nights were another matter: once they were all asleep, all shut up in their little cells in the hive, I lay in bed and told myself I was a lost boy, a child without family. I reminded myself that they all slept in rooms where they’d slept for years, that I alone was a newcomer, and I felt alien and unguarded. I listened to the sounds in my grandparents’ house, sounds probably not much different from the sleeping sounds and night noises of my late parents’ home, the sounds of creaking wood and loose windowpanes, a cat mousing under the porch, and transformed these simple night noises into ghosts and bats, and danger on two legs. The street sounds were no better, the wind roared and the high calls of the nighthawks unnerved me, and cats fighting sounded like babies left out in an alley.
Sometimes I caught snatches of conversation from people walking home from Riverview or a night in a Belmont Avenue tavern: in the isolation of my dark little room their voices seemed louder than they probably were, harsher, even threatening, they were coming up the stairs for me and I’d have no time to wake someone. For the first couple of months with my grandparents, I stayed awake so long at night I was able to convince myself that I never really slept. Once I made the mistake of sharing this remarkable fact with my grandfather, who simply raised his eyebrows and said I seemed to be sleeping when he came in to check on me each night.
A new fear came to me, for having been visited early on by death, I had come to be obsessed with it. These dark moments in the middle of the night soon accommodated a new worry, that my new family would all die as those before them had.
The first time this thought struck me, I fought it down, but it returned on other nights and soon took on a knotty logic. I had more than once entertained the notion that the loss of my parents was in some way a punishment. At first I could not have said what I was being punished for, though I believe such notions are common to children who suffer a sudden tragedy. I was in some way a bad boy who had been found out and punished. This early feeling of guilt subsided in the face of my more practical concerns and worries about my new life, but now, in the middle of these solitary nights, it found me once more and terrified me. It seemed clear and logical that my family, grandparents, uncles, and aunt, would all perish as my punishment for the many bad things I had done. And where my previous notion had simply been that I was “bad” in some nebulous way, I now saw myself as a child turning to evil. I saw a boy who crept about the house and went where he was told not to go, opened drawers belonging to adults, sampled what he liked in the pantry, and even stole out of the house on his own. I saw a boy who had joined in with his wild cousin to do things for which swift punishment was merited, a boy who broke into barns and climbed roofs, and I saw worst of all a boy who had begun to feel and then to demonstrate in strange ways his anger at his relatives. Such a boy, it seemed to me in the middle of the night, such a boy could expect a terrible punishment. On more than one of these occasions I cried and prayed to God not to take any of them unless He planned to take me as well. In the mornings I vowed to change, but my plans for the defeat of evil were always thwarted by stronger impulses. Gradually the fears and feelings of guilt left me for a time and I thought I was through with them. In reality, they were simply growing tentacles and horns.
In the evenings we often went out as a group, whoever happened to be home, setting in place patterns that would last for summers to come. We went to Hamlin park and had ice cream bars and Popsicles or to church carnivals, or best of all, to Riverview. To Riverview, the ancient amusement park that sprawled along the river in the heart of the old neighborhood like a walled country of smoke and noise and seemed to be telling me, “Here anything can happen, and it probably will.” It was unlike anything I was ever to see again, part amusement park, part dance hall, part circus, acres upon acres of wooden hills and towers that always seemed too frail to support the metal cars, trains, and rockets they carried, let alone the raucous crowds who squeezed into them. To a child’s eye, it was the whole gaseous adult world writ large: noisy and smoky, the air thick with tobacco smoke and cooking smoke and burnt fuel and steam, cotton candy and popcorn and women’s perfume and the dense mystery of odors that wafted from the beer garden. Attractions were found here to show up the sentimental, the silly, the dark side of the world.
There were rides to terrify the hardiest of street boys, fun houses and parachutes and nearly a dozen roller coasters: the Bobs, the Greyhound, the Silver Flash, the Comet, the Fireball.
And noise, always noise, the clackety racket of the coasters as they pulled stolidly to the tops of the hills just before dropping fifty or sixty feet to the undying terror of the riders, music, laughter, the happy background screams of the people dropping through the sky on the Para-Chutes. Men yelling to one another, kids shouting, the sideshow barker with a voice like a klaxon that reached you long before you could see him.
There were reminders here, too, of my parents: we’d come here often, and one summer my father had worked the gate, two nights a week, to make extra money. On those nights, we got in free, and I felt like a minor celebrity.
In the summer, Riverview took over a child’s consciousness. It lay at the place where Clybourn Avenue dead-ended just before the river, and when the sun was high overhead I could see the park up the street, shimmering in the whitish glare like a magic kingdom, something that might be gone in a high wind.
On hot dull afternoons, my friends and I lay under the trees in Hamlin Park and spun lies and folktales about the rides: that a boy had died of fright on the Bobs, that a man had pushed his wife out of the Greyhound, that lovers had taken a long suicidal dive from the topmost car of the Ferris Wheel, that a child exactly our age had tumbled from the Comet and been sliced like summer sausage beneath the coaster’s wheels.
We repeated overheard fragments of adult conversation, embellished them, improved them, stretched them to their proper size and gave them new form: fights became brawls, muggings became murders. A purse snatching became robbery at gunpoint. None of us had yet been allowed to go into the Freak House, and so it too became fodder for our imaginations: the “tallest man in the world” became ten feet tall, the fat lady had to be rolled into the park, the fire-eater farted flames. Matt said there was a child inside who was actually half-wolf, and my own contribution was the two-headed man, whom I claimed to have seen any number of times. I said he looked like Buster Crabbe, on both of his faces.
And on the hottest nights it seemed as if my entire world had conspired to show up at Riverview. I entered with my family and promptly ran into friends, neighbors, cousins, other uncles and aunts, schoolmates. Everyone had ride coupons they didn’t need: I had extras of the Ferris Wheel and the neighbors up the street always seemed to have extra coupons for the Greyhound or the Comet, and I never tired of riding them. But more than the free coupons, I learned to watch the crowd for familiar faces, to wait for the old creaking park to pull its little surprises on me.
To a child obsessed with his place in the world, Riverview sent me constant reminders that in fact I’d inherited a great tangle of family that could pop up anywhere, and that my neighborhood literally had no end. One night my uncles took me and I was delighted to see Grandma Dorsey and Aunt Ellen and her children; another time I was standing in line waiting to get on the Bobs when someone slapped me on the back of my head. I spun around to find my cousin Matt grinning at me.
On still another evening, an unearthly shadow seemed to fall upon me, only me of all the people standing in line for the most nightmarish coaster of them all, the Bobs: I turned to find my Aunt Teresa, now Sister Fidelity, beaming down at me. I was intimidated by the good sister, blood ties or no, not only by her billowy habit but by her lovely face as well, and I didn’t want any of the other kids to see me talking to a nun. I smiled and wished that I had a hole I could crawl into, or that her new assignment among the poor on the West Side could begin immediately. A few feet back, I could see two of my schoolmates, eyeballs bulging, their schoolboy assumption being that I had done something wrong and that a nun had come all the way to Riverview to bring me to justice. She asked me how my summer was going and then admitted
