Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

I did little on these excursions but wander the neighborhood, and I returned each time filled with the sense of my own cleverness. Most times I stayed where I was supposed to be, but on certain afternoons I seemed to need the adventure and its attendant risks and rewards.

Most of all, I delighted in this secret that I kept from all of my family.

One evening my grandmother returned from the drug store and fixed me with an odd look. She said nothing to me but later I heard her whispering in the kitchen to my Aunt Anne, and when I went to bed that night she told me I must always make certain someone knew where I was.

My father’s clan, the Dorseys, were a tougher sort of people than my mother’s, having survived not only a greater degree of poverty, but life with Grandpa Dorsey. Though I knew they were my family, I thought of them as Matt’s people, and the Flynns as mine. They lived, the better part of them, clustered around Old Town, a neighborhood already aging at the time of the Great Fire. The Dorseys had been there since the turn of the century, when a teenage John Dorsey, my grandfather, had first come up from Peoria to make his mark in the big town, working first as a laborer.

He met and married my grandmother around 1909 or 1910 when both were in their early twenties; they settled somewhere around Division and Sedgwick, married and raised a brood straight out of a Victorian novel, eleven children in all. At one time, all of them were shoehorned into a basement flat on Goethe. Two of her children had died young; a daughter had been born severely retarded and was in a sanitarium, and no one spoke of her.

There was more than twenty years difference in age between the oldest child living, a daughter named Ellen, and the youngest, my Aunt Mollie (Grandma Dorsey had given birth to her at the age of forty-three, and people spoke of Grandma as though she were fecundity personified).

Grandpa Dorsey’s death at sixty-six from a heart attack had come as a surprise to no one. If anything, people were awed that his perennial abuse of his body and occasional consorting with people of a dark, hard type hadn’t put endmarks to him long before this. He was said to have been quick-tempered, ambitious, smart, flighty, a dreamer; tireless, cocky, irrepressible, a Good-time Charlie trying to hit one of life’s trifectas.

All my life I was to hear tales of him. He’d had his own construction business at twenty-two, a fleet of three dozen cabs on the eve of the Depression, he owned a pair of buildings on Wells Street—all of this gone like dandelion fluff within two years of the crash. He got up onto his feet almost immediately, there was apparently no job he wouldn’t take to make a few nickels: his later résumé would have read like a litany of all the day-labor jobs available in the country.

I don’t know what kind of money it would have taken in the Depression to raise a house of nine children, but whatever it was, Grandpa Dorsey didn’t have it, he was never able to climb back to where he’d been. They moved almost every year between 1932 and 1941, frequently to avoid an eviction. On one occasion he coldcocked the sheriff’s man coming with the papers, just to buy them time to drag their belongings up the alley to another place.

I once listened to Uncle Gerald reminiscing about the whole bunch of them, spread out in a long line from their old flat to the newest one, usually no more than a block away, moving from Scott to Schiller, Schiller to Goethe, Goethe to Evergreen, Evergreen to Wells, damp basements to drafty storefronts to attics turned overnight into housing by a couple of men with saws and hammers; a procession of Dorseys, the eldest carrying boxes, bags, and cheap furniture and the youngest pulling toy wagons filled with the family’s possessions.

They were perennially poor, their home always crowded; their luck seldom held for more than a year, their lives made complicated by the mercurial nature of the person at the head of the household. I remembered him vaguely as a man with an energetic manner who spoke to me as though he had seen so many like me that he didn’t have much time to be impressed—which, in fairness, was true: he’d seen enough of his own. What I remember most about Grandpa Dorsey was his eyes: they were unusually bright, almost feverish, as if he couldn’t wait to get on with his next adventure in life. Many things about him fascinated me, not least of which was the fact that he was the sole adult who took no particular interest in me. He died about the same time my brother did.

My Grandma Flynn found it hard to speak of Grandpa Dorsey without a little snarl of contempt creeping into her voice, and my uncles spoke of him in terms that mixed wonder with disapproval. No one could explain clearly to me where his fortune had all gone, but gone it was. I once heard Tom and Mike talking about him in that low murmur adults resort to when they’re being secretive but too lazy to whisper, and it seemed to me that they were hinting that gambling was at the bottom of some of it, and what he hadn’t lost on the ponies and the fights he’d lost to the Depression. I did not yet fully understand the Depression, nor do many people, in my estimation. As nearly as I could understand, the Depression was for some the equivalent of a hurricane that blows up along the coast and knocks people’s lives and fortunes into the drink. My grand-father had apparently been a victim of this sort of bad luck, and had compounded the tragedy by creating more of his own.

I have wondered about him often through the years, not because of any closeness between us—there was none to speak of—but because of the mark he left on my hard-luck Aunt Mary Jane, and through her to my cousin Matt. I’d heard them say that Mary Jane had “a heart of gold and not as much sense as God gave sheep”—Grandma Flynn’s words. Grandma also once said that Matt was “his grandfather come back to try life one more time,” and the note in her voice said that this was something that boded well for no one.

But once or twice a week I stayed with Grandma Dorsey. I loved my visits there—she expected even less of me than the other side of the family did, and since she wasn’t working in a knitting mill she had time for other things: that is to say, she baked. She was a short, rotund woman, much older than the grandparents I lived with, who had at some early, difficult time in her life with John Dorsey decided to take a sunny view of the world. That world had done its best to shake her loose of this notion, but she persisted in her humble happiness. She delighted in a house crowded with people, and she loved to cook. She baked constantly and in large amounts and very well. She hummed when she baked, snacked on the dough, tossed odd scraps of it and failed cookies to her dog, a great unwashed collie named “King,” and filled her kitchen with smells that I don’t expect to encounter again ’til the afterlife.

At this time she was already in her late sixties—it was hinted that she’d even lied about her age to Grandpa—and the rearing of her small army of children plus her adventures with Grandpa had worn her down, so that her idea of childcare was what a modern educator might have called “unstructured.” In short, she didn’t really know what to do with me, and often didn’t know where I was. Her most common recourse was to provide me with surplus kitchen utensils and send me outside to dig for treasure. The flat was the ground floor of a red brick building on Evergreen right next to the El tracks: her “yard” was the dank muddy expanse beneath the steel skeleton of the tracks. It was frequently muddy, and it was into this material that I dug and tunneled, frequently producing great mounds of black dirt that I later turned into forts and buildings that she marveled at.