In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  Without seeing a connection, I grew short-tempered, I spent little time on homework assignments and forgot half of them; my answers in class were frequently wrong, and when my classmates began to laugh at me, I discovered a new role. I went out of my way to say and do stupid things, reveled in their laughter, and in a short time taught them to expect the bizarre from me. Through it all, the big moon-faced nun at the front of the room stared calmly at me, like one waiting for a long-winded speaker to finish. Sister Polycarp had taken the name, I learned, of an obscure martyr and bishop of the early church, and we called her “The Carp,” not from any personal animus toward her but simply because she was there, and a nun, and a teacher. We had names for them all.

  In quiet, measured tones she corrected my responses, silenced the class, steered the lessons back on course. When possible, she ignored me. Other times she kept me after school. My disruptions were constant and my nervous energy mounted through the week till I was a mass of tension come Friday, my antics hit a peak and I had to be disciplined.

  I seem to recall standing for at least part of each Friday in a corner, or facing the blackboard. She led me to my place without comment, resumed her lessons as though I did not exist. Her serenity enraged me. One afternoon she put me in the corner and I simply refused to shut up, so she taped my mouth closed. It was just paper tape and I licked through it in twenty minutes, to the delight of my fellow scholars. Sister put me out in the hall and I remained there till school was over.

  She kept me there as my classmates went by and then handed me a note to give to my grandparents. The note invited them to come and see her. This meeting took place the following evening and when my grandmother and Aunt Anne returned, they were not angry as I had expected but very quiet. They sat me down in the kitchen and told me the gist of their conversation with my teacher, which was that I seemed to be going out of my way to become the class clown.

  “She’s trying to be patient with you, Danny,” Aunt Anne said, and my grandmother muttered something about what Sister Polycarp was going to think of the family that was raising me.

  “She says you act like a little crazy man,” Grandma added, “like you lost your mind.”

  “I think she likes you, Danny,” Aunt Anne said, and I nodded though I was fairly certain my teacher had taken a deep dislike to me, and I was not at all surprised. I promised them I’d try to do better. When I saw my uncles, I expected new lectures from them, but Uncle Mike just told me to “settle down,” and Tom asked, “You gonna try to do better, kiddo?” while his eyes asked other questions.

  I was taken aback by their chorus of disapproval and it bothered me greatly that I had no explanation for myself. More than anything, I was frustrated at my inability to call up any of what seemed half a dozen good reasons for the way things happened, it seemed there were things I could say that would make them all shut up, but I could think of none of them. They were disappointed in me and it seemed unfair. After all, I never began a school day looking for ways to disrupt my classroom. I didn’t intentionally forget my homework or what little I studied. It merely happened. I convinced myself quickly that they understood nothing of my situation, that it would be fruitless to try to explain my side. I decided that I would do better, but I believed not much would come of it, for I’d made an enemy in the classroom.

  After about a week of meticulously forced good behavior, Sister Polycarp sent home another note, saying that I was doing well, and Grandma and Aunt Anne congratulated me, unaware that even a child bound for a life of crime will manage a week of good behavior after a serious parent-teacher meeting.

  As I was leaving the kitchen with a handful of pretzels, my aunt stopped me.

  “Matt’s still having trouble, Danny.”

  “He’s in trouble all the time,” I said, then added, “He’s got Sister Charles Boromeo,” certain that this was explanation enough for Matt’s more difficult time. There were two second grades and Matt was in the other one, and though Sister Polycarp and I were embarked on a course of strife, I wouldn’t have traded places with Matt for anything.

  Anne opened her mouth and seemed to catch herself. She wanted to tell me something and couldn’t seem to bring herself to do it. In the end, she nodded. “Yes, he’s in trouble a lot, the poor kid. He’s not…school’s not a very comfortable place for your cousin.” This seemed to me to be a rather stupid observation, and I was disappointed in her: of course he wasn’t happy, none of us were, we were all schoolkids at the mercy of teachers with unclear goals, capricious temperament, and medieval notions of discipline.

  It was true enough that Matt was in trouble “all the time”: we had entered into a tacit competition to see which of us could range farther outside the pale of civilized behavior in school and, irritant though I may have been in my own class, I was not in Matt’s weight class. He had given some indication in first grade that he’d be trouble in a classroom, but had gone on to outdo himself in second, turning his school days into a sort of war between himself and Sister Boromeo and the principal, and anybody else who took their side.

  It did not help matters that Sister Charles Boromeo was aged and frail and irascible, a tiny black-robed curmudgeon who scuttered back and forth with little feverish movements and lost her temper and her concentration at the slightest disturbance. She thought he was incorrigible, and announced it to anyone who would listen; she further held to the unshakable notion that Matt and I were brothers and shared a sort of miscreant gene pool that had already determined our fates.

  Eventually I was to learn that the rickety nun had also taught my father and Uncle Gerald on Matt’s side, and Uncle Mike and Uncle Tom on mine, and that these experiences had taught her no good could come of our bloodlines. It was a time of physical punishment, in the classroom as well as in the home—small wonder that we fought constantly in the playground, on corners, in the alleys, picked senseless fights, and displayed what seems to me now to have been a random cruelty—and the ill-tempered little nun was quick to use her hand on her unruly charges.

  And so, when my well-meaning aunt tried to tell me that school was a difficult place for Matt, I had the odd new experience of knowing things my adults could only guess at.

  She could not know, none of them could, what Matt and I talked about, what I knew about him. On those rare occasions when neither of us was kept after school, we walked home together and I listened in surprise and admiration at his fulminations, his raging youthful tirades about school: he hated it, hated the nuns, hated the subjects, worthless subjects that were of no practical value—“What good’s religion, tell me that, huh?” he would ask. He was bored nearly to madness and had begun to spread his frustration in the classroom. His frantic teacher had taken to hitting him with a ruler and pulling on his hair, and he plotted her demise. He told me if she hit him once more, he’d punch her in the nose, he’d chop her head off, he’d throw the body in the North Branch of the Chicago River which flowed just a few yards past Matt’s home in the projects.

  On afternoons when his rage was at low ebb, we made a game of it, allowing our comic-book-filled imaginations to devise ingenious ways to rid our world of Sister Charles Boromeo: we would tie her across the streetcar tracks on Western Avenue, drop her out of the Para-Chutes at Riverview, drown her in the murky water of the lagoon in Lincoln Park, stuff her lifeless corpse in the cold stone sarcophagus in the Egyptian room at the Field Museum, toss her in with the piranhas at the Shedd Aquarium.

  Week in and week out, Matt was disciplined constantly, his parents called in. The mornings after these meetings he was sullen and subdued. On one occasion, I was late and they were already waiting for me, my Aunt Mary Jane and Matt, tight-lipped and pale. He refused to say anything and she sent us on our way. For several blocks he said nothing. Looking at his angry profile, I saw that Matt had a red welt on the side of his face and another on his forearm.

  “Where’d you get those?” I asked when we we
re a block from school.

  “Where d’ya think? My old man.” After a moment he added, “He really gave it to me.”

  “With what?”

  “His belt. That’s what this is from, the buckle on his stupid belt,” he said, holding up his arm. “I hate him.”

  For some time I couldn’t say anything, he’d given me so much to think about: I couldn’t imagine anyone in my family hitting me with anything but the flat of a hand on my behind, and that rare enough. And I’d never heard a child speak with such pure hostility about a parent.

  “He’s not happy, Danny,” Aunt Anne said. “There are things in his life…” she began, and I saw her confusion. She had things to tell me and wasn’t sure how, wasn’t sure how much, and in the end she just gave up and repeated, “He’s just not a happy kid.”

  “I know,” I said. I thought of Matt’s anger at his father, of the beatings and the angry red marks on his face and arms, on the face of this boy whose life at times seemed perfect to me, and wondered.

  ***

  After school sometimes I went to Hamlin Park with my local playmates, and more often than not we ran into Matt. Sometimes he was wandering alone and fell in with us, but most of the time he was with other boys, frequently boys I didn’t know from the far end of the neighborhood beyond Riverview or from the section of the projects along the river where he lived. Once or twice I saw him with older boys, and on these occasions he barely acknowledged me. I wondered how he knew so many different children from the far corners of the neighborhood.

  One afternoon he was in a fight. He was matched with an older boy and taking a beating. They boxed and the older boy used his reach to throw long rights that caught Matt coming in and bloodied his mouth and nose, and he kept coming in. I yelled that they had to stop it and the other boys ignored me, I told them my uncle was coming to break it up and they finally stepped in. The older boy backed off and they had to hold Matt off him, he was crying and panting through his bloody mouth, his breath making bubbles through the blood and saliva. When it was over he stalked off down the street, head down, hands clenched in tight little fists. I ran after him but he wouldn’t talk to me.

  ***

  For a time I believe I actually worked at my truce with Sister Polycarp though an observant witness would have seen the fragile fabric of the thing unraveling. In the other second grade just down the hall, however, nothing had changed. Matt was still embroiled in his undeclared war with the entire adult world. He was punished constantly, sent home with notes. His parents were called in again and again to conferences with his teacher and the principal. At one of them the old nun informed Matt’s parents that he would never amount to anything, that he was just like all the other males from our family that she’d had the unpleasant task of teaching, and Aunt Mary Jane would have gone for the old woman’s throat if not for the intervention of the young assistant pastor, who calmed her down and brought the meeting to an uneasy close.

  In the mornings when we walked to school together I was no longer subjected to his high-pitched rages. Frequently he was silent, and at other times he just spoke of what he planned to do that day after school. He talked frequently of the older boys he’d taken up with at the park, particularly one named Joe Kunzel, a tall, handsome blond boy several years older who had a little gang of younger children that he led through the neighborhood. Several times they’d engaged in fistfights with other groups of boys at local schoolyards, and once Matt told me in gleeful tones that they’d begun regularly to steal pop and gum from the small grocery store on Damen and George. I went along with them on a couple of their raids through the area but Joe Kunzel made it clear he wasn’t much interested in me becoming part of his gang, and the feeling was mutual. I didn’t really want to be there when they had their adventures: I preferred not to see what they did.

  February closed with snow and March brought in cold and sleet, and then surprised us with our first warm day of the year. That morning we were walking to school when Matt shocked me by stopping at the viaduct on Diversey and announcing that he wasn’t going any further.

  “You’re gonna be late,” I pointed out.

  “I’m cuttin’, nitwit.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “You’ll catch it.”

  He gave me a cold look and then snorted. “Oooh, I’m so scared. You think I don’t catch it already, Dan? Whattya think happens when I get home with those stinkin’ notes? And if I lose the notes, they call my ma, and my old man comes home and beats the crap outta me. I ain’t goin’, and I don’t care what they do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t say nothing to nobody.”

  “They’ll ask me what happened…”

  “Tell ’em I stopped here to pee on the tracks and we were late so you went ahead.”

  I did as instructed, went through my studies and eventually forgot about Matt. At lunch, the principal caught me on the playground and interrogated me. I gave her my story and she watched me for a long moment, clearly suspicious, then let it go. That night Aunt Mary Jane called and they put me on the phone, informing me that I was never to let my cousin run off again, that he could have been in danger, that anybody could have grabbed him and thrown him in the river. When she was through I felt as if the whole affair had been my idea, and my grandmother looked at me as though I’d robbed the church. My Uncle Tom took me aside.

  “You got caught in the middle here, see? You let him get you into this. Next time tell him he got you into trouble and you’re not gonna lie for him. That’s what your grandma is mad about. That’s all that is.”

  “Aunt Mary Jane is mad at me, too.”

  “Aunt Mary Jane is mad because she’s worried about her kid.” He sighed. “And she’s got good reason,” he added, and I wondered what he meant.

  The Roaster

  It was to prove a difficult March for me, but a Saturday early in the month provided a brief interlude in my life, for it was on that day that my grandmother made the mistake of sending Grandpa for a chicken.

  We were in the living room, the three of us, and Grandpa was reading the sports section, and affected not to understand Grandma’s request.

  “A chicken?”

  “Yes, a nice one for dinner. A fresh one. I’ll make dumplings.”

  He grumbled and snorted, and after a moment said, “Where do you want me to get a chicken?”

  “Go to the German over there on Belmont. He’ll give you a nice bird. I didn’t like that bird I bought at the A&P.”

  “That was a chicken, was it?”

  “Now what did you think it was?”

  Grandma berated him for his inability to be serious and then he gave her an odd look, then looked again at me. He smiled and I experienced one of those moments when another person’s thought is actually visible to the beholder. His face froze and a glassy look came into his eyes. He grinned now, looking just this side of demented, and then he nodded to his wife.

  “A chicken, is it? All right, I’ll go buy a chicken. Can I take this fellow with me?” He pointed to me.

  “All right.” She gave me a pointed look. “A roaster, tell the man.”

  I recall that I had a lovely time, tempered slightly by my realization that, two hours into our journey, we had ridden buses, bought snacks, and stopped in several taverns but we were no closer to finding a chicken than a cure for cancer.

  I knew better than question him about our direction, so I rode the buses with him and listened to him chatting with the other drivers. We got off the Roosevelt Road bus at Racine and he stood there on the corner for several seconds, hands in his pants pockets, looking up the street at the low-rise projects.

  “This was my neighborhood a long time ago.” A dreamy look had come into his eyes and I had the notion that for just a moment, he’d forgotten I was there.

  Coming up the str
eet, was a huge green wagon full of loose vegetables and crates of them, pulled by the most massive horse I’d ever seen. The driver sat impassively and looked straight ahead, as though unaware that he’d left his own time and entered ours.

  Grandpa saw me watching the great horse. “You like the horses, do you?”

  I told him I did.

  “Well, I’ll have you know, when they made me a foreman on the Illinois-Central railroad, I rode a horse.”

  “You rode a horse?” I gaped at him, unable of course to see him as the nineteen- or twenty-year-old he must have been.

  “I did,” he assured me, and he might as well have told me he’d fought dragons.

  “I rode all day, up and down the line to see that the men worked and make sure there was no trouble. I had long sections of track to cover, and no one but me to cover it. I rode that horse all day in whatever weather there was.” He tried to make it sound arduous and wearing, but I heard the little sigh in his voice that said it had been a grand thing to be a young Irishman in the new country riding a horse under the warm sun and giving orders to other people. “A chestnut mare, I rode.”

  I tried to relate this image to my life. “Were you with your mother and father?”

  “Oh, no, no. My father was dead by then, and my mother stayed in Ireland with my sisters. She died in 1932. Twenty-three years she’s been dead,” he added, with a note of surprise. “That first year, I had a room on O’Brien and my brother lived on Parnell, I thought all the streets was named after Irishmen. He’s gone now, you know.”

  “He died in a fire.”

  “Yes,” my grandfather said, and offered nothing more.

  “Did you know Grandma then?”

  “Ah, I did and I didn’t. I knew her, knew of her, you know, back in the old country. Our families knew one another. Her people are from Leitrim, the same as mine, and my brothers and I knew Martin and Frank and the twins, all of them. My oldest brother actually had some notions about marrying your grandmother’s older sister, but nothing came of it. Then I come to the States, about the same time Martin came here, and after I’d been here awhile, Martin brought over your Uncle Frank and your grandmother, and the twins, and the poor fella that fell down the elevator. Martin had more sense then, you see. And it was Martin who decided I needed to meet a nice girl and settle down.”