believe he was remembering the days when he and my grandfather had attempted to sell gin concocted in the family bathtub, and a thin, cloudy whiskey that Uncle Frank had devised in the garage behind his rooming house, Uncle Frank’s commercial ambitions unfettered by the fact that he was a policeman. It was this ill-advised venture into the world of business that earned Uncle Martin the title of “The Old Reprobate” from my grandma, his sensible sister. He was “The Old Reprobate” and Uncle Frank, who seemed to bring disaster or violence wherever he went, was “The Great Ninny” to his sister.
“It would peel the skin off your arm,” I’d heard Grandma say about Uncle Martin’s bathtub product. “It would melt your eyeballs. People nearly died of it.”
“Oh, they did not,” Uncle Martin would say, and Grandma would just say “Billy Fahey” and nod confidently.
Uncle Martin would swallow and look away with a nervous light in his eye, and eventually say, “That was just a coincidence: he always had a bad gut.”
Once or twice I’d heard them argue this way and she’d mutter about the repulsiveness of drinking something brewed in a common bathtub. When he said it was just fine, she’d say, “Do you drink your bathwater then, Martin? What would our mother have said?”
This would end the debate: the mention of their mother, dead under the sod of County Leitrim more than thirty years, was enough to silence any argument, bring quiet and calm, and I’d heard how my grandmother once, when they were all young, had stopped a fierce brawl outside the drugstore up on Clybourn by this magical incantation. No one else ever brought her up: the use of their mother’s name seemed a trump card available only to Grandma.
Uncle Tom rescued me from Martin with a wave. I went and stood beside him and watched him greet people, even people he didn’t remember. Among these people was a wizened woman I’d never seen before who nodded to us and moved on into the funeral parlor.
“Oh, Christ,” Tom said.
“Who is that lady?”
“Nobody knows, kid. She just shows up at funerals.” And in truth, during the course of my life I was to see her at a dozen or more funerals, her presence always both amusing and vaguely reassuring to me, like a tired but beloved joke.
The high point, if there could be said to be one at a funeral, was the appearance of the MacReady sisters, both of them, including Betty who had long been rumored to be dying. She did not seem to me to be dying or even contemplating it: like her sister Mary, she was hugely rotund, talkative, loud, and aggressive. They were a year apart yet so remarkably alike that they were often referred to in family circles as “the twins,” though I once heard Uncle Mike refer to them as “the battlewagons.” The reference had confused me.
“Oh, here we go,” Mike said.
Tom nodded and I heard him mutter, “Okay, this is just what we needed.”
The MacReady sisters marched together into the funeral parlor, followed at a respectable distance by Joe Collins, Mary’s confused-looking husband—said by my uncles to be the stupidest person in the United States—and Uncle Mike muttered, “The fleet must be in, ’cause there’s the Iowa and the Missouri,” and I could see the resemblance to twin battleships, as they steamed through the mourners and forced a parting of the crowd. They wore matching, tentlike blue coats and twin pillbox hats—Mary’s was adorned by a single dangling flower, while her sister’s had none. In addition to their sizable presence, they brought noise to my parents’ funeral, like a benign wind, and I saw amusement and anticipation on many of the faces around me.
My grandfather exchanged a quick happy look with my uncles, Grandma rolled her eyes (they were her second cousins) and the sisters fell upon the happy crowd, engulfing one and all in their massive embrace. They spoke at the same time and in loud barks, chattered and called to people across the parlor, and the wake grew festive in spite of itself.
When I least expected it, they turned to me and I heard Uncle Tom whisper, “No matter what they do, smile. And don’t try to outrun ’em.”
I did as I was told, though it was difficult. They both reminded me of the loud, mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. They squeezed me, savaged my hair, patted me on the head, picked me up, and, inevitably, kissed me, leaving my entire right cheek dripping and lipstick-covered. I shot a glance at my cousin Matt and his wide-eyed horror confirmed my worst fears of how it had looked. Aunt Mary gave me another squeeze and just when I thought my breastbone would cave in, she let me go. The sisters then went on up to the caskets where there was a tense moment as they put a shoulder into one another for space on the kneeler, causing some to fear an outbreak of fisticuffs. Eventually they came to some amicable division of space and proceeded to sob quietly together. Joe Collins stood a respectful distance behind them and looked uneasy.
“Why does Aunt Mary’s husband walk behind her all the time?” I asked Tom.
“He knows it’s safer back there.”
Toward the end of the evening I fell asleep in a chair and Tom took me home and put me to bed.
The following morning they took me to the funeral. At the funeral home the priest led us in prayers, and when they closed my mother’s casket, Grandma Flynn gave in to her grief and sobbed so heartbreakingly I thought she’d die there. It was the deepest, truest expression of grief I’d yet seen in life, and I was horrified. People moved to comfort her but Aunt Anne, my shy, slender Aunt Anne, just shouldered her way to her mother and put a consoling arm around her. Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike stood on either side of me and took turns murmuring, “It’s all right, people cry at funerals,” but for the rest of the day I wondered if my grandmother, too, was going to die. A few feet away, Grandma Dorsey stood red-eyed but quiet, flanked by my aunts Mollie and Ellen, and looking small and very old.
At some point they all found people to greet and I found myself standing apart from any of them. I looked around the big, crowded parlor of the funeral home and realized my Aunt Mollie was standing a few feet away, watching me.
She smiled but like most of the others she had been crying and her cheeks were still wet, and she had a tissue crushed into one hand. I didn’t know what to say to her so I waved, and she came over and hugged me.
“It’ll be all right, sweetheart. It just doesn’t seem like it right now.” She gazed from me to the casket where her favorite brother lay and just shook her head.
After the mass, I rode with my uncles to the cemetery and watched as they gave Grandma Dorsey the flag that had been draped over my father’s casket in honor of his Navy service. When we were done there, we all returned to Grandma Flynn’s house and I experienced my first true Irish wake, that is to say, I attended a party. There was food enough to supply the Chinese Army, and liquor, and my grandmother counted herself lucky to have a home after my cousins and I were finished with it.
But it was to survive this and many other traumas in its time, my grandmother’s house, just as it had born the hurts of wind and weather, and a small fire that had given some wayward self-taught architect an excuse to tack on a questionable extension: a piece that seemed to butt itself into the rear of the big house as if the two had collided. No matter how one viewed it, my grandparents’ house was a singular place, unlike anything else in the neighborhood, a great rambling, drafty, flaking mass of wood that had come together around the time of the Chicago Fire, a frame beehive of rooms and closets and corners, turrets and cupolas and porches, a house that time had passed by. But it sat boldly at the corner of Clybourn and Leavitt and gave itself airs beside a triangular lot owned by someone else, a patch of land given over to weeds and insects and the occasional mouse. My grandparents did not own it, but rented it from a former neighbor who had moved to Evanston.
Whatever its age and tortured provenance, it was the biggest house on the street. A recent repainting in bone white had left it a gleaming relic, and I thought it palatial. At times I played out on the wide porch and pretended it was a castle, and in my imagination, I named it the Castle of the Flynns, and it became a tribal stronghold replete with dungeons and moat and battlements. My grandfather once told me it was haunted, and on