of this gone like dandelion fluff within two years of the crash. He got up onto his feet almost immediately, there was apparently no job he wouldn’t take to make a few nickels: his later résumé would have read like a litany of all the day-labor jobs available in the country.
I don’t know what kind of money it would have taken in the Depression to raise a house of nine children, but whatever it was, Grandpa Dorsey didn’t have it, he was never able to climb back to where he’d been. They moved almost every year between 1932 and 1941, frequently to avoid an eviction. On one occasion he coldcocked the sheriff’s man coming with the papers, just to buy them time to drag their belongings up the alley to another place.
I once listened to Uncle Gerald reminiscing about the whole bunch of them, spread out in a long line from their old flat to the newest one, usually no more than a block away, moving from Scott to Schiller, Schiller to Goethe, Goethe to Evergreen, Evergreen to Wells, damp basements to drafty storefronts to attics turned overnight into housing by a couple of men with saws and hammers; a procession of Dorseys, the eldest carrying boxes, bags, and cheap furniture and the youngest pulling toy wagons filled with the family’s possessions.
They were perennially poor, their home always crowded; their luck seldom held for more than a year, their lives made complicated by the mercurial nature of the person at the head of the household. I remembered him vaguely as a man with an energetic manner who spoke to me as though he had seen so many like me that he didn’t have much time to be impressed—which, in fairness, was true: he’d seen enough of his own. What I remember most about Grandpa Dorsey was his eyes: they were unusually bright, almost feverish, as if he couldn’t wait to get on with his next adventure in life. Many things about him fascinated me, not least of which was the fact that he was the sole adult who took no particular interest in me. He died about the same time my brother did.
My Grandma Flynn found it hard to speak of Grandpa Dorsey without a little snarl of contempt creeping into her voice, and my uncles spoke of him in terms that mixed wonder with disapproval. No one could explain clearly to me where his fortune had all gone, but gone it was. I once heard Tom and Mike talking about him in that low murmur adults resort to when they’re being secretive but too lazy to whisper, and it seemed to me that they were hinting that gambling was at the bottom of some of it, and what he hadn’t lost on the ponies and the fights he’d lost to the Depression. I did not yet fully understand the Depression, nor do many people, in my estimation. As nearly as I could understand, the Depression was for some the equivalent of a hurricane that blows up along the coast and knocks people’s lives and fortunes into the drink. My grand-father had apparently been a victim of this sort of bad luck, and had compounded the tragedy by creating more of his own.
I have wondered about him often through the years, not because of any closeness between us—there was none to speak of—but because of the mark he left on my hard-luck Aunt Mary Jane, and through her to my cousin Matt. I’d heard them say that Mary Jane had “a heart of gold and not as much sense as God gave sheep”—Grandma Flynn’s words. Grandma also once said that Matt was “his grandfather come back to try life one more time,” and the note in her voice said that this was something that boded well for no one.
But once or twice a week I stayed with Grandma Dorsey. I loved my visits there—she expected even less of me than the other side of the family did, and since she wasn’t working in a knitting mill she had time for other things: that is to say, she baked. She was a short, rotund woman, much older than the grandparents I lived with, who had at some early, difficult time in her life with John Dorsey decided to take a sunny view of the world. That world had done its best to shake her loose of this notion, but she persisted in her humble happiness. She delighted in a house crowded with people, and she loved to cook. She baked constantly and in large amounts and very well. She hummed when she baked, snacked on the dough, tossed odd scraps of it and failed cookies to her dog, a great unwashed collie named “King,” and filled her kitchen with smells that I don’t expect to encounter again ’til the afterlife.
At this time she was already in her late sixties—it was hinted that she’d even lied about her age to Grandpa—and the rearing of her small army of children plus her adventures with Grandpa had worn her down, so that her idea of childcare was what a modern educator might have called “unstructured.” In short, she didn’t really know what to do with me, and often didn’t know where I was. Her most common recourse was to provide me with surplus kitchen utensils and send me outside to dig for treasure. The flat was the ground floor of a red brick building on Evergreen right next to the El tracks: her “yard” was the dank muddy expanse beneath the steel skeleton of the tracks. It was frequently muddy, and it was into this material that I dug and tunneled, frequently producing great mounds of black dirt that I later turned into forts and buildings that she marveled at.
Her apartment bore the scar tissue of a long, crowded life, and to an inquisitive child, it was a place of delight, a packrat’s nest. I’d once heard my father tell my mother that Grandma Dorsey hadn’t thrown away anything since the turn of the century, and this seemed a bald statement of fact: her flat was a jumble of furniture and knickknacks and improbable objects that either she or my late grandfather had found reason to keep, including toys, magazines, jars, boxes, bottles, tin cans, and for some unfathomable reason, bottle caps. She also seemed to have coasters from every saloon her husband had ever frequented, and I played with these in great stacks.
It also smelled. Like most children, I did not mind the world’s smells, not yet having developed the finicky notions of the adult world, so that today when I encounter those smells, the odors of damp, rotting plaster, ancient wood, primeval wallpaper, dirty rugs, I am nostalgic. These were the smells of a happy place, a place further associated in my mind with her baking, with the odd old toys she was always dragging out of a closet for me, with the generally hedonistic experience of being a seven-year-old boy unutterably spoiled by his grandmother.
I would play on the floor of her small musty living room or crowd her kitchen table with homemade lead soldiers that had belonged to my father and his brothers before him, and from time to time she’d steal a glance at me over her shoulder as she baked or cooked—often she’d make soup or stew or spaghetti sauce enough to feed half a dozen people, with the understanding, no, the hope that one or more of her brood would drop by.
A docile, patient woman who hummed more than she spoke—Grandma Flynn said this was the result of a lifetime of speaking to a wayward husband ’til she was breathless—Grandma Dorsey seldom had much to say to me beyond questions about what I needed and whether I was hungry. I learned early on that the answer to this latter question was always “yes” and it brought swift rewards unknown in the house where I lived. Later, one or another of my uncles or aunts on that Dorsey side might stop by to chat or see how she was, and she’d feed them, and on some nights there were three or four unexpected but perfectly welcome visitors in her kitchen, all of her issue. They were happy to see me, they thought I was just what she needed during the day to keep from going soft mentally, and they liked me, every one of them, but they had grown up in a crowd and most of them were in the process of creating their own, and I was not the center of the universe that I was in the Flynn house.
Late that summer I began to see my cousin Matt at Grandma’s house on a regular basis. Aunt Mary Jane had gotten a job downtown at The Fair store, and so he spent most of his days in the care of Grandma Dorsey. Some weeks I was there more than once, and so Matt and I came to count on seeing one another.
He was a handsome boy, blond and hazel-eyed and wild and cheerful, physically gifted where I was clumsy, confident where I was shy. He was adventurous and restless and I thought he was a sort of paradigm of boyhood. With his rough self-assurance, he seemed somehow older to me, so that I had found not only a perfect companion but an older brother. I wished I had his looks, his laugh, his voice, I became irritated with the clothes my late mother had burdened me with, for they weren’t like Mart’s. I wore saddle shoes to church and he had red gym shoes, he wore blue jeans—the first time I asked Grandma Flynn for blue
