a cigarette, commanding me to be silent, and I would slink back to where I came from, my feelings bruised. He soon learned that when I was in the midst of one of my all-day drawings, filled with dinosaurs or knights in bloody battle, I was reluctant to join him on one of his long bus rides, and at first he took this personally.
We also had to learn how to communicate. Once in a while, when he didn’t want to talk to certain callers, he would ask me to answer the noisy phone in the kitchen, and he wasn’t very specific about what to say.
One morning when he was listening to his music and I was drawing at the dining room table, the phone rang. He looked up at the wall clock and said, “That’s Gillis, that crazy fool. Eleven o’clock and he’s drinking.” Gillis was a loud drunk, as annoying an adult as I was to meet in my childhood, and my grandfather didn’t much relish the thought of an afternoon in Gillis’s company. So he had me answer the phone.
“What should I say, Grandpa?”
“Tell him anything. Just tell him I’m not here. And tell him I’m not going to be here—for the foreseeable future.” He seemed pleased with this last part and laughed to himself.
I found this message puzzling and didn’t for a moment think Mr. Gillis would accept it, especially from a boy not yet eight years old, so I manufactured a more logical reason for my Grandfather’s inability to come to the phone.
I took a deep breath, swallowed, picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”
It was Mr. Gillis, and he asked for Grandpa.
“He’s dead.”
“What?” the voice squawked into my ear.
“He’s dead.”
“But I just saw him yesterday.”
“He died today.”
“What did he die of, for God’s sake?”
“Ammonia,” I said with confidence, for I had heard of many people dying of ammonia, and my grandmother always warned me that this killer illness would take me if I didn’t wear a hat on cold days.
Mr. Gillis was speechless, and I took the opportunity to say “Good-bye,” and hang up on him. When I told Grandpa what I’d done, he was as speechless as Gillis, and then he began to tell me what an outlandish thing I’d done. When he recounted the moment to my grandmother and Uncle Tom that afternoon, he laughed himself breathless, laughed ’til he’d started one of his long coughing episodes. I couldn’t have been more confused, but I enjoyed the boisterous moment after dinner when a delegation from Miska’s tavern came over to pay their respects and make inquiries about my Grandpa’s sudden passing.
Several weeks later I was left alone in the house on an afternoon when all the adults were working and Grandpa, who had been coughing more than normal, had to go in for mysterious medical tests. There was no one to watch me, and my grandparents gave me instructions in the most urgent tone that I was to let no one into the house, no one, “Not even the Pope,” my grandfather said, ’til one of my uncles came home. I took this injunction as I took all things verbal: literally.
I sat calmly in the silent house with the chain on the front and back doors, holding onto my instructions like a remnant of the True Cross, and drew a large, elaborate picture on my special drawing paper.
And when my Aunt Mollie Dorsey, pressed into service as a last-minute baby-sitter, knocked on the door, I refused to let her in. She certainly wasn’t the Pope, and my instructions were clear. She was a sweet-tempered young woman with an unusual sense of humor and a laugh to match, high and joyous, and when it became clear to her that she would not cross that threshold ’til an adult Flynn came home to let her in, she settled herself on the porch and we had a fine chat through the locked door.
Several times that afternoon I heard her burst out laughing though I could not have said what was so funny. I kept her there for two-and-a-half hours and had to spend the greater part of the next two days listening to both sides of my family giving one another different versions of the story. The consensus seemed to be that I was a good boy but bereft of plain sense, and one had to be careful what one said to me.
On the whole, though, the time I was to spend with Grandpa that first summer without my parents provided me with some reassurance: we did the same kinds of things we had always done together, nothing had changed, at least about these times. My days with him tended to the nomadic: as a retired streetcar conductor, he was entitled to a lifetime of free rides on any of Chicago’s transportation systems, whether El train, streetcar, or bus, and he seemed to know every single driver or conductor we ever met—they all called him “Pat” or “Irish.”
Sometimes we rode the troublesome trolley buses that ran hooked to a dark tangle of overhead wires: a trolley that came loose from its wire could snarl the traffic to all the points of the compass for a half hour. On our rides, we took a window seat near the driver. Some of them would let me have stacks of unused transfers and the transfer punch they used, and I’d sit and clip and punch away ’til I was covered in bus-transfer confetti, all the while listening to Grandpa and the old-timers joke and trade tales of the old days, of blizzards and great storms that shut down the city, and fights, and men with razors and guns.
We scoured the city: he took me down to Haymarket Square where he knew a Greek who ran a produce company, and they fed me strawberries while they talked. Sometimes we went to visit his friend Herb, an embattled instructor at the Moler Barber College. This was a small institution on West Madison Street that took in young men of dubious dexterity, ostensibly to turn them into barbers. Sometimes Grandpa got a haircut or shave, and on rare occasions he let them cut my hair, though my grandmother would raise hell with what they did to my head. These were, after all, young men who merely wanted to be barbers.
My mother had still been alive the first time Grandpa had taken me to the barber college for a haircut, and the nervous young barber-in-training had shorn me too close on one side. I was amused by the bizarreness of it but my mother had shrieked when she saw me.
“Good God,” she’d said. “What happened to his hair?”
“It’s only a haircut,” Grandpa said.
“It’s all bare on one side. My God, Dad, what did they use, an axe?”
“They’re just young fellas learning, and it only costs a dime there,” he argued.
“Oh, honey, they butchered you,” my mother said, looking at me ruefully. I was puzzled by her reaction: my religion books were peopled by monks with tonsure, and I fancied that I resembled the Norman knights in my book about England. I also wanted to tell her I’d gotten off easily: while I was there, another incipient barber had cut a man’s ear with the straight razor and made him howl with the clippers.
Sometimes Grandpa took me to Hamlin Park and watched me play, sitting on a long bench painted a sickly green and chatting with men his age. At such times I believed the world was overrun with old men. When it rained, we settled for a visit to his friends at the firehouse on Barry, and they let me climb all over the pumper truck while they shot the breeze.
He was not perfect. In a family burdened by a love of drink, he was as troubled as any, and as the terrifying prospect of endless leisure opened its dark maw to him, he had developed a more urgent need to drink, even though such a course was bound to involve him in almost constant conflict with my grandmother, which contest he would necessarily, inevitably, lose.
He
