had heard more than one remark proposing beatification for Grandma Dorsey by virtue of having survived life with Grandpa Dorsey, or, as Grandma Flynn put it, “for not putting an end to that one and tossing the body in the river.” It was clear to me that, had Grandma Flynn been espoused to Grandpa Dorsey, it would have been a short, stormy marriage, and would have ended badly for the husband.
That night, as I went to bed, I said a small prayer of thanks to God for making me so popular that my relatives felt they had to share me. Half a dozen of them were still out there in the yellow kitchen, relaxed now that a decision of sorts had been made and most of them had dodged this strange new bullet. They cracked open a couple of quarts of Sieben’s beer and chatted. The talk turned to the two young ones they’d just buried, and once or twice I heard their voices break, but eventually my uncles took over with funny stories about my mother and father, and then it sounded like a party. I sat up on one elbow and listened to it all. Their voices were reassuring to me: I was literally surrounded by people who would take care of me.
It proved to be the only night in a period of almost five months that I felt reassured about anything. By the following night, when the “conference” with its party atmosphere had already begun to blend into the blurred tangle of recent events, the new terror that I’d come to know at bedtime had returned. I cocooned myself in the covers, burrowed beneath the fat old pillow I’d inherited—it had been my mother’s, Grandma told me—and wept. The night after my parents had died, I’d fought sleep for hours, convinced that if I closed my eyes I’d die during the night. Each night the fear returned, and though I gradually came to realize I wasn’t going to pass away in my sleep, I became convinced that I lived an unprotected life, that I had lost a sort of mystical shield afforded to each child at the outset of life, and that the love of these grandparents, uncles, and aunts was a poor substitute for the genuine article.
During those first few weeks I spent a great deal of time in small dark places: closets, darkened rooms, under tables. I drew pictures of my parents, dozens of them, scores of them each week—pictures in pencil and pen and in crayon, pictures of my parents and me at the park, at the zoo, in Wisconsin Dells where we’d gone the summer my baby brother Johnny had died, at Riverview, at home eating dinner. I crawled under my grandmother’s table and drew them obsessively, and one day when I came home from a walk with my grandfather, my Uncle Tom was looking at them with my grandmother. Her eyes were red and she was shaking her head. He looked at me curiously, and I realized he wasn’t concerned with the implicit sadness in the drawings.
“You drew all these, Danny?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know you could draw. Can your friends draw like this?”
I shook my head. His reaction puzzled me: it was a well-known fact in school that no one drew as well, but no one ran as fast as Jimmy Kaszak, and Theodore Renzi could play the accordion. As an afterthought I mentioned that Michael Neely could draw airplanes but not people. He nodded.
“You draw what you feel like drawing, kiddo, but next time you draw something besides your … you know, besides people, let me see ’em.”
“Sure,” I said, and thought no more of it.
Sometime later, I saw a movie on television 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
