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