When Sister Polycarp called my home later in the week, I saw that my trouble had fed upon itself till it was now a disaster. My grandmother was furious and asked if I was losing my mind, my grandfather muttered about my lack of sense, and even my Uncle Tom was upset. It seemed that everyone in the house leaped at the opportunity to demonstrate displeasure, and when dinnertime came I could hardly eat for the great dull knot that had grown in my stomach. After dinner, my Uncle Tom took me aside and told me that I’d disappointed everyone in the house. He told me if I didn’t find a way to do better, I’d be expelled, I’d go to Schneider School and I wouldn’t see any of my friends. At bedtime I heard a renewed chorus of admonitions to do better, and climbed into my bed feeling like a criminal. I lay in bed crying for a long time before sleep came.
I greeted the new morning with dread, hated the thought of facing Sister Polycarp, and wished I had the nerve to cut school like Matt. That morning I glanced up from my spelling book and she was studying at me, shaking her head. When our eyes met, she looked away. At the end of that day she called me to her desk and gave me a written punishment to do for having thrown away the two notes, and the back of my neck felt hot. I felt twenty-seven pairs of eyes on me, I was suddenly self-conscious about my clothes and the cowlick at the back of my head, and I told myself there wasn’t a person in the room at that moment who actually liked me. I wanted to make myself disappear.
For the rest of the week and part of the next, I faced a cross-examination by my uncle or my grandparents each evening to see if I’d begun to turn things around, and it seemed I was no longer trusted by anyone in the house. On St. Patrick’s Day my grandparents and Aunt Anne accompanied me to the annual party held in the school cafeteria, and for a time I stayed with them and behaved as though a very stiff sort of alien life form had taken over my body. I waved surreptitiously to my friends, spoke only when spoken too, and had a dreadful time. Eventually they turned me loose with the admonition to behave, and for an hour or so forgot myself. I did what all children must do at a school party, I ran wild with my friends. We ate too much cake with green frosting, drank too much punch, and wrestled in the boys’ room till the principal sent in an eighth grader to drag us out.
We finally decided upon a game of hide-and-seek requiring one team to find and physically drag the other team’s members to a sort of jail, and looking back on that time I can see unconscious statements being made in our games about the way we all saw our world. Predictably this game erupted into a sort of random and purely impersonal violence, and we had two casualties before we’d been playing for ten minutes. When I tripped my friend Jamie and caused him to hit his head against a table, the game was over. I received a short, hot lecture from my grandmother that included dragging me over to examine the large lump miraculously growing from my friend’s head, and a while later we left, and my grandmother was pointedly not speaking to me.
March 27 should have been the high point of the month, for it was my eighth birthday, and I’d produced extensive lists almost as long as the ones I’d given my relatives at Christmas-time. Measured by almost any yardstick, it should have been a fine birthday: I received presents, I ate things that were no good for me, and there was even a small party with my family there and cousin Matt, and even a surprise appearance by Grandma Dorsey and Aunt Mollie. Somehow, in the very midst of the celebration, it struck me that my seventh birthday had been celebrated in another place, attended by my father and presided over with self-assurance and efficiency by my mother. I suddenly noticed how hard they were all trying to make this party work, and how unaccustomed they were to throwing a child’s party. They forgot things and then rushed around to make them right, things my mother would have handled without effort. Suddenly this seemed an unhappy imitation of that one, and I know that it was because I could not feel my mother’s presence in that room. I did what I could to pretend I was enjoying it, but that night in bed I conjured up memories not of that day’s presents and attention but of the last party given for me by my mother.
At school I simply came undone. One afternoon that week I received two tests back and found that I’d failed one disastrously and barely passed the other. I sickened at the thought that I’d have to show these to my family. During the reading lesson I began to draw, whether doodling absently or intentionally avoiding work, I no longer remember, but Sister Polycarp caught me and confiscated my drawing.
“Pay attention, young man. No one excused you from school.” I tried to find my reader and couldn’t, and when she asked me what I was waiting for, I heard a boy snicker behind me and I told him to shut up. Sister Polycarp told me to watch my mouth and I began to cry, and I told her to shut up. She sent me out into the hall and told me she’d be speaking to my grandparents that night.
I did not come home from school that afternoon.
When the bell rang I put on my hat and coat like everyone else, trembling and near to vomiting with fear. I left the building in line with my class, but when we filed out onto the corner where dozens of mothers were waiting, I turned east and began walking fast. I was not running away, I had no destination in mind, I simply wanted to put some distance between myself and my family. There seemed no good reason to go home.
For a time I lingered at Wrightwood Park, then I went to the local public school playground where I was eventually chased by a trio of bored boys. For perhaps two hours I wandered the neighborhood, convinced that I was having a very dark day in a generally dark life. Something in the gray sky and chill air seemed to put me in mind of my grandfather, and I reflected first on our encounter with the chicken and then on that moment on the bus when he’d begun coughing. I saw once more the look in his eyes and I think I began to cry, then quickly turned up a side street so no one would ask me what was wrong. The sky went darker and I knew my family would have missed me by now, and my fear became terror, for I realized I’d nursed trouble into a calamity. Eventually I made it to Clybourn, but I turned the wrong way and soon found myself among unfamiliar sights. I mistook the first railroad tracks I encountered for those close to my house, and it was some time before I realized this couldn’t be right. I began to panic. Somewhere along Clybourn, I sat down on a fire hydrant. I can remember the dull feeling growing in my chest, the tightness in my throat, my fight, my unsuccessful fight, to suppress tears. The image of my grandfather came to me, and then for some reason a picture of my parents, and then I was sobbing, a lost boy in a strange place. A man stopped in front of me and asked me if I was lost but they’d always told me not to talk to strangers and I got up and walked away with my head down. I heard a woman ask me if I was wandering around alone but I said nothing to her.
Sometime later I went up Clybourn the other way and after what seemed hours saw the big Hines lumber yard in the distance and realized I was nearing my neighborhood. Just short of Diversey, a police car pulled up along the curb and a pair of older police officers got out. One asked me if my name was Daniel. I said yes and he just jerked a thumb in the direction of the squad car.
“Get in, Daniel. You got people looking for you.”
They drove me to my house and I suffered the time-honored embarrassment of the child returned to his family by the police.
Inside my grandparents’ house they all crowded around me, Tom and Mike and Anne and both my grandparents, and they all started talking at once. Aunt Anne hugged me and I was grateful because everyone else seemed to have other measures in mind.
“Where you been?” I heard Tom asking over and over.
I didn’t actually know so I was unable to give him an intelligent answer, and then Grandma put her hands on my shoulder and demanded to know what I was thinking.
“For the love of God,” she said. “Why would you run away?”
“Bejesus, what’s got into you?” I heard Grandpa say, though it wasn’t clear whether this was meant for her or for me.
“I got lost,” I finally blurted out.
&
nbsp; “How could you get lost?” Uncle Mike asked.
I wanted to explain it to him, it seemed I could calm them all if I could just make them listen. Then, and not for the last time, I looked from face to face and saw that there weren’t enough words to explain it, that they’d never give me the chance to get my story out, that they had a hundred questions and were asking them all at once.
I started to answer, began to cry and went on, talking louder and louder and sobbing till I’d lost all control and the day’s disasters spilled out one upon the other, and when I’d finished I realized no one was saying anything and that I was still crying. They seemed to have taken a step back, so that I remember standing there with my hands at my sides crying, and then my nose was running and Grandma was wiping it with one of her small dainty handkerchiefs that smelled of lavender.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she was saying but only to herself.
They waited for a moment and then launched into a new set of questions, each of my family zeroing in on a different item from my song of woe.
“Somebody chased you?” Tom demanded. “Who chased you?”
“Oh, Danny, you told your teacher to shut up?” Anne asked.
“She’s gonna call here?” Grandpa asked, as if this made no sense.
There was a slight pause and I heard my grandmother’s voice, quieter than the others. “You were afraid to come home? To us?”
I looked at her and knew which of the day’s many transgressions was the worst. Tom began asking me about the boys who’d chased me and Anne was saying something, but I could look only at my grandmother’s face. She shook her head slowly and spoke in an odd way, as though I might not understand otherwise.
“This is your home, and we’re your family, and you should never be afraid to come home to my house, I don’t care who you told to shut up, not the Holy Father himself.” And she walked out to the kitchen to leave the rest of them to the sorting out of my confused state.
“We’ll talk to your teacher,” Aunt Anne said.
“I’ll talk to her,” Tom said, and Aunt Anne shook her head.
“No, you won’t. You’ll take a swing at her.”
He shrugged as if this was no surprise to anyone and for the first time that day I laughed.
“That what you want?” he asked.
“No.”
“She’s nice, really, his nun.” Anne gave me a look that dared me to contradict her and I was forced to nod agreement. Polycarp was nice, she just hated me.
They dragged me into the kitchen and fed me one of Grandma’s little fat hamburgers and a Pepsi in honor of my tragic encounters with my world. I sat there and picked things out of my hamburger—she had a repellent custom of putting little balls of bread dough into the ground beef to make it go further—and my grandmother and Uncle Tom sat there and watched me. I was too hungry to mind. As I ate, they asked me what they wanted to know. Tom seemed to be concerned that gangs of boys might be attacking me on a daily basis, and my grandmother wanted to know if the two tests were about things I couldn’t understand.
When I was finished eating everyone but Tom left the room and he just sat there watching me eat. I looked up at him from time to time but he seemed content to watch me till I’d finished everything, and then he leaned forward with his elbows on the table.
“So you had a pretty bad day.”
“Yeah.”
“Probably seems like everybody’s picking on you all at once, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“So what else? I want you to tell me. What else is bothering you?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, there is. You look mad. You mad at us?”
I remember that I started to say, no, there was nothing wrong, I wasn’t mad at anyone, but he’d managed to loosen the logjam inside me and I just sat there with an Oreo cookie in my hand weeping and blubbering about the very empty world that was Danny Dorsey’s. It all came out, things unplanned as well as intended: I told him I hated school and didn’t want to go back there, that no one in the house would listen to me, that nobody cared what happened to me, that I was in trouble all the time, and somewhere in all of it I thought of my parents and immediately afterwards my grandfather. I began to say things I’d never thought to say, I have no clear idea what, but it all came out, and I know I said I wanted them back, my parents, and I must have blurted out my grandfather’s name.
My uncle said nothing, never moved except at one point to make a sharp wave of his hand at whoever had come back into the room. He waited me out in silence, his eyes telling me he thought he was witnessing my total breakdown. I saw a slight nod at the mention of my parents and then his eyes widened slightly at the mention of his father.
In the end I exhausted myself. I couldn’t see through the tears and my throat seemed to have shut down, and I’d said all I could ever say.
Still he waited me out and then after a moment he raised his eyebrows and said, “Got it all out?”
I nodded without really knowing what he meant.
“If you wanna cry some more, it’s okay.”
“No.”
He wet his lips and I saw him take a deep breath like a man about to dive into cold water. Then he lowered his head till our eyes were level and said quietly, “You said Grandpa. What about Grandpa?”
I thought, “He’s going to die,” and for a moment I feared I’d blurt out my peculiar form of haunting, that they were all going to die on me. What I said was, “He’s sick,” but I knew he’d understood.
He nodded. “Yeah, he’s a sick guy.”
I had cried so much and so hard that evening that now I had the hiccups and couldn’t stop, but eventually he made me laugh about them and then he spoke to calm me down.
“You gonna go crazy on us, Dan?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. But you’re having a hard time and I think there’s gonna be times when nobody can keep you from being, you know, sad. And probably every once in a while it seems like we forget about you, kiddo. And I guess we do—no, I don’t mean we forget you’re alive, but we forget we have new, you know, new things to think about, to worry about. Everybody wants to make sure you’re okay and so we run around and try to make sure you’ve got what you need, and then we all go back to livin’ our usual lives, and sometimes we forget that we don’t have those lives no more. Nobody knew you were having trouble with anything in school, and I guess we all thought since we haven’t heard from your teacher, we thought things were better about you behaving.”
“I threw away the notes.”
He sighed, “Uh, yeah, I think you said that. But the point is we didn’t know. We didn’t know you were having any trouble and we didn’t know you were feeling bad. And once in a while, you’re gonna have to say something to somebody, to me or your grandma or your aunt, you got to let us know, we’re not mind readers.”
He let out a long slow breath. “So. So now we got things to do. We got to make it right with your teacher, and—these punks, they’re somebody you know?”
“No. I never saw them before.”
“Well, anybody at school pushes you around, older kids, especially, you let me know. And…” He looked around and I realized he had come to my grandfather.
“You live in a house full of people, kinda forgetful people, maybe, but you’re like the star of the show, you’re the most important person in the place, and everybody will take care of you no matter what. And nobody”—he looked down at the table and began playing with a pack of cigarettes—“nobody lives forever. But there’s always gonna be somebody here to take care of you.”
“I don’t want anybody to die anymore.”
He paused with his mouth half open, clearly not knowing where to take this, what he could promise me. “Everybody dies,” he said, quietly. “But…we’re all gonna be here for a while, you, me, ever
ybody else here. Nobody’s gonna die tomorrow. Unless maybe your nun heaves you out a window.”
I laughed and he pointed to my hand.
“Look what you did with that cookie. That’s what babies do with their food.” I stared at my Oreo and saw that I’d squeezed it into a brown paste. I laughed and he directed me to “get another one and start over,” and then he got up and left the room. When he left I heard him let out a long breath.
***
That night I lay in bed and relived the endless list of my humiliations, and worst of all the smothering moment when I’d faced their group disapproval. It seemed the worst thing I’d done was what I’d done from fear, and I knew I’d wake with more of the same, for I had yet to face Polycarp, and there might be other afternoons when the world’s bad boys would be waiting for me and I might not get away. Perhaps my grandparents would keep me home if they thought I’d caught pneumonia or something grave on my wanderings, mumps, perhaps, there was a small outbreak of mumps that month. But they’d seen through my symptoms before, my faked cramps and imaginary headaches and dizziness, and I knew they’d send me on to my fate. For a brief moment I thought it would teach them all something if I died in the night. But I remembered my uncle’s face and his voice, and I believed that I might survive this time after all.
The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was my grandmother’s head peering around the door at me. There was worry in her face, and something else, a preoccupation, as though one part of her was trying to sort something out even as the other part came to check on me. I think I said “hello” to her and she gave me a troubled smile.
“Good night, sunshine,” was all she said.
Nuns and Reckonings
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 17
