THE SECTION of Flynn’s in which people eat, as opposed to the part in which they drink and wait, is huge and rambling. There are several rooms, added one by one as the restaurant has grown over the last two hundred something years, linked by passages that turn at unpredictable places and rise and fall wherever the growing Flynn’s burst through the wall of an adjoining building. The dining rooms are brightly lit, blinding in contrast with the lounge, as if a sharp moral distinction had been made between eating and drinking, a New England attitude imposed: drinking, like sex, is a furtive, dirty occupation, to be done in the dark, but eating is wholesome, and, as long as you do it neatly, you may do it with the lights on. After an hour in the lounge, when one moves into the light one is apt to experience what BW has called
. . . the penitential squint exacted from the daytime drinker, the squint that we make involuntarily when we’ve been drinking in the afternoon at that little spot on Newbury Street we favor and come out into the low winter sun and are made to feel that we have been doing something wrong, that this painful squint and its accompanying unwilled rearward jerk of the head are what we deserve, and we hang our head, a head already beginning to pound.
A group of ten is being seated at a long table. The five facing Matthew are obviously related. One of them is the grandmother of the clan, it seems, and Matthew guesses that she’s being feted. They look to him like the sort of family that doesn’t get together unless there’s a reason, an obligation. All of them have the grandmother’s curly hair, and all, male and female, wear it at nearly the same length. They all have her bulbous nose, too.
People come to Flynn’s for celebrations, as this group has done, because they regard it not so much as a place to eat as a place to be experienced, and the experience is supposed to be shared with friends. Everyone’s supposed to get together just like old times — it’s been so long since we’ve gotten together — and have a hell of a good time. Matthew has never liked going out under such circumstances. There’s always a false heartiness in the conversations, something too boisterous, like the false intimacy of salesmen who call him Matt or the phony camaraderie among people who work together but have nothing else in common.
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