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.
The subject of the council was me, not that anyone said it in so many words, but they all gave me long looks when they clomped in from the wooden porch, as though getting a fresh fix on me, reminding themselves what I was all about. For the first time, I saw that I made them uncomfortable, and several of them looked away quickly when our eyes met. My excitement at seeing all these adults and being at my grandmother’s house was soon dampened both by these uneasy glances and by the mordant atmosphere both sides brought to this table. The wake was over, this was life. I was a reminder, after all, of the deaths of two beloved young people, and it had already dawned on me that I was something of a burden, perhaps even a liability.
If I had any doubt what this meeting was to be about, it was soon dispelled when my grandma herded them all into the yellow-painted kitchen and told me to stay in the front of the house and play. She gave me a little wink and a bottle of Pepsi—a clear bribe, and the fact that it came without a glass meant it was an afterthought: she was nervous. I waited a respectable thirty seconds or so to give them a chance to get started and then crept into the dining room and crawled under the table, from where I could hear ninety percent of their conversation.
It was a tearful meeting, and once or twice I heard raised voices, always quickly hushed by Grandma Flynn barking out, “Hush up, will you, the boy’ll hear you!” in a voice that would have been heard in the second balcony at Chicago Stadium.
Their talk wandered as they tried to avoid the inevitable, but ultimately Grandma grabbed them and pulled them back to earth. In the end it was decided that no single one of them could be expected to carry this new weight.
On the Dorsey side, Aunt Ellen had three of her own, and her husband, my Uncle Roy, was dead. Uncle Gerald was a confirmed bachelor, Mollie was still single, James was about to marry, and my Uncle Joe and his wife Loretta had their hands full—they had Bernie and his sister Dorothy, and David, a child with cerebral palsy, and I now learned that an orphan was considered a similar sort of burden, for I heard someone say “they have trouble enough already.”
When Matt’s parents—my Uncle Dennis and Aunt Mary Jane—were mentioned, I heard my Grandma Flynn quickly say, “Oh, no, no, the poor things.” Someone agreed that they were in “money trouble,” but I had heard a different kind of trouble in my grandmother’s voice, my first intimation that there was something about Matt’s house that I knew nothing of.
In the end it was decided that they would all share the responsibility. I would live with the Flynns. On certain days of the week, my Grandmother Dorsey would take care of me; on other days, I’d be in the care of Grandpa Flynn. On weekends, my Uncle Tom would help out, as would my Uncle Mike. The married ones expressed their determination to do what they could, to take me out to spend time with my cousins on occasion and give the others a break. I was to live, though, with Grandma and Grandpa Flynn, which also meant with Uncles Tom and Mike and Aunt Anne.
There had been some talk of my moving in with Grandma Dorsey and, had the deal turned out differently, I might have had an entirely different life, for Grandma Dorsey was a quiet, passive woman worn down by decades of life with
