My grandfather cranked his Victrola and played fiddle music and after a few shots tried to dance to it. Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin joined him, but my grandmother stopped them when Frank fell over a table and just missed sailing out the open window. A bit later an argument erupted between the MacReady sisters, so that I thought they might wrestle, and my grandmother commissioned her brothers to intervene, which they did by dragging the massive ladies out onto the dining room floor for a primeval version of a fox trot. The four of them bumped and lurched around the dining room like continents colliding, and the rest of us, Dorseys and Flynns, perhaps from relief that we hadn’t been asked to dance with them, formed a tight circle round them and clapped.
The rest of the evening was marked by loud talking, they all talked at the same time, and by their music, which they insisted on singing with, and by smoke, they smoked, all the men and half the women, Luckies and Chesterfields and Camels, unfiltered, of course, for a filter was something in a car engine.
By eleven o’clock the last of the guests had been bundled into cars or cabs and the house grew quiet at last. It was the latest I’d stayed up in years, and I fell asleep on my grandmother’s living room sofa.
Two days later some of those guests reconvened at Grandma’s house, for what could only be called a council, involving a dozen or so of my relatives—Grandma and Grandpa Flynn and their three surviving children, and about half of the Dorseys, including Grandma Dorsey, her bachelor son Gerald, her son James and his fiancée Gail, her daughters Ellen and Mollie and of course Teresa, the nun.
The subject of the council was me, not that anyone said it in so many words, but they all gave me long looks when they clomped in from the wooden porch, as though getting a fresh fix on me, reminding themselves what I was all about. For the first time, I saw that I made them uncomfortable, and several of them looked away quickly when our eyes met. My excitement at seeing all these adults and being at my grandmother’s house was soon dampened both by these uneasy glances and by the mordant atmosphere both sides brought to this table. The wake was over, this was life. I was a reminder, after all, of the deaths of two beloved young people, and it had already dawned on me that I was something of a burden, perhaps even a liability.
If I had any doubt what this meeting was to be about, it was soon dispelled when my grandma herded them all into the yellow-painted kitchen and told me to stay in the front of the house and play. She gave me a little wink and a bottle of Pepsi—a clear bribe, and the fact that it came without a glass meant it was an afterthought: she was nervous. I waited a respectable thirty seconds or so to give them a chance to get started and then crept into the dining room and crawled under the table, from where I could hear ninety percent of their conversation.
It was a tearful meeting, and once or twice I heard raised voices, always quickly hushed by Grandma Flynn barking out, “Hush up, will you, the boy’ll hear you!” in a voice that would have been heard in the second balcony at Chicago Stadium.
Their talk wandered as they tried to avoid the inevitable, but ultimately Grandma grabbed them and pulled them back to earth. In the end it was decided that no single one of them could be expected to carry this new weight.
On the Dorsey side, Aunt Ellen had three of her own, and her husband, my Uncle Roy, was dead. Uncle Gerald was a confirmed bachelor, Mollie was still single, James was about to marry, and my Uncle Joe and his wife Loretta had their hands full—they had Bernie and his sister Dorothy, and David, a child with cerebral palsy, and I now learned that an orphan was considered a similar sort of burden, for I heard someone say “they have trouble enough already.”
When Matt’s parents—my Uncle Dennis and Aunt Mary Jane—were mentioned, I heard my Grandma Flynn quickly say, “Oh, no, no, the poor things.” Someone agreed that they were in “money trouble,” but I had heard a different kind of trouble in my grandmother’s voice, my first intimation that there was something about Matt’s house that I knew nothing of.
In the end it was decided that they would all share the responsibility. I would live with the Flynns. On certain days of the week, my Grandmother Dorsey would take care of me; on other days, I’d be in the care of Grandpa Flynn. On weekends, my Uncle Tom would help out, as would my Uncle Mike. The married ones expressed their determination to do what they could, to take me out to spend time with my cousins on occasion and give the others a break. I was to live, though, with Grandma and Grandpa Flynn, which also meant with Uncles Tom and Mike and Aunt Anne.
There had been some talk of my moving in with Grandma Dorsey and, had the deal turned out differently, I might have had an entirely different life, for Grandma Dorsey was a quiet, passive woman worn down by decades of life with the late Grandpa Dorsey, a difficult man who had led his family through disasters beyond my ability to comprehend.
I had heard more than one remark proposing beatification for Grandma Dorsey by virtue of having survived life with Grandpa Dorsey, or, as Grandma Flynn put it, “for not putting an end to that one and tossing the body in the river.” It was clear to me that, had Grandma Flynn been espoused to Grandpa Dorsey, it would have been a short, stormy marriage, and would have ended badly for the husband.
That night, as I went to bed, I said a small prayer of thanks to God for making me so popular that my relatives felt they had to share me. Half a dozen of them were still out there in the yellow kitchen, relaxed now that a decision of sorts had been made and most of them had dodged this strange new bullet. They cracked open a couple of quarts of Sieben’s beer and chatted. The talk turned to the two young ones they’d just buried, and once or twice I heard their voices break, but eventually my uncles took over with funny stories about my mother and father, and then it sounded like a party. I sat up on one elbow and listened to it all. Their voices were reassuring to me: I was literally surrounded by people who would take care of me.
It proved to be the only night in a period of almost five months that I felt reassured about anything. By the following night, when the “conference” with its party atmosphere had already begun to blend into the blurred tangle of recent events, the new terror that I’d come to know at bedtime had returned. I cocooned myself in the covers, burrowed beneath the fat old pillow I’d inherited—it had been my mother’s, Grandma told me—and wept. The night after my parents had died, I’d fought sleep for hours, convinced that if I closed my eyes I’d die during the night. Each night the fear returned, and though I gradually came to realize I wasn’t going to pass away in my sleep, I became convinced that I lived an unprotected life, that I had lost a sort of mystical shield afforded to each child at the outset of life, and that the love of these grandparents, uncles, and aunts was a poor substitute for the genuine article.
During those first few weeks I spent a great deal of time in small dark places: closets, darkened rooms, under tables. I drew pictures of my parents, dozens of them, scores of them each week—pictures in pencil and pen and in crayon, pictures of my parents and me at the park, at the zoo, in Wisconsin Dells where we’d gone the summer my baby brother Johnny had died, at Riverview, at home eating dinner. I crawled under my grandmother’s table and drew them obsessively, and one day when I came home from a walk with my grandfather, my Uncle Tom was looking at them with my grandmother. Her eyes were red and she was shaking her head. He looked at me curiously, and I realized he wasn’t concerned with the implicit sadness in the drawings.
“You drew all these, Danny?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know you could draw. Can your friends draw like this?”
I shook my head. His reaction puzzled me: it was a well-known fact in school that no one drew as well, but no one ran as fast as Jimmy Kaszak, and Theodore Renzi could play the accordion. As an afterthought I mentioned that Michael Neely could draw airplanes but not people. He nodded.
“You draw what you feel like drawing, kiddo, but next time you draw something besides your … you know, besides