In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  “Why do you work in a dairy if you don’t want to?”

  He gave me an amused look. “It pays the rent, it’s better than standing on the corners wondering where the next nickel’s gonna come from. Which is where a lotta guys are right now. No, you see, sometimes you have to take what people are willing to give you. When I was a kid, I thought I was hot stuff, I thought I had all the answers, and then I found out, yeah, I was smarter than the average guy but they don’t give out medals for that, kiddo. They don’t knock your door down trying to give you fancy jobs. I should have gone to school when I got out of the service. But I didn’t, and now I’m a guy in a dairy.”

  “Is it a bad thing to be a guy in a dairy?”

  “No, but some guys have a different idea what kind of guy they are, and I’m one of ’em.”

  I wanted to ask him what kind of guy he was but was prevented by another Milwaukee home run, this one by Joe Adcock, and it left Wrigley Field and soared far over Waveland, and I tried in vain to follow its flight.

  “I couldn’t see it come down,” I said.

  “It didn’t. Some of ’em just stay up there in the sky forever.” He laughed and said we should go get something to eat. I wanted to ask him my question but that part of our talk seemed finished. We took the bus back to the neighborhood and he spent most of the ride looking out the window over my head. On that day I was eager to get home, to curl up in a corner of my room with my toys or a book and get away from the feelings that had come over me in the ballpark: I knew without fully understanding that he wanted a girl who belonged to someone else, I knew he didn’t have a lot of money, and now I understood that he was not happy with what he was. For the first time, I saw that other people might not view him as I did, that they were unaware of what a special person he was, and I was saddened. That night I prayed for his life to get better.

  But there are few relationships so simple. He was more attentive to me than anyone could have expected, generous with his time, with himself, but it was not enough. All children are demanding and my needs were great. I hated to share him, resented all things in his young bachelor’s life that competed with me for his attention: his girls, his job, his friends, his baseball team—features of his world by turns fascinating and hated.

  On weekends when he couldn’t spend time with me I sulked and wandered around the house with my head down in what I hoped was a fine display of anger and would say nothing when my grandparents wanted to know what was wrong.

  One night he came home late from a date and I crept out of my room while he was in the bathroom. I hadn’t seen him in two nights. The following day was Wednesday, and I hoped he’d offer to take me somewhere, so I was giving him the opportunity to tell me about it. When he emerged from the bathroom in his pajama bottoms I was waiting for him in the hall. He came out looking preoccupied, and he was almost on top of me before he noticed me.

  “Whattya doing out of bed?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Your grandma will have your hide, and then she’ll have mine ’cause it’ll be my fault that you’re up somehow.” He spoke sternly but patted me on the head. “Now go to bed. You need a drink of water or something?”

  “No. Are we going anywhere tomorrow?”

  He shook his head quickly. “Uh, no, not tomorrow. I got something I gotta do tomorrow. Maybe Saturday or Sunday, okay?”

  I nodded and mumbled something in what I hoped was a clear display of disappointment.

  He said, “Saturday or Sunday for sure, all right?”

  And I nodded again and went off to bed.

  The following day I went into his room and closed the door behind me. I opened the top drawer of his dresser and stared at his private things. To that point I had gone through only my grandparents’ dresser and the drawers and shelves of the pantry: the two identical dressers in my uncles’ bedrooms were off-limits, like their wallets. Grandma had once told me it was very impolite to go through a woman’s purse, even for money, and that a boy found rooting around in a man’s wallet could be up to no good. Their drawers seemed logically to fall into that same forbidden category, so that when I opened Tom’s top drawer that day, I understood that I was crossing some sort of line.

  I took my time going through his things: there were cuff links and tie pins, and I found a small plastic box with a half dozen or so military buttons. At the back of the drawer I found an old Morgan silver dollar, and I took it. As I closed the drawer, I noticed a small photograph of Tom and a group of his friends. I stared at it for a moment and then picked up a pencil stub and made a long dark line across the front of it. By the following day I was filled with remorse for what I’d done. I used an eraser to remove some of the pencil line, and then put the silver dollar back.

  New Year, New Troubles

  At summer’s end I went back to school at St. Bonaventure’s. My teacher would be a nun new to the school, with the exotic name of Sister Polycarp, and I was nervous about her, and about school in general. First grade had been an uneasy time for me. My teacher had been Sister Augustine, a stern old nun who could not abide a wise guy, and my inability to remain quiet or even seated for long periods of time had brought me into frequent conflict with her. So although I was excited to see my friends, I entered the second grade with some foreboding. My feelings worsened on the first day, when I noticed all my schoolmates being brought to school by their mothers, or in some cases, mothers and fathers. I was brought to school by Aunt Anne, which did not seem the same thing at all.

  My fears about my new teacher proved unfounded, at least for the time being, for Sister Polycarp knew about my parents and was quietly solicitous of me. I soon found that my “situation” had given me a kind of celebrity among the other children. School and the little landmarks by which a child notes the time on his calendar eased my terrors and after a couple of weeks I had settled in. Our school mornings were punctuated by prayers for the conversion of Russia and, precisely at 10:30 every morning when the siren went off, a bizarre exercise in which all the students slipped out of their seats and took refuge beneath their wooden desks—for our protection, it was said, against nuclear attack.

  During one of these exercises I peered over the edge of my desk to see if Sister Polycarp had, as she was required, forced her sizable form under her desk. She was in her chair, staring out the window and shaking her head.

  In truth she seemed kind enough, and if I had allowed her to be herself, I’d have encountered no trouble from her at all, but it was not to be.

  In general, though, the first few weeks of that new school year passed without major incident. I managed to focus my attention on my toys, my friends, my adventures at Grandma Dorsey’s house with Matt, and most of all the new kind of family life I’d begun. In the late afternoons I watched television—the year before, Grandma and Grandpa had bought a wonderful new Stromberg-Carlson. It had a blond wood cabinet that Grandma wiped and polished like a religious relic, and a small grayish screen like Cyclops’s blind eye.

  I watched cartoons and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Elmer the Elephant or Garfield Goose, and The Little Rascals, and when my uncles and Grandma came home from work the house filled with noise I’d never really experienced in my parents’ small, quiet flat. We chattered and laughed over dinner, and in the evenings if it was warm, we all walked over to Hamlin Park, and Uncle Tom or Uncle Mike bought me an ice-cream bar or a Popsicle. On Wednesdays and Fridays we watched the Gillette Fights, often televised from a place inexplicably called St. Nicholas Arena, though it had no apparent connection with St. Nicholas’s more important life’s work.

  I can still see myself at those times, sitting back while all the adults around me focused their attention on the radio, the television, or each other, and watching them, telling myself I now had a new family and my year in school would be like anyone else’s, perhaps even better, for Aunt Anne was normally there to help me with my homew
ork to a degree that my late mother would have found indulgent.

  But my days soon brought me reminders that my situation was forever altered. After a short, unimportant fight in the playground with a third grader named Henry, I was hauled into the principal’s office, where I received, along with my opponent, a stern lecture from the most universally feared individual in the building, a tall thin nun whose name I believed to be “Sister Phillip-the-Principal.” The older boy was able to make her see the fight as my fault, and she sent me on my way with the admonition to improve my behavior lest I cause shame to my family. She started to say “your parents,” and then caught herself.

  Shortly after that, I was sent home with the first of innumerable notes from Sister Polycarp to my grandparents, a succession of urgent sounding epistles that before year’s end would rival St. Paul’s, in number if not in complexity of message.

  My grandmother took that first note from me as though I’d handed her a dead insect, and when she’d digested the message from Sister Polycarp that I’d developed a great love for the sound of my own voice, she made her disappointment in me clear. I had nothing to say in my own defense, for it seemed there was no audience for anything I could have brought up. That night I lay in bed and told myself that my mother would have understood the situation and handled it much better than these people who had no idea what they were doing.

  A few days later, a third incident occurred that underscored for me the truth of my situation. I was walking home alone, having missed Matt, and I must have dawdled long enough to allow most of the children to get ahead of me, for there was no one else around.

  I had stopped just past the viaduct on Diversey to watch a fire truck rumble by when a boy ran by me, grabbed my cap, and dashed up the street. I yelled and gave chase. He appeared to be older, and he was faster, but I caught him at the corner when he had to stop for a truck that was making a turn. Without thinking, I ran up to him, demanded my hat, pulled it from his hand, and shoved him. He staggered a couple of steps and smacked me a perfect shot in the nose, and I went down on the sidewalk. I got up, crying, and went after him, swinging with both hands, and he laughed.

  I remember that he was a strangely disheveled-looking boy with odd, close-set eyes, and his jacket bagged on him as though bought for someone else. There is nothing quite so urgent as a child’s need to get at a tormentor, and I can still see myself chasing him up and down the sidewalk, sobbing over my injured nose as I attempted to land just one blow. The older boy eluded me easily, chuckling as I threw long roundhouse punches with no chance of landing. In the end he tired of the game, dropped me with another punch, and ran off. He turned the corner past the Stewart-Warner factory and was gone.

  My experience shocked me. I had had fights on the playground and seen Matt provoke several, but no stranger had ever struck me without provocation. I was frightened, and all the way home I looked over my shoulder to see if he was following me.

  Aunt Anne was waiting for me at Clybourn and Diversey, a concerned look on her face, for by now I was quite late. I touched my nose and saw that there was no blood. I was on the verge of blurting out my story when something told me to keep it to myself. I saw my uncles telling me to stand up for myself, and my grandmother and grandfather wanting to know why I was alone in the first place, and decided it was no use.

  That night in bed I imagined coming home to my mother, imagined her instant reaction of concern and anger. I saw her pursuing the older boy down the street, confronting my hard-hearted principal, and tearing Sister Polycarp’s notes in small pieces and throwing them at her. But there was no mother in my life, and I told myself it made a difference. I told myself I was, in some fundamental way, unprotected, and that the new arrangement of my life had failed in its first tests.

  Other tests came and I waited expectantly. Halloween approached, a different sort of test in my new life: anybody, I thought, could give me a bed and clothes, but what would my holidays be like? Would they understand what a small boy needed in order to celebrate a holiday that had already taken on as many of the mystical trappings and connections as Christmas? Perhaps it took the combined intelligence of all four adults in the household and a bit of prodding and advice from the other relatives who had children in the household, but in any case the adult complement of my new home managed to display an understanding of what Halloween meant to a child. For the first time in my memory, the front windows of the big house were filled with cardboard pumpkins and witches, and my grandmother came back from Lincoln and Belmont with a big bag of Halloween candy, with which she filled a glass bowl in the living room—ostensibly for the trick-or-treaters but in reality for my consumption. She took me to Woolworth’s on Lincoln for one of our little shopping trips: we ate at the long lunch counter dominated by the smell of hot dogs steaming in glass cases at either end of the counter. For a while I looked at toys, and she bought me a pair of plastic pirates, then took me to pick out a costume.

  “Your grandfather wants to paint you with burnt cork and dress you in old clothes like a hobo, it’s his idea of a Halloween costume, but I’ll not have any of that. We did that with Thomas and Michael and you couldn’t get the cork off their faces without taking some of the skin off. They sell costumes in the stores now,” she said, heading toward the costume section. “Burnt cork!” she muttered, moving on ahead of me. “People will think we can’t afford to buy you a decent costume.”

  I selected a Casper the Friendly Ghost costume replete with flat plastic mask and counted myself a lucky boy.

  On the grand day itself my Uncle Tom took me out trick-or-treating right before dinner. The sidewalks were crammed with kids in costume, the air heavy with the smells of burning leaves from the big cottonwoods and oaks, and the dry, dead ones that carpeted the sidewalks like paper. On Leavitt we fell in with a schoolmate and his father. After dinner my uncle took me over to Grandma Dorsey’s house and I went trick-or-treating with Matt and Aunt Ellen’s two sons, my older, more worldly cousins Jeff and Billy. By day’s end I had enough candy to slow down a freighter, and my family had convinced me that at the very least, my new life would include a normal Halloween.

  A Tale of Two Fir Trees

  The year dragged on toward the holidays—for most of 1954, it seemed to be November—but finally December arrived and my family fell all over one another in their determination to show me a “normal” Christmas, with the result that nothing about it seemed normal at all. At first I had thought I might not have much of a Christmas, not having parents any longer—I had wonderfully dramatic visions of myself sitting by the window alone on Christmas, without presents, in an empty house—but then common sense reared its head and I realized that these people had all been a part of my other Christmases, so that it was unlikely this one would pass by unremarked.

  I made a few of the normal remarks a small child makes at the beginning of the season—dry, subtle hints such as staring for long moments at the calendar and then exclaiming, “You mean it’s almost Christmas?” or the more manipulative, “I don’t know how Santa will be able to find me now.”

  They took my hints as verbalized doubts that I’d have a Christmas, and they panicked. Several of them, notably my grandmother, broached this subject with the tentativeness of a first-time brain surgeon, dancing all around the subject and letting fly with leaden hints that I need not be concerned about my holiday. I tried to make them understand that I had no real worries about Christmas, but they were determined to see me, at least at Christmastime, as The Orphan.

  “Poor little thing,” I heard my grandmother say one night. I was believed to be in bed; in reality I was crouched down beside my door, ear to the wood, using my radarlike hearing to eavesdrop. She said “poor little thing” again and I heard something else there as well, the remembrance of her daughter, the realization that her daughter would not share this Christmas.

  “Ma,” Uncle Mike said, “it’ll be okay.”

  �
�It won’t be okay,” Grandpa said, and I could almost see his wife beaming at him for this rare moment of public support. “It’s easy for us all to say it’s Christmas, but the boy has never faced the holidays without his folks.”

  “We’re his folks,” Tom said, and he sounded irritated.

  “We’re no replacement for his mother and father,” Grandma said, “and that’s the God’s truth.”

  “I know, Ma. But we’ll…we’ll just make an extra effort, we’ll do it, and he’ll have a good Christmas.”

  “Does that mean you’ll go to Mass?” I heard the little musical note in her voice that said Grandma, ever the counter-puncher, had caught him at a weak moment.

  “Come on, Ma, I usually go to Mass on Christmas. Lot of other times too.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember seeing him at St. Bonny’s lately, do you, Patrick?”

  “Dad? He wouldn’t know, Ma,” Tom said, laughing. “He’s not there either.”

  “He goes more than you do.”

  “We were talking about Danny, and, yeah, I’ll go to Mass like I always do on Christmas.”

  “Have some more tea,” she said, pleased with the way things were going. I was pleased as well. It seemed that my Christmas was assured, and I set about tending to my own responsibilities in the matter.

  One after another, they asked me what I wanted for Christmas, conferred with one another, got on the phone with Grandma Dorsey and various representatives of the other side of the family. Eventually it struck me that if so many people were interested in my Christmas lists I should have more than one. I sat down one afternoon when I got home from school and made three—one for each household and an extra one, labeled “For Uncles and Aunts” and intended to be shared by all members of that group.

  Several times I overhead them talking about what they planned to get me, and to me they made heavy, pointed references to what Santa himself might come up with. I was reminded that Santa expected a certain standard of behavior, and I pretended to believe this, but I was certain that he’d go easy on a kid who had just lost both parents.