In the Castle of the Flynns. Michael Raleigh
about explorers in some jungle place where there were still dinosaurs. These were particularly inept explorers, inasmuch as the dinosaurs stomped, chewed, or gored the majority of them, and I fell in love with dinosaurs on the spot. Aunt Anne took me to the crowded library that occupied one wing of the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse and I took out all the books on dinosaurs, then spent the rest of that week drawing them. One evening I found my uncles passing my drawings back and forth and shaking their heads.
They noticed me simultaneously.
Uncle Mike frowned up at me. “You trace these, right, Danny?”
“No. We don’t have any good tracing paper.”
“Freehand he does ’em all,” Tom said. “Freehand.”
Uncle Mike’s gaze went from the drawings to me again. “Seven years old and he draws better than I do.” I didn’t see his point: anyone drew better than Uncle Mike.
A scene from that time stands out. I was drawing at my grandmother’s kitchen table and my Uncle Tom was sitting across from me nursing a cup of tea. He twirled the cup gently in the saucer as was his habit, occasionally glancing at my drawing, once or twice shaking his head as my picture took shape and color.
“You’re good, kiddo. That must be fun,” he said, and I remember looking up at him in surprise. He caught my look and just said, “Takes your mind off things, I bet.”
I nodded but just to please him. For of course it took my mind off nothing, I could draw and pay almost no attention to the drawing or the process. I went back to my picture, secretly watching Tom as he sipped his cold tea and stared off into space, thinking about whatever it was he wished he could take his mind off.
The first weeks were awkward, filled with moments that frightened me, that made me wonder if the whole group of them together would be competent to do what my mother had done largely unaided. I needed haircuts, shoes, new summer clothes, in the fall I’d need school pants, shots for school, I’d outgrown my winter coat, and none of them seemed to have a clear idea where or when to provide these things—I once overheard my Uncle Tom and Grandma trying to figure out the best place to buy my clothes for the upcoming school year.
“I know she liked Wieboldt’s better than Goldblatt’s,” my uncle said in a musing tone.
“But Goldblatt’s has cheaper clothes for the little ones,” Grandma pointed out. “I used to take her there and we’d watch the old ladies in the babushkas fight over things in the bargain basement, she thought that was so funny.” She sounded as though her voice was about to break, and he said “Ma,” in a pleading tone, and then she was herself again. “But she wouldn’t go to either of them for shoes, I know that. You can take him to Flagg Brothers, or Father and Son.”
They had little conferences about everything, I caught them talking about my clothes, my playmates, about who would take me to the zoo or the movies or a ballgame, and the little talks always ended with one or the other of them making assurances that everything would be taken care of, that they’d do the best they could. But their efforts were not reassuring to me: they had no idea how my mother and I spent my summer days, they’d have no clue about my daily schedule when I came home from school, no notion that I went over to Jamie Orsini’s house at least once a week, and that my mother and I went to the library at Hamlin Park on Wednesday afternoons, and at times it seemed that the loss of my parents had also robbed me of all the little things that had made up my life. I watched their awkward attempts to do what was needed and grew furious with them all.
One evening after dinner I hid in the farthest corner of my room and cried. My grandmother found me and wanted to know what was wrong, and I felt foolish explaining that on warm nights like this one my mother would take me for a walk and buy me a Popsicle from a little man with a pushcart.
Uncle Mike loomed in the doorway behind her, looking concerned and puzzled. “You want a Popsicle, pal, is that all? Is that why he’s crying?” he asked, and I hated him.
I don’t know what I did or said, but my grandmother just shook her head.
“No, no, it’s not the Popsicle. It’s the … it’s what he did, you know. It’s the walk and the Popsicle.” She got up and tried to brush wrinkles from a lap rich with them. “The walk and the Popsicle and his mother is what he misses. Well, I wouldn’t mind a walk and a Popsicle. Come on, sweetheart,” she said, holding out her hand. Tears were beginning to form at the edges of her eyes, but she blinked at them and cleared her throat, as though she was about to deliver one of her orations, but all she said, in a tired, preoccupied voice, was, “I like the banana ones.”
One night I woke with a bloody nose, and before I’d cleared the sleep from my eyes there were all ’round me in a terrifying Tolstoyan death scene, a wall of my adults, Anne and Tom and Mike and my grandfather, all of them looking as though they were watching an execution.
“Oh, God,” Aunt Anne said, as though she’d seen God.
“Bejesus,” Grandpa said, “will you look at that.”
“There’s blood all over the bed,” Michael pointed out, and my Uncle Tom was telling me to take it easy when I thought I already was taking it easy, and then my grandmother shouldered her way through the circle and took me by the hand.
“Whattya think, Ma, does he need a doctor?” Uncle Tom asked.
“For the love of God, it’s a bloody nose, not cancer. It’s no more than all of you had, and more than once.” Reassured and delighted by the attention, I grinned at all of them and thought my uncles might faint.
On another occasion, after a movie and ice cream with Uncle Tom, I began vomiting in his car. My mess was bright red and chunk-filled, and I wondered if I would die of it.
“Jesus Christ,” Uncle Tom said, and gave a hard jerk on the steering wheel that sent me flying into the door of the car. He drove me directly to the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I was born and where I would now, apparently, die, and carried me in with a wild-eyed look of panic that had me on the verge of tears.
A man sat on a chair, holding one injured hand in the other, and a worried-looking couple stood at a desk, waiting, I believe, to have a baby.
A harried nurse put a hand on my head, muttered, “No fever,” sniffed at the mess on my shirt and gave my uncle a look that might have drawn blood.
“Pop,” she said. “It’s pop, and God-knows-what-else.” She eyed me and said, “What else?”
“Popcorn and a Mounds bar and Raisinettes. And ice cream.”
She gave Uncle Tom the evil eye again and said, “You’re not his father, are you.”
It was a statement rather than a question, and Tom just shook his head, then said, “Uncle.”
“Figures. I can tell you don’t have kids yet, Charlie.” She disappeared into a side room, emerged with a wet towel and cleaned me up. Then she told Uncle Tom, “Take him home, give him lukewarm water or apple juice or a little applesauce.” Then she looked at me. “Next time this guy takes you to a movie, don’t eat so much junk, you hear?”
My grandmother ruled the Castle of the Flynns, but of all of them, the person who was to become my caretaker, putting his unlikely mark on me during that uncertain first summer without parents was not my grandmother, who still worked five days a week, but my grandfather, forced by a bad heart to take an early retirement from the streetcars. I had little idea what “a bad heart” meant, though I noticed that he walked slowly and liked a nap in the afternoon, and it seemed these might be the manifestations of such a condition. Nor did I see significance or connection in his frequent coughing and the pack of Camels that never seemed far from