“Jesus,” I heard him say. “I almost broke my neck, and yours, too. What’re you doin’ on the floor?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and scrambled to my feet, embarrassed.
He brushed hair from his face. “What are you doing here, Dan?”
“Nothing.”
“Why were you sleeping outside my door?”
In the candor of a sleep-dulled brain I told him, “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Sure I’m all right. What’re you talking about?” He squinted at me and I just stood there, dumb with the need for sleep and past caring how foolish I seemed.
“I’m fine, Dan,” he said, and seemed about to say something else when he just told me to go back to bed. I did as I was told and he went on to the bathroom. I was already wrapped in the covers when he came into my room. He tapped me on my head and whispered, “Anybody in there?”
I pulled the covers back and he was shaking his head. “I don’t know how you can sleep like that. I’d smother. Come have a talk with me,” he said, and I slid out of bed. I waited while he went back to his room to fetch his pajama top and then followed him out into the living room.
He brought me a couple of cookies on a small plate, and a glass of milk, and then he turned on the TV. I gave him a look and he shrugged.
“What Grandma don’t know won’t hurt her.”
He fiddled with the channel selector and found an old movie about jungle explorers, then came and sat down on the couch with me.
He nodded toward my milk. “Spill that and we’re both on bread and water.”
“I won’t.”
He watched me for a moment, then said, “You’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t have any nightmares or nothing like that?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good.” He nodded toward the television. “Jon Hall here has got troubles, though. Look, he’s got natives after him and he runs into a man-eating vine. And I think his shorts are itching him, too.”
I laughed and he patted me on the shoulder. I could see he wanted to say something more but for a while we both watched the mindless old movie, in which Jon Hall did seem to have troubles to rival Job’s, and gradually I saw that Tom was no longer even looking at the television. He was staring at the far wall.
I never saw him cry, and I knew I wouldn’t see it now, nor any other sign of capitulation or despair. But he sat a few inches from me and couldn’t have presented a clearer portrait of defeat. He needed someone to help him through this time, an uncle of his own, though I couldn’t envision Uncle Martin or Uncle Frank being anything but a bottomless source for more trouble.
For a few seconds I fancied again that I could protect him, I would be his last line of defense against the catastrophes that seemed to be gathering in his near future. I stared at him and told myself as long as I was around, as long as I could keep near him, I could protect him, I could pray, I could call in favors from God the way soldiers in the war movies called in air strikes and artillery support. I listened to his silence and wished the movie would go on forever.
I was planning all the things I could do to protect him from the capricious world of adults when I noticed that he was looking at me and shaking his head.
“I must be in pretty bad shape, huh? I got a eight-year-old boy sittin’ up nights worrying about me. So whattya think, Dan—you think I’m gonna jump off a building?”
In truth I thought he’d die in his sleep or slip off life’s deep end like Uncle Dennis, but I couldn’t put either of those thoughts into words. I shook my head.
“But you’re worried about me.” He sighed. “Things happen to you in life, they can turn you into a bum if you don’t watch out. I’ll be all right, Dan, Jesus, I feel like an a…like a jerk making you worried about me. I’ll be okay, I just need to…”
And then I opened my mouth without ever planning to, I opened my mouth and started talking and couldn’t stop.
“You should go away,” I heard myself saying. “You should go someplace far away where nobody can bother you, and you should wait there, and you could come back when everything’s different, you could go away till you feel okay again and start everything over.”
When I finished I met the surprise in his eyes and felt horror at myself, what I’d said, the implications of my own words. He looked away for a moment, then made a long slow shake of his head.
I watched him and I know I was about to slink back to my bed when I realized that he was silently laughing. His face was red and his eyes were shut, and a low hiss was the only sound that escaped him, but he was laughing that sibilant laugh he shared with his father. I looked up at him, feeling utterly stupid, and he saw, and put an arm around me.
“I’m not laughing because you said anything dumb, I’m laughing because you said what I was thinking.” He gave me a long look of affection. “Maybe your Uncle Mike is right about you.”
I blinked, confused. “About what?”
“He thinks you’re not human. Thinks you’re some kinda creature from space, like in those movies you and me go to. He says you got ears like a cat, you can hear through doors and walls, and he thinks you see everything, he thinks you show up whenever anything is gonna happen, good or bad. And he thinks you can read minds.”
“I don’t think I can read minds,” I admitted, and I wasn’t sure about my propensity to materialize at dramatic moments, but I was willing to admit to the other things. I was fairly certain I did have the hearing of a jungle animal, and all children think they have the eyes of eagles. After all, they notice everything, forget nothing.
“Well, you read one mind just now.”
I started to smile and then his meaning dawned on me and a hard knot grew in my throat. “You’re going away?”
“I think I am. Sometime after the holidays. But don’t get that look on your face, I’m not leaving. I’m just…taking a vacation.”
He was staring at the television. I looked at the screen for a moment, where Jon Hall was now in quicksand, and my brain was seething with suggestions. It was his turn to read minds.
“No, I’m not going to Africa, kiddo. Nothin’ that dramatic.”
“It would be neat.”
“Tell you what, I go to Africa, I’ll take you with me. No, I’m just gonna get in my car and take a long drive, see some of the country, and think for a change.” He looked straight ahead as he spoke, and I understood he was talking to himself, that no response was necessary.
“It’s why people stay in trouble all their lives. They never get a chance to step back and take a look at what’s going wrong, at maybe what they’re doing wrong. But I’m gonna. I don’t know if I’ll come up with any answers, but I’m sure not doing any good right now.”
He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the blue glow of the old movie, and now that he’d put words to his feelings I wanted to talk him out of it, to tell him it was the silliest idea I’d ever had, that adults didn’t do this sort of thing. He said nothing more for a time and I told myself that he was leaving me.
Without a word, for I no longer trusted my voice not to break, I got up and moved toward my bedroom door.
“Hey, Dan. Wait up.” He came toward me, shaking his head, and put a hand on my shoulder.
“You don’t trust nobody yet, you don’t know what to believe. I told you, you got people all around you that you can count on. And I’m one of ’em. I’m not your Uncle Dennis. I say I’m coming back, I’ll come back.”
I held my tongue for a moment, then blurted out, “What if you get killed in a car crash?”
He made a wry face. “Gee, thanks, that helps a lot. I’m not gonna get killed in a car crash. Now go to bed, and don’t say nothing to your grandmother about that car crash stuff, you’ll make her nuts. She’s gonna be nuts enough as it is.”
***
And so it was that one cold morning in late February, he got into the Buick and took off down Route 66 where they were all going back in 1956, and was somewhere in New Mexico when Helen and Philly Clark were married, a big wedding at St. Andrew’s Church, with a lavish reception at an ornate hall on the Northwest side.
Tom sent me postcards from New Mexico and Arizona and Texas, and I brought them to school to show my friends the proof of this man of the Flynns who actually traveled around the country. Privately, I waited daily for word of his death, and my grandmother was no help whatsoever, asking repeatedly what a young man alone could possibly do by himself for all this time, and predicting that some dark-hearted stranger was going to “knock him in the head and take all his money.”
Almost a month after leaving but just short of my ninth birthday, he pulled up in front of the house in the now-dusty Buick and emerged with his suitcase and bags of souvenirs, many of them for me.
That night I sat at his feet and listened as he told his parents what he’d done, the things he’d seen. He spoke of Indians in walled towns, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, the mountains, he’d seen antelope and cactus and eagles and a coyote. They took it all in, my grandmother looking as though she’d found herself in the presence of Marco Polo. I fell asleep before he was finished.
The following day he went to the tavern and allowed his partners to buy him out for what amounted to little more than pocket change. Afterward, he seemed relieved.
Around the house he was almost himself again but quieter, calmer, and I was uncertain that this change was for the better. He treated me the same as he always had, and if anything we spent more time together, more museums, more trips to zoos and parks, more movies: his trip through the Southwest had done nothing to dull his taste for westerns, and if there was a western out in the spring of 1956 that we missed, it was not for lack of effort on Tom’s part. But there was a tight-lipped quality to him now, a part of him no longer accessible, and it made me uncomfortable. In my darker moments I found his behavior foreboding.
He seldom went out with his old friends now, though he eventually began seeing women again. About these women he told us nothing—not me, nor his parents, nor his sister and brother. When I asked him once if he had a new girlfriend yet, he silenced me with the same look I’d gotten from asking him about Korea, then said, “When I got something to tell you, champ, I’ll let you know.”
Sometime in late April he began seeing a young woman that no one seemed to know anything about. He told us only that he’d met her at a dance and that he’d “seen her around.” He never brought this new girl home, was careful not to introduce her to old friends, and this all served to vex my grandmother as nothing else could have. She took to muttering to herself, giving voice to her darkest fears about the dangerous sort of women he was wont to take into his heart.
She referred to the mystery woman as “that one,” and once I happened into the kitchen when she was cutting onions and peppers and muttering to herself about her son. She called him “a lost boy, just a lost boy.”
Just before school let out for summer, he capitulated to several months of badgering by his mother and Aunt Anne and brought the new girl home after warning us one and all not to make her feel as if she were on display.
“She’s not some thing in a zoo, all right?”
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll all like her, the poor thing,” Grandma said, her doubts manifest in her voice.
For the first time in my life, I combed my hair without an adult telling me I needed to.
The new girl proved to be Mollie Dorsey. The two of them, Tom and Mollie, stood just inside the door as though unsure whether they were entirely welcome, their faces showing a mix of delight, relief, guilt at weeks of outright, bald-faced lying. I couldn’t catch my breath, my ears seemed to be ringing. My grandfather kept saying, “I knew something was up, I knew it,” and my grandmother, speechless for just this rare moment in her long life, threw her head back and laughed, eyes shut and mouth wide, just as she looks in the picture.
I felt as though a loose piece of the firmament had just slid with a neat click into its natural place. I wanted to proclaim to anyone within earshot that it had all been my idea, though I knew something quite different had taken place. I understood in a vague way that this marvel would never have happened if my uncle’s life had kept to its original course. For a time I was uncomfortable with this knowledge, wondering if he viewed this new phase of his life as a second-best choice, a poor second. It was not till many years later that I learned from my own life that a happy man understands the pointlessness of looking back.
Epilogue
I greeted the summer of 1956 with a child’s willful assumption that life would now be a settled, patterned affair, ignoring all the contrary evidence around me. In April my grandfather had gone in to the hospital for a brief time, and in June he went out to the Hines V.A. Hospital. He would be in and out of Hines several times before the end. At the beginning they took me with when they visited him, though I wasn’t allowed into the ward itself.
A couple of times with the help of a sympathetic nurse, we contrived meetings on a back staircase where I gave him pictures I’d drawn and told him of my latest adventures. He gave me Chiclets and Lifesavers, told me not to let Grandma see them because she’d say, “They’ll rot your teeth,” and made me laugh when he asked if I’d seen The Chicken. Once, as I waited out on the hospital lawn while my grandmother and Uncle Tom went in to visit him privately, I chanced to look up and saw him in a window, watching me. When he died late that summer, we were all tested for tuberculosis.
My grandmother recovered slowly from his passing, and I understood enough of death now to worry about her. Soon enough, however, she had returned to her hard but comfortable routine of work at the knitting mill and keeping her house. She seemed to spend more time in the kitchen over her tea, in the company of only the big yellow radio. In the fall of 1956, my grandmother stunned the entire gathered family at dinner with the announcement that she was going to New York to search for her lost brother. A Greek chorus around her dinner table told her she was insane.
“Mom, that’s nuts,” Anne said.
“Ma, you’re not going to New York,” Uncle Mike said, and Grandma wheeled on him.
“And who died and left you boss in my house, young man?”
I saw Uncle Mike wince, and when he opened his mouth for another ill-considered response, Aunt Lorraine put a restraining hand on his arm, to match the one she doubtless wanted to clap across his mouth.
Beside me I heard Uncle Tom mutter, “Ah, Christ.”
She looked from one to the other of them, little red points of anger in her cheeks. I offered to go with her if I could be excused from school. She ignored me, staring down the table at Tom till he said, “No, kiddo, she’s already got her dance partner picked out.”
“Indeed I do not need a dance partner,” Grandma said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. He looked at his new wife, Mollie, who just nodded once.
They were gone for a week in October, and when they returned from New York my grandmother was quietly self-satisfied. All she would tell anyone was, “We found him, the poor soul, and he’s all right.” Tom said nothing: she’d sworn him to secrecy.
***
In that childhood visited by a hundred terrors, one eventually came to stand out: that all the people around me in those days, all the people I loved best, would die and I’d survive them. I hated the thought, fought to suppress it whenever it visited me, refused to admit the possibility that I could outlive them all, and more than once I wished for an early death, preferably something combining heroism with high drama. At the time, I was bombarded like all Catholic schoolboys with instructive stories of the saints, I knew the names of a hundred of them, the cherished causes for which one sought their individual help, I knew their lives and their deaths, hardships an
d bloody torments, but of them all, the one whose end called out to me was St. John, the Evangelist.
The image of that ancient saint—companion and even friend to Jesus, comrade and co-adventurer with the other doomed ones in that embattled band of dreamers—he alone living to an improbable age, much of it spent on a sun-baked island in exile, caught me and held me and would not let go. I wondered about this solitary old man, about his memories, his private moments, his nights, whether he was bitter to have witnessed the passing of his whole world, to have outlasted them all; whether this solitude among strangers was sufficient to shake his faith and render meaningless the way he’d lived his life.
Age has done nothing to enlighten me about those other holy souls the nuns tried to teach me about, but I cannot help feeling that I understand the old saint on the island, however imperfectly. I have outlived almost all of them, you see, the Dorseys and the Flynns. Almost all the laughing faces in “The Photographer’s Nightmare” have gone: grandparents, uncles and aunts, the lot of them assembling in another world, Uncle Martin no doubt looking the Creator in the eye and grumbling, “Not much of an afterlife, is it, your lordship?”
A handful remain from that time: my Uncle Michael, stolid and grumbling and arthritic, out in the suburbs with his unswervingly cheerful Lorraine. He is content with his lot though baffled by life in general, uncertain why he outlived his family.
My Aunt Teresa currently serves her church in Guatemala, where she is a sort of principal in a school for the poorest of the poor. I saw her a couple of years ago when she came home for a short rest. Still the pretty nun though now in her sixties, she allowed me to take her to lunch. She writes me often, taking a few moments from the seemingly endless labor of a nun’s life in a poor country. She jokes that this work is nothing to her days among the poor in Chicago.
Nor is she the sole person from my past to be found in the jungles of Central America, for in the verdant, steamy heart of the Costa Rican rain forest is Rusty Kilgallen. Contrary to my imaginings, he did not turn out to be a dazzling weapon for international terrorism but a renowned herpetologist. As I write this, he stalks through the jungle in search of a rare snake whose venom is an almost perfect toxin. I still mistrust his motives.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 33