deep breath. I believed I would be dead by morning.
At some point during the night I opened my eyes to find my grandparents hovering over me, my grandfather looking worried and my grandmother furious.
“Should we call O’Leary?” my grandfather was asking.
“We should, and have him examine their heads, the both of ’em, especially my son that doesn’t have the sense God gave barnyard animals.”
From somewhere outside my room I heard my uncle say, “Aw, Ma, he was having a good time, for God’s sake.”
“You couldn’t put that suntan lotion on him, the poor thing? And what did he have to eat?”
I tried to protest that the barbecued ribs had been my undoing, having developed this notion between trips to the bathroom, but I was too weak. I felt my grandmother feeling my forehead and then I drifted off to sleep, alternately praying for death and vowing that if I lived, I’d never eat spareribs again, nor play in the sun, and I had a passing notion to swear off orange pop, but I wasn’t ready to commit to it.
My near-death experience passed in the night. My grandmother gave me the silent treatment all the next day, and I suspect my uncle envied me because she spent the greater part of it in a verbal assault on his judgment. He sat at the kitchen table and smoked, and when she tore into him for bringing me home “half-naked and ready for the last rites,” as she put it, he seemed to grow smaller, as though withering in her heat.
Late in the day she muttered something in his direction and I saw him laughing, and knew that if I survived the sunburn and the stomach cramps, he would likely survive his mother’s anger, though I thought my chances were better. By the end of the day I was taking solid food, sitting in my undershorts and covered in calamine lotion thick enough to repel hailstones. I even had a can of pop after dinner, 7 Up, believed by my grandmother to have medicinal properties, but I did not eat a rib again till I was almost thirty.
Dog Days
It was a summer of weddings and parties, but there was an undercurrent of trouble to it, and I believe I was, on some level, conscious of that.
We grew, all of us, more aware of the decline of my grandfather’s health. I found myself watching when he coughed, to be told in an aggravated tone that it was “just a cough, not a heart attack,” and to mind my business. More than once I heard my grandmother badger him about his diet, his smoking, his visits to the tavern, and he would grumble, “Woman, will you give me some peace?”
Once I heard him tell her that he was convinced his coughing became more troublesome when she was thus harassing him.
“There’s no rest from your trouble, it weakens my constitution. I can feel it,” and then he coughed for effect.
My grandmother didn’t buy either the logic or the performance, called him “a great willful child with no more sense than little Danny in there,” and stalked out of the room.
As though to demonstrate his health, he took to playing practical jokes on her: one day, for example, he called her from Liquor Town and said he was the police, that her husband had been apprehended in the commission of some crime. He delighted in imitating members of her family, his specialty being his impression of Mary McReady, the surviving member of the Behemoth Sisters. For this act he stuffed pillows under his belt and wore Grandma’s Sunday coat, put a small saucepan on his head to represent the celebrated pillbox hat, and spoke in a froggy voice, asking repeatedly if there was any whiskey in the house.
Several times that summer in 1955 I spent the day with my grandfather. Once we went to the zoo and the other time he took me to the Historical Society and I held my breath waiting for the security man to recognize me as the young miscreant who had rolled the artillery piece around and otherwise compromised the sanctity of the museum. A different man was on duty, though, and the day was uneventful, except that I was aware of things that had never been there before: my grandfather’s labored breathing and his flagging energy. I’d noticed these changes during an earlier trip to the zoo, where he made frequent stops to rest on a bench, and at one point seemed to be gasping. He made light of both, said it was the heat, and since it was a wilting August day I believed him.
In the Historical Society there was an exhibit on the death of Lincoln, and Grandpa had always been fascinated by it: the museum had come by a number of Lincoln’s possessions, items he’d used, items he’d carried on his person the night of his death, even the bed he’d been laid on in his final moments. On this visit, my grandfather lingered on these things for even longer than usual, till I was practically prancing up and down the hall in my need to move on to cannons and battleflags.
Late one evening I crept out of bed to use the washroom and saw my grandmother sitting alone at the kitchen table. She was leaning against the table, her arms crossed and hugging herself, and looking off into space. I decided not to bother her but she looked up at exactly that moment, as though she’d sensed my presence. She blinked at me, shifted in her chair, and asked me if anything was wrong. I went to the bathroom and when I came out again, she said, “Good night, sunshine,” in a distracted voice. I remember thinking that she was probably having one of the sad times when she thought of my mother.
One muggy night we were all together for dinner, even Uncle Mike, who called himself “bachelor for the night” because Lorraine was at a bridal shower for a friend.
My grandmother served us cold corned beef and her homemade potato salad and cole slaw, and a couple of quart bottles of Meister Bräu appeared on the table. They threw open all the windows and I watched the beer bottles sweat and create little pools on Grandma’s tablecloth. Her delight at having the crowd back around her dining room table was obvious and infectious, and dinner took on the trappings of a party. Everyone seemed to be talking too loud, and there were moments when everyone was speaking at once. My uncles were debating about what they called the “dog days,” with Mike insisting they didn’t begin till August, and Tom holding that as soon as you couldn’t sleep at night without soaking the bed, you were in the dog days.
Since Uncle Mike was the nominal guest, they all took turns prodding him with questions about whether his new marriage had wrought any changes in him. Never a man to let unimportant things like conversation take precedence over his food, Mike grunted answers through his corned beef, smiled a great deal, and seemed unaware that he’d gotten both mustard and horseradish on his face.
“Are you still a slob?” Aunt Anne asked with an expression of innocent interest.
“He was the slob,” Mike told her, pointing at Tom with a fork. “I was the neat one,” he said through a huge mouthful of food.
“The one with the best manners, certainly,” Anne said with a sly look, and everyone laughed except Mike, who looked mystified.
&nb
sp; “Exactly,” he said through his potato salad.
Grandpa held up a hand for silence and gave his older boy a serious look. “Not to bring up an unpleasant subject, Michael, but they tell me she left you.” Grandpa looked at me. “The milkman, you said it was.”
I must have looked shocked, and I wasn’t at all sure what he meant by “the milkman,” and they all laughed as I sputtered that I’d never said any such thing.
They had gone giddy for the night, and I thought at the time they were just so glad to be together once more that no one minded hearing the same stories and tired jokes. I didn’t mind any of it, and found that I was now a featured performer, for they couldn’t let the evening move on without rehashing the epic tale of The Chicken. Grandpa had already begun the storyteller’s process of embellishing and editing, so that I’d already heard the tale half a dozen different ways, including one version in which I wept and ran after the chicken as it disappeared into the night. This led to a brief debate over whether the chicken episode was hard evidence that Grandpa had begun to lose his mind.
Grandma steered the talk to her younger children and forced Anne to tell us about the promising young man whom she’d met at a dance at St. Bonaventure’s.
“A college man, he is,” Grandma said, happy with any replacement for the undistinguished Roger.
“Well, he’s had some college,” Anne said. “He’s gonna finish on the G.I. bill.”
“I wanna meet this guy,” Tom said. He exchanged a wink with Mike and added, “Some night when Mike’s free. We can sit down with him at the table, have a beer, decide if he’s—what, Mike?”
“If he’s fit,” Mike said through cole slaw.
“That’s it, see if he’s fit to be courting our sister.”
“‘Courting’?” Anne wrinkled her nose at them. “Nobody calls it that anymore, this is modern times, and for your information, I just met him, we’re just…” Then she caught the looks going from Tom to Mike and realized they were having fun with her, and she laughed.
“I’ll bring him to you guys when I’ve toughened him up.”
“Fair enough,” Tom said. Uncle Mike went on chewing.
For her part, Aunt Anne tried to pry something about Helen out of her brother.
“And what about you, Mr. Romeo? How’s that new girlfriend of yours? The one I haven’t actually met yet.”
“Oh, no?” Tom said innocently. “Gee, Danny’s met her, right, Dan?”
I nodded, feeling a member of a small inner circle.
“She’s fine, Sis. And you’ll meet her soon enough. When I toughen her up.”
“We’re not going to bite her, for goodness sake,” Grandma sniffed.
“What’s the hurry?” Tom asked. Then he gave Aunt Anne a funny smile, the smile of a fellow who knows secrets that cannot be turned loose yet.
We stayed at the dinner table so long that I received a second Pepsi, largely to keep me quiet. Eventually the talk turned to Grandpa’s health and I felt some of the steam go out of the room.
“Leave me be about my health, for God’s sake,” Grandpa said. “I’m fine, I’m just old, that’s what you all forget. I’m not a young buck anymore.”
“He needs to go to a doctor,” Grandma said, as though speaking of a person who was not present. “He’s so stubborn, he never wants to listen to anyone. He needs to see O’Leary over on Damen. Maybe you can talk some sense into him, you boys. He won’t listen to your sister or meself.”
“Not now,” Grandpa protested. “Let me eat my dinner in peace.”
This proved a tactical error, for it allowed Grandma, addressing him directly now, to point out that dinner had been over for twenty minutes, and that what he ate “wouldn’t keep a bird on the wing. A baby eats more than you eat, Patrick Flynn, for the Love of God.”
Grandpa growled at her, something like, “Give me some peace.” She turned her complaints to Tom, telling him Grandpa was eating almost nothing these days. Before Tom could say anything, Grandpa stopped him in midsentence with, “I still drink that eggnog thing of hers every morning of my life,” and this seemed to mollify Grandma and to impress Tom.
“Yeah? Still, Dad? You still drink the eggnog?”
“I do. Ask Danny. Tell them, Dan, tell them how I brace myself against the sink there and force it down. A lesser man would toss it down the drain and lie about it.”
“He does, he drinks it,” I said. “He says it’s terrible.”
“You keep still,” Grandma said. To her husband, she said, “You need more than a glass of eggnog.”
“I thought it would give me eternal life. If it doesn’t do at least that much, I’ll drink it no more.”
“Maybe I’ll make a bigger glass of eggnog.”
Grandpa stared at her for several seconds and then speared the last piece of corned beef from the platter and forced it into his mouth. Only half made it inside his mouth, and he made a fine show of chewing it with the tail end still hanging outside and mumbling how good her food was, and I had to laugh. My grandmother stared at me with regal contempt, then shook her head at Grandpa.
“You can make all the jokes you want, you know I’m right,” she said.
She gave me a hard look. “And he’s not that funny.” Still shaking her head, she gave a little nod to Aunt Anne, and the two of them began to clear the table.
Uncle Mike gave us all a contented look and allowed as how Lorraine was great but couldn’t cook like Grandma. This seemed to lift my grandmother’s mood, and a moment later I heard her humming in the kitchen. Mike left to pick up “the wife,” as he called her, and I moved, uninvited or no, into the living room with Tom and Grandpa.
I listened to the scratchy sounds of Tom and Grandpa lighting up their cigarettes, and my grandfather brought up the subject of the Cubs, the hapless Cubs, who by that point in the summer of 1955 were an object of pity or horror, depending on how fervently one followed them. Their ineptitude thus far had been broken only by the emergence to center stage of “the colored boy,” as my grandfather quietly called him, Ernie Banks, the only bright spot during the previous season of disaster and on his way to shake a few long-cherished Chicago notions about how well black people might play baseball.
My grandfather was off on a rant this evening and Uncle Tom let him run with it. Grandpa went on at length about the misguided efforts of the Cubs’ ownership, then launched into a sort of Ode to Dead Pitchers, narrating the achievements of Grover Cleveland Alexander—“Who could pitch better drunk and puking up his guts in the bullpen than these fellas can pitch cold sober”—and someone named Mordecai Brown—“He had just the three fingers, and he could make the ball go anywhere he wanted.”
Uncle Tom sat across from him, nodding and smiling, occasionally looking to see if I was paying attention. He smoked and listened, and it struck me that Tom had heard Grandpa’s baseball views before, and knew by heart the list of Grandpa’s dead Cub heroes. But there was something in his face that said it was somehow important for him to listen to his father talk about baseball on this steamy summer night, to listen as long as Grandpa needed him to.
Unraveling
Less than a week later I heard that Uncle Dennis had gone to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. They told me at dinner, then excused me and went on talking about the disaster he’d become: he owed everybody, cadged drinks and placed bets he couldn’t cover, then placed further bets, some of them apparently quite foolish, in an attempt to come up with cash in a hurry. He was apparently drinking more than ever, and I heard my uncle speculate that Dennis would lose his job before long.
Short of death, no one in my world had ever suffered through such a string of disasters. More importantly, no one had been sent to a hospital by another person’s malice. I was horrified. By this time I think I knew I didn’t like my Uncle Dennis very much, he reserved the large part of his charm for other adults, but
he was still my family, and it came as a shock to me that one of my own circle of grown-ups could have his life come crashing down around him. That night I dreamt that dark, shadowy men were pursuing Dennis down an alley; he was crying and there was no one to help him.
***
The darkness had taken us by surprise and we were hurrying up Clybourn when a vaguely familiar man in a suit stepped out of a gangway a few yards ahead of us and planted himself in the middle of the sidewalk, as though astraddle a narrow bridge. From the corner of my eye I saw Matt go stiff-backed as he recognized his father. I heard Matt mutter a greeting and I was about to speak but something in Dennis’s face silenced me. He was smiling but there was nothing happy in it, and he peered at us as though watching for something. He still wore a small piece of bandage at the corner of one eye, and I told myself not to stare at it.
“What’re you doin’ out when it’s dark?” he said to his son. He brushed back his suitcoat—he was always in a suit—and thrust one hand casually into his pants pocket, then rocked slightly on his feet. In the distance I could see the lights of Riverview, and the Para-Chutes dropping their screaming loads, but they might have been many miles away. For some reason I remember noting that the street was nearly empty.
His squint focused first on Matt and then on me, a long look that seemed to carry a dull malice, and I felt the need to say, “Hi, Uncle Dennis.”
He snorted. “Never mind ‘Hi, Uncle Dennis,’” he muttered, and I could barely understand him. “Your grandma’s gonna have your hide. And you,” he said to his son, and then stopped. He wet his lips and rocked a little to one side and nodded, as drunk as I’d ever seen an adult, and I took a little step back from him. He was nodding at Matt now and when I looked at my cousin, he was watching his father with an open fear that I’d never seen before. I saw Matt take his hands from his pockets, slowly, and then let them dangle because he didn’t know what to do with them.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 27