Tom is gone, of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. Once a year I drive up to the northwoods country in Wisconsin to visit his widow, who chose never to remarry. Mollie has come, in old age, to resemble no one so much as her elder sister, my late Aunt Ellen—tough-minded, independent, a woman who has seen the elephant and found nothing to be afraid of. Like the many Irish wakes of my youth, these visits to Aunt Mollie’s house are not entirely somber affairs. She makes me tea and we talk of those old days and the Flynns and Dorseys and most of all, of our mutual favorite, her late husband. Then I take her to dinner: we find ourselves a private corner in a Wisconsin roadhouse and she proceeds to drink me under the table, all the while spinning the old tales I still need to hear, my reassurance that he found happiness in a short life.
Years after all these events of my childhood I was to see my Uncle Dennis once more. I was hurrying down Clark Street and heading for the Loop, and I passed a corner where three men were arguing. They were drunk and poorly dressed and seemed to be discussing money, and from the desultory way they pressed their claims, it was an argument they’d had more than once. One of them, the shortest, broke away from the others and began stalking, eyes asquint in the wind, in my direction. I recognized him instantly, the haunting gray eyes would have given him away behind a mask. He was hatless and gray-haired, his face burnished a dark red by drink or the elements, and he gave no sign that he knew me. As he passed, one of the other men called to him: the name he used was “Lacey.”
In the summer of 1971, Philly Clark, thrice married and divorced, was found dead in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental in a parking lot at O’Hare. He had been shot. There seemed to be little surprise among people who knew him and the darker associations of his life. For years people had spoken knowingly of his connections, and there was speculation that Philly’s unfortunate combination of ambition and a taste for gambling had hastened his end.
Someone from the old neighborhood told me that Helen had moved away but I never believed it, for the people I knew in those days didn’t leave Chicago unless they were drafted. And indeed I believe I saw Helen once after that time, many years later, though I am still uncertain it was she. I was waiting for a light to change and the Belmont bus moved by me and I caught a glimpse of a face in a window. I saw her for no more than a fraction of a second but recognized her immediately. She looked like any of the other women on the bus, a dark-haired woman in a scarf, just one more working woman going home after a day in an office or a factory or a warehouse.
After all the years, one detail in the old photo still obsesses me: the blurred running figure entering the photo through its right-hand margin, as though invading the picture from an adjoining frame, my cousin Matt. He is smiling in the photograph, excited, almost dancing into the cursing photographer’s line of vision. I have all my life been troubled by that smile, the smile of a boy unaware that his life will unfold in a way far different than he imagines. At some point in the 1960s we lost contact and he left my life for many years, so long that at one point I caught the tail ends of rumor that he was dead, the victim of liquor or his own temper—in one version, killed in a fight, a John Doe somewhere in the potter’s field corner of a distant cemetery, ignominious, insulting end, a street person’s death. Both Dorseys and Flynns accepted this as horror but no surprise: he was, after all, his father’s son, and for a time I believed it.
But more from a native intractability than anything else I began to allow myself to doubt, and eventually faint hints reached me, other versions of his story and a chance sighting, no proof for any court I knew of but enough for me to believe that he still lived. The year was 1977, and I had reached my own dead-end, a gray time when I no longer seemed to see a point in my life. I remembered my grandmother’s tight-lipped trip to New York and decided that I could do a lot worse than look for Matthew Dorsey, whether he wished to be found or not.
It took almost two years, but I found him—twice, for he had no wish to return to any part of the life he’d known. My search took me first south and then west, and into the back streets of a half dozen cities. I spoke with priests and social workers and street people and sought his face in flophouses and parks, and at one point found myself following a pair of traveling carnivals on his track. Somewhere toward the end I realized that I was searching for my own good more than his, but I found him. I will say neither that I saved him from the street nor turned his life around nor brought him to a dramatic religious conversion, just that I found him. The day I finally caught up with him was a painful one for us both: he had not wanted to be found, and I had not been expecting to see the sick man he was. I stayed with him for the better part of a week, and managed to get him to see a doctor.
We spoke over the phone more than once after that, and for a time I had an address for him. I have not heard from him now in six years but I believe him to be alive, and he knows where to find me.
***
The stores on Clybourn Avenue are shuttered, some of them torn down, the big laundry closed. Riverview is long gone, a clanking ghost invisible to all but a handful. The rambling house at Leavitt and Clybourn still stands, though probably not for long: when last I drove by, a small rear staircase had collapsed and a piece of plywood had been thrown across the hole to prevent anyone’s using the stairs. The long porch that girded the house and gave it its airs and small pretensions now sags in several places, and the dark underside, the old damp beams and joists that hold it all up cannot be much better. It is still white, now a dusty, uneven white, the color of old bone, and clings stubbornly to a certain dignity. I stopped my car and studied it. In the living room window, where as a child I watched the street on rainy mornings, a small round Hispanic face watched me. I waved and she waved back, just a shy wiggle of her fingers.
For four decades and more I have held my picture to the light, half wondering if I might notice some new detail, never before remarked, a new face in the shadows, and failing that, studying once more the faces of those long dead. I understand that a part of me attempts in this way to breathe life into those faces, break the seals of time.
I watch them at this moment in their lives that found them laughing, cocksure for just that wisp of time that they all had life by its knotty tail, and I wonder what they would make of Daniel Dorsey. I have, after all, never made a great success of anything, never quite established a career as a painter, “never made a buck,” as Uncle Mike would say. My wife, herself a tale, in and out of my life for twenty-five years, calls it a foolish question. She’s right, though like my grandfather in that distant tug-of-war marriage, I won’t let her know. But approve of me or not, to them I’d still be one of their own, come hell or high water. A stranger studying my photograph would probably see just another family, one that never quite achieved anything, made no mark at all in its world, left no footprint, a family like the millions of others that populate the cemeteries. This unenlightened stranger would be unaware that he was gazing at the face of royalty.
Michael Raleigh is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including The Riverview Murders, which won the first Eugene Izzi Award. He has received four Illinois Arts Council Grants for fiction. He teaches English at Truman College. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Katherine, and their three children, Sean, Peter, and Caitlin.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 34