In the Castle of the Flynns. Michael Raleigh

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Dedication

       In Loving memory of Catherine Raleigh McNamara

       For the Raleighs and the McHughs: this is not their story — but it could have been

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Pictures

The Darkest News

The Council

I Discover Adult Supervision

Another Tribe Altogether

Riverview

Uncle, Hero, and Film Critic

       High Art and Baseball

       New Year, New Troubles

       A Tale of Two Fir Trees

       Christmas 1954

       Enemies and Allies

       The Roaster

       Lizards and War and Lost History

       A Cold Week in March

       Nuns and Reckonings

       Young Men and Love

       Other People’s Business

       Of Madmen, Science, and the River

       First Communion, Against All Odds

       A Tale of a Serving Spoon

       Death of a Dreadnought

       Tough Guys

       Two Weddings, One of Them Inevitable

       A Trip to the Country

       Dog Days

       Unraveling

       Brain Fever

       Runaway

       The Announcement

       Labor Day

       Aftershocks

       Epilogue

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Pictures

      I keep the photographs together always. They are framed now, my two family portraits, but wrinkled and faded from my youthful inattention: had I known what they’d someday mean to me, I’d have shown them better care. The first is a studio portrait, on a thick sort of cardboard, of four people: my parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Dorsey, my infant brother Johnny, and me. At the time of this photo, I was a few months short of my fifth birthday. Within the year Johnny would be dead of rheumatic fever. Two years after Johnny, my parents would be dead as well. It is a stiff, posed photo, and I can see my smile beginning to give way to boredom or gravity. I have studied the photograph over the years, looking for some hint that this family already sensed its impending fortune, some dark suggestion of unhappiness in the eyes. I have found none: the faces in a photo reveal only what the subjects hope. Any deeper message is probably in the imagination of the beholder.

      The second picture is quite different. I have come to think of it as The Photographer’s Nightmare. Taken in 1955, the year after the death of my parents, it is crowded, unfocused at the edges, as if distracted from its purposes by the raucous, manic behavior of several of its subjects. The lighting is uneven, one of the people has turned his head just as the photographer snapped his little button and, as a result, appears to have two faces attempting too late to blend. A person is entering the photo from the right, almost as if he has come to visit from an adjoining picture—a role he was to play in my life. The people in the photo are singing, singing badly and very loud, and the ones in the back row, the СКАЧАТЬ