Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

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.

There were reminders here, too, of my parents: we’d come here often, and one summer my father had worked the gate, two nights a week, to make extra money. On those nights, we got in free, and I felt like a minor celebrity.

In the summer, Riverview took over a child’s consciousness. It lay at the place where Clybourn Avenue dead-ended just before the river, and when the sun was high overhead I could see the park up the street, shimmering in the whitish glare like a magic kingdom, something that might be gone in a high wind.

On hot dull afternoons, my friends and I lay under the trees in Hamlin Park and spun lies and folktales about the rides: that a boy had died of fright on the Bobs, that a man had pushed his wife out of the Greyhound, that lovers had taken a long suicidal dive from the topmost car of the Ferris Wheel, that a child exactly our age had tumbled from the Comet and been sliced like summer sausage beneath the coaster’s wheels.

We repeated overheard fragments of adult conversation, embellished them, improved them, stretched them to their proper size and gave them new form: fights became brawls, muggings became murders. A purse snatching became robbery at gunpoint. None of us had yet been allowed to go into the Freak House, and so it too became fodder for our imaginations: the “tallest man in the world” became ten feet tall, the fat lady had to be rolled into the park, the fire-eater farted flames. Matt said there was a child inside who was actually half-wolf, and my own contribution was the two-headed man, whom I claimed to have seen any number of times. I said he looked like Buster Crabbe, on both of his faces.

And on the hottest nights it seemed as if my entire world had conspired to show up at Riverview. I entered with my family and promptly ran into friends, neighbors, cousins, other uncles and aunts, schoolmates. Everyone had ride coupons they didn’t need: I had extras of the Ferris Wheel and the neighbors up the street always seemed to have extra coupons for the Greyhound or the Comet, and I never tired of riding them. But more than the free coupons, I learned to watch the crowd for familiar faces, to wait for the old creaking park to pull its little surprises on me.

To a child obsessed with his place in the world, Riverview sent me constant reminders that in fact I’d inherited a great tangle of family that could pop up anywhere, and that my neighborhood literally had no end. One night my uncles took me and I was delighted to see Grandma Dorsey and Aunt Ellen and her children; another time I was standing in line waiting to get on the Bobs when someone slapped me on the back of my head. I spun around to find my cousin Matt grinning at me.

On still another evening, an unearthly shadow seemed to fall upon me, only me of all the people standing in line for the most nightmarish coaster of them all, the Bobs: I turned to find my Aunt Teresa, now Sister Fidelity, beaming down at me. I was intimidated by the good sister, blood ties or no, not only by her billowy habit but by her lovely face as well, and I didn’t want any of the other kids to see me talking to a nun. I smiled and wished that I had a hole I could crawl into, or that her new assignment among the poor on the West Side could begin immediately. A few feet back, I could see two of my schoolmates, eyeballs bulging, their schoolboy assumption being that I had done something wrong and that a nun had come all the way to Riverview to bring me to justice. She asked me how my summer was going and then admitted that she didn’t like to ride a roller coaster by herself.

“If I die,” she said, “no one will be able to tell Grandma Dorsey.” I knew I would never die on a roller coaster, but I had no such confidence in the constitution of a nun, and so I allowed her to ride with me. We spent the minute-or-so of terror howling and laughing at one another. On the second hill I thought she’d lose her habit but it didn’t budge. After that, we went on the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and became fast friends.

Poised in the topmost car as the great Ferris Wheel took on a fresh load of passengers, nothing around us but a sky bleeding purple, we chatted, this nun just back from the Lord’s Missions in Guatemala and I, and for an adult she made incredible sense.

“This is my favorite place in the whole park, Danny, the top of the Ferris Wheel. From here you can see your whole life spread out down there. I can see where you live, and I can almost see my mother’s house over on Evergreen, and I can see the houses of all the people for miles.”

I agreed with her that this was a wonderful place, and she nodded happily, then surprised me with her next question.

“Do they make you feel like an oddball?”

“Who?” I asked but I knew who.

“Your family—well, mine, too. Our families, then. Do they make you feel a little strange?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I was unsure how to answer: she was an adult, after all, and Grandma Flynn had once said she was the smartest one on either side of the family, though the men had been unwilling to go so far.

“They make me feel like one of those poor souls in the freak show,” she said.

“Are they poor souls? Will they not go to heaven?”

She laughed. “Of course they will. Maybe sooner than a lot of us. Anyhow, we’re different from the rest of the family, you and I. I’m different because I became something … something not so strange but people don’t understand why a girl does it, and so they’ll never again treat me like a normal person. I’m not a member of the family anymore, I’m a nun . My first Christmas back home after taking my vows, my own brother Gerald was calling me ‘Sister’ like I’m some character out of the Lives of the Saints . I could have brained him.”

I blinked here and gave myself away.

“You want to call me that too, don’t you? When I’m home with my family, I’m Teresa. Aunt Teresa to you.”

“What does Uncle Gerald call you now?”

“Nothing. He’s afraid to call me ‘Teresa’ and he knows I’ll do him an injury if he calls me ‘Sister’ again. He always was a little slow,” she said under her breath, but I heard her anyway.