Читать книгу In the Castle of the Flynns - Michael Raleigh - Страница 8

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 to the news on the radio and did not want to be bothered. If I came babbling into the room at such moments, he would wave an impatient hand, always holding 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 took me to taverns and bought me cokes with maraschino cherries in them, and little flat boxes of stick pretzels. When she came home from the knitting mill, my grandmother would ask me what we had done all day and I would announce that we spent the whole afternoon in a saloon, and she would upbraid my grandpa in a shrill voice.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in a tavern, Pat? You have to take the boy into a tavern? What on God’s earth is on your mind, taking him into those filthy places?”

Her tone troubled me, as did her obvious anger with my beloved Grandpa, but what was most vexing was her sudden renunciation of taverns, since I knew the two of them went on occasion to a tavern on a Saturday evening and more than once I’d heard them come home singing.

One night he stayed out later than usual, and when he returned, his face was flushed and he was sporting a ridiculous-looking smile and a gash over one eye. He had fallen on the sidewalk. She took him into the bathroom to clean him up, assailing him all the while with her opinion of the low estate to which he had fallen. She called him names, questioned his sense, and generally laid down a barrage of verbal artillery that had my head spinning, and I wasn’t even the object of the assault. When he’d been patched up, he made his way to the kitchen and sank onto his accustomed chair, where he lit up a Camel and stared out the window, drumming tar-stained fingers on the table as Grandma continued the evening’s homily. Finally, he turned and squinted at her and caught her in mid-sentence with “Bejesus, woman, will you shut up!”

Of all the many avenues open to him, this was not his best. I would have pretended to collapse on the table, for example, or claimed stomach trouble and scurried back to the bathroom. But he told her to shut up. And she hit him with a pan. It was a large black cast iron skillet she used for bacon and eggs and to create the little lake of rendered lard that was required before she could make chicken or pork chops. She took hold of it in both hands and whacked him on top of his head.

Amazingly, it made a loud “bong,” as if this were a scene in a Popeye cartoon. He winced, rubbed his head, and puffed on the cigarette. She replaced the pan and left the room, red-faced and teary with anger. For the rest of the evening they said nothing to each other, but after they put me to bed, I was aware that they sat together in the living room watching a show with Julius LaRosa, one of their favorites.

She was vigilant about my budding morals and questioned me about the places where Grandpa took me. Often we went to visit what she called “his cronies” in the neighborhood: a blind man named George who fed me caramels that he kept in a bowl in front of him. I was fascinated by George, for Grandpa had once told me that George had lost his sight in the ’20s when a hoodlum had tossed acid in his face. The attack had been a mistake, the acid meant for another man. We also visited a little round Italian man in the projects named Tony. He made his own wine, either in his tub or in the basement, and frequently sent a bottle of it home with us as a sop to Grandma. And we went to taverns.

He considered himself something of a sharpie but was no match for her. Once when I was perhaps six, after we’d spent a lovely afternoon in a cool, dark tavern, him watching the ballgame and me playing with the saloonkeeper’s new litter of dalmatian pups, he coached me on what to say to Grandma’s interrogation.

“Don’t tell her we went to a tavern.”

“But we did.”

“Oh, sure, but you can say we visited Gerry. We did see Gerry, didn’t we?”

“Yes. He was in the tavern.”

“There you have it.”

And so, when she came home from the knitting mill, she asked me what we’d done and I announced that we’d visited Gerry. “Did you go to the tavern?” she asked, and when I said, “No,” she quietly asked if I’d been able to play with the new Dalmatian puppies at the tavern, to which I answered, “Yes, I got to play with them all afternoon.” It was this and similar experiences which taught me that in this lifelong contest, he might hope to outlast her, but he was no match for her as a tactician.

At times, to avoid dragging me into godless places, my grandpa took to bringing home his liquor, usually pint or half-pint bottles of wine or bourbon. When finished, he would hide the bottles, and it was his choice of hiding place that sometimes made me doubt his sanity. An empty bottle might find itself under the cushion of the big red armchair in the living room, or under one of the sofa cushions, or behind a vase on a shelf in the dining room, and once he hid his spent bottle inside the body of the Victrola.

It is plain that on some level he intended her to find the bottles—“Dead soldiers,” he called the empties—that they were his shiny glass emblems of defiance, a skull-and-crossbones trail to show he was still running his own life, when of course illness and boredom had taken it over. So she found his little bottles effortlessly, and each discovery produced a scene that might have been scripted.

“What is this?” she would say, holding the bottle by two fingers like a dead rat and staring at it as though she’d never seen one before.

“Oh, now what does it look like?” he would mutter, looking at the television.

“You’ve been drinking this poison again.”

“No,” he would say. “That’s an old one.”

“I reversed the cushion on this chair last week, and this filthy thing wasn’t there then.”

“Well, I don’t remember when I drank it. I’m not even sure it’s mine,” he would say with a shrug.

“And whose is it, then? Mine?”

And my grandfather would turn to me and give me a long, slow squint, and this would set her off.

“Oh, for the love of God, you know very well it’s not his,” she would say, and march off to the kitchen, and then it was her turn to mutter, a couple of people who had learned to communicate both directly and indirectly after thirty years of unarmed conflict. “A moron I’ve chosen to live my life with,” she would say, “an amadan I’ve got for a husband, without the sense to come in out of the rain, pouring poison down his throat and dragging a tiny boy along with him.”

There would follow the sound of the bottle being tossed violently into the garbage can.

“A brainless idiot I’m joined to for life,” she’d say loudly.

Still facing the television screen he would mutter something like, “A little drink never hurt anybody I know,” and she would hear it, as she was intended to, the softness of his voice notwithstanding, and this would launch her like a missile into a short but violent burst of anger and general name-calling, a performance that would in Shakespeare’s day have earned her the title of Village Scold.

And then she would be all right. A few minutes would pass, marked by the sounds and smells of Grandma putting dinner together, and after allowing her a short while to calm down, my grandfather would call out, “What’s for dinner?”

“God knows you don’t deserve one.”

“Probably not, but I’d like to know anyway.”

“Pork chops and boiled potatoes.”

He would nod, pleased with the answer, and I would nod along with him. She was making good things, and that meant she wasn’t holding a grudge.

Good things they were, always, she could cook anything and make it taste like food on a picnic, but it was not necessarily the menu a doctor would have put together. The salient characteristic of my grandmother’s cooking was lard. “Shortening” she called it, but it was lard, lard from a can the size of a man’s head, thick and white with the consistency of new-poured cement, and when it had melted into a pool an inch thick in the big black skillet, she would drop in the pork chops, or the chicken, or the hamburgers. If necessary, she cooked eggs in it, though she clearly felt that the ideal medium for the cooking of eggs was the grease from a half-pound of bacon.

She wasn’t trying to kill him: she was just a farm girl from the simplest part of the old country, where a breakfast or dinner that “stuck to your ribs” was more than a colorful expression. Once I saw her drop my grandfather’s toast in the bacon grease. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but she left it there and when it was soaked through, she slapped it on his plate.

“A little grease makes your insides work,” she once told me, thus giving me the notion that lard was the culinary equivalent of a good thick motor oil and suggesting to me that Grandpa was probably healthier than he looked. For his part, however, the old man frequently claimed that after one of her breakfasts he often lost the feeling in his lower legs.

A typical dinner was chicken or pork chops, potatoes, sometimes soup, a vegetable. And jello. In the years we were together she served me jello perhaps two thousand times, and it was always lemon: perhaps she found the color soothing, or had heard lemon jello had magical properties, so that was what we had. With dinner they split a quart of Meister Bräu, and indulged in the fantasy that this small quantity of beer was my grandfather’s “ration,” ignoring the fact that he’d put away a half-pint of Jim Beam earlier in the afternoon.

She made me drink milk, except on Saturdays when she gave me Pepsi-Cola. Fried pork chops, boiled potatoes, green beans, lemon jello, Pepsi. To this day, if I’m served pork chops I expect it to be followed by lemon jello, and I can’t think of any of these things, can’t taste them, without thinking of my grandmother.

Each morning when I awoke she was already up and dressed for work and tending to the needs of “the two simple-minded children that live in my poor house.” She made us sandwiches for lunch, wrapping them in a thick waxed paper, and fixed “eggnog” for him in a tall glass. It appeared to be sugar and a raw egg in a glass of milk, and after it had set a while, the contents separated into layers. Grandpa would hold it up to the light and peer at it, then shake his head.

“Oh, look at that, would you? Something in there’s moving.”

Then he would stir it and drink half of it down at a swallow, gasping afterward.

“Is it like the eggnog we have at Christmas?” I asked him once.

“Good God, no.” He stared at his eggnog and spoke in a stage whisper, “She tries to poison me.” Then he pretended to have a brilliant idea. “Here, Danny-boy, do you want it?”

I told him I had cereal, and I did, multi-colored balls of cereal that went soggy in milk and dyed it the colors of spumoni ice cream. In any case, I had no need for this glass of milk with disgusting elements of raw egg floating around in it. For his part, he seemed to find my little soggy bits of cereal repellent, and frequently I’d find him grimacing as I fished for the last shapeless bits swimming in the now-colored milk.

After she went to work, I’d play or read and he would smoke Camels at the kitchen table—a practice that seemed to be a male responsibility in most households: my uncles all did it and I remembered seeing my father sitting at our kitchen table smoking and staring out the window.

In the afternoons we went on our trips, and when we came back, he would settle in under the glow of a couple of snorts and take a short nap. As he slept, I would explore the house, unfettered by an adult hand. I went through my grandparents’ drawers and studied old photographs, read old mail, explored the dark recesses of Uncle Tom’s closet and the dresser where Uncle Mike kept magazines with pictures of girls without clothes. I understood that these magazines had something to do with sex and that I mustn’t look at them, and so I rooted them out like a termite on old wood. I went through my uncles’ pockets in search of scandal and found loose change, scraps of paper, work-related notes, receipts. I crept into the pantry and drank Log Cabin syrup straight from the little tin chimney atop the painted cabin, I spooned honey straight from the jar, I tried wine, which I found acridly repulsive, purloined hard candy from a hidden jar, stuck a greedy finger into the raspberry reserves and, finally, I sank my exploratory fangs into the wax fruit on grandma’s living room table. It was, like most wax, tasteless, and I was surprised that anything so colorful as her wax peach could be so bland. I tried to smooth out the toothmarks and set the peach back in the bowl, then bit into the wax grapes, in case the peach had been set out as a decoy.

Eventually, she was to find the tooth marks, and it happened when I was in the next room, in the dining room, where I had covered the entire dinner table with my toy soldiers. From the corner of my eye I saw her bend over the glass bowl and freeze and I shot her a quick glance. She was holding the wax peach and staring at it open-mouthed. Then she glanced from it to me with the look that she’d probably have used if I’d told her I’d gone dancing naked down Clybourn. In the end, she replaced the peach, bite marks down, and said nothing. As she walked into the kitchen, she was shaking her head.

And on another lazy afternoon in my company, my grandfather set fire to the couch.

He had nodded off with a Camel between his tobacco-stained fingers and I was playing a few feet away on the living room floor with my soldiers. I had noticed the cigarette but was still convinced at that stage of life that adults normally knew what they were doing. A while later, I saw that his hand had dropped down and loosened its grip, and the cigarette was now directly on Grandma’s sofa, her lovely flowered sofa, the prize of her living room, the cigarette coal in the center of one of the cushions. As I watched, the cigarette burned a small hole into the cushion, and then the hole grew a bright thin orange glow, and this tiny layer of fire began to eat at the sides of the hole ’til it was the size of a baseball.

I began to get nervous—not for my own safety, for thought I could outrun the fire, but for Grandpa’s: I feared that my grandmother would kill him. I remember the growing panic in my heart and then I went over to wake him: it took me several minutes and when I finally got him to open one eye, I pointed to what his wayward cigarette had done.

He bounced up like a cartoon character and stared at the burning circle for a moment, and then said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m a dead man.”

Then he began to beat at it with his hands. He could do that, beat out fire with his hands, because of something that had happened to him all those years of standing in the open doorway of a streetcar in the cold. He’d lost some of the feeling in his fingertips, and I’d seen him put out matches and unused cigarettes by casually squeezing matchhead or coal between thumb and forefinger. Now he beat at the offending flame and sent me for a glass of water, and I had to go twice because I spilled the first glass on my shirt.

When the fire was out, the room heavy with the acrid smell of wet, burnt cloth, we sat there on either side of the accusing hole. My grandfather coughed and made an irritated gesture of waving away smoke that I couldn’t see. Grandpa didn’t speak, he just kept sighing. Finally, we got up and he flipped the cushion so the hole was hidden. Then he looked at me.

“Don’t tell your grandma, or we’ll both be dead men.”

“Why me?”

“Because you were here.”

“But I don’t smoke.”

“It won’t make a bit of difference. She’ll say you were my accomplice. We’re in this together. If she finds out, there’ll be no corner of the earth where we’ll be safe.”

For weeks my grandfather attempted to hide the problem from her by the simple expedient of sitting on the sofa whenever she was home. He spent hours at a time in that one spot, as though he’d become melded to it. I tried to hold up my end of the bargain, planting myself on the sofa when he left it unguarded, but eventually she wore us down.

He was in the bathroom and I was on the wounded cushion, and she came in and announced that she needed to reverse the cushions. She asked me to get up and I feigned first deafness and then an ignorance of English, and she finally grabbed me and pulled me off the sofa. I made it as far as the door to my bedroom before I heard the sudden gasp that told me she’d found the hole.

For a moment it seemed that the power of speech had left her: she made a strangled squawking sound, like an aggrieved duck.

“Oh, what’s he gone and done now? I’ll brain him,” she said between clenched teeth, and then touched the hole as though she could heal it with her fingers. She let the cushion drop, then turned slowly to look for one of us, and found me. Her voice had snared me in the doorway and paralyzed me like wasp-sting, and I found myself uttering silent prayers to St. Joseph in his function as Patron Saint of a Happy Death. I wasn’t holding out for a happy passing, just a quick one, and then she advanced across the room like Rommel’s tanks. Her eyes, normally a soft brown, were red. No, they were glowing.

“You did that to my sofa?”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “I don’t even smoke!”

And then she smiled. “Ah,” she said. That was all she said, but it was a lot. She said “Ah” the way Hannibal probably said it when he caught the Romans at Cannae. She said “Ah” and I said a prayer for the lost soul of my grandfather.

He came out of the bathroom humming, and when he saw the hot coals in Grandma’s eyes the song died young in his throat. He looked from her to me, understood what had happened, wet his lips, and prayed for sudden eloquence or the timely intervention of the Deity.

Their conversation, if anything so one-sided can be called that, is a blur to me, though his mistakes were apparent even to a seven-year-old—the first was the old “What sofa?” routine, the second, his attempt to look puzzled, which instead made him look very stupid and seemed to vex her all the more. She rained invective on him, mixing insults with expressions of disbelief and frequently invoking Jesus or Mary or the other saints, including St. Jude whom she addressed as the Patron of Lost Causes since she was “certainly married to one.”

Much of this oration was English though there were a few words in Gaelic, and when she was done, he was pale and I could have sworn he was shorter. She left the room and went into the kitchen to bang pots and pans together, and he sank onto the armchair, pulled out his smokes, thought better of it, and jammed them back into his pocket.

I asked him if he was all right. He looked at me with his mournful Stan Laurel eyes and shook his head. “My life is over.”

She refused to eat with us that night, waiting ’til we were done before entering the kitchen. The next morning, she made and wrapped our sandwiches for lunch and fixed his eggnog and said nothing ’til she was leaving. At the door, she gave him a long look and said, “Burn a piece of my furniture today, Patrick Flynn, and we’ll need the priest.”

My grandfather just nodded and looked like a man who’s received the governor’s pardon. For several weeks after that, she found no empty liquor bottles in the dark recesses of her home, and he kept his visits to the tavern down to the minimum necessary to sustain life.

More than once I heard them arguing over his cough, his smoking, and there was a different tone to these fights. My grandmother seldom raised her voice in these discussions, my grandfather sounded frustrated rather than irritated, and they kept their voices low, as though these times were somehow private.

Gradually I came to understand that my grandfather’s afternoon naps, especially those after a couple of drinks, provided me with an almost perfect freedom: nothing woke him at these times, and it was a short jump from my rummaging through the drawers and cupboards of the house to the realization that I might do more. Shortly after the incident with the couch, I went out alone. I slipped out the back, left the screen door resting against a shoe, and went out into the alley that ran behind the house.

It was a narrow filthy place of cracked pavement with wide holes that collected a brownish oily water after a hard rain and bred mosquitoes. Garbage spilled out of small metal cans and fed mice and, on more interesting occasions, rats. We were just a few blocks from the river, and the neighborhood drew them, and on that first foray on my own, I found a dead one. I poked at it with a stick, gingerly as if it might revive itself. The body was already stiff, and something made me plunge the stick into it.

From the alley I made my way through the neighborhood, pausing at the small playground across from my house, delighted that I alone was unaccompanied by an adult. When I noticed a woman on a bench frowning my way, I left.

I was probably gone no more than twenty minutes, but I felt I’d been adventurous, I’d done something on my own, I had a secret. And when I returned to find Grandpa still sleeping, I experienced a sudden feeling of excitement, as though I’d won a victory over him.

I did little on these excursions but wander the neighborhood, and I returned each time filled with the sense of my own cleverness. Most times I stayed where I was supposed to be, but on certain afternoons I seemed to need the adventure and its attendant risks and rewards.

Most of all, I delighted in this secret that I kept from all of my family.

One evening my grandmother returned from the drug store and fixed me with an odd look. She said nothing to me but later I heard her whispering in the kitchen to my Aunt Anne, and when I went to bed that night she told me I must always make certain someone knew where I was.