Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

The high point, if there could be said to be one at a funeral, was the appearance of the MacReady sisters, both of them, including Betty who had long been rumored to be dying. She did not seem to me to be dying or even contemplating it: like her sister Mary, she was hugely rotund, talkative, loud, and aggressive. They were a year apart yet so remarkably alike that they were often referred to in family circles as “the twins,” though I once heard Uncle Mike refer to them as “the battlewagons.” The reference had confused me.

“Oh, here we go,” Mike said.

Tom nodded and I heard him mutter, “Okay, this is just what we needed.”

The MacReady sisters marched together into the funeral parlor, followed at a respectable distance by Joe Collins, Mary’s confused-looking husband—said by my uncles to be the stupidest person in the United States—and Uncle Mike muttered, “The fleet must be in, ’cause there’s the Iowa and the Missouri ,” and I could see the resemblance to twin battleships, as they steamed through the mourners and forced a parting of the crowd. They wore matching, tentlike blue coats and twin pillbox hats—Mary’s was adorned by a single dangling flower, while her sister’s had none. In addition to their sizable presence, they brought noise to my parents’ funeral, like a benign wind, and I saw amusement and anticipation on many of the faces around me.

My grandfather exchanged a quick happy look with my uncles, Grandma rolled her eyes (they were her second cousins) and the sisters fell upon the happy crowd, engulfing one and all in their massive embrace. They spoke at the same time and in loud barks, chattered and called to people across the parlor, and the wake grew festive in spite of itself.

When I least expected it, they turned to me and I heard Uncle Tom whisper, “No matter what they do, smile. And don’t try to outrun ’em.”

I did as I was told, though it was difficult. They both reminded me of the loud, mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland . They squeezed me, savaged my hair, patted me on the head, picked me up, and, inevitably, kissed me, leaving my entire right cheek dripping and lipstick-covered. I shot a glance at my cousin Matt and his wide-eyed horror confirmed my worst fears of how it had looked. Aunt Mary gave me another squeeze and just when I thought my breastbone would cave in, she let me go. The sisters then went on up to the caskets where there was a tense moment as they put a shoulder into one another for space on the kneeler, causing some to fear an outbreak of fisticuffs. Eventually they came to some amicable division of space and proceeded to sob quietly together. Joe Collins stood a respectful distance behind them and looked uneasy.

“Why does Aunt Mary’s husband walk behind her all the time?” I asked Tom.

“He knows it’s safer back there.”

Toward the end of the evening I fell asleep in a chair and Tom took me home and put me to bed.

The following morning they took me to the funeral. At the funeral home the priest led us in prayers, and when they closed my mother’s casket, Grandma Flynn gave in to her grief and sobbed so heartbreakingly I thought she’d die there. It was the deepest, truest expression of grief I’d yet seen in life, and I was horrified. People moved to comfort her but Aunt Anne, my shy, slender Aunt Anne, just shouldered her way to her mother and put a consoling arm around her. Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike stood on either side of me and took turns murmuring, “It’s all right, people cry at funerals,” but for the rest of the day I wondered if my grandmother, too, was going to die. A few feet away, Grandma Dorsey stood red-eyed but quiet, flanked by my aunts Mollie and Ellen, and looking small and very old.

At some point they all found people to greet and I found myself standing apart from any of them. I looked around the big, crowded parlor of the funeral home and realized my Aunt Mollie was standing a few feet away, watching me.

She smiled but like most of the others she had been crying and her cheeks were still wet, and she had a tissue crushed into one hand. I didn’t know what to say to her so I waved, and she came over and hugged me.

“It’ll be all right, sweetheart. It just doesn’t seem like it right now.” She gazed from me to the casket where her favorite brother lay and just shook her head.

After the mass, I rode with my uncles to the cemetery and watched as they gave Grandma Dorsey the flag that had been draped over my father’s casket in honor of his Navy service. When we were done there, we all returned to Grandma Flynn’s house and I experienced my first true Irish wake, that is to say, I attended a party. There was food enough to supply the Chinese Army, and liquor, and my grandmother counted herself lucky to have a home after my cousins and I were finished with it.

But it was to survive this and many other traumas in its time, my grandmother’s house, just as it had born the hurts of wind and weather, and a small fire that had given some wayward self-taught architect an excuse to tack on a questionable extension: a piece that seemed to butt itself into the rear of the big house as if the two had collided. No matter how one viewed it, my grandparents’ house was a singular place, unlike anything else in the neighborhood, a great rambling, drafty, flaking mass of wood that had come together around the time of the Chicago Fire, a frame beehive of rooms and closets and corners, turrets and cupolas and porches, a house that time had passed by. But it sat boldly at the corner of Clybourn and Leavitt and gave itself airs beside a triangular lot owned by someone else, a patch of land given over to weeds and insects and the occasional mouse. My grandparents did not own it, but rented it from a former neighbor who had moved to Evanston.

Whatever its age and tortured provenance, it was the biggest house on the street. A recent repainting in bone white had left it a gleaming relic, and I thought it palatial. At times I played out on the wide porch and pretended it was a castle, and in my imagination, I named it the Castle of the Flynns, and it became a tribal stronghold replete with dungeons and moat and battlements. My grandfather once told me it was haunted, and on more than one summer night I peered into darkened rooms in hopes of espying a ghost.

And on the day of my parents’ funeral, this Castle of the Flynns was assailed from all sides by the two families and their retinues.

My grandfather cranked his Victrola and played fiddle music and after a few shots tried to dance to it. Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin joined him, but my grandmother stopped them when Frank fell over a table and just missed sailing out the open window. A bit later an argument erupted between the MacReady sisters, so that I thought they might wrestle, and my grandmother commissioned her brothers to intervene, which they did by dragging the massive ladies out onto the dining room floor for a primeval version of a fox trot. The four of them bumped and lurched around the dining room like continents colliding, and the rest of us, Dorseys and Flynns, perhaps from relief that we hadn’t been asked to dance with them, formed a tight circle round them and clapped.

The rest of the evening was marked by loud talking, they all talked at the same time, and by their music, which they insisted on singing with, and by smoke, they smoked, all the men and half the women, Luckies and Chesterfields and Camels, unfiltered, of course, for a filter was something in a car engine.

By eleven o’clock the last of the guests had been bundled into cars or cabs and the house grew quiet at last. It was the latest I’d stayed up in years, and I fell asleep on my grandmother’s living room sofa.

Two days later some of those guests reconvened at Grandma’s house, for what could only be called a council, involving a dozen or so of my relatives—Grandma and Grandpa Flynn and their three surviving children, and about half of the Dorseys, including Grandma Dorsey, her bachelor son Gerald, her son James and his fiancée Gail, her daughters Ellen and Mollie and of course Teresa, the nun.