Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

When I went back inside, my grandmother buttonholed me, round-faced and matronly in a new permanent and a dark dress with small white dots. She had doubtless been looking for my grandfather, who was almost certainly in Vandiver’s tavern out front, or perhaps Dunne’s saloon up the street, but she was willing to settle for me.

“Are you having a nice time, Danny?”

“Oh, sure.” And of course I was: thus far the wedding had presented me with violence, humor, drunkenness, jealousy, and my first experience of sex, dimly understood but fascinating. “Can we go to another wedding next week, Grandma?”

She laughed. “Oh, not next week, sweetheart, but soon enough. Maybe both of your uncles will finally settle down with a nice girl.” She said this without much conviction and scanned the big smoky room in search of either of her sons. Tom chose this moment to enter with the dark-haired girl, who had thankfully pulled her dress back up.

I stole a glance at Grandma. Worry softened her face, and her dark-eyed gaze followed her favorite child across the dance floor. We both watched Tom take his leave of the girl with a little wink, and Grandma allowed herself a little snort at the girl’s expense, accompanied by a brief wrinkling of the nose to show her disapproval. I wasn’t sure why she would disapprove: I thought the girl was wonderful.

Eventually I rejoined my cousins and we trooped around the hall, weaving in and out of trouble and managing to be in all the best places: the groomsman and the jealous boyfriend went at it not ten feet from us, and the aforementioned teenager threw up just as we were passing by. Toward the end of the long night we kids all split up and went back to the tables where we belonged. Matt stayed with me for a while; we sat down at an empty table a few feet from his parents, Dennis and Mary Jane. They were arguing, and I could tell by the way he watched them that this was nothing new. When he saw that I was staring, he smiled at me and began talking about the trip they were taking to the Wisconsin Dells the following weekend. When his father got up and staggered away from the table, Matt gave me a little whack and said he had to go. I told him I’d see him around.

A little while after that we took our picture. It took some time to set up: my grandmother wanted her two brothers in it, my great uncles Martin and Frank, and this was no small undertaking, for we had to send out search parties. Eventually they found Martin in the tavern grumbling and making dire predictions of the end of the world to anyone who would listen, and Uncle Frank’s wife Rose found him asleep in his car—he came in blinking and licking his lips, and his hair stood up on one side where he’d been sleeping on it. You can still see it in the photo—he looks as if he’s modeling a new hairstyle, and one of his eyes is not completely open. My grandmother was relieved to hear that he’d been asleep in the car, which meant that the community was safe.

They all seemed happy, my grandmother had also located Grandpa and he was still coherent—and we crowded together and attempted half-heartedly to accommodate the poor photographer. He was a beefy man with a matted shock of hair and ill-fitting clothes. He chain-smoked and his shirt had come out of his trousers, and he had had a long hard day trying to squeeze dignified photographs out of that sweaty, unrestrained gathering. Somewhere at the periphery I could hear someone singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and then all of them picked it up and I thought the photographer would run outside and throw himself in front of the Damen Avenue bus. Aunt Anne was running her hands through my hair and they made me stand right in the center of them all. Someone, one of my uncles, was patting me on the shoulder and they were howling away like cats on the back fence.

I was laughing, at what I couldn’t have said, and if you had told me my life would be frozen at just that moment in time, that I would enter the next world feeling just as I did then, I would have counted myself lucky. I had probably begun to understand that they all belonged to me, and I to them.

The photographer snapped his picture and muttered something and then asked us to stay for one more, something had gone wrong, and as he pressed his button anew, someone bumped him from behind, and this last time just as he took the picture, Matt bolted into the camera’s field.

The fat photographer straightened up, said, “That’ll have to do,” and I heard him add “goddammit” under his breath as he waddled away with his camera, trailing cigarette ash and shirt-tails behind him. Shortly after that troubled photo session a fight broke out over a coat, and the police were called. I thought my heart would burst.

I rode home with Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike was driving, hunched over the wheel as though the car crowded him. He was big and heavily built, and had the red hair of Grandpa’s people. Tom was dark-haired and dark-eyed like his mother, and a relatively small man, though I couldn’t see it then. They muttered to one another in the voices they usually used when they didn’t want me to hear, but I did, I always did, and I knew they were talking about Tom and the girl.

“Playing with fire, Tom. It ain’t gonna work.”

“We’ll see.”

“And Philly, he finds out, he’ll come looking for the both of you.” He pronounced it “Da bota you.”

“I can’t do nothing about that.” A moment later Tom added, “He don’t appreciate her, he don’t appreciate what he’s got. If I hadn’t had to go to overseas, she’d have been mine. I’m gonna take her from him.” Tom said this last with the same tone of absolute certainty he’d used after the death of my parents, when he’d told me that they were all going to take care of me.

“Be careful,” Uncle Mike told him, and then sighed. He sat looking out the window and shaking his head.

I waited what I thought to be a respectful moment and then asked, “Are you gonna marry the lady with the black hair, Uncle Tom?”

“Jesus,” Tom muttered. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You don’t miss anything, do you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, this is between the three of us. About that lady—whose name is Helen, by the way—it’s too soon to be talking about that kinda thing. Besides, nobody can tell what’s gonna happen in the future. Now crawl back in your hole and go to sleep.”

I nodded, my suspicions confirmed: this was the mysterious Helen whose name I’d heard whispered among the family.

“Just be careful,” Mike repeated. “He’s nuts, that guy.”

“Yeah? So what? So am I,” Tom said quietly.

I was delighted to hear his intentions. I wanted him to marry the dark-haired girl, I wanted him to have anything he wanted. Just as he was his mother’s favorite, he was mine: he was handsome and funny and brave and a war hero, and in the absence of a father, I was convinced Tom had hung the moon.

For much of the time, though, I associated Tom with bad news, it seemed that he was always the one delegated to give bad news, and on a June morning in 1954 that I will never forget he had given me mine. He had dropped down on one knee to get closer to my level—I’d been playing on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, and I’d already come to expect any adult dropping down on one knee to give me a serious talk about something: it had been my mother’s habit. He gave me a nervous half-smile and put a hand on my shoulder.

I wanted to run away, for I sensed what was coming: something had happened to my parents, to both of them. I’d spent the night at my grandmother’s and it was clear that something catastrophic had occurred. My parents had gone out on Friday night and had not come back to pick me up, and then I’d woken during the night to hear my grandmother sobbing in the kitchen and my grandfather trying to calm her.