In the Castle of the Flynns. Michael Raleigh
sofa, the prize of her living room, the cigarette coal in the center of one of the cushions. As I watched, the cigarette burned a small hole into the cushion, and then the hole grew a bright thin orange glow, and this tiny layer of fire began to eat at the sides of the hole ’til it was the size of a baseball.
I began to get nervous—not for my own safety, for thought I could outrun the fire, but for Grandpa’s: I feared that my grandmother would kill him. I remember the growing panic in my heart and then I went over to wake him: it took me several minutes and when I finally got him to open one eye, I pointed to what his wayward cigarette had done.
He bounced up like a cartoon character and stared at the burning circle for a moment, and then said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m a dead man.”
Then he began to beat at it with his hands. He could do that, beat out fire with his hands, because of something that had happened to him all those years of standing in the open doorway of a streetcar in the cold. He’d lost some of the feeling in his fingertips, and I’d seen him put out matches and unused cigarettes by casually squeezing matchhead or coal between thumb and forefinger. Now he beat at the offending flame and sent me for a glass of water, and I had to go twice because I spilled the first glass on my shirt.
When the fire was out, the room heavy with the acrid smell of wet, burnt cloth, we sat there on either side of the accusing hole. My grandfather coughed and made an irritated gesture of waving away smoke that I couldn’t see. Grandpa didn’t speak, he just kept sighing. Finally, we got up and he flipped the cushion so the hole was hidden. Then he looked at me.
“Don’t tell your grandma, or we’ll both be dead men.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were here.”
“But I don’t smoke.”
“It won’t make a bit of difference. She’ll say you were my accomplice. We’re in this together. If she finds out, there’ll be no corner of the earth where we’ll be safe.”
For weeks my grandfather attempted to hide the problem from her by the simple expedient of sitting on the sofa whenever she was home. He spent hours at a time in that one spot, as though he’d become melded to it. I tried to hold up my end of the bargain, planting myself on the sofa when he left it unguarded, but eventually she wore us down.
He was in the bathroom and I was on the wounded cushion, and she came in and announced that she needed to reverse the cushions. She asked me to get up and I feigned first deafness and then an ignorance of English, and she finally grabbed me and pulled me off the sofa. I made it as far as the door to my bedroom before I heard the sudden gasp that told me she’d found the hole.
For a moment it seemed that the power of speech had left her: she made a strangled squawking sound, like an aggrieved duck.
“Oh, what’s he gone and done now? I’ll brain him,” she said between clenched teeth, and then touched the hole as though she could heal it with her fingers. She let the cushion drop, then turned slowly to look for one of us, and found me. Her voice had snared me in the doorway and paralyzed me like wasp-sting, and I found myself uttering silent prayers to St. Joseph in his function as Patron Saint of a Happy Death. I wasn’t holding out for a happy passing, just a quick one, and then she advanced across the room like Rommel’s tanks. Her eyes, normally a soft brown, were red. No, they were glowing.
“You did that to my sofa?”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “I don’t even smoke!”
And then she smiled. “Ah,” she said. That was all she said, but it was a lot. She said “Ah” the way Hannibal probably said it when he caught the Romans at Cannae. She said “Ah” and I said a prayer for the lost soul of my grandfather.
He came out of the bathroom humming, and when he saw the hot coals in Grandma’s eyes the song died young in his throat. He looked from her to me, understood what had happened, wet his lips, and prayed for sudden eloquence or the timely intervention of the Deity.
Their conversation, if anything so one-sided can be called that, is a blur to me, though his mistakes were apparent even to a seven-year-old—the first was the old “What sofa?” routine, the second, his attempt to look puzzled, which instead made him look very stupid and seemed to vex her all the more. She rained invective on him, mixing insults with expressions of disbelief and frequently invoking Jesus or Mary or the other saints, including St. Jude whom she addressed as the Patron of Lost Causes since she was “certainly married to one.”
Much of this oration was English though there were a few words in Gaelic, and when she was done, he was pale and I could have sworn he was shorter. She left the room and went into the kitchen to bang pots and pans together, and he sank onto the armchair, pulled out his smokes, thought better of it, and jammed them back into his pocket.
I asked him if he was all right. He looked at me with his mournful Stan Laurel eyes and shook his head. “My life is over.”
She refused to eat with us that night, waiting ’til we were done before entering the kitchen. The next morning, she made and wrapped our sandwiches for lunch and fixed his eggnog and said nothing ’til she was leaving. At the door, she gave him a long look and said, “Burn a piece of my furniture today, Patrick Flynn, and we’ll need the priest.”
My grandfather just nodded and looked like a man who’s received the governor’s pardon. For several weeks after that, she found no empty liquor bottles in the dark recesses of her home, and he kept his visits to the tavern down to the minimum necessary to sustain life.
More than once I heard them arguing over his cough, his smoking, and there was a different tone to these fights. My grandmother seldom raised her voice in these discussions, my grandfather sounded frustrated rather than irritated, and they kept their voices low, as though these times were somehow private.
Gradually I came to understand that my grandfather’s afternoon naps, especially those after a couple of drinks, provided me with an almost perfect freedom: nothing woke him at these times, and it was a short jump from my rummaging through the drawers and cupboards of the house to the realization that I might do more. Shortly after the incident with the couch, I went out alone. I slipped out the back, left the screen door resting against a shoe, and went out into the alley that ran behind the house.
It was a narrow filthy place of cracked pavement with wide holes that collected a brownish oily water after a hard rain and bred mosquitoes. Garbage spilled out of small metal cans and fed mice and, on more interesting occasions, rats. We were just a few blocks from the river, and the neighborhood drew them, and on that first foray on my own, I found a dead one. I poked at it with a stick, gingerly as if it might revive itself. The body was already stiff, and something made me plunge the stick into it.
From the alley I made my way through the neighborhood, pausing at the small playground across from my house, delighted that I alone was unaccompanied by an adult. When I noticed a woman on a bench frowning my way, I left.
I was probably gone no more than twenty minutes, but I felt I’d been adventurous, I’d done something on my own, I had a secret. And when I returned to find Grandpa still sleeping, I experienced a sudden feeling of excitement, as though I’d won a victory over him.
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.