Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

In the morning she woke me with a forced smile and a stricken look in her eyes and then made me pancakes in an empty kitchen—my grandfather wasn’t in his accustomed place, sitting facing the window and filling the air with the blue smoke from his Camels. My grandmother hardly spoke to me during breakfast except to ask if I wanted more pancakes. After five I was full, but she kept making them. I remember that they were perfect, not a one of them burned or irregular. In a lifetime of making pancakes for me and the others in her family, that was the only day I can remember when she hadn’t produced at least one pancake the color and consistency of my school shoes. I watched her silent form and saw her wipe her eyes several times. At one point she stopped and just leaned on the stove with both hands, and I knew what had happened but said nothing, as though I could fend off this evil, undo it, perhaps, if I could but refrain from speaking of it.

My uncle came in just as I’d gone into the living room to play. I remember that he stood with the door half-opened, as if he might leave again, and then he went out to the kitchen. I heard my grandmother begin to weep, and then Uncle Tom came in to see me with the look of a fighter who has just barely beaten the count. Uncle Mike was behind him, big-eyed and looking stunned.

“How you doing, kiddo?” he asked, and didn’t even fake a smile.

“I don’t know,” I told him, and I didn’t.

He looked off past me for a moment and then got down on his knee. “Something happened. A bad … a bad thing, kiddo.” He broke off and looked away again, and this time he made a faint gasping sound. He seemed to be searching for the words, and I beat him to it.

“Something bad happened to Mommy and Daddy.”

He blinked in surprise and then nodded. “Yeah. They were in an accident. And they died. They went to heaven.”

“I want them to come back.”

He looked away again and shook his head. “No, they … people don’t come back. Once they been to heaven, they … they don’t come back.”

“How do you know they’re dead?”

He shot a panicked look at his brother, saw no help, plodded on alone. “I was, you know, I was out there.”

“I won’t see them?”

“Not ’til you get up there, to heaven.”

“I wanna go now.”

“You can’t, not yet, anyways, you got to …”

And then I let it all out, and I have no clear recollection of the next few minutes, except that I sobbed against his jacket ’til his shoulder was wet, and I could hear them all crying, all of them except him. He just hugged me. I had a sudden feeling of terror that was somehow balanced by the fact that the accident hadn’t taken him as well. Up close, he smelled of Old Spice and Wildroot Cream Oil and I had always wanted to smell like him.

I remembered our crowded apartment up the street on Clybourn, a cluttered flat above a shop where they repaired radios and fans and had them lining the windows, and I saw myself alone in the middle of it. They were all gone. I was seven years old and they were all gone.

“Where am I gonna live?” I said into the cloth of his jacket, and he patted the back of my head.

“You’ll be okay, Danny, you’ll be all right.” Then, after a brief hesitation, “We’ll take care of you.”

They attempted to keep the details from me but it was all they talked about, every telephone call was about this terrible thing, and I soon learned how they had died: a head-on collision at the intersection of Belmont and Clark. A drunk teenager had tried to beat the red light on Belmont, the worst and final mistake in his young life, for the collision had killed him as well. My father was dead when the ambulance arrived. My mother, thrown from the car, had died on the way to the hospital.

On nights when sleep came slowly, I lay in bed quaking with a child’s rage at them all, at my mother for leaving me, at this dead boy for killing my parents, at my father for what seemed his incompetence—the news bore frequent accounts of other accidents whose victims survived, and I thought he should have been able to save himself, or at least my mother.

There had been a brief, tearful wake for my brother Johnny that I can hardly recall. My sole surviving image from it is the horror of my mother, beautiful and disconsolate in a plain black dress—there is nothing so terrifying to a child as the sight of a parent crying. But my parents’ wake was my first real experience of the rituals of death. They all tried to keep me from it as well as they could—my grandmother was convinced it was harmful for me to see both my parents in their caskets—but Uncle Tom insisted that I be present for some of it, and I was glad. I had a brief moment of elation when I approached their twin caskets: I was going to see them again. And I knew it was them: Uncle Mike had made a brief sortie into theology while they were getting me dressed, explaining about souls and spirits but it all sounded like gibberish to a seven-year-old boy, and he gave it up almost immediately. These two figures in the caskets were my parents, it was them but life had left them. I raised a hand to touch my mother’s fingers, clasped around a rosary of my grandma’s and then I stopped.

“No, go on,” I heard Uncle Tom’s voice. “It’s okay, they’re your parents, nobody else’s.” He let his eyes linger on his dead sister’s face, wet his lips, and then stood back to let me by.

I touched her fingers and they were cold and the skin felt strange, rubbery. I moved over to my father and he felt the same, and for some reason I was consoled by this, that they were experiencing this thing together. I had a momentary urge to climb in with them, as I’d climbed so often into their bed. I wanted to talk to them but was self-conscious. In the end, I knelt down and said an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary,” and stared at them for a while, ’til my uncle put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on, Dan, some of your cousins are here.” In the background I could hear my grandmother crying and talking about me.

I watched their reactions as they entered, the Flynns and Dorseys, saw how they embraced one another like old friends and then watched their faces fall as they remembered the enormity of this double dose of the world’s trouble. More than once I saw them peer in disbelief at the twin coffins at the chapel’s far end.

On the far side I saw my Grandma Dorsey in the protective embrace of her beautiful daughter Teresa, or Sister Fidelity as she was now—widely viewed by the two families as both saint and eccentric because she had already achieved two rare states in life: she was a nun just returned from working in the foreign missions, and she had gone to college.

As nearly as I could understand it, going to college was an odd thing for a girl to do, and the other—“Joining the Lord’s household,” as Grandma Flynn put it—put her on a different plane from the rest of us. In an Irish household one could come no closer to sainthood than to become a nun; it did not bring the glory and neighborhood celebrity conferred on boys who voiced the determination to become a priest, but it was viewed in a different way. Seminarians played ball and boxed, priests went to ballgames and even liked a shot of Jim Beam now and then, but a girl who went into the convent renounced the world, even the neighborhood. We didn’t understand them and so they took on a special place in the pantheon, like astrophysicists.

For the rest of it, I was glad they’d let me come, for as near as I could make out, a wake was a family party done up in dark clothing: every relative I had on earth was there, three generations of Irish immigrants, and half the neighborhood. There were even black people, three women and a young man who had known my mother from the big A&P where she worked. They spoke to my grandparents and I saw that both my grandmothers were glad to see these black people, but Grandpa Flynn seemed uncomfortable with them. Grandpa Dorsey was dead, so there was no reaction from him.