Читать книгу In the Castle of the Flynns - Michael Raleigh - Страница 10

Looking back at the summer of 1954, my first summer with my grandparents, I can see all the stages but I am unable to make out the seams, as one time blends into another, but I’m certain that within a month of trial-and-error they’d managed to resurrect as much of my old routine as could be expected.

In the afternoons I played with a boy up Clybourn named Ricky or my schoolmate Jamie Orsini. My days were full, each one reflecting the determination of the adults around me to make up for what they saw as a great yawning hole in my life, and I have little recollection of afternoons spent moping or mourning.

I seemed to have inherited many more layers of supervision than I thought necessary, and that unlike my late mother, who was willing on occasion to let me walk up the street to a playmate’s house, my grandparents tended to believe I’d been abducted if I was gone for more than two hours. I sometimes overheard them fretting over the gloriously rudderless Tuesdays I spent at Grandma Dorsey’s in Matt’s company. As I was to learn later, they feared Matt’s influence on me, and they spoke often of Grandma Dorsey’s “frailty,” though in truth she was solid as an anvil, just not particularly adept at the supervision of small boys.

My 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 that she didn’t like to ride a roller coaster by herself.

“If I die,” she said, “no one will be able to tell Grandma Dorsey.” I knew I would never die on a roller coaster, but I had no such confidence in the constitution of a nun, and so I allowed her to ride with me. We spent the minute-or-so of terror howling and laughing at one another. On the second hill I thought she’d lose her habit but it didn’t budge. After that, we went on the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and became fast friends.

Poised in the topmost car as the great Ferris Wheel took on a fresh load of passengers, nothing around us but a sky bleeding purple, we chatted, this nun just back from the Lord’s Missions in Guatemala and I, and for an adult she made incredible sense.

“This is my favorite place in the whole park, Danny, the top of the Ferris Wheel. From here you can see your whole life spread out down there. I can see where you live, and I can almost see my mother’s house over on Evergreen, and I can see the houses of all the people for miles.”

I agreed with her that this was a wonderful place, and she nodded happily, then surprised me with her next question.

“Do they make you feel like an oddball?”

“Who?” I asked but I knew who.

“Your family—well, mine, too. Our families, then. Do they make you feel a little strange?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I was unsure how to answer: she was an adult, after all, and Grandma Flynn had once said she was the smartest one on either side of the family, though the men had been unwilling to go so far.

“They make me feel like one of those poor souls in the freak show,” she said.

“Are they poor souls? Will they not go to heaven?”

She laughed. “Of course they will. Maybe sooner than a lot of us. Anyhow, we’re different from the rest of the family, you and I. I’m different because I became something … something not so strange but people don’t understand why a girl does it, and so they’ll never again treat me like a normal person. I’m not a member of the family anymore, I’m a nun. My first Christmas back home after taking my vows, my own brother Gerald was calling me ‘Sister’ like I’m some character out of the Lives of the Saints. I could have brained him.”

I blinked here and gave myself away.

“You want to call me that too, don’t you? When I’m home with my family, I’m Teresa. Aunt Teresa to you.”

“What does Uncle Gerald call you now?”

“Nothing. He’s afraid to call me ‘Teresa’ and he knows I’ll do him an injury if he calls me ‘Sister’ again. He always was a little slow,” she said under her breath, but I heard her anyway.

“And you’re different because they can’t quite bring themselves to treat you like any other small boy. You’re a special problem for them, and they’re going to treat you like one. Just don’t take it to heart. Don’t think you’re a special problem. None of it is anyone’s fault, that’s the thing to remember.” I must have shown some reaction to this mention of fault, for she turned toward me, but she had misunderstood. “They all … they all mean well. You’re a lucky boy to have so many people love you. Just don’t let them drive you crazy.”

“I won’t.” We’d begun our slow descent now, and she was quiet for a moment. “Are they nice? The people there?”

“The people? In Guatemala, you mean? Oh, sure, they are, they’re grand. You’d like them—they’re like the Irish.” This seemed to strike her as a fine joke, and she put her head back and laughed, and I found myself chuckling along with her.

When the ride was finished, she patted me on the head and asked after Grandma Flynn.

“She’s fine,” I said without thinking.

“Oh, Lord, no, I’m sure she’s not fine. She’s lost her daughter, and they were great friends, your mother and Mrs. Flynn, great friends. Be very good for her.”

“I will.”

She nodded, then looked away in distraction, and I remembered that she had lost a brother. After a moment she fished a half-dollar out of some secret compartment in her habit.

“You’re a nice boy, Danny. I enjoyed our rides together.”

“Me, too, Sis … Aunt Teresa.”

“Well done. Here.” She handed me the fifty-cent piece, made a brisk turn on her heel, and walked off, tall and handsome and self-assured, ignoring the many curious faces that took a moment to gawk at her. My Uncle Tom had once remarked with a rueful note that it was “too bad that one became a nun.” Uncle Mike had simply said, “Yeah, what a waste,” and though I didn’t understand what either of them meant, I knew I liked her, too.

In Riverview I entered a tiny porthole into the adult world. I was a watcher of people, I studied strangers the way I eavesdropped on my uncles, and the rickety old park rewarded me with dark glimpses into the behavior of the species. I saw fights there between older boys and once between two very drunken men outside the beer garden. They were both fat, both bleeding from scalp cuts that exaggerated their injuries and made the scene wonderfully lurid. The police came rushing over from the little police station inside the park and collared them both. As they pulled the men away, someone clapped, whether for the action of the police or the quality of the fisticuffs, I wasn’t sure.

There were other tensions in the park. I always stopped to watch at the place where you tried to make a man in a cage fall into a tub of water by hitting a target with a thrown ball. The men within the little cage were usually black, the ones outside were white, sometimes cocky young ones with good aim, but usually older men, sweating, grunting drunks. The black men sat on little perches like dark-skinned birds and laughed at the efforts of their tormentors. The more the men threw and missed, the angrier they became, muttering threats and racial epithets at the black men, who responded with loud doubts about the white men’s manhood. Once as I watched this little two-headed rite of racist hostility, my grandmother grabbed my arm and yanked me away. Behind me I heard my uncles chuckling at the scene, then a loud shout as one of the black men went into the drink.

On a humid night toward the end of that first summer, I was patrolling with my cousin Matt when we came upon a scene that struck me as something from a movie. Two groups of young men had come upon one another, four or five on a side. One group included my uncles, Tom and Mike, and a pair of their friends. The other group was led by Philly Clark. Perhaps someone had put a shoulder into someone else in the crowded midway, perhaps there had been a choice remark tossed over a shoulder. Something had already happened, I couldn’t tell what, but it was clear from the way the men had formed a pair of facing lines, and from the way they all watched Philly and my Uncle Tom, that these young men all expected trouble.

We moved closer ’til we could see the angry faces—some were angry, though a tall thin guy behind Philly looked nervous, and my Uncle Mike simply looked like a man who has found himself in an unpleasant situation out of his control. In truth these two groups had faced each other before over other matters. From opposite ends of the neighborhood, they viewed each other as rivals, for jobs, for girls, for status. Matters usually crested during the summer, for both groups fielded baseball teams that faced each other in the various men’s leagues in the parks. There had been individual fights, and at least one group effort.

I had heard Philly Clark’s name in my grandmother’s house. My uncles talked about him and my grandmother had called him a “hooligan.” From what little I’d been given, I pieced together that there was trouble between Philly and Uncle Tom, part but not all of it over a girl. At that time, I knew no more about her. More than this, they detested each other. Philly was tall and handsome, had been a star athlete at Lane Tech and, it was said, was well-connected, and not only because his father was a precinct captain.

Now, he stood just a couple of feet from my uncle, head thrust forward belligerently. He was speaking to Tom, pointing to emphasize his words, and his finger seemed to come within touching distance of my uncle’s face. Tom stood back on his heels and looked up at him—he was four or five inches shorter than Philly. He had an oddly satisfied look on his face, as though the whole scene was amusing him. If it was, he was alone in his amusement.

“Oh, boy,” I heard Matt say. “They’re gonna fight!” We moved closer so that I could make out some of Philly’s words.

“I stay away from what’s yours, you keep away from what’s mine, you got that?”When my uncle said nothing, Philly poked him in the chest with the finger. “You got that?”

Tom ignored the finger. “How can she be yours if she’s with me? Answer me that, Philly.”

“She ain’t gonna be with you, not ever, not if you want to live a long time. You got that?” Philly jabbed him again with the finger, and I thought he might throw a punch. My uncle just took a half-step back and looked at Philly’s hand.

“You tired of that finger?” Tom asked. He sounded very calm. “You tired of that nice shirt, those slacks, those fancy shoes?”

“Oh, tough guy, I’m terrified,” Philly said with a mirthless smile.

“No, you’re the tough guy, everybody shits green ink when you walk by, but if you don’t step aside and let me pass, I’ll give you enough trouble to last you for a while.”

“I can take you, Flynn.”

“What’re you, sixteen, Philly? You still think the girls like a guy who can knock somebody around. Now get out of my way or you’re gonna wish you had.”

A long moment passed as Philly considered whether to take things up a notch. People can smell a street fight coming, and a small crowd had formed around my uncles and the other men.

“I kicked your ass before, Flynn,” Philly said so that he could be heard over the park noises.

“Long time ago. Ancient history, kid stuff. And you never wanted to fight me in a ring.” Tom grinned at him. “Tony Zale gave Graziano a rematch, Philly.”

“Oh, you’ll get a rematch all right,” Philly said, but he was moving away, giving Tom a path.

My uncle walked straight ahead, looking neither left nor right, and his group followed him.

“Just remember what I said, Flynn,” Philly said to my uncle’s departing back. Then he and the others broke into a little circle, chattering all at once. One of them was patting Philly on the back, but I could see Philly Clark’s eyes, and I saw that the big handsome man in the good clothes had lost face.

Later that night as we walked the two blocks to my grandparents’ house, my uncles muttered to one another about the incident and I kept a respectful silence. Uncle Mike was urging Tom to be cautious.

“Watch your back door with that guy,” I heard him say.

Tom’s voice was so low I almost missed his answer. “I ain’t worried about Philly. Jesus, Mike, I was overseas, people tried to kill me over there, for Christ’s sake. What’s that punk gonna do to me?”

“Just be careful, is all I’m telling you.”

“I got no interest in a beef with Philly Clark. I couldn’t care less if I can take him or he puts my lights out. I just wanta take his girl away.”

Uncle Mike growled in irritation and seemed to give up. I thought that made it my turn, so just as we reached our house, I tossed in my two cents’ worth.

“Are you gonna have a fight with that guy, Uncle Tom?”

They both spun around and Uncle Mike looked irritated.

“You’re not supposed to listen to our conversations,” he said, but Uncle Tom looked amused.

“How’s he supposed to do that, huh? We’re both jawin’ away like he’s not here. He supposed to put gumballs in his ears, or what?”

He paused at the broken gate, hands in his pockets, looking calm and confident. “No. I don’t fight with street trash no more, I’m retired, like Joe Louis. That guy gives me any lip, I’ll sic you and your cousin Matt on him.” He shot a quick grin at me and then led me into the house. My grandmother, after her perfunctory mutterings about how late they’d kept me out, put me into bed. I was exhilarated by what I had seen, and bothered by it as well, with its hint of potential danger for yet another of my loved ones, and the one I already prized most. I went to sleep that night daydreaming about a heroic encounter between my uncle and Philly Clark, and in my version, the big man in the fancy clothes took a fearful drubbing from my uncle to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers.

A later version, edited and refined many times, had my uncle lying temporarily stunned on the ground as I administered an incredible beating to his assailant.