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 his hand.
In hindsight I feel a special compassion for him: it was to him that the task fell of acclimating me to my new life. My grandmother worked at a knitting mill on North Avenue “for that pirate, that buccaneer,” as she called her employer—correctly predicting that he would one day take his mail in a cell. My uncles both had jobs, Aunt Anne worked as well and was little more than a teenager.
Thus it transpired that my initial baby-sitter/playmate/surrogate parent was my grandfather, Patrick Flynn. Not that he was new to my company: for a time my mother had worked and Grandpa Flynn had occasionally been my baby-sitter then as well. He was a tall, sad-faced man who asked little of life and whose quiet mien disguised his sense of humor. He walked with one hand in his slacks pocket at a stately pace, like Fred Astaire in slow motion. When he pulled a face or wanted to be comical, he could make himself look like Stan Laurel, and I told him so frequently. He was fifty-eight the year I moved into their home, though in the photographs he looks older.
It was from Grandpa Flynn that I learned about buses and streetcars, boxers and baseball players, of the age and breadth and complexity of the city beyond Clybourn Avenue. He was fond of Irish music, and sometimes on cool afternoons I sat beside him in the living room as he put his old hard plastic 78s on the black Victrola in the living room and gave the machine a few cranks. Frequently these were humorous records, most of them recording the continuing adventures of a man named Casey: “Casey at the Doctor,” “Casey at the Dentist,” etc.
At other times, he listened to music, music filled with fiddles and tin whistles and pipes, and if the mood hit him, he danced, though his dancing wouldn’t have been obvious to an outside observer, for he shuffled his feet slowly, with no hope of keeping time with the music. He also grinned a great deal, which is actually how I knew he was dancing. When he was truly filled with the music, he would yank me to my feet and make me join him, going in slow motion through the steps ’til I had a vague idea what I was supposed to do. He taught me the jig, at least his abridged version, and something called a hornpipe, which he said was a sailor’s dance.
He was also a natural storyteller, that is to say, a shameless liar. He related tales from his youth and embellished them ’til they shone like the Greek myths, narrated the unlikely adventures of his brothers-in-law Martin and Frank and made them seem like Abbot and Costello. He spoke of the Old Country and filled me with fascination and terror: fascination when he told me of half-human selkies and the “little people” who, he contended, lived no farther from his native village than I lived from Riverview; terror when he spoke of ghosts and banshees and undead entities that populated the moody landscapes and roamed the gray skies—Ireland seemed to hold more unearthly beings than people. He also spun outrageous tales of his own indigent boyhood, the tasks to which his hard-working parents had set him on their farm or, when he was having fun with me, “on the fishing boat out on the wide ocean, in all harsh weather,” though a glance at the map would have told me Leitrim’s water was primarily bogs and rivers, and the odd small lake.
He claimed that the Irish had less food than anyone on earth, less even than the Chinese for whom we prayed in school, and were reduced to eating little else but potatoes, though the English were said to have worse notions about what one could eat: he claimed they were fond of the white, mushy fat on bacon and that they ate it uncooked, with yellow mustard.
“Which,” he would say, “explains a great deal about them, you see.”
I see now that he was a simple man. Left to his own designs he would have passed his leisure listening to his records or roaming the city on streetcars to the very end of time, stopping for the occasional shot and beer in a cool, dark neighborhood tavern, and watching baseball or boxing on television—which he considered the great wonder of the age. Nuclear power did not impress him and he would have thought the computer the spawn of the devil, but television seemed to him the nation’s gift to the man without means.
In our now-permanent association, we found we had things to learn about each other. There were times when he liked to listen
