In the Castle of the Flynns

I Discover Adult Supervision

My grandmother ruled the Castle of the Flynns, but of all of them, the person who was to become my caretaker, putting his unlikely mark on me during that uncertain first summer without parents was not my grandmother, who still worked five days a week, but my grandfather, forced by a bad heart to take an early retirement from the streetcars. I had little idea what “a bad heart” meant, though I noticed that he walked slowly and liked a nap in the afternoon, and it seemed these might be the manifestations of such a condition. Nor did I see significance or connection in his frequent coughing and the pack of Camels that never seemed far from his hand.

In hindsight I feel a special compassion for him: it was to him that the task fell of acclimating me to my new life. My grandmother worked at a knitting mill on North Avenue “for that pirate, that buccaneer,” as she called her employer—correctly predicting that he would one day take his mail in a cell. My uncles both had jobs, Aunt Anne worked as well and was little more than a teenager.

Thus it transpired that my initial baby-sitter/playmate/surrogate parent was my grandfather, Patrick Flynn. Not that he was new to my company: for a time my mother had worked and Grandpa Flynn had occasionally been my baby-sitter then as well. He was a tall, sad-faced man who asked little of life and whose quiet mien disguised his sense of humor. He walked with one hand in his slacks pocket at a stately pace, like Fred Astaire in slow motion. When he pulled a face or wanted to be comical, he could make himself look like Stan Laurel, and I told him so frequently. He was fifty-eight the year I moved into their home, though in the photographs he looks older.

It was from Grandpa Flynn that I learned about buses and streetcars, boxers and baseball players, of the age and breadth and complexity of the city beyond Clybourn Avenue. He was fond of Irish music, and sometimes on cool afternoons I sat beside him in the living room as he put his old hard plastic 78s on the black Victrola in the living room and gave the machine a few cranks. Frequently these were humorous records, most of them recording the continuing adventures of a man named Casey: “Casey at the Doctor,” “Casey at the Dentist,” etc.

At other times, he listened to music, music filled with fiddles and tin whistles and pipes, and if the mood hit him, he danced, though his dancing wouldn’t have been obvious to an outside observer, for he shuffled his feet slowly, with no hope of keeping time with the music. He also grinned a great deal, which is actually how I knew he was dancing. When he was truly filled with the music, he would yank me to my feet and make me join him, going in slow motion through the steps ’til I had a vague idea what I was supposed to do. He taught me the jig, at least his abridged version, and something called a hornpipe, which he said was a sailor’s dance.

He was also a natural storyteller, that is to say, a shameless liar. He related tales from his youth and embellished them ’til they shone like the Greek myths, narrated the unlikely adventures of his brothers-in-law Martin and Frank and made them seem like Abbot and Costello. He spoke of the Old Country and filled me with fascination and terror: fascination when he told me of half-human selkies and the “little people” who, he contended, lived no farther from his native village than I lived from Riverview; terror when he spoke of ghosts and banshees and undead entities that populated the moody landscapes and roamed the gray skies—Ireland seemed to hold more unearthly beings than people. He also spun outrageous tales of his own indigent boyhood, the tasks to which his hard-working parents had set him on their farm or, when he was having fun with me, “on the fishing boat out on the wide ocean, in all harsh weather,” though a glance at the map would have told me Leitrim’s water was primarily bogs and rivers, and the odd small lake.

He claimed that the Irish had less food than anyone on earth, less even than the Chinese for whom we prayed in school, and were reduced to eating little else but potatoes, though the English were said to have worse notions about what one could eat: he claimed they were fond of the white, mushy fat on bacon and that they ate it uncooked, with yellow mustard.

“Which,” he would say, “explains a great deal about them, you see.”

I see now that he was a simple man. Left to his own designs he would have passed his leisure listening to his records or roaming the city on streetcars to the very end of time, stopping for the occasional shot and beer in a cool, dark neighborhood tavern, and watching baseball or boxing on television—which he considered the great wonder of the age. Nuclear power did not impress him and he would have thought the computer the spawn of the devil, but television seemed to him the nation’s gift to the man without means.

In our now-permanent association, we found we had things to learn about each other. There were times when he liked to listen to the news on the radio and did not want to be bothered. If I came babbling into the room at such moments, he would wave an impatient hand, always holding a cigarette, commanding me to be silent, and I would slink back to where I came from, my feelings bruised. He soon learned that when I was in the midst of one of my all-day drawings, filled with dinosaurs or knights in bloody battle, I was reluctant to join him on one of his long bus rides, and at first he took this personally.

We also had to learn how to communicate. Once in a while, when he didn’t want to talk to certain callers, he would ask me to answer the noisy phone in the kitchen, and he wasn’t very specific about what to say.

One morning when he was listening to his music and I was drawing at the dining room table, the phone rang. He looked up at the wall clock and said, “That’s Gillis, that crazy fool. Eleven o’clock and he’s drinking.” Gillis was a loud drunk, as annoying an adult as I was to meet in my childhood, and my grandfather didn’t much relish the thought of an afternoon in Gillis’s company. So he had me answer the phone.

“What should I say, Grandpa?”

“Tell him anything. Just tell him I’m not here. And tell him I’m not going to be here—for the foreseeable future.” He seemed pleased with this last part and laughed to himself.

I found this message puzzling and didn’t for a moment think Mr. Gillis would accept it, especially from a boy not yet eight years old, so I manufactured a more logical reason for my Grandfather’s inability to come to the phone.

I took a deep breath, swallowed, picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

It was Mr. Gillis, and he asked for Grandpa.

“He’s dead.”

“What?” the voice squawked into my ear.

“He’s dead.”

“But I just saw him yesterday.”

“He died today.”

“What did he die of, for God’s sake?”

“Ammonia,” I said with confidence, for I had heard of many people dying of ammonia, and my grandmother always warned me that this killer illness would take me if I didn’t wear a hat on cold days.

Mr. Gillis was speechless, and I took the opportunity to say “Good-bye,” and hang up on him. When I told Grandpa what I’d done, he was as speechless as Gillis, and then he began to tell me what an outlandish thing I’d done. When he recounted the moment to my grandmother and Uncle Tom that afternoon, he laughed himself breathless, laughed ’til he’d started one of his long coughing episodes. I couldn’t have been more confused, but I enjoyed the boisterous moment after dinner when a delegation from Miska’s tavern came over to pay their respects and make inquiries about my Grandpa’s sudden passing.

Several weeks later I was left alone in the house on an afternoon when all the adults were working and Grandpa, who had been coughing more than normal, had to go in for mysterious medical tests. There was no one to watch me, and my grandparents gave me instructions in the most urgent tone that I was to let no one into the house, no one, “Not even the Pope,” my grandfather said, ’til one of my uncles came home. I took this injunction as I took all things verbal: literally.

I sat calmly in the silent house with the chain on the front and back doors, holding onto my instructions like a remnant of the True Cross, and drew a large, elaborate picture on my special drawing paper.

And when my Aunt Mollie Dorsey, pressed into service as a last-minute baby-sitter, knocked on the door, I refused to let her in. She certainly wasn’t the Pope, and my instructions were clear. She was a sweet-tempered young woman with an unusual sense of humor and a laugh to match, high and joyous, and when it became clear to her that she would not cross that threshold ’til an adult Flynn came home to let her in, she settled herself on the porch and we had a fine chat through the locked door.

Several times that afternoon I heard her burst out laughing though I could not have said what was so funny. I kept her there for two-and-a-half hours and had to spend the greater part of the next two days listening to both sides of my family giving one another different versions of the story. The consensus seemed to be that I was a good boy but bereft of plain sense, and one had to be careful what one said to me.

On the whole, though, the time I was to spend with Grandpa that first summer without my parents provided me with some reassurance: we did the same kinds of things we had always done together, nothing had changed, at least about these times. My days with him tended to the nomadic: as a retired streetcar conductor, he was entitled to a lifetime of free rides on any of Chicago’s transportation systems, whether El train, streetcar, or bus, and he seemed to know every single driver or conductor we ever met—they all called him “Pat” or “Irish.”

Sometimes we rode the troublesome trolley buses that ran hooked to a dark tangle of overhead wires: a trolley that came loose from its wire could snarl the traffic to all the points of the compass for a half hour. On our rides, we took a window seat near the driver. Some of them would let me have stacks of unused transfers and the transfer punch they used, and I’d sit and clip and punch away ’til I was covered in bus-transfer confetti, all the while listening to Grandpa and the old-timers joke and trade tales of the old days, of blizzards and great storms that shut down the city, and fights, and men with razors and guns.

We scoured the city: he took me down to Haymarket Square where he knew a Greek who ran a produce company, and they fed me strawberries while they talked. Sometimes we went to visit his friend Herb, an embattled instructor at the Moler Barber College. This was a small institution on West Madison Street that took in young men of dubious dexterity, ostensibly to turn them into barbers. Sometimes Grandpa got a haircut or shave, and on rare occasions he let them cut my hair, though my grandmother would raise hell with what they did to my head. These were, after all, young men who merely wanted to be barbers.

My mother had still been alive the first time Grandpa had taken me to the barber college for a haircut, and the nervous young barber-in-training had shorn me too close on one side. I was amused by the bizarreness of it but my mother had shrieked when she saw me.

“Good God,” she’d said. “What happened to his hair?”

“It’s only a haircut,” Grandpa said.

“It’s all bare on one side. My God, Dad, what did they use, an axe?”

“They’re just young fellas learning, and it only costs a dime there,” he argued.

“Oh, honey, they butchered you,” my mother said, looking at me ruefully. I was puzzled by her reaction: my religion books were peopled by monks with tonsure, and I fancied that I resembled the Norman knights in my book about England. I also wanted to tell her I’d gotten off easily: while I was there, another incipient barber had cut a man’s ear with the straight razor and made him howl with the clippers.

Sometimes Grandpa took me to Hamlin Park and watched me play, sitting on a long bench painted a sickly green and chatting with men his age. At such times I believed the world was overrun with old men. When it rained, we settled for a visit to his friends at the firehouse on Barry, and they let me climb all over the pumper truck while they shot the breeze.

He was not perfect. In a family burdened by a love of drink, he was as troubled as any, and as the terrifying prospect of endless leisure opened its dark maw to him, he had developed a more urgent need to drink, even though such a course was bound to involve him in almost constant conflict with my grandmother, which contest he would necessarily, inevitably, lose.

He took me to taverns and bought me cokes with maraschino cherries in them, and little flat boxes of stick pretzels. When she came home from the knitting mill, my grandmother would ask me what we had done all day and I would announce that we spent the whole afternoon in a saloon, and she would upbraid my grandpa in a shrill voice.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in a tavern, Pat? You have to take the boy into a tavern? What on God’s earth is on your mind, taking him into those filthy places?”

Her tone troubled me, as did her obvious anger with my beloved Grandpa, but what was most vexing was her sudden renunciation of taverns, since I knew the two of them went on occasion to a tavern on a Saturday evening and more than once I’d heard them come home singing.

One night he stayed out later than usual, and when he returned, his face was flushed and he was sporting a ridiculous-looking smile and a gash over one eye. He had fallen on the sidewalk. She took him into the bathroom to clean him up, assailing him all the while with her opinion of the low estate to which he had fallen. She called him names, questioned his sense, and generally laid down a barrage of verbal artillery that had my head spinning, and I wasn’t even the object of the assault. When he’d been patched up, he made his way to the kitchen and sank onto his accustomed chair, where he lit up a Camel and stared out the window, drumming tar-stained fingers on the table as Grandma continued the evening’s homily. Finally, he turned and squinted at her and caught her in mid-sentence with “Bejesus, woman, will you shut up!”

Of all the many avenues open to him, this was not his best. I would have pretended to collapse on the table, for example, or claimed stomach trouble and scurried back to the bathroom. But he told her to shut up. And she hit him with a pan. It was a large black cast iron skillet she used for bacon and eggs and to create the little lake of rendered lard that was required before she could make chicken or pork chops. She took hold of it in both hands and whacked him on top of his head.

Amazingly, it made a loud “bong,” as if this were a scene in a Popeye cartoon. He winced, rubbed his head, and puffed on the cigarette. She replaced the pan and left the room, red-faced and teary with anger. For the rest of the evening they said nothing to each other, but after they put me to bed, I was aware that they sat together in the living room watching a show with Julius LaRosa, one of their favorites.

She was vigilant about my budding morals and questioned me about the places where Grandpa took me. Often we went to visit what she called “his cronies” in the neighborhood: a blind man named George who fed me caramels that he kept in a bowl in front of him. I was fascinated by George, for Grandpa had once told me that George had lost his sight in the ’20s when a hoodlum had tossed acid in his face. The attack had been a mistake, the acid meant for another man. We also visited a little round Italian man in the projects named Tony. He made his own wine, either in his tub or in the basement, and frequently sent a bottle of it home with us as a sop to Grandma. And we went to taverns.

He considered himself something of a sharpie but was no match for her. Once when I was perhaps six, after we’d spent a lovely afternoon in a cool, dark tavern, him watching the ballgame and me playing with the saloonkeeper’s new litter of dalmatian pups, he coached me on what to say to Grandma’s interrogation.

“Don’t tell her we went to a tavern.”

“But we did.”

“Oh, sure, but you can say we visited Gerry. We did see Gerry, didn’t we?”

“Yes. He was in the tavern.”

“There you have it.”

And so, when she came home from the knitting mill, she asked me what we’d done and I announced that we’d visited Gerry. “Did you go to the tavern?” she asked, and when I said, “No,” she quietly asked if I’d been able to play with the new Dalmatian puppies at the tavern, to which I answered, “Yes, I got to play with them all afternoon.” It was this and similar experiences which taught me that in this lifelong contest, he might hope to outlast her, but he was no match for her as a tactician.

At times, to avoid dragging me into godless places, my grandpa took to bringing home his liquor, usually pint or half-pint bottles of wine or bourbon. When finished, he would hide the bottles, and it was his choice of hiding place that sometimes made me doubt his sanity. An empty bottle might find itself under the cushion of the big red armchair in the living room, or under one of the sofa cushions, or behind a vase on a shelf in the dining room, and once he hid his spent bottle inside the body of the Victrola.

It is plain that on some level he intended her to find the bottles—“Dead soldiers,” he called the empties—that they were his shiny glass emblems of defiance, a skull-and-crossbones trail to show he was still running his own life, when of course illness and boredom had taken it over. So she found his little bottles effortlessly, and each discovery produced a scene that might have been scripted.

“What is this?” she would say, holding the bottle by two fingers like a dead rat and staring at it as though she’d never seen one before.

“Oh, now what does it look like?” he would mutter, looking at the television.

“You’ve been drinking this poison again.”