In the Castle of the Flynns

It also smelled. Like most children, I did not mind the world’s smells, not yet having developed the finicky notions of the adult world, so that today when I encounter those smells, the odors of damp, rotting plaster, ancient wood, primeval wallpaper, dirty rugs, I am nostalgic. These were the smells of a happy place, a place further associated in my mind with her baking, with the odd old toys she was always dragging out of a closet for me, with the generally hedonistic experience of being a seven-year-old boy unutterably spoiled by his grandmother.

I would play on the floor of her small musty living room or crowd her kitchen table with homemade lead soldiers that had belonged to my father and his brothers before him, and from time to time she’d steal a glance at me over her shoulder as she baked or cooked—often she’d make soup or stew or spaghetti sauce enough to feed half a dozen people, with the understanding, no, the hope that one or more of her brood would drop by.

A docile, patient woman who hummed more than she spoke—Grandma Flynn said this was the result of a lifetime of speaking to a wayward husband ’til she was breathless—Grandma Dorsey seldom had much to say to me beyond questions about what I needed and whether I was hungry. I learned early on that the answer to this latter question was always “yes” and it brought swift rewards unknown in the house where I lived. Later, one or another of my uncles or aunts on that Dorsey side might stop by to chat or see how she was, and she’d feed them, and on some nights there were three or four unexpected but perfectly welcome visitors in her kitchen, all of her issue. They were happy to see me, they thought I was just what she needed during the day to keep from going soft mentally, and they liked me, every one of them, but they had grown up in a crowd and most of them were in the process of creating their own, and I was not the center of the universe that I was in the Flynn house.

Late that summer I began to see my cousin Matt at Grandma’s house on a regular basis. Aunt Mary Jane had gotten a job downtown at The Fair store, and so he spent most of his days in the care of Grandma Dorsey. Some weeks I was there more than once, and so Matt and I came to count on seeing one another.

He was a handsome boy, blond and hazel-eyed and wild and cheerful, physically gifted where I was clumsy, confident where I was shy. He was adventurous and restless and I thought he was a sort of paradigm of boyhood. With his rough self-assurance, he seemed somehow older to me, so that I had found not only a perfect companion but an older brother. I wished I had his looks, his laugh, his voice, I became irritated with the clothes my late mother had burdened me with, for they weren’t like Mart’s. I wore saddle shoes to church and he had red gym shoes, he wore blue jeans—the first time I asked Grandma Flynn for blue jeans she said I’d wear them “over your grandmother’s lifeless corpse.” For his part, Matt thought I was funny: he was not verbally gifted, had trouble expressing himself at times, and had no memory for jokes. And if ever I was to meet a boy who needed to laugh, it was Matthew.

I fed him jokes and one-liners I’d heard from Milton Berle or Sid Caesar on television and had him gasping for breath. I wished we were brothers, and once told another boy that we were.

It was critical that he liked me: he was everything I wanted to be, and more than anything else, he had what I had already lost. He could pepper his conversation with indifferent mentions of his father and casual references to his mother. He had parents whom he saw every day, who took care of him and bought him things, and I didn’t quite believe that what I had measured up. I lived with old people, and no matter how I admired him, Uncle Tom was not my father, and I was already aware of their collective difficulty in anticipating the needs of a small boy. Once Matt made a reference to his mother and father fighting: he sounded angry with both of them, he spoke as though he hated his home, and I wondered what there could be about a home with a mother and father that would make a boy sound that way.

Under Grandma Dorsey’s attitude of Optimistic Permissiveness, my days with Matt were an unending adventure. She had a groundless belief in our basic common sense and judgment. Also since there were two of us, she felt we were safe, and so we were allowed to explore “the block”—which we took as license to roam the entire North Side.

We spent whole days in Lincoln Park, roaming the great sprawling park from north to south, from the prehistoric ridge of Clark Street to the lake itself. The park was a wilder, darker place then, with more trees and heavy clumps of dense bushes and undergrowth, and an enterprising child could find a thousand places to hide.

Statues made their home in the park, it teemed with them, and we sought them out, puzzled over their names and then just clambered over them, LaSalle and Shakespeare and Linneaus, Hans Christian Andersen and the great seated Lincoln behind the Historical Society. We threw stones at the ducks in the lagoon, tried to spook the zoo animals or their attendants, and once made off with the bucket of fish that were about to be fed to the penguins, then stood at the side of the lagoon and threw fish chunks at the young couples in the slow-moving rowboats. We crouched in the little underpasses and listened to the strange echoing sounds of our voices, climbed the high hill at the edge of the lagoon to visit the statue of General Grant; we hid in the underbrush to spy on lovers, tried to push each other into the lagoon, rolled in the grass.

Children are fascinated with the dead, and so we always sought out the graves. The land for Lincoln Park had been reclaimed from cemeteries, the old City Cemetery and several others, and when these graveyards had been relocated in the nineteenth century in an attempt to put an end to malaria epidemics, a few of the unfortunate—or lucky, depending on one’s view of a corpse’s inalienable rights—deceased had been left behind. The city admits, now as then, only to three, though the park doubtlessly rests on the bones of hundreds of early Chicagoans of all races, particularly the poor.

Foremost of these Abandoned Dead were the Couch brothers, Ira and James, resting for all time in the lone tomb left after this crepuscular relocation, a gray mausoleum just north of the Historical Society.

We would creep up to the tomb—you could get at it then, touch it, climb on it, leave your initials, anything short of entering it to visit Ira and James, and it was always a high point of our park excursions. We worked feverishly to figure out a way to get inside but failed, though Matt was certain we’d eventually crack it. “When we get older, we’ll be smarter,” went his reasoning.

The other dead man was said to be buried closer to Clark Street and now enjoys quiet celebrity due to a plaque indicating his presence in the nether regions just below the horseshoe pits: this second dead man was David Kennison, the last known survivor of the Boston Tea Party, who had lived more than fifty years after that momentous piece of public lawlessness to end his days in the swamp town at the junction of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.

On occasion we entered the Historical Society itself and viewed with awe the reassembled cabin where Abraham Lincoln had spent part of his childhood, and the items taken from his pockets the night of his death. I was fascinated by these things and developed the belief, shared only with Matt, that if Lincoln’s former home and cherished belongings lived in this old building, then the spirit of Abe himself couldn’t be far away.

From the park we would go to the big red-brick mansion where the Cardinal lived and where, my cousin assured me, the Pope stayed when he was in Chicago on vacation; we prowled shops and gangways in Old Town and ventured west across Orleans into the projects. I found these little treks with Matt almost as interesting as my Wednesdays with Uncle Tom, especially as there was an element of danger present in his company: Matt seemed to delight in antagonizing other boys, he could spot a group of kids on a street corner—white kids or black, it made no difference to him—and say something in five seconds that would have all of them chasing us with blood in their eyes.

Once or twice they caught us, these unsuspecting boys, some of them several years older than we, and then Matt stunned us all by popping one of them in the mouth and taking off before anyone could react. He was quick and devious, and I never saw a sign of fear, though once a taller boy was getting the better of him and Matt, sobbing through gritted teeth, went so crazy, punching and clawing and kicking, that the older boy let him go and took off running. I was to see Matt fight a number of times as we got older, and to see his anger often, though rarely directed at me.

Most of the time, though, we just explored that part of the city, from Old Town to the outer edge of the Loop, from the projects to the lake. Soon we took on followers, three or four of the kids from Grandma Dorsey’s block. They liked me well enough but were drawn to Matt: when he wasn’t bent on provoking fights with large groups of strangers, he was actually a good companion. Every group needs a child who looks beyond the normal activities and routines, who sees in odd things possibilities for recreation, if not criminal malfeasance, and Matt served in that capacity for us. He was not only adventurous but imaginative, and his peculiar obsession was with gates and bars and barriers, which he read as the adult world’s personal challenges to children, sufficient to generate an immediate and urgent need for transgression.

We scoured the city, climbed roofs and roamed cobblestone alleys—most of the old alleys in those days and a good number of the sidestreets in Chicago were still surfaced with smooth red bricks that were picturesque but hell on car tires. We investigated porches and basements, jumped fences and even broke into the odd building.

Once we came upon a tall, weathered frame building that looked very much like a farm building, a relic perhaps of the days when that section of the city had been unreclaimed prairie. It had the big double doors of a barn and leaned to one side, as though gravity were about to tip it over. Matt took one look at it and decided it was a national treasure.

“It’s a hundred years old.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell. The wood’s all gray, and they don’t build buildings like this no more. Let’s go in.”

“We’ll get in trouble,” I said.

He looked at me as though I’d drooled on my chest.

“No, we won’t. The guy who owned this is dead, or he would have painted it.”

This seemed air-tight logic to me, and I told him I was in.

The building sat on a corner lot, surrounded on both sides by what we always called “prairies”—unused vacant lots given over to weeds and prairie flowers sometimes four or five feet high, and thick as the bristles on a brush. Rabbits and mice lived in these places, and small snakes, you could lose or hide things in them, and Matt contended that a dead man had been found in one near his house but no one believed him.

Grandma Dorsey had begun giving me my father’s old Hardy Boy mysteries, and I realized that I was poised at the onset of exactly the type of adventure that Frank and Joe Hardy seemed to have every week. Thus the locked doors of the old barn gave me no pause: the Hardy Boys were forever breaking-and-entering in the name of adventure. Besides, to this day I have no idea where we were but it was a strange neighborhood, and a crowd of small boys far from their homes quickly lose what little moral restraint they have acquired. We bought Matt’s line of reasoning without hesitation. Rooting around in the high grass like a scavenger tribe, we found a rotten log and, using this as a battering ram, Matt and I and a boy named Terry Logan pounded at the ancient planking near the back of the building until it caved in with a dry crack. We pulled the shattered plank away and without hesitation crawled in.

A billion specks of dust hung suspended in the bar of gold light from the hole we’d just made, and the rest was darkness. We were vaguely aware of a large dark shape in the center a few feet away but it wasn’t ’til our eyes had adjusted to the darkness that we realized it was a car. It was unlike any car I was familiar with, tall and boxy and odd, and I realize now that it was probably one of the old ungainly cars from the 1920s. More important to us than its strange silhouette were the thick cobwebs that hung from it and dangled from what few corners of the old barn we could see. Matt drew a finger through the dust along the door of the car, then looked up and squinted into the dark.

“There’s something up there,” he said, and my heart sank but I followed him to the back, where we found a brittle wooden staircase that moved from side to side as the three of us climbed up. “Up” led to a loft that seemed to run along all four sides of the building. It was narrow and crowded with boxes and long or bulky objects that we could not see but which made each step an adventure. At one point Terry Logan almost fell out of the loft, and afterwards I could hear his fevered, terrified breathing.

“Ain’t this a ball?” Matt asked at one point, and I almost laughed aloud at Terry’s unconvincing, “Sure is.”

“Prob’ly spiders up here,” Matt said with undisguised joy.

At the front we found a sort of window, matted with fifty years of dust and filth, which Matt kicked in after only a second’s moral debate, our earlier assault on the wall having made him a hardened second-story man. Sunlight, blinding sunlight, shot through the hole. Now that we could see around us, the barn lost none of its mystique: we could see old farm tools, ploughs and scythes and a pile of old wood-handled drills, and Matt thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

“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 terrible 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.