In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  “This place is great, this is unbelievable. These are from Civil War times I bet.”

  “Maybe older,” I suggested, and we had a brief three-way debate on whether there had been a Chicago before the Civil War, with the others insisting that there hadn’t been, and me holding to a position that Chicago was even older than New York.

  Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up very close by. We scampered down the staircase, and I was struck by a wave of terror that did not abate even when I tumbled the last three steps and landed on my back with Terry Logan on top of me. Matt was already out the hole. When we emerged into what seemed to be a sun that had moved closer in our absence, we saw a man staring at us. I have since seen shock on many faces, but never, before or since, have I seen shock so perfect, so total, as this man watched three small boys issue from his property through a hole of their own making. His mouth was open and his eyes unnaturally wide, and when he finally spoke, his voice was just a whisper.

  “You little bastards!” he said, and then I heard Matt giggle and knew our adventure was entering a new phase. Matt headed through the prairie, instinctively seeking an equalizer for the man’s long legs and finding one in the thick weeds. Terry and I followed with our hearts battering through our chests. I was by turns horrified that my life was about to end in a foreign place where no one knew me, and delighted that we were having an adventure which involved a potentially violent adult who rained profanity on us with a vigor I’d never before experienced. This man had none of the imagination I’d noted among my uncles and some others, but the vehemence with which he cursed us was admirable and made one overlook his lack of a vocabulary.

  As I ran through weeds head-high, I could hear the man behind us, panting and still cursing, and I realized I was laughing, and so was Matt. Then I fell. I caught my foot in the tangled stems of the weeds and went down, certain that my life had come to a sorry end. For a while I lay there, holding my breath and peering up at the blue sky with one eye, expecting the tall weeds to part at any moment and reveal the drooling, maniacal face of the cursing man, who would then kill me. He tramped heavily through the grass, gasping now, and then I heard a heavy thud and a groan.

  For just a frozen moment in time I lay there wondering if this was the first manifestation in my young life of that most widely debated of creatures, the Guardian Angel. Had my personal angel grabbed the Cursing Man by an ankle, or given him a hard push to send him face-first into the weeds, or just created a sudden and short-lived hole for the Cursing Man to step into? For a second I worried that My Angel had struck the man dead, but even in my nascent and often bizarre theology there was little place for the concept of Guardian-Angel-as-Personal-Assassin. Whatever had happened, I was grateful and eventually remembered that the continuation of my life depended on my escape. I bounded to my feet and took off.

  Matt and Terry were waiting for me at the mouth of an alley a block away; Terry was saucer-eyed with fright and Matt had gone pale under his constant sunburn, not because he’d been afraid of being caught himself but because he’d envisioned going home to tell my grandmother he’d gotten me killed or sent to prison.

  “Hi, you guys,” I said in my breeziest manner.

  “Did he get you?” Terry asked.

  “Nah. I got by him without him seeing me. I fell though,” I added, feeling that I had to account for my tardy arrival. Matt gave me a look that mixed relief and disapproval, and we all made for home at a brisk trot.

  Later that day I tried in a circuitous way to find out whether Matt believed in angels. It was a mistake. He stared at me for a moment with a look halfway between skepticism and irritation.

  Then he said simply, “There’s no angels. I don’t believe in none of that. That’s make-believe.” Something in his face and tone told me that his angel had had more than one opportunity to show up, and hadn’t.

  Riverview

  Looking back at the summer of 1954, my first summer with my grandparents, I can see all the stages but I am unable to make out the seams, as one time blends into another, but I’m certain that within a month of trial and error they’d managed to resurrect as much of my old routine as could be expected.

  In the afternoons I played with a boy up Clybourn named Ricky or my schoolmate Jamie Orsini. My days were full, each one reflecting the determination of the adults around me to make up for what they saw as a great yawning hole in my life, and I have little recollection of afternoons spent moping or mourning.

  I seemed to have inherited many more layers of supervision than I thought necessary, and that unlike my late mother, who was willing on occasion to let me walk up the street to a playmate’s house, my grandparents tended to believe I’d been abducted if I was gone for more than two hours. I sometimes overheard them fretting over the gloriously rudderless Tuesdays I spent at Grandma Dorsey’s in Matt’s company. As I was to learn later, they feared Matt’s influence on me, and they spoke often of Grandma Dorsey’s “frailty,” though in truth she was solid as an anvil, just not particularly adept at the supervision of small boys.

  My nights were another matter: once they were all asleep, all shut up in their little cells in the hive, I lay in bed and told myself I was a lost boy, a child without family. I reminded myself that they all slept in rooms where they’d slept for years, that I alone was a newcomer, and I felt alien and unguarded. I listened to the sounds in my grandparents’ house, sounds probably not much different from the sleeping sounds and night noises of my late parents’ home, the sounds of creaking wood and loose windowpanes, a cat mousing under the porch, and transformed these simple night noises into ghosts and bats, and danger on two legs. The street sounds were no better, the wind roared and the high calls of the nighthawks unnerved me, and cats fighting sounded like babies left out in an alley.

  Sometimes I caught snatches of conversation from people walking home from Riverview or a night in a Belmont Avenue tavern: in the isolation of my dark little room their voices seemed louder than they probably were, harsher, even threatening, they were coming up the stairs for me and I’d have no time to wake someone. For the first couple of months with my grandparents, I stayed awake so long at night I was able to convince myself that I never really slept. Once I made the mistake of sharing this remarkable fact with my grandfather, who simply raised his eyebrows and said I seemed to be sleeping when he came in to check on me each night.

  A new fear came to me, for having been visited early on by death, I had come to be obsessed with it. These dark moments in the middle of the night soon accommodated a new worry, that my new family would all die as those before them had.

  The first time this thought struck me, I fought it down, but it returned on other nights and soon took on a knotty logic. I had more than once entertained the notion that the loss of my parents was in some way a punishment. At first I could not have said what I was being punished for, though I believe such notions are common to children who suffer a sudden tragedy. I was in some way a bad boy who had been found out and punished. This early feeling of guilt subsided in the face of my more practical concerns and worries about my new life, but now, in the middle of these solitary nights, it found me once more and terrified me. It seemed clear and logical that my family, grandparents, uncles, and aunt, would all perish as my punishment for the many bad things I had done. And where my previous notion had simply been that I was “bad” in some nebulous way, I now saw myself as a child turning to evil. I saw a boy who crept about the house and went where he was told not to go, opened drawers belonging to adults, sampled what he liked in the pantry, and even stole out of the house on his own. I saw a boy who had joined in with his wild cousin to do things for which swift punishment was merited, a boy who broke into barns and climbed roofs, and I saw worst of all a boy who had begun to feel and then to demonstrate in strange ways his anger at his relatives. Such a boy, it seemed to me in the middle of the night, such a boy could expect a terribl
e punishment. On more than one of these occasions I cried and prayed to God not to take any of them unless He planned to take me as well. In the mornings I vowed to change, but my plans for the defeat of evil were always thwarted by stronger impulses. Gradually the fears and feelings of guilt left me for a time and I thought I was through with them. In reality, they were simply growing tentacles and horns.

  ***

  In the evenings we often went out as a group, whoever happened to be home, setting in place patterns that would last for summers to come. We went to Hamlin Park and had ice cream bars and Popsicles or to church carnivals, or best of all, to Riverview. To Riverview, the ancient amusement park that sprawled along the river in the heart of the old neighborhood like a walled country of smoke and noise and seemed to be telling me, “Here anything can happen, and it probably will.” It was unlike anything I was ever to see again, part amusement park, part dance hall, part circus, acres upon acres of wooden hills and towers that always seemed too frail to support the metal cars, trains, and rockets they carried, let alone the raucous crowds who squeezed into them. To a child’s eye, it was the whole gaseous adult world writ large: noisy and smoky, the air thick with tobacco smoke and cooking smoke and burnt fuel and steam, cotton candy and popcorn and women’s perfume and the dense mystery of odors that wafted from the beer garden. Attractions were found here to show up the sentimental, the silly, the dark side of the world.

  There were rides to terrify the hardiest of street boys, fun houses and parachutes and nearly a dozen roller coasters: the Bobs, the Greyhound, the Silver Flash, the Comet, the Fireball.

  And noise, always noise, the clackety racket of the coasters as they pulled stolidly to the tops of the hills just before dropping fifty or sixty feet to the undying terror of the riders, music, laughter, the happy background screams of the people dropping through the sky on the Para-Chutes. Men yelling to one another, kids shouting, the sideshow barker with a voice like a klaxon that reached you long before you could see him.

  There were reminders here, too, of my parents: we’d come here often, and one summer my father had worked the gate, two nights a week, to make extra money. On those nights, we got in free, and I felt like a minor celebrity.

  In the summer, Riverview took over a child’s consciousness. It lay at the place where Clybourn Avenue dead-ended just before the river, and when the sun was high overhead I could see the park up the street, shimmering in the whitish glare like a magic kingdom, something that might be gone in a high wind.

  On hot dull afternoons, my friends and I lay under the trees in Hamlin Park and spun lies and folktales about the rides: that a boy had died of fright on the Bobs, that a man had pushed his wife out of the Greyhound, that lovers had taken a long suicidal dive from the topmost car of the Ferris wheel, that a child exactly our age had tumbled from the Comet and been sliced like summer sausage beneath the coaster’s wheels.

  We repeated overheard fragments of adult conversation, embellished them, improved them, stretched them to their proper size and gave them new form: fights became brawls, muggings became murders. A purse snatching became robbery at gunpoint. None of us had yet been allowed to go into the Freak House, and so it too became fodder for our imaginations: the “tallest man in the world” became ten feet tall, the fat lady had to be rolled into the park, the fire-eater farted flames. Matt said there was a child inside who was actually half-wolf, and my own contribution was the two-headed man, whom I claimed to have seen any number of times. I said he looked like Buster Crabbe, on both of his faces.

  And on the hottest nights it seemed as if my entire world had conspired to show up at Riverview. I entered with my family and promptly ran into friends, neighbors, cousins, other uncles and aunts, schoolmates. Everyone had ride coupons they didn’t need: I had extras of the Ferris wheel and the neighbors up the street always seemed to have extra coupons for the Greyhound or the Comet, and I never tired of riding them. But more than the free coupons, I learned to watch the crowd for familiar faces, to wait for the old creaking park to pull its little surprises on me.

  To a child obsessed with his place in the world, Riverview sent me constant reminders that in fact I’d inherited a great tangle of family that could pop up anywhere, and that my neighborhood literally had no end. One night my uncles took me and I was delighted to see Grandma Dorsey and Aunt Ellen and her children; another time I was standing in line waiting to get on the Bobs when someone slapped me on the back of my head. I spun around to find my cousin Matt grinning at me.

  On still another evening, an unearthly shadow seemed to fall upon me, only me of all the people standing in line for the most nightmarish coaster of them all, the Bobs: I turned to find my Aunt Teresa, now Sister Fidelity, beaming down at me. I was intimidated by the good sister, blood ties or no, not only by her billowy habit but by her lovely face as well, and I didn’t want any of the other kids to see me talking to a nun. I smiled and wished that I had a hole I could crawl into, or that her new assignment among the poor on the West Side could begin immediately. A few feet back, I could see two of my schoolmates, eyeballs bulging, their schoolboy assumption being that I had done something wrong and that a nun had come all the way to Riverview to bring me to justice. She asked me how my summer was going and then admitted that she didn’t like to ride a roller coaster by herself.

  “If I die,” she said, “no one will be able to tell Grandma Dorsey.” I knew I would never die on a roller coaster, but I had no such confidence in the constitution of a nun, and so I allowed her to ride with me. We spent the minute-or-so of terror howling and laughing at one another. On the second hill I thought she’d lose her habit but it didn’t budge. After that, we went on the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Ferris wheel and became fast friends.

  Poised in the topmost car as the great Ferris wheel took on a fresh load of passengers, nothing around us but a sky bleeding purple, we chatted, this nun just back from the Lord’s Missions in Guatemala and I, and for an adult she made incredible sense.

  “This is my favorite place in the whole park, Danny, the top of the Ferris wheel. From here you can see your whole life spread out down there. I can see where you live, and I can almost see my mother’s house over on Evergreen, and I can see the houses of all the people for miles.”

  I agreed with her that this was a wonderful place, and she nodded happily, then surprised me with her next question.

  “Do they make you feel like an oddball?”

  “Who?” I asked but I knew who.

  “Your family—well, mine, too. Our families, then. Do they make you feel a little strange?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I was unsure how to answer: she was an adult, after all, and Grandma Flynn had once said she was the smartest one on either side of the family, though the men had been unwilling to go so far.

  “They make me feel like one of those poor souls in the freak show,” she said.

  “Are they poor souls? Will they not go to heaven?”

  She laughed. “Of course they will. Maybe sooner than a lot of us. Anyhow, we’re different from the rest of the family, you and I. I’m different because I became something…something not so strange but people don’t understand why a girl does it, and so they’ll never again treat me like a normal person. I’m not a member of the family anymore, I’m a nun. My first Christmas back home after taking my vows, my own brother Gerald was calling me ‘Sister’ like I’m some character out of the Lives of the Saints. I could have brained him.”

  I blinked here and gave myself away.

  “You want to call me that too, don’t you? When I’m home with my family, I’m Teresa. Aunt Teresa to you.”

  “What does Uncle Gerald call you now?”

  “Nothing. He’s afraid to call me ‘Teresa’ and he knows I’ll do him an injury if he calls me ‘Sister’ again. He always was a little slow,” she said under her breath, but I heard her anyway.

  “And you’re
different because they can’t quite bring themselves to treat you like any other small boy. You’re a special problem for them, and they’re going to treat you like one. Just don’t take it to heart. Don’t think you’re a special problem. None of it is anyone’s fault, that’s the thing to remember.” I must have shown some reaction to this mention of fault, for she turned toward me, but she had misunderstood. “They all…they all mean well. You’re a lucky boy to have so many people love you. Just don’t let them drive you crazy.”

  “I won’t.” We’d begun our slow descent now, and she was quiet for a moment. “Are they nice? The people there?”

  “The people? In Guatemala, you mean? Oh, sure, they are, they’re grand. You’d like them—they’re like the Irish.” This seemed to strike her as a fine joke, and she put her head back and laughed, and I found myself chuckling along with her.

  When the ride was finished, she patted me on the head and asked after Grandma Flynn.

  “She’s fine,” I said without thinking.

  “Oh, Lord, no, I’m sure she’s not fine. She’s lost her daughter, and they were great friends, your mother and Mrs. Flynn, great friends. Be very good for her.”

  “I will.”

  She nodded, then looked away in distraction, and I remembered that she had lost a brother. After a moment she fished a half dollar out of some secret compartment in her habit.

  “You’re a nice boy, Danny. I enjoyed our rides together.”

  “Me, too, Sis…Aunt Teresa.”

  “Well done. Here.” She handed me the fifty-cent piece, made a brisk turn on her heel, and walked off, tall and handsome and self-assured, ignoring the many curious faces that took a moment to gawk at her. My Uncle Tom had once remarked with a rueful note that it was “too bad that one became a nun.” Uncle Mike had simply said, “Yeah, what a waste,” and though I didn’t understand what either of them meant, I knew I liked her, too.