'Tis

The day after the Dachau laundry detail my neck swells up and the doctor tells me pack a bag, he’s sending me back to Munich, that I’ve got the mumps. He wants to know if I was near children because that’s where the mumps come from, children, and when a man gets them it could be the end of his line.

Know what I mean, soldier?

No, sir.

It means you might never have kids yourself.

I’m sent in a jeep with a driver, Corporal John Calhoun, who tells me the mumps is God’s punishment for fornicating with German women and I should take this as a sign. He stops the jeep and when he tells me kneel with him by the side of the road to beg God’s forgiveness before it’s too late I have to obey because of his two stripes. There’s froth at the corners of his mouth and I know from growing up in Limerick that’s a sure sign of lunacy and if I don’t drop to my knees with John Calhoun he might turn violent in the name of God. He raises his arms to the sky and praises God for sending me the gift of the mumps just in time to mend my ways and save my soul and he would like God to keep sending me further gentle reminders of my sinful ways, chicken pox, toothache, measles, severe headaches and pneumonia if necessary. He knows it was no accident he was chosen to drive me to Munich with my mumps. He knows the Korean War was started so that he could be drafted and sent to Germany to save my soul and the souls of all the other fornicators. He thanks God for the privilege and promises to watch over the soul of Private McCourt in the mumps ward of the Munich military hospital as long as the Lord desires. He tells the Lord he is happy to be saved, that he’s joyous, oh, joyous, indeed, and he sings a song about gathering by the river and pounds the steering wheel and drives so fast I wonder if I’ll be dead in a ditch before I’m ever cured of the mumps.

He leads me down the hospital hall, sings his hymns, tells the world I am saved, that the Lord hath sent a sign, yeah verily, the mumps, that I am ready to repent. Praise God. He tells the admissions medic, a sergeant, that I am to be given a Bible and time for prayer and the sergeant tells him get the hell outa heah. Corporal Calhoun blesses him for that, blesses him from the bottom of his heart, promises to pray for the sergeant who is clearly on the side of the devil, tells the sergeant he’s lost but if he’ll right now drop to his knees and accept the Lord Jesus he’ll know the peace that passeth all understanding and he foams so much at the mouth his chin is snow.

The sergeant comes from behind his desk and pushes Calhoun down the hall to the front door with Calhoun telling him, Repent, Sergeant, repent. Let us pause, brother, and pray for this Irishman touched by the Lord, touched with the mumps. Oh, let us gather by the river.

He is still pleading and praying when the sergeant propels him into the Munich night.

A German orderly tells me his name is Hans and takes me to a six-bed ward where I’m issued hospital pajamas and two cold bulging ice packs. When he tells me, Zis iss for your neck and zis iss for your bollez, four men in the beds chant, Zis iss for your neck and zis iss for your bollez. He smiles and places one ice pack on my neck, the other in my groin. The men lob ice packs at him for more ice and tell him, Hans, you’re so good at catching you could play baseball.

One man in a corner bed whimpers and doesn’t throw his ice pack. Hans goes to his bed. Dimino, would you like ice?

No, I don’t want ice. What’s the use?

Oh, Dimino.

Oh, Dimino, my ass. Goddam Krauts. Look what you did to me. Gave me the goddam mumps. I’ll never have kids.

Oh, you will haf kids, Dimino.

How would you know? My wife will think I’m a fairy.

Oh, Dimino, you’re not a fairy, and Hans turns to the other men, Is Dimino a fairy?

Yeah, yeah, he’s a fairy, you’re a fairy, Dimino, and he turns to the wall, sobbing.

Hans touches his shoulder. They don’t mean it, Dimino.

And the men chant, We mean it, we mean it. You’re a fairy, Dimino. We got swollen balls and you got swollen balls but you’re a crybaby fairy.

And they chant till Hans pats Dimino’s shoulder again, hands him ice packs and tells him, Here, Dimino, keep your bollez cool and you will have many chiltren.

Will I, Hans? Will I?

Oh, you will, Dimino.

Thanks, Hans. You’re an okay Kraut.

Thanks, Dimino.

Hans, you a fairy?

Yes, Dimino.

That why you like putting ice packs on our balls?

No, Dimino. Iss my job.

I don’t mind if you’re a fairy, Hans.

Thanks you, Dimino.

You’re welcome, Hans.

Another orderly pushes a book cart into the ward and I have a feast of reading. Now I can finish the book I started coming from Ireland on the ship, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I’d rather read F. Scott Fitzgerald or P. G. Wodehouse but Dostoyevsky is hanging over me with his story of Raskolnikov and the old woman. It makes me feel guilty all over again after the way I stole money from Mrs. Finucane in Limerick when she was dead in the chair and I wonder if I should ask for an army chaplain and confess my awful crime.

No. I might be able to confess in the darkness of an ordinary church confession box but I could never do it here in daylight all swollen with the mumps with a screen around the bed and the priest looking at me. I could never tell him how Mrs. Finucane was planning to leave her money for priests to say Masses for her soul and how I stole some of that money. I could never tell him about the sins I committed with the girl in the refugee camp. Even while I think of her I get so excited I have to interfere with myself under the blankets and there I am with one sin on top of another. If I ever confessed to a priest now I’d be excommunicated altogether so my only hope is that I’ll be hit by a truck or something falling from a great height and that will give me a second to say a perfect Act of Contrition before I die and no priest will be necessary.

Sometimes I think I’d be the best Catholic in the world if they’d only do away with priests and let me talk to God there in the bed.

17

After the hospital two good things happen. I’m promoted to corporal because of my powerful typing when I turn in supply reports and the reward is a two-week furlough to Ireland if I want it. My mother wrote to me weeks ago to say how lucky she was to get one of the new corporation houses up in Janesboro and how lovely it is to have a few pounds for new furniture. She’ll have a bathroom with a tub, a sink, a toilet and hot and cold water. She’ll have a kitchen with a gas range and a sink and a sitting room with a fireplace where she can sit and warm her shins and read the paper or a nice romance. She’ll have a garden in the front for little flowers and plants and a garden in the back for all kinds of vegetables and she won’t know herself with all the luxury.

All the way on the train to Frankfurt I’m dreaming of the new house and the comfort it’s bringing my mother and my brothers, Michael and Alphie. You’d think that after all the miserable days in Limerick I wouldn’t even want to go back to Ireland but when the plane approaches the coast and the shadows of clouds are moving across the fields and it’s all green and mysterious I can’t stop myself from crying. People look at me and it’s a good thing they don’t ask me why I’m crying. I wouldn’t be able to tell them. I wouldn’t be able to describe the feeling that came around my heart about Ireland because there are no words for it and because I never knew I’d feel this way. It’s strange to think there are no words for the way I feel unless they’re in Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson or Dostoyevsky and I didn’t notice them.

My mother is at the railway station to meet me, smiling with her new white teeth, togged out in a bright new frock and shiny black shoes. My brother Alphie is with her. He’s going on twelve and wearing a gray suit that must have been his confirmation suit last year. You can see he’s proud of me, especially my corporal’s stripes, so proud he wants to carry my duffel bag. He tries but it’s too heavy and I can’t let him drag it along the ground because of the cuckoo clock and the Dresden china I brought my mother.

I feel proud myself knowing that people are looking at me in my American army uniform. It isn’t every day you see an American corporal getting off the train at the Limerick railway and I can’t wait to walk the streets knowing the girls are going to be whispering, Who’s that? Isn’t he gorgeous? They’ll probably think I fought the Chinese hand to hand in Korea, that I’m back for a rest from the serious wound which I’m too brave to show.

When we leave the station and walk to the street I know we’re not going the right way. We should be going toward Janesboro and the new house, instead we’re walking by the People’s Park the way we did when we first came from America and I want to know why we’re going to Grandma’s house in Little Barrington Street. My mother says that, well, the electricity and the gas aren’t in the new house yet.

Why not?

Well, I didn’t bother.

Why didn’t you bother?

Wisha, I don’t know.

That puts me in a rage. You’d think she’d be glad to be out of that slum in Little Barrington Street and up there in her new house planting flowers and making tea in her new kitchen that looks out on the garden. You’d think she’d be longing for the new beds with the clean sheets and no fleas and a bathroom. But no. She has to hang on to the slum and I don’t know why. She says ’tis hard moving out and leaving her brother, my Uncle Pat, that he’s not well in himself and barely hobbling. He still sells papers all around Limerick but, God help him, he’s a bit helpless and didn’t he let us stay in that house when we were in a bad way. I tell her I don’t care, I’m not going back to that house in the lane. I’ll stay here in the National Hotel till she gets the electricity and gas up in Janesboro. I hoist my duffel bag to my shoulder and when I walk away she whimpers after me, Oh, Frank, Frank, one night, one last night in my mother’s house, sure it wouldn’t kill you, one night.

I stop and turn and bark at her, I don’t want one night in your mother’s house. What the hell is the use of sending you the allotment if you want to live like a pig?

She cries and reaches her arms to me and Alphie’s eyes are wide, but I don’t care. I sign in at the National Hotel and throw my duffel bag on the bed and wonder what kind of a stupid mother I have who’ll stay in a slum a minute more than she has to. I sit on the bed in my American army uniform and my new corporal’s stripes and wonder if I should stay here in a fit of rage or walk the streets so that the world can admire me. I look out the window at Tait’s clock, the Dominican church, the Lyric Cinema beyond where small boys are waiting at the entrance to the gods where I used to go for tuppence. The boys are raggedy and rowdy and if I sit at this window long enough I can imagine I’m looking back at my own days in Limerick. It’s only ten years since I was twelve and falling in love with Hedy Lamarr up there on the screen with Charles Boyer, the two of them in Algiers and Charles saying, Come wiz me to ze Casbah. I went around saying that for weeks till my mother begged me to stop. She loved Charles Boyer herself and she’d prefer to hear it from him. She loved James Mason, too. All the women in the lane loved James Mason, he was so handsome and dangerous. They all agreed it was the dangerous part they loved. Sure a man without danger is hardly a man at all. Melda Lyons would tell all the women in Kathleen O’Connell’s shop how she was mad for James Mason and they’d laugh when she said, Bejesus, if I met him I’d have him naked as an egg in a minute. That would make my mother laugh harder than anyone in Kathleen O’Connell’s shop and I wonder if she’s over there now telling Melda and the women how her son Frank got off the train and wouldn’t come home for a night and I wonder if the women will go home and say Frankie McCourt is back in his American uniform and he’s too high and mighty now for his poor mother below there in the lane though we should have known for he always had the odd manner like his father.

It wouldn’t kill me to walk over to my grandmother’s house this one last time. I’m sure my brothers Michael and Alphie are bragging to the whole world that I’m coming home and they’ll be sad if I don’t stroll down the lane in my corporal’s stripes.

The minute I go down the steps of the National Hotel the boys at the Lyric Cinema call across Pery Square, Hoi, Yankee soldier, yoo hoo, do you have any choon gum? Do you have a spare shilling in your pocket or a bar of candy in your pocket?

They pronounce candy like Americans and that makes them laugh so hard they fall against each other and the wall.

There’s one boy off to the side who stands with his hands in his pockets and I can see he has two red scabby eyes in a face full of pimples and a head shaved to the bone. It’s hard for me to admit that’s the way I looked ten years ago and when he calls across the square, Hoi, Yankee soldier, turn around so we can all see your fat arse, I want to give him a good fong in his own scrawny arse. You’d think he’d have respect for the uniform that saved the world even if I’m only a supply clerk now with dreams of getting my dog back. You’d think Scabby Eyes would notice my corporal’s stripes and have a bit of respect but no, that’s the way it is when you grow up in a lane. You have to pretend you don’t give a fiddler’s fart even when you do.

Still, I’d like to cross the square to Scabby Eyes and shake him and tell him he’s the spitting image of me when I was his age but I didn’t stand outside the Lyric Cinema tormenting Yanks over their fat arses. I’m trying to convince myself that’s the way I was myself, till another part of my mind tells me I wasn’t a bit different from Scabby Eyes, that I was just as liable as him to torment Yanks or Englishmen or anyone with a suit or a fountain pen in his top pocket riding around on a new bike, that I was just as liable to throw a rock through the window of a respectable house and run away laughing one minute and raging the next.

All I can do now is walk away keeping myself twisted to the wall so that Scabby Eyes and the boys won’t see my arse and have ammunition.

It’s all confusion and dark clouds in my head till the other idea comes. Go back to the boys like a GI from the films and give them change from your pocket. It won’t kill you.

They watch me coming and they look as if they’re about to run though no one wants to be a coward and run first. When I dole out the change all they can say is, Ooh, God, and the different way they look at me makes me feel happy. Scabby Eyes takes his share and says nothing till I’m walking away and he calls after me, Hey, mister, sure you don’t have any arse at all at all.

And that makes me feel happier than anything.

The minute I turn off Barrington Street and down the hill to the lane I hear people saying, Oh, God, here’s Frankie McCourt in his American uniform. Kathleen O’Connell is at the door of her shop laughing and offering me a piece of Cleeve’s toffee. Sure, didn’t you always love that, Frankie, even if it destroyed the teeth of Limerick. Her niece is here, too, the one that lost an eye when the knife she was using to open a bag of potatoes slipped and went into her head. She’s laughing over the Cleeve’s toffee, too, and I’m wondering how you can still laugh with an eye gone.

Kathleen calls down to the little fat woman at the corner of the lane, He’s here, Mrs. Patterson, a regular film star he is. Mrs. Patterson takes my face in her hands and tells me, I’m happy for your poor mother, Frankie, the terrible life she had.

And there’s Mrs. Murphy who lost her husband at sea in the war, living now in sin with Mr. White, nobody in the lanes the slightest bit shocked, and smiling at me, You are a film star, indeed, Frankie, and how’s your poor eyes. Sure, they look grand.

The whole lane is out standing at doors and telling me I’m looking grand. Even Mrs. Purcell is telling me I’m looking grand and she’s blind. But I understand that’s what she’d tell me if she could see and when I come near her she holds out her arms and tells me, Come here outa that, Frankie McCourt, and give me a hug for the sake of the days we listened to Shakespeare and Sean O’Casey on the wireless together.

And when she puts her arms around me she says, Arrah, God above, there isn’t a pick on you. Aren’t they feeding you in the American army? But what matter, you smell grand. They always smell grand, the Yanks.

It’s hard for me to look at Mrs. Purcell and the delicate eyelids that barely flutter on the eyes set back in her head and remember the nights when she let me sit in the kitchen listening to plays and stories on the wireless and the way she’d think nothing of giving me a mug of tea and a big cut of bread and jam. It’s hard because the people in the lane are at their doors delighted and I’m ashamed of myself for walking away from my mother and sulking on the bed in the National Hotel. How could she explain to the neighbors that she met me at the station and I wouldn’t come home? I’d like to walk the few steps to my mother at her door and tell her how sorry I am but I can’t say a word for fear the tears might come and she’d say, Oh, your bladder is near your eye.

I know she’d say that to bring on a laugh and keep her own tears back so that we wouldn’t all feel shy and ashamed of our tears. All she can do now is say what any mother would in Limerick, You must be famished. Would you like a nice cup of tea?

My Uncle Pat is sitting in the kitchen and when he lifts his face to me it makes me sick to see the redness of his eyes and the yellow ooze. It reminds me of little Scabby Eyes over at the Lyric Cinema. It reminds me of myself.

Uncle Pat is my mother’s brother and he’s known all over Limerick as Ab Sheehan. Some people call him the Abbot and no one knows why. He says, That’s a grand uraform you have there, Frankie. Where’s your big gun? He laughs and shows the yellow stubs of teeth in his gums. His hair is black and gray and thick on his head from not being washed and there’s dirt in the creases on his face. His clothes, too, shine with the grease of not being washed and I wonder how my mother can live with him and not keep him clean till I remember how stubborn he is about not washing himself and wearing the same clothes day and night till they fall from his body. My mother couldn’t find the soap once and when she asked him if he had seen it he said, Don’t be blamin’ me for the soap. I didn’t see the soap. I didn’t wash meself in a week. And he said it as if everyone should admire him. I’d like to strip him in the backyard and hose him down with hot water till the dirt left the creases on his face and the pus ran from his eyes.

Mam makes the tea and it’s good to see she has decent cups and saucers now not like the old days when we drank from jam jars. The Abbot refuses the new cups. I want me own mug, he says. My mother argues with him that this mug is a disgrace with all the dirt in the cracks where all kinds of diseases might be lurking. He doesn’t care. He says, That was me mother’s mug that she left to me, and there’s no arguing with him when you know he was dropped on his head in his infancy. He gets up to limp out to the backyard lavatory and when he’s gone Mam says she did everything to move him out of this house and stay with her for a while. No, he won’t go. He’s not going to leave his mother’s house and the mug she gave him long ago and the little statue of the Infant of Prague and the big picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus above in the bedroom. No, he’s not going to leave all that. What matter. Mam has Michael and Alphie to take care of, Alphie still in school and poor Michael washing dishes down at the Savoy Restaurant, God help him.

We finish our tea and I take a walk with Alphie down O’Connell Street so that everyone will see me and admire me. We meet Michael coming up the street from his job and there’s a pain in my heart when I see him, the black hair falling down to his eyes and his body a bag of bones with clothes as greasy as the Abbot’s from washing dishes all day. He smiles in his shy way and says, God, you’re looking very fit, Frankie. I smile back at him and I don’t know what to say because I’m ashamed of the way he looks and if my mother were here I’d yell at her and ask her why Michael has to look like this. Why can’t she get him decent clothes or why can’t the Savoy Restaurant at least give him an apron to save himself from the grease? Why did he have to leave school at fourteen to wash dishes? If he came from the Ennis Road or the North Circular Road he’d be in school now playing rugby and going to Kilkee on his holidays. I don’t know what’s the use of coming back to Limerick where children are still running around in bare feet and looking at the world through scabby eyes, where my brother Michael has to wash dishes and my mother takes her time moving to a decent house. This is not the way I expected it to be and it makes me so sad I wish I were back in Germany drinking beer in Lenggries.

Some day I’ll get them out of here, my mother, Michael, Alphie, over to New York where Malachy is already working and ready to join the air force so that he won’t be drafted and sent to Korea. I don’t want Alphie to leave school at the age of fourteen like the rest of us. At least he’s at the Christian Brothers and not a National school like Leamy’s, the one we went to. Some day he’ll be able to go to secondary school so that he’ll know Latin and other important things. Now at least he has clothes and shoes and food and he needn’t be ashamed of himself. You can see how sturdy he is, not like Michael, the bag of bones.

We turn and make our way back up O’Connell Street and I know people are admiring me in my GI uniform till some call out, Jesus, is that you, Frankie McCourt? and the whole world knows I’m not a real American GI, that I’m just someone from the back lanes of Limerick all togged out in the American uniform with the corporal’s stripes.

My mother is coming down the street all smiles. The new house will have electricity and gas tomorrow and we can move in. Aunt Aggie sent word she heard I’d arrived and she wants us to come over for tea. She’s waiting for us now.

Aunt Aggie is all smiles, too. It’s not like the old days when there was nothing in her face but bitterness over not having children of her own and even if there was bitterness she was the one who made sure I had decent clothes for my first job. I think she’s impressed with my uniform and my corporal’s stripes the way she keeps asking if I’d like more tea, more ham, more cheese. She’s not that generous with Michael and Alphie and you can see it’s up to my mother to make sure they have enough. They’re too shy to ask for more or they’re afraid. They know she has a fierce temper from not having children of her own.

Her husband, Uncle Pa Keating, doesn’t sit at the table at all. He’s over by the coal range with a mug of tea and all he does is smoke cigarettes and cough till he’s weak, clutching at himself and laughing, These feckin’ fags will kill me in the end.

My mother says, You should give ’em up, Pa, and he says, And if I did, Angela, what would I do with myself? Would I sit here with my tea and stare at the fire?

She says, They’ll kill you, Pa.

And if they do, Angela, I won’t give a fiddler’s fart.

That’s the part of Uncle Pa I always loved, the way he doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart about anything. If I could be like him I’d be free though I wouldn’t want his lungs the way they were destroyed by German gas in the Great War, then years working in the Limerick Gas Works and now fags by the fireplace. I’m sad he’s sitting there killing himself when he’s the only man who ever told the truth. He’s the one that told me don’t get caught taking tests for the post office when I could save my money and go to America. You could never imagine Uncle Pa telling a lie. It would kill him faster than gas or the fags.

He’s still all black from shoveling coke and coal at the Gas Works and there’s no flesh on his bones. When he looks up from his place by the fire the whites of his eyes are dazzling around the blue. You can see when he looks over at us he has a special fondness for my brother Michael. I wish he had that fondness for me but he doesn’t and it’s enough to know he bought me my first pint long ago and told me the truth. I’d like to tell him the way I feel about him. No, I’m afraid someone would laugh.

After the tea at Aunt Aggie’s I’m thinking of going back to my room at the National Hotel but I’m afraid my mother will get the hurt look in her eyes again. Now I’ll have to doss in my grandmother’s bed with Michael and Alphie and I know the fleas will drive me mad. Ever since I left Limerick there hasn’t been a flea in my life but now that I’m a GI with a bit of flesh on my bones I’ll be eaten alive.

Mam says, No. There’s a powder called DDT that kills everything and she has it sprinkled all over the house. I tell her it’s what we were sprayed with from small planes flying over our heads in Fort Dix so that we’d be saved from the torment of mosquitoes.

Still, it’s crowded in the bed with Michael and Alphie. The Abbot is in his bed across the room grunting and eating from a paper of fish and chips the way he always did. I can’t sleep listening to him and thinking of the days when I licked the grease from the newspaper that held his fish and chips. Here I am in the old bed with my uniform hanging over the back of a chair with nothing changed in Limerick but the DDT that keeps the fleas away. It’s a comfort to think of the children who can sleep now with the DDT and not have the torment of the fleas.

The next day my mother tries for the last time to get Uncle Pat, her brother, to move up to Janesboro with us. He says, Noah, noah. That’s the way he talks from being dropped on his head. He won’t go. He’ll stay here and when we’re all gone he’ll move into the big bed, his mother’s bed that all of us slept in for years. He always wanted that bed and now he’ll have it and he’ll have his tea from his mother’s mug every morning.

My mother looks at him and the tears are there again. It makes me impatient and I want her to take her things and go. If the Abbot wants to be that stupid and stubborn let him be. She says, You don’t know what it is to have a brother like this. You’re lucky all your brothers are whole.

Whole? What is she talking about?

Lucky you are to have brothers that are sensible and healthy and never dropped on their heads.

She cries again and asks the Abbot if he’d like a nice cup of tea and he says, Noah.

Wouldn’t he like to come up to the new house and have a nice warm bath in the new bathtub?

Noah.

Oh, Pat, oh, Pat, oh, Pat.

She’s so helpless with tears she has to sit down and he does nothing but stare at her out of his oozing eyes. He stares at her without a word till he reaches for his mother’s mug and says, I’ll have me mother’s mug and me mother’s bed that ye kept me out of all these years.

Alphie goes over to Mam and asks her if we can go to our new house. He’s only eleven and he’s excited. Michael is already at the Savoy Restaurant washing dishes and when he’s finished he can come to the new house where he’ll have hot and cold running water and he can take the first bath of his life.

Mam dries her eyes and stands. Are you sure now, Pat, you won’t come? You can bring the mug if you like but we can’t bring the bed.

Noah.

And that’s the end of it. She says, This is the house I grew up in. When I went to America I didn’t even look back going up the lane. ’Tis all different now. I’m forty-four years of age and ’tis all different.

She puts on her coat and stands looking at her brother and I’m so tired of her moaning I want to pull her out of the house. I tell Alphie, Come on, and we move out the door so that she has to follow us. Whenever she’s hurt her face grows whiter and her nose sharper and that’s the way it is now. She won’t talk to me, treats me as if I had done something wrong by sending the allotment so that she could have some kind of a decent life. I don’t want to talk to her either because it’s hard to feel sympathy for someone, even your mother, who wants to stay in a slum with a brother who’s simple from being dropped on his head.

She’s like that in the bus all the way up to Janesboro. Then, at the door of the new house, she starts foostering in her bag. Oh, God, she says, I must have left the key behind, which shows she didn’t want to leave her old house in the first place. That’s what Corporal Dunphy told me once in Fort Dix. His wife had that habit of forgetting keys and when you have that habit it means you don’t want to go home. It means you have a dread of your own door. Now I have to knock next door to see if they’ll let me go around to the back in case there’s a window open for me to climb in.

That puts me in such a bad mood I can barely enjoy the new house. It’s different with her. The minute she steps into the hall the paleness goes from her face and the sharpness from her nose. The house is already furnished, at least she did that, and now she says what every mother in Limerick would say, Well, we might as well have a nice cup of tea. She’s like Captain Boyle yelling at Juno in Juno and the Paycock, Tay, tay, tay, if a man was dyin’, you’d be tryin’ to make him swally a cup o’ tay.

18

All the years I grew up in Limerick I watched people go to dances at Cruise’s Hotel or the Stella Ballroom. Now I can go myself and I needn’t be a bit shy with the girls with my American uniform and my corporal’s stripes. If they ask me was I ever in Korea and was I wounded I’ll give them a small smile and act as if I don’t want to talk about it. I might limp a little and that might be enough of an excuse for not being able to dance properly which I never could anyway. There might be at least one nice girl who will be sensitive about my wound and take me to a table for a glass of lemonade or stout.

Bud Clancy is up on the stage with his band and recognizes me the minute I walk in. He signals for me to go up to him. How are you, Frankie? Back from the wars, ha ha ha. Would you like us to play a special request?

I tell him “American Patrol” and he talks into the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s one of our own home from the wars, Frankie McCourt. And I’m in heaven with everyone looking at me. They don’t look long because once “American Patrol” starts they’re twirling and swinging away on the floor. I stand by the bandstand wondering how they can go on dancing and ignoring an American corporal in their midst. I never thought I’d be ignored like this and now I have to ask a girl to dance to save face. The girls are ranged in seats along the walls, drinking lemonade, chatting, and when I ask them to dance they shake their heads, No, thanks. Only one says, yes, and when she gets up I notice she has a limp and that puts me in a quandary wondering if I should postpone my own limp for fear she might think I was mocking her. I can’t leave her standing there all night so I lead her out to the dance floor and now I notice everyone looking at me because her limp is so bad she nearly loses her balance every time she steps forward on the right leg that’s shorter than the left. It’s hard to know what to do when you have to dance with someone with such a serious limp. I know now how foolish it would be for me to put on my false war limp. The whole world would be laughing at us, me going one way, she the other way. What’s worse is I don’t know what to say to her. I know that if you have the right thing to say you can save any situation but I’m afraid to say anything. Should I say, Sorry for your limp, or, How did you get it? She doesn’t give me a chance to say anything. She barks at me, Are you going to stand there gawking all night? and I can’t do anything but lead her to the floor with Bud Clancy’s band playing “Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you hurry me home.” I don’t know why Bud has to play fast tunes when girls with limps like this are barely able to put one foot before the other. Why couldn’t he play “Moonlight Serenade” or “Sentimental Journey” so that I could use the few steps I learned from Emer in New York? Now the girl is asking me if I think this is a funeral and I notice she has the flat accent that shows she’s from a poor part of Limerick. Come on, Yank, start swinging, she says, and steps away and twirls on her one good leg as fast as a top. Another couple bumps against us and they tell her, Powerful, Madeline, powerful. You’re out on your picky tonight, Madeline. Better than Ginger Rogers herself.

Girls along the wall are laughing. My face is on fire and I wish to God Bud Clancy would play “Three O’Clock in the Morning” so that I could lead Madeline back to her seat and give up dancing forever but, no, Bud starts a slow one, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” and Madeline presses herself up against me with her nose in my chest and pushes me around the floor, clumping and limping, till she steps back from me and tells me if this is the way Yanks dance then she’ll dance from this day out with the men of Limerick who know how, thank you very much, indeed.

The girls along the wall laugh even harder. Even the men who can’t get anyone to dance with them and spend their time drinking pints are laughing and I know I might as well leave because no one will dance with me after the spectacle I made of myself. I have such a desperate feeling and I’m so ashamed of myself that I want them to feel ashamed and the only way to do that is to put on the limp and hope they’ll think it’s a war wound but when I hobble toward the door the girls shriek and turn so hysterical with laughter I run down the stairs and into the street so ashamed I want to throw myself into the River Shannon.

The next day Mam tells me she heard I went to a dance last night, that I danced with Madeline Burke from Mungret Street and everyone is saying, Wasn’t that very good of Frankie McCourt to dance with Madeline the way she is, God help us, an’ him in his uniform an’ all.

It doesn’t matter. I won’t go out in my uniform anymore. I’ll wear civilian clothes and no one will be looking to see if I have a fat arse. If I go to a dance I’ll stand by the bar and drink pints with the men who pretend they don’t care when the girls say no.

I have ten days left on my furlough and I wish it was ten minutes so that I could go back to Lenggries and get whatever I want for a pound of coffee and a carton of cigarettes. Mam says I’m acting very dour but I can’t explain the strange feelings I have for Limerick after all the bad times of my childhood and now the way I disgraced myself at the dance. I don’t care if I was good to Madeline Burke and her limp. That’s not what I came back to Limerick for. I’ll never try to dance with anyone again without looking to see if they have legs the same length. It should be easy if I watch them going to the lavatory. In the long run it’s easier to be with Buck and Rappaport, even Weber, taking the laundry to Dachau.

But I can’t tell my mother any of this. It’s hard to tell anyone anything especially if it’s about coming and going. You have to get used to a big powerful place like New York where you could be dead in your bed for days with a strange odor coming from your room before anyone would notice. Then you’re put into the army and you have to get used to men from all over America, all colors and shapes. When you go to Germany you look at people on the streets and in the beer places. You have to get used to them, too. They seem ordinary though you’d like to lean across to the group at the next table and say, Did anyone here kill Jews? Of course we were told in army orientation sessions to keep our mouths shut and treat Germans as allies in the war against godless communism but you’d still like to ask out of pure curiosity or to see the looks on their faces.

The hardest part of all the coming and going is Limerick. I’d like to walk around and be admired for my uniform and corporal’s stripes and I suppose I would if I hadn’t grown up here but I’m known to too many people because of the time I spent delivering telegrams and working for Easons and now all I get is, Ah, Jaysus, Frankie McCourt, is that yourself? Aren’t you lookin’ grand entirely. How’re your poor eyes and how’s your poor mother? You never looked better, Frankie.

I could be wearing the uniform of a general but all I am to them is Frankie McCourt the scabby-eyed telegram boy with the poor suffering mother.

The best part of being in Limerick is walking around with Alphie and Michael though Michael is usually busy with a girl who’s mad about him. All the girls are mad about him with his black hair and blue eyes and shy smile.

Oh, Mikey John, they say, isn’t he gorgeous.

If they say it to his face he blushes and that makes them love him even more. My mother says he’s a grand dancer, that’s what she heard, and no one is better singing “When April showers, they come your way.” He was having his dinner one day and the news came on the radio that Al Jolson had died and he got up, crying, and walked away from his dinner. It’s a very serious thing when a boy walks away from his dinner and it proved how much Michael loved Al Jolson.

With all his talent I know Michael should be in America and he will because I’ll make sure of it.

There are days I walk the streets in civilian clothes by myself. I have a notion that when I visit all the places we lived in I’m in a tunnel through the past where I know I’ll be happy to come out at the other end. I stand outside Leamy’s School where I got whatever education I have, good or bad. Next door is the St. Vincent de Paul Society where my mother went to keep us from starving. I wander the streets from church to church, memories everywhere. There are voices, choirs, hymns, priests preaching or murmuring during confession. I can look at the doors on every street in Limerick and know I delivered telegrams at every one.

I meet schoolmasters from Leamy’s National School and they tell me I was a fine boy even if they forget how they whacked me with stick and cane when I couldn’t remember the proper answers for the catechism or the dates and names in Ireland’s long sad history. Mr. Scanlon tells me there’s no use in being in America unless I make a fortune for myself and Mr. O’Halloran, the headmaster, stops his car to ask me about my life in America and to remind me of what the Greeks said, that there is no royal road to knowledge. He’ll be very surprised, he says, if I turn my back on books to join the shopkeepers of the world, to fumble in the greasy till. He smiles with his President Roosevelt smile and drives away.

I meet priests from our own church, St. Joseph’s, and other churches where I might have gone to confession or delivered telegrams but they pass me. You have to be rich to get a nod from a priest, unless he’s a Franciscan.

Still I sit in silent churches to look at altars, pulpits, confessionals. I’d like to know how many Masses I attended, how many sermons frightened the life out of me, how many priests were shocked by my sins before I gave up going to confession altogether. I know I’m doomed the way I am though I’d confess to a kindly priest if I could find one. Sometimes I wish I could be a Protestant or a Jew because they don’t know any better. When you belong to the True Faith there are no excuses and you’re trapped.

There’s a letter from my father’s sister, Aunt Emily, to say my grandmother is hoping I’ll be able to travel to the North to see them before I leave for Germany. My father is living with them, working as a farm laborer all around Toome, and he’d like to see me too after all these years.

I don’t mind traveling to the North to see my grandmother but I don’t know what I’ll say to my father. Now that I’m twenty-two I know from walking around Munich and Limerick and looking at children in the streets I could never be the father that walked away from them. He left us when I was ten to work in England and send us money but, as my mother said, he chose the bottle over the babies. Mam says I should go to the North because my grandmother is frail and might not last till the next time I come home. She says there are some things you can do only once and you might as well do them that once.

It’s surprising she should talk about my grandmother like this after the cold reception she got when she landed from America with my father and four small children but there are two things she hates in the world, holding grudges and owing money.

If I go to the North in a train I should wear my uniform for the admiration I’m sure to get though I know if I open my gob with my Limerick accent people will turn away or stick their heads in books and newspapers. I could put on an American accent but I already tried that with my mother and she went into hysterics, laughing. She said I sounded like Edward G. Robinson under water.

If anyone talks to me the only thing I can do is nod my head or shake it or put on the look of a secret sadness caused by a severe war wound.

It’s all for nothing. The Irish are so used to American soldiers coming and going since the end of the war I might as well be invisible in my corner of the carriage on the train to Dublin and then Belfast. There’s no curiosity, no one saying, Are you back from Korea? Aren’t those Chinamen terrible? and I don’t even want to put on the limp anymore. A limp is like a lie, you have to remember to keep it going.

My grandmother says, Och, don’t you look grand in your uniform, and Aunt Emily says, Och, you’re a man now.

My father says, Och, you’re here. How’s your mother?

She’s grand.

And your brother Malachy and your brother Michael and your wee brother what’s his name?

Alphie.

Och, aye, Alphie. How’s your wee brother Alphie?

They’re all grand.

He lets out a small Och and sighs, That’s grand.

Then he wants to know if I take a drink and my grandmother says, Now, Malachy, enough of that talk.

Och, I only wanted to warn him of the bad company to be found in pubs.

This is my father who left us when I was ten to spend every penny he earned in the pubs of Coventry with German bombs dropping all around him, his family next to starvation in Limerick and here he is putting on the air of one in the grip of sanctifying grace and all I can think of is there must be some truth to the story he was dropped on his head or the other story that he had a disease like meningitis.

That might be an excuse for the drinking, the dropping on the head or the meningitis. German bombs couldn’t be an excuse because there were other Limerickmen sending money home from Coventry, bombs or no bombs. There were even men who fell in with Englishwomen and still sent money home though that money would slow down to nothing because Englishwomen are notorious for not wanting their Irishmen to support their families at home when they have three or four snotty-nosed English brats of their own running around demanding bangers and mash. Many an Irishman at the end of the war was so desperate trapped between his Irish and English families there was nothing for him to do but jump on a ship to Canada or Australia never to be heard from again.

That wouldn’t be my father. If he had seven children with my mother it was only because she was there in the bed doing her wifely duty. Englishwomen are never that easy. They’d never suffer an Irishman who would leap on them in the bravery of a few pints and that means there are no little McCourt bastards running the streets of Coventry.

I don’t know what to say to him with his little smile and his Och aye because I don’t know if I’m talking to a man in his right mind or the man dropped on his head or the one with meningitis. How can I talk to him when he gets up, sticks his hands deep into his trouser pockets and marches around the house whistling “Lily Marlene”? Aunt Emily whispers he hasn’t had a drink in ages and it’s a great struggle for him. I want to tell her it was a greater struggle for my mother to keep us all alive but I know he has the sympathy of his whole family and anyway what use is there going over the past. Then she tells me how he suffered over my mother’s disgraceful doings with her cousin, how the story drifted back to the North that they were living as man and wife, that when my father heard about it in Coventry, with the bombs dropping all around him, it drove him so mad he was in the pubs day, night and in between. Men home from Coventry would tell how my father would run into the streets during the air raids lifting his arms to the Luftwaffe and begging them to drop one on his poor tormented head.

My grandmother nods her head, agreeing with Aunt Emily, Och, aye. I want to remind them my father drank long before the bad days in Limerick, that we had to hunt him in pubs all over Brooklyn. I want to tell them that if he’d only sent money we could have stayed in our own house instead of being evicted and having to move in with Mam’s cousin.

But my grandmother is frail and I have to control myself. My face feels tight and there are dark clouds in my head and all I can do is stand and tell them my father drank all through the years, drank when babies were born and babies died and drank because he drank.

She says, Och, Francis, and shakes her head as if to disagree with me, as if to defend my father, and that causes such a rage in me I hardly know what to do till I’m pulling my duffel bag down the stairs and out on the road to Toome, Aunt Emily at the hedge calling, Francis, oh, Francis, come back, your grandmother wants to talk to you, but I keep walking though I’m aching to go back, that bad as my father is I’d at least like to know him, that my grandmother was doing only what any mother would do, defending her son who was dropped on his head or had meningitis, and I might go back except that a car stops and a man offers me a lift to the bus station in Toome and once I’m in the car there’s no going back.

I’m not in the mood for talk but I have to be polite to the man even when he says the McCourts of Moneyglass are a fine family even if they’re Catholics.

Even if they’re Catholics.

I’d like to tell the man stop the car and let me out with my duffel bag but if I do I’ll be only halfway to Toome and I’d be tempted to walk back to my grandmother’s house.

I can’t go back. The past won’t go away in this family and there would surely be talk again of my mother and her great sin and then we’d have an explosion and I’d be dragging my duffel bag along the Toome road again.

The man lets me out and when I say thanks I wonder to myself if he marches around on the twelfth of July beating a drum with the other Protestants but he has a kind face and I can’t imagine him beating a drum for anything.

All the way on the bus to Belfast and the train from Belfast to Dublin I have the ache to go back to the grandmother I might never see again and to see if I could get past my father’s little smiles and the Och ayes but once I’m on the train to Limerick there’s no going back. My head is cluttered with images of my father, my Aunt Emily, my grandmother, and the sadness of their lives in the farmhouse with seven useless acres. Then there’s my mother in Limerick, forty-four years of age with seven children, three dead, and all she wants, as she says, is a little peace, ease and comfort. There’s the sadness of Corporal Dunphy’s life in Fort Dix and Buck in Lenggries, the two of them who found a home in the army because they wouldn’t know what to do with the outside world, and I’m afraid if I don’t stop thinking this way the tears will come and I’ll disgrace myself in this carriage with five people gawking at me in my uniform saying, Jaysus, who’s the Yank weeping in the corner? My mother would say, Your bladder is near your eye, but the people in the carriage might say, Is this a specimen of what’s fighting the Chinese hand to hand over there in Korea?

Even if there weren’t another soul in the carriage I’d have to control myself because the slightest hint of a tear and the salt in it makes my eyes redder than they are and I don’t want to get off the train and walk the streets of Limerick with eyes like two piss holes in the snow.

My mother opens the door and clutches at her chest. Mother o’ God, I thought you were an apparition. What are you doing back so soon? Sure, didn’t you leave only yesterday morning. Gone one day, back the next?

I can’t tell her how I’m home because of the bad things they were saying in the North about her and her terrible sin. I can’t tell her how they had my father nearly canonized for his suffering over that same sin. I can’t tell her because I don’t want to be tormented by the past and I don’t want to be trapped between the North and the South, Toome and Limerick.

I have to lie and tell her my father is drinking and that makes her face go white again and her nose pointed. I ask her why she acts so surprised. Isn’t this the way he always was?

She says she hoped he might have given up the drink so that we’d have a father we could talk to, even in the North. She’d like Michael and Alphie to see this father they barely knew and she wouldn’t want them to see him in his wildness. When he was sober he was the best husband in the world, the best father. He’d always have a song or a story or a comment about the state of the world that made her laugh. Then everything was destroyed with the drink. The demons came, God help us, and children were better off without him. She’s better off now by herself with the few pounds coming in and the peace, ease and comfort that’s in it and the best thing now would be a nice cup of tea for I must be famished after my travels to the North.

All I can do with the days left in Limerick is walk around again knowing I’ll have to make my way in America and I won’t return for a long time. I kneel in St. Joseph’s Church by the box where I made my First Confession. I move to the altar rail to look at the place where the bishop patted my cheek at Confirmation and made me a soldier of the True Church. I wander up to Roden Lane where we lived for years and wonder how families can still live there all sharing the one lavatory. The Downes house is a shell and that’s a sign there are other places to go besides the slums. Mr. Downes brought his whole family over to England and that’s what comes of working and not drinking the wages that should go to wife and children. I could wish I had a father like Mr. Downes but I didn’t and there’s no use complaining.

19

With the months left in Lenggries there is nothing to do most of the day but run the supply room and read books from the base library.

There are no more laundry trips to Dachau. Rappaport told someone about our visit to the refugee camp and when the story reached the captain we were hauled in and reprimanded for unsoldierly conduct and confined to barracks for two weeks. Rappaport says he’s sorry. He didn’t mean for some asshole to spill the beans but he felt terrible over the women in the camp. He tells me I shouldn’t go around with the likes of Weber. Buck is okay but Weber fell out of a tree. Rappaport says I should concentrate on getting an education, that if I were Jewish that’s all I’d be thinking about. How would he know about the times I looked at college students in New York and dreamed I’d be like them. He tells me when I’m discharged I’ll have the Korean GI Bill and I can go to college but what use is that when I don’t even have the high school diploma? Rappaport says I shouldn’t think about why I can’t do something. I should think about why I can do it.

That’s the way Rappaport talks and I suppose that’s the way it is when you’re Jewish.

I tell him I can’t go back to New York and go to high school if I have to earn a living.

Nights, says Rappaport.

And how long will it take me to get a high school diploma that way?

A few years.

I can’t do that. I can’t spend years working by day, going to school by night. I’d be dead in a month.

So what else are you going to do?

I don’t know.

So? says Rappaport.

* * *

My eyes are red and oozing and Sergeant Burdick sends me on sick call. The army doctor wants to know about my last treatment and when I tell him about the doctor in New York who said I had a disease from New Guinea he says that’s it, that’s what you got, soldier, go get your head shaved and report back in two weeks. It’s not so bad getting your head shaved in the army with the way you have to wear a cap or helmet except that if you go to a bierstube the Lenggries girls might call out, Oh, Irishman’s got the clap, and if you try to explain it’s not the clap they only pat your cheek and tell you come to them any time clap or no clap. In two weeks there’s no improvement in my eyes and the doctor says I have to go back to the military hospital in Munich for observation. He doesn’t say he’s sorry for making a great mistake, for making me get my head shaved, that it probably wasn’t the dandruff at all or anything from New Guinea. He says these are desperate times, Russians massing on the border, our troops have to be healthy, and he’s not going to take a chance on this eye disease from New Guinea spreading all over the European Command.

They send me in a jeep again but the driver now is a Cuban corporal, Vinnie Gandia, who is asthmatic and plays drums in civilian life. It was hard for him being in the army but the music business was slow and he needed some way to send money to the family in Cuba. They were going to kick him out of the army in basic training because his shoulders were so bony he couldn’t carry a rifle or a fifty-millimeter machine gun barrel till he saw a picture of a Kotex on a box and a light went on in his head. Jesus. That was it. Slip the Kotex pads under his shirt as a pad on his shoulders and he was ready for anything the army could throw at him. After remembering Rappaport did the same thing I wonder if Kotex knew how they were helping the fighting men of America. All the way to Munich Vinnie guides the steering wheel with his elbows so that he can tap with his drumsticks on every hard surface. He gasps bits of songs, Mister Whatyoucallit whatcha doin’ tonight, and bap bap da do bap do do de do bap to go along with the beat and then he’s so excited the asthma hits him and he’s gasping so hard he has to stop the jeep and pump his inhaler. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel and when he looks up there are tears on his cheeks from the strain of trying to breathe. He tells me I should be grateful all I have is sore eyes. He wishes he had sore eyes instead of asthma. He could still play the drums without stopping for his goddam inhaler. Sore eyes never stopped a drummer. He wouldn’t care if he went blind long as he could play the drums. What’s the use of living if you can’t play your goddam drums? People don’t appreciate not having asthma. They sit around moaning and bitching about life and all the time breathing breathing nice and normal and taking it for granted. Give ’em one day of asthma and they’ll spend the rest of their lives thanking God with every breath they take, just one day. He’s gonna have to invent some kind of gadget you hang on your head so you can breathe when you play, some kind of helmet maybe, and you’re in there breathing like a baby in fresh air and you’re rapping away on them drums, shit, man, that would be heaven. Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, they don’t have asthma, lucky bastards. He says if I can still see when I get out of the army he’ll take me to joints on Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. If I can’t see he’ll still take me. Shit, you don’t have to see to hear the sounds, man, and wouldn’t that be something, him gasping and me with a white cane or a seeing-eye dog up and down Fifty-second Street. I could sit with this blind guy, Ray Charles, and we could compare notes. That makes Vinnie laugh and brings on the attack again and when he gets his breath back he says asthma is a bitch because if you think of something funny you laugh and that takes your breath away. That pisses him off, too, the way people go around laughing and taking it for granted and never think what it would be like to play drums with asthma, never think what it’s like when you can’t laugh. People just don’t think about things like that.

The army doctor in Munich says the doctors in New York and Lenggries are full of shit and pours something silvery into my eyes that feels like acid. He tells me stop whining, be a man, you’re not the only unit to get this infection, goddammit. I should be thankful I’m not a unit in Korea getting my ass shot off, that half these fat-ass units in Germany should be over there fighting with their paisans in Korea. He tells me look up, look down, look right, look left, and that will get the drops into every corner of my eyes. And how the hell, he wants to know, how the hell did they let these two eyes into this man’s army? Good thing they sent me to Germany. In Korea I’d need a seeing-eye dog to fight off the goddam Chink units. I’m to stay in the hospital a few days and if I keep my eyes open and my mouth shut I’ll be an okay unit.

I don’t know why he keeps calling me a unit and I’m beginning to wonder if eye doctors in general are different from other doctors.

The best part of being in the hospital is that even with the bad eyes I can read all day and into the night. The doctor says I’m supposed to rest the eyes. He tells the medic to pour the silvery liquid into the eyes of this unit every day until further notice but the medic, Apollo, tells me the doctor is full of shit and brings a tube of penicillin ointment which he smears on my eyelids. Apollo says he knows a thing or two because he went to medical school himself but had to drop out because of a broken heart.

In a day the infection disappears and now I’m afraid the doctor will send me back to Lenggries and that will be the end of my easy days reading Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Herman Melville. Apollo tells me not to worry. If the doctor comes into my ward I should rub my eyes with salt and they’ll look like

Two piss holes in the snow, I say.

Right.

I tell him my mother made me rub salt on my eyes a long time ago to make them look sore so that we’d get money for food from a mean man in Limerick. Apollo says, Yeah, but this is now.

He wants to know about my coffee and cigarette ration which, obviously, I’m not using and he’ll be glad to take them off my hands in return for the penicillin ointment and the salt treatment. Otherwise the doctor will come with the silvery stuff and in no time I’ll be back in Lenggries counting out sheets and blankets till my discharge in three months. Apollo says Munich is crawling with women and it’s easy to get laid but he wants high-class stuff not some whore in a bombed-out building.

The cause of all my misfortunes is a book by Herman Melville called Pierre, or the Ambiguities which isn’t a bit like Moby Dick and so dull it puts me to sleep in the middle of the day and there’s the doctor shaking me awake and waving the tube of penicillin left behind by Apollo.

Wake up, goddammit. Where did you get this? Apollo, right? That unit, Apollo. That goddam dropout from a half-ass medical school in Mississippi.

He marches to the door and roars down the hall, Apollo, get your ass in here, and there’s Apollo’s voice, Yes, sir, yes, sir.

You, goddammit, you. Did you supply this unit with this tube?

In a way, sir, yes, sir.

What the hell are you talking about?

He was suffering, sir, screaming with his eyes.

How the hell do you scream with your eyes?

I mean, sir, the pain. He would scream. I would apply the penicillin.

Who told you, eh? You a goddam doctor?

No, sir. It’s just something I saw them doing in Mississippi.

Fuck Mississippi, Apollo.

Yes, sir.

And you, soldier, what are you reading there with those eyes?

Pierre, or the Ambiguities, sir.

Christ. What the hell is it about?

I don’t know, sir. I think it’s about this Pierre who’s caught between a dark-haired woman and a fair-haired woman. He’s trying to write a book in a room in New York and he’s so cold the women have to heat up hot bricks for his feet.

Christ. You’re going back to your outfit, soldier. If you can lie on your ass here reading books about units like that you can be an active unit again. And you, Apollo, you’re lucky I don’t have your ass before a firing squad.

Yes, sir.

Dismissed.

Next day Vinnie Gandia drives me back to Lenggries and he drives without his drumsticks. He says he can’t do it anymore, that he nearly got himself killed after he brought me to Munich the last time. You can’t drive, drum and handle your asthma, simple as that. You gotta choose, and the drumsticks had to go. If he got into an accident and had damaged hands and couldn’t play he’d stick his head in the oven, simple as that. He can’t wait to get back to New York and hang out around Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. He makes me promise we’ll meet in New York and he’ll take me to all the great jazz joints, no charge, no cost, because he knows everyone and they know if he didn’t have this goddam asthma he’d be right up there with Krupa and Rich, right up there.

There’s a law that says I can sign up for another nine months in the army and avoid the six-year army reserve requirement. If I re-up they can’t call me back any time the United States decides to defend democracy in distant places. I could stay here in the supply room for the nine months doling out sheets, blankets, condoms, drinking beer in the village, going home with an occasional girl, reading books from the base library. I could journey back to Ireland to tell my grandmother my sorrow over walking out in anger. I could take dancing lessons in Munich so that all the girls in Limerick would be queueing up to get out on the floor with me in my sergeant’s stripes which I’d surely get.

But I can’t afford another nine months in Germany with the letters coming from Emer telling me how she’s counting the days till my return. I never knew she liked me that much and now I like her for liking me because that’s the first time in my life I’ve heard that from a girl. I’m so excited over being liked by Emer I write and tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me, too, and that puts me in heaven and makes me want to pack my duffel bag and jump on a plane to her side.

I write and tell her how I long for her and how I’m here in Lenggries inhaling the perfume from her letters. I dream of the life we’ll have in New York, how I’ll go to my job every morning, a warm indoor job where I’ll sit at a desk and scribble important decisions. Every night we’ll have dinner and go to bed early so that we’ll have plenty of time for the excitement.

Of course I can’t mention the excitement part in the letters because Emer is pure and if her mother ever knew I had such dreams the door would be slammed in my face forever and there I’d be, deprived of the company of the only girl ever to say she liked me.

I can’t tell Emer about the way I coveted college girls at the Biltmore Hotel. I can’t tell her about the excitement I’ve had with girls in Lenggries and Munich and the refugee camp. She’d be so shocked she might tell her whole family, especially her big brother Liam, and there would be threats on my life.

Rappaport says that before you get married it’s your obligation to tell the bride about all the things you’ve done with other girls. Buck says, That’s bullshit, the best thing in life is to keep your mouth shut especially with someone you’re going to marry. It’s like the army, never tell, never volunteer.

Weber says, I wouldn’t tell nobody nothing, and Rappaport tells him go swing from a tree. Weber says when he gets married he’ll do one thing for the girl, he’ll make sure he doesn’t have the clap because that can be passed on and he wouldn’t want any kid of his born with the clap.

Rappaport says, Jesus, the beast has feelings.

The night before I go stateside there’s a party in a Bad Tolz restaurant. Officers and noncoms bring their wives and that means ordinary soldiers cannot bring their German girlfriends. Officers’ wives would disapprove knowing that certain ordinary soldiers have wives waiting back home and it’s not proper to sit with German girls who might be destroying good American families.

The captain makes a speech and says I was one of the finest soldiers he ever had under his command. Sergeant Burdick makes a speech and presents me with a scroll honoring me for my tight control of sheets, blankets and protective devices.

When he says protective devices there is snickering along the table till the officers give the warning glares that tell the men, Cut it out, our wives are here.

One officer has a wife, Belinda, who is my age. If she didn’t have a husband I might have a few beers to give me the courage to talk to her but I don’t have to because she leans over and whispers that all the wives think I’m handsome. That makes me blush so hard I have to go out to the lavatory and when I return Belinda is saying something to the other wives that makes them laugh and when they look at me they laugh even harder and I’m sure they’re laughing over what Belinda said to me. That makes me blush again and I wonder if there’s anyone you can trust in this world.

Somehow Buck seems to know what happened. He whispers, The hell with these women, Mac. They shouldn’t mock you like that.

I know he’s right but I’m sad that the last memory of Lenggries I’ll carry away with me is Belinda and the mocking officers’ wives.

20

The day of my discharge from the army at Camp Kilmer I met Tom Clifford at the Breffni Bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan. We had corned beef and cabbage slathered with mustard and beer galore to cool our mouths. Tom had found an Irish bed-and-breakfast place in the South Bronx, Logan’s Boarding House, and once I dropped off my duffel bag there we could come back down and see Emer after work in her apartment at East Fifty-fourth Street.

Mr. Logan seemed to be an old man with a bald head and a meaty red face. He might have been old but he had a young wife, Nora from Kilkenny, and a baby a few months old. He told me he was high up in the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus and I should make no mistake about where he stood on religion and morality in general, that none of his twelve boarders could expect a Sunday morning breakfast unless they could show they had attended Mass and, if at all possible, Holy Communion. For those who attended Communion and had at least two witnesses to prove it there would be sausages with the breakfast. Of course every boarder had two other boarders to testify he went to Communion. There was testifying right and left and Mr. Logan was so upset over what he had to pay out in sausages he disguised himself in Nora’s hat and coat and shuffled up to the middle of the church to discover not only that the boarders hadn’t gone to Communion but that Ned Guinan and Kevin Hayes were the only ones to go to Mass at all. The rest were over on Willis Avenue slipping in the back door of a bar for an illegal drink before noon opening time and when they came streeling back for the breakfast, reeking, Mr. Logan wanted to smell their breath. They told him feck off, this was a free country, and if they had to get their breaths smelled for the sake of a sausage they’d stay content with the watery eggs and milk, the stale bread and watery tea.

Also, there was to be no swearing or any kind of blaguarding in Mr. Logan’s house or we’d be asked to desist and depart. He would not allow his wife and child, Luke, to be exposed to any kind of disgraceful behavior from the twelve young Irish boarders. Our beds might be in the basement but he would always know about disgraceful behavior. No, indeed, it takes years to build up a boarding house business and he was not going to let twelve laborers from the Old Country tear it down. Bad enough that Negroes were moving in right and left and destroying a neighborhood, people with no morality, no jobs and no fathers for their children running the streets like savages.

The weekly rate was eighteen dollars for bed and breakfast and if I wanted dinner that would be an extra dollar a day. There were eight beds for twelve boarders and that was because everyone worked different shifts on the docks and various warehouses and what was the use of having extra beds cluttering up the two rooms in the basement, the only time all the beds were filled was Saturday night and then you had to bunk in with someone else. It didn’t matter because Saturday night was the night to get drunk up on St. Nicholas Avenue and you wouldn’t care if you slept with man, woman or sheep.

There was one bathroom for all of us, bring your own soap, and two long narrow towels that used to be white. Each towel had a black line to separate the top from the bottom and that was how you were supposed to use them. There was a handwritten sign on the wall telling you the top was for anything above your navel, the bottom for anything below, signed J. Logan, prop. The towels were changed every two weeks though there were always fights between the boarders who were careful about the rules and the ones who might have had a drink.

Chris Wayne from Lisdoonvarna was the oldest boarder, forty-two, working in construction and saving to bring over his girlfriend, twenty-three, so that they could get married and have children while he still had a tittle of power in himself. The boarders called him Duke because of his last name and because of the silliness in it. He didn’t drink or smoke, went to Mass and Communion every Sunday, and avoided the rest of us. He had tufts of gray in his curly black hair and he was gaunt from piety and frugality. He had his own towel, soap and two sheets he carried around in a bag for fear we might use them. Every night he knelt by his bed and said the entire rosary. He was the only one who had secured a bed of his own since no one, drunk or sober, would climb in with him or use the bed in his absence because of the odor of sanctity around it. He worked from eight to five every workday and ate dinner with the Logans every night. They loved him for that because it brought in an extra seven dollars a week and they loved him even more for the small amounts he put into his scrawny frame. They didn’t love him later when he started coughing and spitting and there were specks of blood on his handkerchief. They told him they had a child to think of and he’d better find another place. He told Mr. Logan he was a son-of-a-bitch and a pathetic bastard that he felt sorry for. If he thought he was really the father of that child Mr. Logan should look around at his boarders and if he wasn’t completely blind he’d detect a marked resemblance to the child on the face of one of the boarders. Mr. Logan struggled out of his armchair gasping that if he didn’t have the bad heart he’d kill Chris Wayne on the spot. He tried to rush at the Duke but his heart wouldn’t let him and he had to listen to Nora from Kilkenny screeching at him, begging him to stop or she’d be a widow with an orphan child.

The Duke laughed till he gasped at Nora, Don’t worry, that child will always have a father. Sure, isn’t he in this room.

He coughed his way out of the room and down the stairs to the basement and no one ever saw him again.

It was hard to live there after that. Mr. Logan was suspicious of everyone and you could hear him roaring at Nora from Kilkenny at all hours. He took away one of the towels and saved money by buying old bread at the bakery and serving powdered milk and eggs for breakfast. He wanted to make us all go to confession so that he could watch our faces and know if what the Duke said was true. We refused. There were only four boarders long enough in the house to be suspects and Peter McNamee, the longest one there, told Mr. Logan to his face that fooling around with Nora from Kilkenny was the last thing he’d ever think of. She was such a bag of bones from running the house you could hear her rattle and clank coming up the stairs.

Mr. Logan gasped in his armchair and told Peter, That hurt me, Peter, that you’d say my wife clanks and you the finest boarder we ever had even if we were fooled a long time by the false piety of the fella that just left, thank God.

I’m sorry to hurt you, Mr. Logan, but Nora from Kilkenny is not by any means a morsel. No one here would give her a second look on a dance floor.

Mr. Logan looked around the room at us. Is that right, lads? Is that right?

’Tis, Mr. Logan.

Are you sure of that, Peter?

I am, Mr. Logan.

Thank God for that, Peter.

The boarders earn good money on the docks and in the warehouses. Tom works at Port Warehouses loading and unloading trucks and if he works extra hours he goes on time and a half or double time so that his pay is well over a hundred dollars a week.

Peter McNamee works at Merchants Refrigerating Company unloading and storing the meat from the freezer trucks from Chicago. The Logans like him for the slabs of beef or pork he hauls home every Friday night, drunk or sober, and that meat takes the place of the eighteen dollars. We never see this meat and some boarders swear Mr. Logan sells it to a butcher shop on Willis Avenue.

All the boarders drink even though they say they want to save money and go back to Ireland for the peace and quiet that’s in it. Only Tom says he’ll never go back, that Ireland is a miserable bog of a place, and they take that as a personal insult and offer to settle it if he’ll step outside. Tom laughs. He knows what he wants and it’s not a life of fighting and drinking and moaning about Ireland and sharing towels in flophouses like this. The only one who agrees with Tom is Ned Guinan and it doesn’t matter with him because he has the consumption like the Duke and he’s not long for this world. He’s saving enough money so that he can go home to Kildare and die in the house he was born in. He has dreams of Kildare where he’s leaning on a fence at the Curragh watching the horses training in the morning, trotting through the mist that clouds the track till the sun breaks through and turns the whole world green. When he talks like this his eyes glisten and there’s a slight pink flush on his cheeks and he smiles in such a way you’d like to go over and hold him a minute though that’s the kind of thing they might frown on in an Irish boarding house. It’s remarkable that Mr. Logan allows him to stay but Ned is so delicate Mr. Logan treats him like a son and forgets the baby who might be threatened by coughs, spits and flecks of blood. It’s remarkable the way they keep him on the payroll at the Baker and Williams Warehouse where they have him in the office answering the phone because he’s so weak he can’t lift a feather. When he’s not answering the phone he studies French so that he can talk to St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, when he goes to heaven. Mr. Logan tells him very gently he might be on the wrong track in this matter, that Latin is the language you need in heaven and that leads to a long discussion among the boarders as to what language Our Lord spoke, Peter McNamee declaring for a fact it was Hebrew. Mr. Logan says you might be right there, Peter, because he doesn’t want to contradict the man who brings the Sunday meat home on a Friday night. Tom Clifford laughs that we should all brush up on our Irish in case we run into St. Patrick or St. Brigid and everyone glares at him, everyone but Ned Guinan who smiles at everything because it doesn’t matter one way or the other when you’re dreaming of the horses in Kildare.

Peter McNamee says it’s a wonder a single one of us is alive with all the things against us in this world, the weather in Ireland, the TB, the En-glish, the De Valera government, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and now the way we have to break our arses to make a few dollars on the docks and the warehouses. Mr. Logan begs him to mind his language in the presence of Nora from Kilkenny and Peter says he’s sorry, he gets carried away.

Tom tells me of a job unloading trucks at Port Warehouses. Emer says no, I should work in an office where I can use my brains. Tom says warehouse jobs are better than office jobs that pay less and make you wear a suit and tie and have you sitting so much you get an arse on you the size of a cathedral door. I’d like to work in an office but the warehouse pays seventy-five dollars a week and that’s more than I ever dreamed of after my thirty-five dollars a week at the Biltmore Hotel. Emer says that’s fine as long as I save something and get an education. She talks like that because everyone in her family went to school and she doesn’t want me lifting and hauling till I’m a broken old man at the age of thirty-five. She knows from the way Tom and I talk about the boarders that there’s drinking and all kinds of blaguarding and she wouldn’t like me to be spending my time in bars when I could be making something of myself.

Emer has a clear head because she doesn’t drink or smoke and the only meat she eats is an occasional morsel of chicken for her blood. She goes to a business school at Rockefeller Center so that she can earn a living and make something of herself in America. I know her clear head is good for me but I want that warehouse money and I promise her and myself I’ll go to school someday.

Mr. Campbell Groel who owns Port Warehouses isn’t too sure if he wants to hire me, that I might be too scrawny. Then he looks at Tom Clifford who is smaller and scrawnier and the best worker on the platform and if I’m half as strong and fast I have the job.

The platform boss is Eddie Lynch, a fat man from Brooklyn, and when he talks to me or Tom he laughs and puts on a Barry Fitzgerald accent which I don’t think is a bit funny though I have to smile because he’s the boss and I want the seventy-five dollars every Friday.

At noon we sit on the platform with our lunches from the diner on the corner, long liverwurst and onion sandwiches dripping with mustard and Rheingold beer so cold it gives me a pain in my forehead. The Irish talk about the drinking they did last night and they laugh over their great sufferings in the morning. Italians eat the food they’ve brought from home and don’t know how we can eat that liverwurst shit. The Irish are offended and want to fight except that Eddie Lynch says anyone in a fight on this platform can go looking for a job.

There’s one black man, Horace, and he sits away from the rest of us. He smiles once in a while and says nothing because that’s the way it is.

When we finish at five someone will say, Okay, let’s go for a beer, one beer, just one, and we all laugh at the idea of one beer. We drink at bars with longshoremen from the piers who are always fighting over whether their union, the ILA, should join the AFL or the CIO and when they’re not fighting about that they’re fighting about unfair hiring practices. Hiring bosses and gang foremen go to different bars farther into Manhattan for fear they might have trouble along the waterfront.

There are nights when I stay out so late and I’m so confused with the drink there’s no sense going back to the Bronx at all and it’s just as easy to sleep on the platform where the bums keep fires going in great drums on the street till Eddie Lynch comes along with his Barry Fitzgerald accent and tells us, Off your awrse and on your feet. Even when I’m hungover I want to tell him arse is pronounced with a flat a but he’s from Brooklyn and he’s the boss and he’ll say awrse forever.

Sometimes there’s night work on the piers unloading ships and if there aren’t enough longshoremen with ILA cards they’ll hire warehousemen like myself with Teamster cards. You have to be careful you’re not taking jobs from longshoremen because they think nothing of sinking a baling hook in your skull and pushing you down between ship and dock on the chance you’ll be crushed beyond recognition. They make better money on the docks than we do in the warehouses but the work is unsteady and they have to fight for it every day. I carry my own hook from the warehouse but I’ve never learned to use it for anything but lifting.

After three weeks at the warehouse and all the liverwurst and beer I’m scrawnier than ever. Eddie Lynch says in his Brooklyn brogue, Faith an’ begorrah, I could slip you and Clifford through the awrse of a sparrow, two o’ youse.

With the nights of drinking and working on the piers my eyes are flaring up again. They’re worse when I have to handle sacks of hot Cuban peppers from United Fruit ships. Sometimes the only thing that will give me relief is beer and Eddie Lynch says, Jesus Christ, the kid is so desperate for the beer he’s pouring it through his eyes.

The warehouse money is good and I should be content except that there’s nothing in my head but confusion and darkness. The Third Avenue El is packed every morning with people in suits and dresses, fresh and clean and happy in themselves. If they’re not reading newspapers they’re talking and I hear them describing their vacation plans or bragging about how well their children are doing in school or college. I know they’ll work every day till they’re old and silver-haired and they’ll be content with their children and grandchildren and I wonder if I’ll ever live like that.

In June the papers are filled with stories about university commencement exercises and pictures of happy graduates and their families. I try to look at the pictures but the train rocks and jolts and I’m thrown against passengers who give me superior looks because of my work clothes. I want to announce that this is only temporary, that one day I’ll be going to school and wearing a suit like them.

21

I wish I could be stronger at the warehouse and say no when someone laughs about going for a beer, one beer, just one. I should say no especially when I’m supposed to meet Emer to go to a movie or eat a piece of chicken. Sometimes after hours of drinking I call her and tell her I had to work overtime but she knows better and the more I lie the colder her voice and there’s no use calling and lying anymore.

Then, deep into the summer, Tom tells me Emer is going with someone else, she’s engaged, she’s wearing a big ring from her fiancé, an insurance man from the Bronx.

She won’t talk to me on the phone and when I knock on her door she won’t let me in. I beg her for a minute so that I can tell her how I’m a changed man, how I’m going to mend my ways and lead a decent life, no more stuffing myself with liverwurst sandwiches, no more guzzling beer till I can hardly stand.

She won’t let me in. She’s engaged and there’s a glint of diamond on her hand that sends me into such a wildness I want to pound the wall, tear out my hair, throw myself on the floor at her feet. I don’t want to stumble away from her to Logan’s Boarding House and the one towel and the warehouses and the docks and the drinking till all hours while the rest of the world, Emer and her insurance man included, lead clean lives with towels galore, all happy on graduation day and smiling with their perfect American teeth brushed after every meal. I want her to take me in so that we can talk about the days before us when I’ll have a suit and an office job and we’ll have our own apartment and I’ll be safe from the world and all temptation.

She won’t let me in. She has to go now. She has to see someone and I know it’s the insurance man.

Is he inside?

She says no but I know he is and I yell that I want to see him, trot the bugger out and I’ll deal with him, I’ll lay him out.

Then she shuts the door in my face and I’m so shocked my eyes dry up and all the heat leaves my body. I’m so shocked I wonder if my life is a series of doors closed in my face, so shocked I don’t even want to go to the Breffni Bar for a beer. People are passing me on the streets and cars are honking but I feel so cold and alone I could be in a prison cell. I sit on the Third Avenue El to the Bronx and think of Emer and her insurance man, how they’re having a cup of tea and laughing at the way I disgraced myself, how clean and wholesome they are, the two of them, not drinking, not smoking, waving away the chicken.

I know that’s the way it is around the country, people sitting in their living rooms, smiling, secure, resisting temptation, growing old together because they’re able to say, No, thank you, I don’t want a beer, not one.

I know Emer is acting like this because of my behavior and I know I’m the one she wants, not this man who’s probably sipping tea boring her to distraction with insurance stories. Still, she might like me again and take me back if I give up the warehouse, the docks, the liverwurst, the beer, and get a decent job. There’s still a chance for me since Tom told me they won’t be getting married till next year and if I improve myself starting tomorrow she’ll surely take me back although I don’t like thinking of him sitting for months on the couch kissing her and running his paws all over her shoulder blades.

Of course he’s an Irish-American Catholic, that’s what Tom told me, and of course he’ll respect her purity till the wedding night, this insurance man, but I know Irish-American Catholics have filthy minds. They have all the dirty dreams I have myself, especially insurance men. I know Emer’s man is thinking of the things they’ll be doing on their wedding night though he’ll have to confess his dirty thoughts to the priest before he gets married. It’s a good thing I’m not getting married myself because I’d have to confess to the things I did with women all over Bavaria and across the border to Austria itself and sometimes even Switzerland.

There’s an employment agency advertisement in the paper offering office jobs, steady, secure, well-paid, six-week paid training session, suit and tie required, preference given veterans.

The application form wants to know where I graduated from high school and when and that forces me to lie, Christian Brothers Secondary School, Limerick, Ireland, June 1947.

The agency man tells me the name of the company offering employment, Blue Cross.

Sir, what kind of company is that?

Insurance.

But.

But what?

Oh, it’s all right, sir.

It’s all right because I realize if I’m hired by this insurance company I might move up in the world and Emer will take me back. All she has to do is choose between two insurance men even if the other one has already given her a diamond ring.

Before I can even talk to her again I have to finish my six-week training course at the Blue Cross. The offices are on Fourth Avenue in a building with an entrance like the door of a cathedral. There are seven men in the training session, all high school graduates, one so badly wounded from the Korean War his mouth has moved around to the side of his head and he dribbles on his shoulder. It takes days to understand what he’s trying to say, that he wants to work for Blue Cross so that he can help veterans like himself who were wounded and have no one. Then a few days into the course he discovers he’s in the wrong place, that it was the Red Cross he wanted all along and he curses the instructor for not telling him before. We’re glad to see him go even after the way he suffered for America but it’s hard to be sitting all day with a man whose mouth is on the side of his head.

The instructor is Mr. Puglio and the first thing he tells us is that he’s studying for his master’s degree in business at NYU and, second, all the information we wrote on our application will be carefully checked, so if anyone claims he went to college, and didn’t, correct it now or else. The one thing Blue Cross won’t tolerate is a lie.

The boarders at Logan’s laugh every morning when I put on my suit, shirt, tie. They laugh even harder when they hear what my pay is, forty-seven dollars a week rising to fifty when I finish the training session.

There are only eight boarders left. Ned Guinan went home to Kildare to look at horses and die and two others married waitresses from Schrafft’s who are famous for saving up to go home and buy the old family farm. The towel marked Top and Bottom is still there but no one uses it after Peter McNamee caused a sensation by going out and buying a towel of his own. He says he was weary of looking at grown men dripping after their showers walking around and shaking themselves dry like old dogs, men who would squander half their wages on whiskey but couldn’t see their way to buying a towel. He says it was the last straw one Saturday when five boarders sat around on their beds drinking duty-free Irish whiskey from Shannon Airport, talking and singing along with an Irish radio program, putting themselves in the mood for a dance in Manhattan that night. After they took showers the towel was useless and instead of walking around to shake themselves dry they began to dance jigs and reels to the music on the radio and they were having a grand time except that Nora from Kilkenny came to replace toilet paper and walked in without knocking and when she saw what she saw she screamed like a banshee and ran up the stairs hysterical to Mr. Logan who came down to find the dancers rolling around naked and laughing and not giving a fiddler’s fart about Mr. Logan and his yelling that they were a disgrace to the Irish nation and Mother Church and he had a good mind to throw the lot of them into the street in their pelts and what kind of mothers did they have at all. He went back upstairs mumbling because he’d never evict five boarders paying eighteen dollars each a week.

When Peter brought his own towel home everyone was astonished and tried to borrow it but he told them bugger off and hid it in various places though hiding it was a problem because a towel, to dry, needs to be hung up and will only grow damp and musty if folded and hidden under the mattress or the bathtub itself. It made Peter bitter that he couldn’t hang his towel to dry till Nora from Kilkenny told him she’d take it upstairs and watch over it while it dried, she and Mr. Logan were that grateful for the meat he never failed to deliver every Friday night. That was a nice solution till Mr. Logan became agitated every time Peter went up for his dry towel and chatted a few minutes with Nora from Kilkenny. Mr. Logan would stare at his baby boy, Luke, then at Peter and back again at the baby and his frown would grow so severe his eyebrows met. He could stand it no longer and called up the stairs, Does it take all day, Peter, to get your dry towel? Nora has work to do in this house. Peter would come down the stairs. Ah, sorry, Mr. Logan, very sorry, but that doesn’t satisfy Mr. Logan who is staring at little Luke again and back at Peter. I have something to tell you, Peter. We won’t be needing your meat anymore and you’ll have to find a way to keep your towel dry yourself. Nora has enough to do without standing guard over your towel while it dries.

That night there is screaming and yelling in the Logan room and next morning Mr. Logan pins a note to Peter’s towel telling him he’ll have to leave, that he’s caused too much damage to the Logan family the way he took advantage of their good nature in the matter of drying the towel.

Peter doesn’t mind. He’s moving out to Long Island to his cousin’s house. We’ll all miss him, the way he opened up the world of towels to us, and now we all have them, they’re hanging everywhere and everyone is honorable about not using other men’s towels because they never dry anyway in the dampness of the basement bedroom.

22

It’s easier traveling on the train every morning in my suit and tie and the New York Times held up so that the world will see I’m not the kind of yob that reads comics in the Daily News or the Mirror. People will see that this is a man in a suit that can handle big words on his way to an important job in an insurance office.

I might be wearing a suit and reading the Times and getting admiring looks but I still can’t help committing my daily deadly sin, Envy. I see the college students with the covers on their books, Columbia, Fordham, NYU, CCNY, and I feel empty thinking I’ll never be one of them. I’d like to go to one of the bookshops and buy college book covers I could flaunt on the train except I know I’d be found out and laughed at.

Mr. Puglio teaches us the different health insurance policies offered by Blue Cross, family, individual, company, widows, orphans, veterans, cripples. When he teaches he becomes excited and tells us it’s a wonderful thing to sleep at night knowing people have nothing to worry about if they get sick as long as they have Blue Cross. We sit in a small room where the air is thick with cigarette smoke for lack of a window and it’s hard to stay awake on a summer’s afternoon with Mr. Puglio getting worked up over premiums. Every Friday he gives us a test and it’s a misery on Monday when he praises the higher scorers and frowns at the low scorers like me. My scores are low because I don’t care about insurance and I wonder if Emer is in her right mind getting engaged to an insurance man when she could be with a man who went from training German shepherds to typing the fastest morning reports in the European Command. I feel like calling her up and telling her now that I’m inside the insurance business it’s driving me mad and is she happy she did this to me. I could still be working at Port Warehouses enjoying my liverwurst and beer if she hadn’t broken my heart entirely. I’d like to call her but I’m afraid she’ll be cold and that will drive me to the Breffni Bar for relief.

Tom is at the Breffni and he says the best thing is to let the wound heal, have a drink and where did you get that awful suit. It’s bad enough to be suffering over the Blue Cross and Emer without having your suit sneered at and when I tell Tom fuck off he laughs and tells me I’ll live. He’s moving out of the boarding house himself to a small apartment in Woodside, Queens, and if I’d like to share the cost is ten dollars a week, cook our own food.

Once again I feel like calling Emer and telling her about my big job at Blue Cross and the apartment I’m getting in Queens but her face is fading in my memory and there’s another place in my mind that tells me I’m glad to be single in New York.

If Emer doesn’t want me what’s the use of being in the insurance business where I’m suffocated every day in an airless room with Mr. Puglio becoming hostile whenever I doze off? It’s hard to sit there when he tells us that the first duty of a married man is to train his wife to be a widow and I daydream about Mrs. Puglio getting the widow lecture. Does Mr. Puglio give her the lecture at the dinner table or sitting up in the bed?

On top of everything my appetite is gone from sitting all day in my suit and if I buy a liverwurst sandwich I throw most of it to the pigeons in Madison Park.

I sit in that park and listen to men in white shirts and ties talking about their jobs, the stock market, the insurance business, and I wonder if they’re content knowing this is what they’ll be doing till their hair turns gray. They tell each other how they told off the boss, how he didn’t have a word to say, his mouth going like this, you know, him stuck to his chair. They’ll be bosses themselves some day with people telling them off and how will they like that. There are days I’d give anything to be strolling along the banks of the Shannon or out the Mulcaire River or even climbing the mountains behind Lenggries.

One of the Blue Cross trainees passes me on his way back to the office.

Yo, McCourt, it’s two o’clock. You coming?

He says yo because he drove a tank in a cavalry outfit in Korea and that’s how they talked when the cavalry had horses. He says yo because that tells the world he wasn’t an ordinary infantry soldier.

We walk to the insurance building and I know I can’t go through that cathedral entrance. I know I’m not cut out for the world of insurance.

Yo, McCourt, come on, it’s late. Puglio will have a shit fit.

I’m not going in.

What?

Not going in.

I walk away down Fourth Avenue.

Yo, McCourt, you crazy, man? You gonna be fired. Shit, man, I gotta go.

I keep going in the bright July sun till I reach Union Square where I sit and wonder what have I done. They say if you quit a job in any big firm or get fired all the other firms are informed and doors are closed to you forever. Blue Cross is a big firm and I might as well give up hope of ever having a big job in any big firm. But it’s a good thing I quit now rather than wait to have the lies on my application form discovered. Mr. Puglio told us that was such a serious offense you’d not only be fired but Blue Cross would demand repayment of the wages paid for the training session and on top of that your name is sent to all the other big firms with a little red flag waving at the top of the page to warn them. That little red flag, said Mr. Puglio, means you’re forever barred from the American corporate system and you might as well move to Russia.

Mr. Puglio loved talking like that and I’m glad I’m away from him, leaving Union Square to stroll down Broadway with all the other New Yorkers who don’t seem to have anything to do. It’s easy to see that some have that little red flag on their names, men with beards and jewelry and women with long hair and sandals who would never be allowed inside the door of the American corporate system.

There are New York places I’m seeing today for the first time, City Hall, the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, a Protestant church, St. Paul’s, which has the grave of Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of Robert who was hanged for Ireland, and farther down Broadway, Trinity Church, looking the length of Wall Street.

Down where the Staten Island Ferries come and go there’s a bar, the Bean Pot, where I have the appetite for a whole liverwurst sandwich and a stein of beer because my tie is off and my jacket is over the back of a chair and I feel relieved I escaped with the little red flag on my name. There’s something about finishing the liverwurst sandwich that tells me I’ve lost Emer forever. If she ever hears of my troubles with the American corporate system she might shed a tear of pity for me though she’ll be grateful in the long run she settled for the insurance man from the Bronx. She’ll be secure knowing she’s insured for everything, that she can’t take a step that’s not covered by insurance.

It’s a nickel for the Staten Island Ferry and the sight of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island reminds me of the morning in October 1949 I sailed into New York on the Irish Oak, past the city and up the river to anchor that night in Poughkeepsie and on the next day to Albany where I took the train back down to New York.

That was nearly four years ago and here I am on the Staten Island Ferry with my tie stuffed in the pocket of the jacket hanging from my shoulder. Here I am without a job in the world, my girlfriend gone, and the little red flag waving on my name. I could go back to the Biltmore Hotel and take up where I left off, cleaning the lobby, scouring toilet bowls, laying carpet, but no, a man who was a corporal can never sink that low again.

Looking at Ellis Island and an old wooden ferry rotting between two buildings makes me think of all the people who passed here before me, before my father and mother, all the people escaping the Famine in Ireland, all the people from all over Europe landing here with their hearts in their mouths for fear they might be caught with diseases and sent back and when you think of that a great moaning moves across the water from Ellis Island and you wonder if the people sent back had to return with their babies to places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary. People who were sent back like that were the saddest people in all of history, worse than people like me who might have bad eyes and the little red flag but are still secure with the American passport.

They won’t let you stay on the ferry when it docks. You have to go inside, pay your nickel and wait for the next ferry and while I’m there I might as well have a beer at the terminal bar. I keep thinking about my mother and father sailing into this harbor over twenty-five years ago and as I sail back and forth on the ferry, six times, having a beer at each end, I keep thinking of the people with diseases who were sent back and that makes me so sad I leave the ferry altogether to call Tom Clifford at Port Warehouses and ask him to meet me at the Bean Pot so that I’ll know how to get home to the small apartment in Queens.

He meets me at the Bean Pot and when I tell him the liverwurst sandwiches here are delicious he says he’s finished with liverwurst, he’s moving on. Then he laughs and tells me I must have had a few, that I’m having trouble getting my tongue around the word liverwurst and I tell him, no, it’s the day I’ve had with Puglio and the Blue Cross and the airless room and the little red flag and the ones who were sent back, the saddest of all.

He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He tells me my eyes are crossing in my head, put on my jacket, home to Queens and into the bed.

Mr. Campbell Groel takes me back at Port Warehouses and I’m glad to be getting decent wages again, seventy-five dollars a week going up to seventy-seven for operating the forklift truck two days a week. Regular platform work means you’re on your feet in the truck loading pallets with boxes, crates, sacks of fruits and peppers. Working the forklift is easier. You hoist up the loaded pallets, store them inside and wait for the next load. No one minds if you read the paper while you wait but if you read the New York Times they laugh and say, Look at the big intellectual on the forklift.

One of my jobs is to store bags of hot peppers off United Fruit ships in the fumigation room. On a slow day it’s a good place to bring in a beer, read the paper, take a nap and no one seems to mind. Even Mr. Campbell Groel on his way out of the office might look in and smile, Take it easy, men. It’s a hot day.

Horace, the black man, sits on a bag of peppers and reads a paper from Jamaica or he reads a letter over and over from his son who is in university in Canada. When he reads that letter he slaps his thigh and laughs, Oh, mon, oh, mon. The first time I ever heard him talk his accent sounded so Irish I asked him if he was from County Cork and he couldn’t stop laughing. He said, All people from the islands have Irish blood, mon.

Horace and I nearly died together in that fumigation room. The beer and the heat made us so drowsy we fell asleep on the floor till we heard the door slam shut and the gas hissing into the room. We tried to push the door back but it was jammed and the gas was making us sick till Horace climbed up on a mound of pepper sacks, broke a window and called for help. Eddie Lynch was closing up outside and heard us and slid the door back.

You’re two lucky bastards, he said, and he wanted to take us up the street for a few beers to clear our lungs and to celebrate. Horace says, No, mon, I can’t go to that bar.

What the hell you talking about? says Eddie.

Black man not welcome in that bar.

Fuck that for a story, says Eddie.

No, mon, no trouble. There’s another place we have a beer, mon.

I don’t know why Horace has to give in like that. He has a son in university in Canada and he can’t have a beer himself in a New York bar. He tells me I don’t understand, that I’m young and I can’t fight the black man’s fight.

Eddie says, Yeah, you’re right, Horace.

In a few weeks Mr. Campbell Groel says the Port of New York is not what it used to be, business is slow, he has to lay off a few men and, of course, I’m the junior man, the first to go.

A few blocks away is Merchants Refrigerating Company and they need a platform man to fill in for men on summer vacation. They tell me, We might be having a heat wave but dress warm.

My job is unloading meat from the freezer trucks that bring sides of beef from Chicago. It’s August on the platform but inside where we hang the meat it’s freezing. The men laugh and say we’re the only workers who travel so fast from the North Pole to the equator and back.

Peter McNamee is platform boss while the regular man is on vacation and when he sees me he says, What in the name of the crucified Jesus are you doing here? I thought you had a brain in your head.

He tells me I should be going to school, that there’s no excuse for me humping sides of beef in and out in and out when I could be using the GI Bill and moving up in the world. He says this is no job for the Irish. They come here and the next thing they’re hacking and coughing up blood discovering they had TB all along, the curse of the Irish race but the last generation to be afflicted. It’s Peter’s job to report if anyone is hacking or coughing all over the sides of beef. Board of Health inspectors would close the place down in a minute and we’d be on the street scratching our arses looking for work.

Peter tells me he’s weary of the whole game himself. He couldn’t get along with the cousin on Long Island and now he’s back in another boarding house in the Bronx and it’s the same old game, bring home the side of beef or any kind of meat on a Friday night and he gets the free lodging. His mother torments him with her letters. Why can’t he find a nice girl and settle down and give her a grandson or is he waiting for her to sink into the grave? She nags him so much about finding a wife he doesn’t want to read her letters anymore.

My second Friday at Merchants Refrigerating Peter wraps the side of beef in newspaper and asks me if I’d like a drink up the street. He rests the side of beef on a bar stool but the meat begins to defrost and there are blood spots and that upsets the bartender. He tells Peter he can’t have that kind of thing in the bar and he’d better put it somewhere. Peter says, All right, all right, and when the bartender isn’t looking he takes the side of beef into the men’s lavatory and leaves it there. He returns to the bar and when he starts talking about the way his mother nags him he shifts from beer to whiskey. The bartender sympathizes with him because they’re both from the County Cavan and they tell me I wouldn’t understand.

There’s a sudden roar from the men’s lavatory and a big man stumbles out yelling that there’s a huge rat sitting on the toilet seat. The bartender barks at Peter, Damn it to hell, McNamee, is that where you put that goddam meat? Get it outa this bar.

Peter retrieves his meat. Come on, McCourt, that’s the end of it. I’m worn out dragging the meat around on Friday nights. I’m going to a dance to get a wife.

We take a taxi to the Jaeger House but they won’t let Peter in with the meat. He offers to leave it at the coat check but they won’t accept it. He creates a disturbance and when the manager says, Come on, come on, get that meat outa here, Peter swings at him with the side of beef. The manager calls for help and Peter and I are pushed down the stairs by two big men from Kerry. Peter yells that he’s only looking for a wife and they should be ashamed of themselves. The Kerrymen laugh and tell him he’s an arsehole and if he doesn’t behave himself they’ll wrap that meat around his head. Peter stands still in the middle of the sidewalk and gives the Kerrymen a peculiar sober look. You’re right, he says, and offers them the meat. They won’t take it. He offers it to people passing by but they shake their heads and hurry past him.

I don’t know what to do with this meat, he says. Half the world is starving but no one wants my meat.

We go to Wright’s Restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street and Peter asks if they’d give us two dinners in exchange for a side of beef. No, they can’t do that. Board of Health regulations. He runs to the middle of the street, lays the meat on the center line, runs back and laughs at the way cars swerve to avoid the meat, laughs even more when there’s the sound of sirens and a police car and an ambulance scream around the corner and stop with flashing lights and men stand around the meat scratching their heads and then laughing till they drive away with the meat in the back of the police car.

He seems to be sober now and we order eggs and bacon at Wright’s. It’s Friday, says Peter, but I don’t give a shit. That’s the last time I’ll drag meat through the streets and subways of New York. I’m tired of being Irish anyway. I’d like to wake up in the morning and be nothing or some kind of American Protestant. So will you pay for my eggs because I have to save my money and go to Vermont and be nothing.

And he walks out the door.

23

On a slow day at Merchants Refrigerating we’re told we can go home. Instead of taking the train back to Queens I walk up Hudson Street and stop at a bar called the White Horse Tavern. I’m nearly twenty-three but I have to prove I’m eighteen before they’ll give me a beer and a knockwurst sandwich. It’s quiet in the bar even though I’ve read in the paper it’s a favorite place of poets, especially the wild man, Dylan Thomas. People sitting at tables by the windows look like poets and artists and they’re probably wondering why I’m sitting at the bar with trousers caked with beef blood. I wish I could sit there by the windows with a long-haired girl and tell her how I’ve read Dostoyevsky and how Herman Melville got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.

There’s nothing to do but sit at the bar tormenting myself with questions. What am I doing here with this knockwurst and beer? What am I doing in the world at all? Will I spend the rest of my life hauling sides of beef from truck to freezer and vice versa? Will I end my days in a small apartment in Queens while Emer is happy raising a family in a suburb completely protected by insurance? Will I ride the subways all my life envying people carrying books from universities?

I shouldn’t be eating knockwurst at a time like this. I shouldn’t be drinking beer when I don’t have an answer in my head. I shouldn’t be in this bar with poets and artists all sitting there with their serious whispered conversations. I’m weary of knockwurst and liverwurst and the feel of frozen meat on my shoulders every day.

I push the knockwurst away and leave a half stein of beer and walk out the door, across Hudson Street, along Bleecker Street, not knowing where I’m going but knowing I have to keep walking till I know where I’m going, and here I am in Washington Square and there’s New York University and I know that’s where I have to go with my GI Bill, high school or no high school. A student points to the admissions office and the woman gives me an application. She says I didn’t fill it in properly, that they need to know my high school graduation, where and when.

I never went.

You never went to high school?

No, but I have the GI Bill and I’ve been reading books all my life.

Oh, my, but we require high school graduation or the equivalency.

But I read books. I’ve read Dostoyevsky and I’ve read Pierre, or the Ambiguities. It’s not as good as Moby Dick but I read it in a hospital in Munich.

You actually read Moby Dick?

I did and Pierre, or the Ambiguities got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.

I can see she doesn’t understand. She goes into another office with my application and brings out the Dean of Admissions, a woman with a kind face. The dean tells me I’m an unusual case and wants to know about my schooling in Ireland. It’s her experience that European students are better prepared for college work and she will allow me to enroll at NYU if I can maintain a B average for a year. She wants to know what kind of work I do and when I tell her about the meat she says, My, my, I learn something every day.

Since I’m not a high school graduate and work full time I’m allowed to take only two courses, Introduction to Literature and the History of Education in America. I don’t know why I have to be introduced to literature but the woman in the admissions office says it’s a requirement even though I’ve read Dostoyevsky and Melville and that’s admirable for someone without a high school education. She says the History of Education in America course will provide me with the broad cultural background I need after my inadequate European education.

I’m in heaven and the first thing to do is buy the required textbooks, cover them with the purple and white NYU book jackets so that people in the subway will look at me admiringly.

All I know of university classes is what I saw a long time ago in the movies in Limerick and here I am sitting in one, the History of Education in America, with Professor Maxine Green up there on the platform telling us how the Pilgrims educated their children. All around me are students scribbling away in their notebooks and I wish I knew what to scribble myself. How am I supposed to know what’s important out of all the things she’s saying up there? Am I supposed to remember everything? Some students raise their hands to ask questions but I could never do that. The whole class would stare at me and wonder who’s the one with the accent. I could try an American accent but that never works. When I try it people always smile and say, Do I detect an Irish brogue?

The professor is saying the Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and that puzzles me because the Pilgrims were English themselves and the English were always the ones who persecuted everyone else, especially the Irish. I’d like to raise my hand and tell the professor how the Irish suffered for centuries under English rule but I’m sure everyone in this class has a high school diploma and if I open my mouth they’ll know I’m not one of them.

Other students are easy about raising their hands and they always say, Well, I think.

Some day I’ll raise my hand and say, Well, I think, but I don’t know what to think about Pilgrims and their education. Then the professor tells us ideas don’t drop fully formed from the skies, that the Pilgrims were, in the long run, children of the Reformation with an accompanying worldview and their attitudes to children were so informed.

There is more notebook scribbling around the room, the women busier than the men. The women scribble as if every word out of Professor Green’s mouth were important.

Then I wonder why I have this fat textbook on American education which I carry in the subways so that people can admire me for being a college student. I know there will be examinations, a midterm and a final, but where will the questions come from? If the professor talks and talks and the textbook is seven hundred pages I’ll surely be lost.

There are good-looking girls in the class and I’d like to ask one if she knows what I should know before the midterm exam in seven weeks. I’d like to go to the university cafeteria or a Greenwich Village coffee shop and chat with the girl about the Pilgrims and their Puritan ways and how they frightened the life out of their children. I could tell the girl how I read Dostoyevsky and Melville and she’d be impressed and fall in love with me and we’d study the history of education in America together. She’d make spaghetti and we’d go to bed for the excitement and then we’d sit up in the bed reading the fat textbook and wondering why people in old New England made themselves so miserable.

Men in the class look at the scribbling women and you know they’re not paying the professor a scrap of attention. You know they’re deciding which girls they’ll talk to afterward and when this first class ends they move toward the good-looking ones. They smile easily with their fine white teeth and they’re used to chatting because that’s what they did in high school where boys and girls sit together. A good-looking girl will always have someone waiting for her in the hall outside and the man in the class who started chatting with her will lose his smile.

The lecturer in the Saturday morning class is Mr. Herbert. The girls in the class seem to like him and they must know him from other classes because they ask him about his honeymoon. He smiles and jingles the change in his trouser pocket and tells us about his honeymoon and I wonder what this has to do with Introduction to Literature. Then he asks us to write two hundred words on an author we’d like to meet and why. My author is Jonathan Swift and I write that I’d like to meet him because of Gulliver’s Travels. A man with an imagination like that would be a great one to have a cup of tea or a pint with.

Mr. Herbert stands on his platform, looks through the essays, and says, Hmmm, Frank McCourt. Where is Frank McCourt?

I raise my hand and feel my face turning red. Ah, says Mr. Herbert, you like Jonathan Swift?

I do.

For his imagination, eh?

Yes.

His smile is gone and his voice doesn’t sound friendly and I feel uncomfortable with the way everyone in the class is looking at me. He says, You do know that Swift was a satirist, don’t you?

I have no notion of what he’s talking about. I have to lie and say, I do.

He says, You do know he was perhaps the greatest satirist in English literature.

I thought he was Irish.

Mr. Herbert looks at the class and smiles. Does that mean, Mr. McCourt, that if I’m from the Virgin Islands I’m a virgin?

There is laughter around the room and I feel my face on fire. I know they’re laughing at me because of the way Mr. Herbert toyed with me and put me in my place. Now he tells the class that my essay is a perfect example of a simplistic approach to literature, that while Gulliver’s Travels may be enjoyed as a children’s story it is important in English literature, not Irish, ladies and gentlemen, for its satiric brilliance. He says, When we read great works of literature in college we endeavor to rise above the mundane and the childish, and when he says that he looks at me.

The class ends and the girls gather around Mr. Herbert to smile and tell him how they enjoyed his honeymoon story and I feel so ashamed I walk down six flights of stairs so that I don’t have to be in the elevator with students who might despise me for enjoying Gulliver’s Travels for the wrong reasons or even students who might feel sorry for me. I put my books in a bag because I don’t care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can’t hold on to a girl, I can’t keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. If I’d stayed there and taken the exam I’d be a postman now strolling from street to street, handing out letters, chatting with the women, going home for my tea without a worry in the world. I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart’s content not giving a fiddler’s fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.

24

Tom is in the apartment singing, making Irish stew, chatting with the wife of the landlord, the Greek downstairs with the dry cleaning shop. The landlord’s wife is a thin blonde and I can see she doesn’t want me to be there. I walk through Woodside to the library to borrow a book I looked at the last time I was there, Sean O’Casey’s I Knock at the Door. It’s a book about growing up poor in Dublin and I never knew you could write about things like that. It was all right for Charles Dickens to write about poor people in London but his books always end with characters discovering they’re the long-lost sons of the Duke of Somerset and everyone lives happily ever after.

There is no happily ever after in Sean O’Casey. His eyes are worse than mine, so bad he can barely go to school. Still he manages to read, teaches himself to write, teaches himself Irish, writes plays for the Abbey Theatre, meets Lady Gregory and the poet Yeats, but has to leave Ireland when everyone turns against him. He would never sit in a class and let someone mock him over Jonathan Swift. He’d fight back and then walk out even if he walked into the wall with his bad eyes. He’s the first Irish writer I ever read who writes about rags, dirt, hunger, babies dying. The other writers go on about farms and fairies and the mist that do be on the bog and it’s a relief to discover one with bad eyes and a suffering mother.

What I’m discovering now is that one thing leads to another. When Sean O’Casey writes about Lady Gregory or Yeats I have to look them up in the Encyclopedia Britannica and that keeps me busy till the librarian starts turning the light on and off. I don’t know how I could have reached the age of nineteen in Limerick ignorant of all that went on in Dublin before my time. I have to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica to learn how famous the Irish writers were, Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE and John Millington Synge who wrote plays where the people talk in a way I never heard in Limerick or anywhere else.

Here I am in a library in Queens discovering Irish literature, wondering why the schoolmaster never told us about these writers till I discover they were all Protestants, even Sean O’Casey whose father came from Limerick. No one in Limerick would want to give Protestants credit for being great Irish writers.

The second week of Introduction to Literature Mr. Herbert says that from his personal point of view one of the most desirable ingredients in a work of literature is gusto and that is certainly found in the works of Jonathan Swift and his admirer, our friend Mr. McCourt. If there is a certain innocence in Mr. McCourt’s apprehension of Swift it is leavened with enthusiasm. Mr. Herbert tells the class I was the only one of thirty-three people who selected a truly great writer, that it discourages him to think there are people in this class who consider Lloyd Douglas or Henry Morton Robinson great writers. Now he wants to know how and when I first read Swift and I have to tell him how a blind man in Limerick paid me to read Swift to him when I was twelve.

I don’t want to talk in class like this because of the shame last week but I have to do what I’m told or I might be kicked out of the university. The other students are looking at me and whispering to each other and I don’t know whether they’re sneering at me or admiring me. When the class ends I take the stairs again instead of the elevator but I can’t get out the door at the bottom because of the sign that says Fire Exit and warns me if I push anything there will be alarms. I climb back to the sixth floor to take the elevator but that door and the doors on the other floors are locked and there’s nothing to do but push the door on the ground floor till the alarm goes off and I’m taken to an office to fill out a form and write a statement as to what I was doing in that place causing alarms to go off.

There’s no use making a statement about my troubles with the teacher who mocked me the first week and praised me the second week, so I write that even though I dread elevators I’ll take them from this day out. I know this is what they want to hear and I learned from the army it’s easier to tell people in offices what they want to hear because if you don’t there’s always someone higher up who wants you to fill out a longer form.

25

Tom says he’s tired of New York, he’s going to Detroit where he knows people and he can make good money working on assembly lines in car factories. He tells me I should come with him, forget college, I won’t get a degree for years and even if I do I won’t make much money. If you’re fast on the assembly line you’re promoted to foreman and supervisor and before you know it you’re in an office telling people what to do, sitting there in your suit and tie with your secretary in a chair opposite tossing her hair, crossing her legs and asking if there’s anything you’d like, anything.

Of course I’d like to go with Tom. I’d like to have money to drive around Detroit in a new car with a blonde beside me, a Protestant with no sense of sin. I could go back to Limerick in bright American clothes except that they’d want to know what kind of work I was doing in America and I could never tell them I stood all day sticking bits and pieces into Buicks rolling past on the assembly line. I’d prefer to tell them I’m a student at New York University even though some would say, University? How in God’s name did you ever get into a university, you that left school at fourteen and never set foot inside secondary school? They might say in Limerick I always had the makings of a swelled head, that I was too big for my boots, that I had a great notion of myself, that God put some of us here to hew wood and draw water and who do I think I am anyway after my years in the lanes of Limerick?

Horace, the black man I nearly died with in the fumigation chamber, tells me if I leave the university I’m a fool. He works to keep his son in college in Canada and that’s the only way in America, mon. His wife cleans offices on Broad Street and she’s happy because they’ve got a good boy up there in Canada and they’re saving a few dollars for his graduation day in two years. Their son, Timothy, wants to be a child doctor so that he can go back to Jamaica to heal the sick children.

Horace tells me I should thank God I’m white, a young white man with the GI Bill and good health. Maybe a little trouble there with the eyes but still, better in this country to be white with bad eyes than black with good eyes. If his son ever told him he wanted to quit school to stand on an assembly line sticking cigarette lighters into cars he’d go up to Canada and break his head.

There are men in the warehouse who laugh at me and want to know why the hell I sit there with Horace during lunch hour. What is there to talk about with a guy whose grandparents just fell out of a tree? If I sit off at the end of the platform reading a book for my classes they ask if I’m some kind of a fairy and they let their hands go limp at the wrists. I’d like to sink my baling hook into their skulls but Eddie Lynch tells them cut it out, leave the kid alone, that they’re ignorant slobs whose grandparents were still in the mud and wouldn’t know a tree if it was rammed up their asses.

The men won’t answer Eddie but they get back at me when we’re unloading trucks by suddenly dropping boxes or crates so that my arms are jerked down and there’s pain. If one is operating the forklift he’ll try to pin me to the wall and laugh, Whoops, didn’t see you there. After lunch they might act friendly and ask how I enjoyed my sandwich and if I say fine they’ll say, Shit, man, didn’t you taste the pigeon shit Joey spread on your ham?

There are dark clouds in my head and I want to go after Joey with my baling hook but the ham rises in my throat and I’m throwing up off the platform with the men clutching each other and laughing, the only ones not laughing are Joey at the river end of the platform looking at the sky because everyone knows he’s not right in the head and Horace at the other end watching and saying nothing.

But after all the ham comes up and the retching stops I know what Horace is thinking. He’s thinking that if this were his son, Timothy, he’d tell him walk away from this and I know that’s what I have to do. I walk to Eddie Lynch and pass him my baling hook, making sure to offer him the handle to avoid the insult of the hook itself. He takes it and shakes hands with me. He says, Okay, kid, good luck, and we’ll send your paycheck. Eddie might be a platform boss with no education who worked his way up but he knows the situation, he knows what I’m thinking. I walk to Horace and shake hands with him. I can’t say anything because I have a strange feeling of love for him that makes it hard to talk and I wish he could be my father. He doesn’t say anything either because he knows there are times like this when words have no meaning. He pats my shoulder and nods and the last sound I hear at Port Warehouses is Eddie Lynch, Get back to work, you bunch of limp pricks.

On a Saturday morning Tom and I ride the train to the bus station in Manhattan. He’s on his way to Detroit and I’m taking my army duffel bag to a boarding house in Washington Heights. Tom gets his ticket, stows his bags in the luggage compartment, steps up on the bus and says, Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to come to Detroit? You could have a hell of a life.

I could easily get on that bus. Everything I own is in the duffel bag and I could throw it in there with Tom’s bags, get a ticket and be on my way to a great adventure with money and blondes and secretaries offering me everything, anything, but I think of Horace telling me what a fool I’d be and I know he’s right and I shake my head at Tom before the bus door closes and he makes his way to his seat, smiling and waving.

All the way up to Washington Heights on the A train I’m caught between Tom and Horace, Detroit and New York University. Why couldn’t I just get a job in a factory, eight to five, an hour for lunch, two weeks vacation every year? I could go home in the evening, take a shower, go out with a girl, read a book when I felt like it. I wouldn’t have to worry about professors mocking me one week, praising me the next. I wouldn’t have to worry about papers and reading assignments from fat textbooks and exams. I’d be free.

But if I traveled on trains and buses in Detroit I might see students with their books and I’d wonder what kind of a fool I was to give up New York University for the sake of making money on the assembly line. I know I’d never be content without a college degree and always wondering what I missed.

Every day I’m learning how ignorant I am especially when I go for a coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at NYU. There are always crowds of students who drop their books on the floor and seem to have nothing to do but talk about their courses. They complain about professors and curse them for giving low grades. They brag about how they used the same term paper for more than one course or they laugh over the ways you can fool a professor with papers copied directly from encyclopedias or paraphrased from books. Most of the classes are so big the professors can only skim the papers and if they have assistants they don’t know from shit. That’s what the students say and going to college seems to be a great game with them.

Everyone talks and no one listens and I can see why. I’d like to be an ordinary student talking and complaining but I wouldn’t be able to listen to people talking about something called the grade average. They talk about the average because that’s what gets you into good graduate schools and that’s what the parents fret over.

When they’re not talking about their averages the students argue about the meaning of everything, life, the existence of God, the terrible state of the world, and you never know when someone is going to drop in the one word that gives everyone the deep serious look, existentialism. They might talk about how they want to be doctors and lawyers till one throws up his hands and declares everything is meaningless, that the only person in the world who makes any sense is Albert Camus who says your most important act every day is deciding not to commit suicide.

If ever I’m to sit with a group like this with my books on the floor and turn gloomy over how empty everything is I’ll have to look up existentialism and find out who Albert Camus is. That’s what I intend to do till the students start talking about the different colleges and I discover I’m in the one everyone looks down on, the School of Education. It’s good to be in business school or the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences but if you’re in the School of Ed you’re at the bottom of the scale. You’re going to be a teacher and who wants to be a teacher. Some of the students’ mothers are teachers and they don’t get paid shit, man, shit. You break your ass for a bunch of kids who don’t appreciate you and what do you get? Bubkes, that’s what you get.

I know from the way they say it that bubkes isn’t good and that’s another word I have to look up along with existentialism. It gives me a dark feeling sitting there in the cafeteria listening to all the bright talk around me knowing I’ll never catch up with the other students. There they are with their high school diplomas and their parents working away to send them to NYU to be doctors and lawyers but do their parents know how much time their sons and daughters spend in the cafeteria going on about existentialism and suicide? Here I am, twenty-three with no high school diploma, bad eyes, bad teeth, bad everything and what am I doing here at all. I feel lucky I didn’t try to sit with the clever suicidal students. If they ever found out I wanted to be a teacher I’d be the laughingstock of the group. I should probably sit in some other part of the cafeteria with future teachers from the School of Education though that would show the world I’m with the losers who couldn’t get into the good colleges.

The only thing to do is finish my coffee and grilled cheese sandwich and go to the library to look up existentialism and find out what makes Camus so sad, just in case.

26

My new landlady is Mrs. Agnes Klein and she shows me a room for twelve dollars a week. It’s a real room, not like the end of a hallway Mrs. Austin rented me on Sixty-eighth Street. There’s a bed, a desk, a chair, a small couch in the corner by the window where my brother Michael can sleep when he comes from Ireland in a few months.

I’m hardly in the door when Mrs. Klein is telling me her history. She tells me I’m not to jump to any conclusions. Her name might be Klein but that was her husband who was Jewish. Her own name is Canty and I should know very well you can’t get more Irish than that and if I have no place to go at Christmas I can spend it with her and her son, Michael, what’s left of him. Her husband, Eddie, was the cause of all her troubles. Just before the war he ran off to Germany with their four-year-old son, Michael, because his mother was dying and he expected to inherit her fortune. Of course they were rounded up, the whole tribe of Kleins, mother and all, and ended up in a camp. No use telling the damn Nazis Michael was an American citizen born in Washington Heights. The husband was never seen again, but Michael survived and, at the end of the war, the poor kid was able to tell the Americans who he was. She tells me what’s left of him is in a little room down the hall. She says I should come to her kitchen Christmas Day about two in the afternoon and have a little drink before dinner. There won’t be turkey. She’d like to cook European, if I don’t mind. She tells me don’t say yes unless I mean it, that I don’t have to come for Christmas dinner if I have some place to go, some Irish girl making mashed potatoes. Don’t worry about her. It wouldn’t be her first Christmas with no one but Michael at the end of the hall, what’s left of him.

On Christmas Day there are strange smells from the kitchen and there’s Mrs. Klein pushing things around in a frying pan. Pierogi, she says, Polish. Michael loves them. Have a vodka with a little orange juice. Good for you this time of year with the flu coming on.

We sit in her living room with our drinks, and she talks about her husband. She says we wouldn’t be sitting around drinking vodka and cooking up the old pierogi if he were here. For him Christmas was business as usual.

She leans over to adjust a light and her wig falls off and the vodka in me makes me laugh out loud at the sight of her skull with little tufts of brown hair. Go ahead, she says. Some day your mother’s wig will fall off and we’ll see if you laugh then. And she claps the wig back on her head.

I tell her my mother has a fine head of hair and she says, No wonder. Your mother never had a lunatic husband that walked into the arms of the Nazis, for Christ’s sakes. If it wasn’t for him Michael what’s left of him would be out of that bed there, having a vodka with his poor mouth watering for his pierogi. Oh, my God, the pierogi.

She jumps from her chair and runs to the kitchen. Well, they’re a little burned, but that only makes them nice and crisp. My philosophy is, do you want to know my philosophy? is whatever goes against you in the kitchen you can turn it to your advantage. We might as well have another vodka while I cook the sauerkraut and kielbasa.

She pours the drinks and barks at me when I ask her what kielbasa is. She says she can’t believe the ignorance in the world. Two years in the U.S. Army and you don’t know from kielbasa? No wonder the Communists are taking over. It’s Polish, for Christ’s sakes, sausage, and you should watch me fry it in case you marry someone who’s not Irish, a nice girl who might demand her kielbasa.

We stay in the kitchen with another vodka while the kielbasa sizzles and the sauerkraut stews with a vinegar smell. Mrs. Klein puts three plates on a tray and pours a glass of Manischewitz for Michael what’s left of him. He loves it, she says, loves the Manischewitz with the pierogi and kielbasa.

I follow her through her bedroom into a small dark room where Michael, what’s left of him, sits up in the bed, staring ahead. We bring in chairs and use his bed as a table. Mrs. Klein turns on the radio and we listen to oompah oompah accordion music. That’s his favorite music, she says. Anything European. He gets nostalgic, you know, nostalgic for Europe, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t you, Michael? Don’t you? I’m talking to you. Merry Christmas, Michael, merry goddam Christmas. She tears off her wig and throws it into a corner. No more pretending, Michael. I’ve had it. Talk to me or next year I cook American. Next year the turkey, Michael, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the works, Michael.

He stares straight ahead and the kielbasa grease glistens around his plate. His mother fiddles with the radio till she finds Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”

Better get used to it, Michael. Next year Bing and the stuffing. To hell with kielbasa.

She pushes her plate aside on the bed and falls asleep with her head by Michael’s elbow. I wait awhile, take my dinner to the kitchen, dump it into the garbage, return to my room and fall into my own bed.

Timmy Coin works at Merchants Refrigerating Company and lives at Mary O’Brien’s boarding house at 720 West 180 Street around the corner from where I live. He tells me drop in any time for a cup of tea, Mary is that friendly.

It’s not a real boarding house, it’s a big apartment, and there are four boarders each paying eighteen dollars a week. They get a decent breakfast any time they like not like Logan’s in the Bronx where we had to go to Mass or be in a state of grace. Mary herself would rather sit in her kitchen on a Sunday morning, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and smiling over the boarders and their stories of how they got these desperate hangovers that make them swear never again. She tells me I can always move in there if one of the boys leaves to go back to Ireland. They’re always going back, she says. They think they can get a few dollars together and settle down on the old farm with some girl from the village but what do you do night after night with nothing but the wife opposite you knitting by the light of the fire and you thinking of the lights of New York, the dance halls on the East Side and the lovely cozy bars on Third Avenue.

I’d like to move into Mary O’Brien’s to get away from Mrs. Agnes Klein who seems to stand forever on the other side of her door waiting for me to turn the key in the lock so that she can shove a vodka and orange juice into my hand. It doesn’t matter to her that I have to read or write papers for my classes at NYU. It doesn’t matter that I’m worn out from the midnight shift on the piers or warehouse platforms. She wants to tell me the story of her life, how Eddie charmed her ass off better than any Irishman and watch out for the Jewish girls, Frank, they can be very charming, too, and very what-do-you-call-it? very sensual and before you know it you’re stepping on the glass.

Stepping on the glass?

That’s right, Frank. Do you mind if I call you Frank? They won’t marry you without you stepping on the wineglass, smashing it. Then they want you to convert so the kids will be Jewish and inherit everything. But I wouldn’t. I was going to but my mother said if I ever turned Jewish she’d throw herself off the George Washington Bridge and between you and me I didn’t give a shit if she jumped and bounced off a passing tugboat. She’s not the one that stopped me from turning Jewish. I kept the faith for my dad, decent man, little problem with the drink, but what could you expect with a name like Canty that’s all over the County Kerry which I expect to see some day if God grants me health. They say the County Kerry is so green and pretty and I never see green. I see nothing but this apartment and the supermarket, nothing but this apartment and Michael what’s left of him at the end of the hall. My father said it would break his heart if I became Jewish, not that he had anything against them, poor suffering people, but hadn’t we suffered, too, and was I going to turn my back on generations of people getting hanged and burned right and left? He came to the wedding but not my mother. She said what I was doing was putting Christ back up there suffering on the cross, wounds an’ all. She said people in Ireland starved to death before they’d take the Protestant soup and what would they say about my behavior? Eddie held me in his arms and told me he had trouble with his family, too, told me when you love someone you can tell the whole world kiss your ass, and look what happened to Eddie, wound up in a goddam oven, God forgive the language.

She sits on my bed, puts her glass on the floor, covers her face with her hands. Jesus, Jesus, she says. I can’t sleep thinking what they did to him and what did Michael see. What did Michael see? I saw the pictures in the papers. Jesus. And I know them, the Germans. They live here. They have delicatessens and children and I ask them, Did you kill my Eddie? and they look at me.

She cries, lies back on my bed and falls asleep and I don’t know if I should wake her and tell her I’m worn out myself, that I’m paying twelve dollars a week so that she can fall asleep in my bed while I try to sleep on the hard couch in the corner which is waiting for my brother Michael coming here in a few months.

I tell this to Mary O’Brien and her boarders and they get hysterical laughing. Mary says, Ah, God love her. I know poor Agnes and all belongin’ to her. There are days she loses her wits entirely and wanders the neighborhood without her wig asking everyone where’s the rabbi so that she can convert for the sake of her son, poor Michael in the bed what’s left of him.

Every fortnight two nuns come to help Mrs. Klein. They wash Michael what’s left of him and change his sheets. They clean the apartment and watch over her while she takes a bath. They brush her wig so that it doesn’t have that tangled look. She doesn’t know it but they weaken her vodka with water and if she gets drunk it’s all in her head.

Sister Mary Thomas is curious about me. Do I practice my religion and what school do I go to because she sees books and notebooks? When I tell her NYU she frowns and wonders if I’m not worried about losing my religion in such a place. I can’t tell her I stopped going to Mass years ago, she and Sister Beatrice are so good to Mrs. Klein and Michael in the bed what’s left of him.

Sister Mary Thomas whispers to me something I’m never to tell another soul unless it’s a priest, that she took the liberty of baptizing Michael. After all, he’s not really Jewish since his mother is Irish Catholic and Sister would hate to think what might happen to Michael if he died without the sacrament. Didn’t he suffer enough in Germany, little boy looking at his father being led off or worse? And doesn’t he deserve the purification of baptism in case he doesn’t wake up some morning in there in the bed?

She wants to know now what is my situation here? Am I encouraging Agnes to drink or is it vice versa? I tell her I don’t have time for anything I’m so busy with school and work and trying to sleep a little. She wants to know if I’d do her a little favor, something to ease her soul. If I have a moment and poor Agnes is sleeping or passed out with the watery vodka would I go down the hall, kneel by Michael’s bed and say a few Hail Marys, maybe a decade of the rosary. He might not understand but you never know. With God’s help the Hail Marys might sink into his poor troubled brain and help him return to the realm of the living, back to the True Faith which came down to him on his mother’s side.

If I do that she’ll pray for me. Above all, she’ll pray that I leave NYU which everyone knows is a hotbed of communism where I’m in great danger of losing my immortal soul and what doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his immortal soul? God knows there must be a place for me at Fordham or St. John’s which are not hotbeds of atheistic communism like NYU. I’d be better off out of NYU before Senator McCarthy goes after it, God bless him and keep him. Isn’t that right, Sister Beatrice?

The other nun nods yes because she’s always so busy she rarely speaks. While Sister Mary Thomas tries to save my soul from atheistic communism Sister Beatrice is giving Mrs. Klein a bath or cleaning Michael what’s left of him. Sometimes when Sister Beatrice opens Michael’s door the smell that drifts up the hall is enough to make you sick but that doesn’t stop her from going in. She still washes him and changes his bedclothes and you can hear her humming hymns. If Mrs. Klein has drunk too much and gets cranky over having to take a bath Sister Beatrice holds her, hums her hymns and strokes the little brown tufts on her skull till Mrs. Klein is a child in her arms. That makes Sister Mary Thomas impatient and she tells Mrs. Klein, You have no right to waste our time like this. We have other poor souls to visit, Catholics, Mrs. Klein, Catholics.

Mrs. Klein whimpers, I’m a Catholic. I’m a Catholic.

That’s debatable, Mrs. Klein.

And if Mrs. Klein sobs Sister Beatrice holds her harder, presses her whole open hand on her head and hums away with a little smile toward heaven. Sister Mary Thomas waggles her finger at me and tells me, Beware of marrying outside the True Faith. This is what happens.

27

There’s a letter telling me report to my faculty adviser in the English Department, Mr. Max Bogart. He says my grades are unsatisfactory, B minus in the History of Education in America and C in Introduction to Literature. I’m supposed to maintain a B average on my year’s probation if I want to stay in college. After all, he says, the dean did you a favor letting you in without a high school diploma and now you let her down.

I have to work.

What do you mean you have to work? Everyone has to work.

I have to work nights, sometimes days, on piers, in warehouses.

He says I have to make a decision, work or college. He’ll give me a break this time and put me on probation on top of the probation I already have. Next June he wants to see me with a straight B average or better.

I never thought college would be all numbers and letters and grades and averages and people putting me on probation. I thought this would be a place where kindly learned men and women would teach in a warm way and if I didn’t understand they’d pause and explain. I didn’t know I’d go from course to course with dozens of students, sometimes over a hundred, with professors lecturing and not even looking at you. Some professors look out the window or up at the ceiling and some stick their noses in notebooks and read from paper that is yellow and crumbling with age. If students ask questions they’re waved away. In English novels students at Oxford and Cambridge were always meeting in professors’ rooms and sipping sherry while discussing Sophocles. I’d like to discuss Sophocles, too, but I’d have to read him first and there’s no time after my nights at Merchants Refrigerating.

And if I’m to discuss Sophocles and get gloomy over existentialism and the Camus suicide problem I’ll have to give up Merchants Refrigerating. If I didn’t have the night job I might be able to sit in the cafeteria and talk about Pierre, or the Ambiguities or Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare in general. There are girls in the cafeteria with names like Rachel and Naomi and they’re the ones Mrs. Klein told me about, Jewish girls who are very sensual. I wish I had the courage to talk to them because they’re probably like Protestant girls, all in a state of despair over the emptiness of it all, no sense of sin and ready for all kinds of sensuality.

In the spring of 1954 I’m a full-time student at NYU working only part-time on the docks and the warehouses or when the Manpower agency sends me on a temporary job. The first one is at a hat factory on Seventh Avenue where the owner, Mr. Meyer, tells me it’s easy work. All I have to do is take these women’s hats, neutral colors all of them, dip these feathers into different dye pots, let the feather dry, match the color against the hat, attach feather to hat. Easy, right? Yeah, that’s what you’d think, says Mr. Meyer, but when I let some of my Puerto Rican help try this job they came up with color combinations that would blind you. These PRs think life is an Easter Parade and it ain’t. You gotta have taste when you match a feather with a hat, taste, my friend. Little Jewish ladies in Brooklyn don’t want to be wearing the Easter Parade on their heads on Passover, know’t I mean?

He tells me I look intelligent enough, college boy, right? Easy job like this shouldn’t be a problem. If it is I shouldn’t even be in college. He’s going away for a few days so I’ll be on my own except for the Puerto Rican ladies working on the sewing machines and the cutting tables. Yeah, he says, the PR ladies will take care of you, ha ha.

I want to ask him if there are colors that match and colors that don’t but he’s gone. I dip feathers into pots and when I attach them to the hats the Puerto Rican women and girls start to giggle and laugh. I finish a batch of hats and they take them to shelves along the walls and bring me another batch. All the time they try not to laugh but they can’t help themselves and I can’t stop blushing. I try to vary the color schemes by dipping the feathers into different pots for a rainbow effect. I use a feather as a paintbrush and on the other feathers I try to make dots, stripes, sunsets, moons waxing and waning, wavy rivers with fish waggling along and birds roosting, and the women laugh so hard they can’t operate the sewing machines. I wish I could talk to them and ask them what I’m doing wrong. I wish I could tell them I wasn’t put into this world to stick feathers on hats, that I’m a college student who trained dogs in Germany and worked on the piers.

In three days Mr. Meyer returns and when he sees the hats he stops inside the door like a man paralyzed. He looks at the women and they shake their heads as if to say there’s madness in the world. He says, What did you do? and I don’t know what to say back. He says, Jesus. I mean are you Puerto Rican or what?

No, sir.

Irish, right? Yeah, that’s it. Maybe you’re color blind. I didn’t ask you about that. Did I ask you about your color blindness?

No, sir.

If you’re not color blind then I don’t know how you can explain these combinations. You make the Puerto Ricans look dull, y’know that? Dull. I guess it’s the Irish thing, no sense of color, no art, f’ Chrissakes. I mean where are the Irish painters? Name one.

I can’t.

You heard of Van Gogh, right? Rembrandt? Picasso?

I did.

That’s what I mean. You’re nice people, the Irish, great singers, John McCormack. Great cops, politicians, priests. Lotta Irish priests but no artists. When didja ever see an Irish painting on the wall? A Murphy, a Reilly, a Rooney? Nah, kid. I think it’s because your people know one color, green. Right? So my advice to you is stay away from anything to do with color. Join the cops, run for office, pick up your paycheck and have a nice life, no hard feelings.

They shake their heads in the Manpower office. They thought this would be the perfect job for me, college boy, right? What’s so hard about sticking feathers on hats? Mr. Meyer called them and said, Don’t send me no more Irish college boys. They’re color blind. Send me someone stoopid that knows colors and won’t mess with my hats.

They say if I could type they’d send me out on all kinds of jobs. I tell them I can type, that I learned in the army and I’m powerful.

They send me to offices all over Manhattan. From nine to five I sit at desks and type lists, invoices, addresses on envelopes, bills of lading. Supervisors tell me what to do and talk to me only when I make mistakes. The other office workers ignore me because I’m only temporary, a temp they say, and I might not even be here tomorrow. They don’t even see me. I could die at my desk and they’d talk past me about what they saw on TV last night and how they’re getting outa here fast Friday afternoon and heading for the Jersey shore. They send out for coffee and pastries and don’t ask me if I have a mouth in my head. Whenever anything unusual happens it’s an excuse for a party. There are presents for people being promoted, getting pregnant, people getting engaged or married, and they’ll all stand around the other end of the office drinking wine, eating crackers and cheese for the hour before they go home. Women will bring in their new babies and all the other women will rush over to tickle them and say, Isn’t she just beautiful? Got your eyes, Miranda, definitely got your eyes. Men will say, Hi, Miranda. Looking good. Nice kid. That’s all they can say because men are not supposed to be enthusiastic or excited over babies. I’m not invited to the parties and I feel strange with my typewriter clacking away and everyone having a good time. If a supervisor is giving a small speech and I’m at the typewriter they’ll call across the office, Excuse me, you over there, quit the racket a minute, will ya? Can’t hear ourselves think here.

I don’t know how they can work in these offices day after day, year in, year out. I can’t stop looking at the clock and there are times I think I’ll just get up and walk away the way I did at the Blue Cross insurance company. The people in their offices don’t seem to mind. They go to the water cooler, they go to the toilet, they walk from desk to desk and chat, they call from desk to desk on the telephone, they admire each other’s clothes, hair, makeup, and anytime someone loses a few pounds on a diet. If a woman is told she lost weight she smiles for an hour and keeps running her hands over her hips. Office people brag about their children, their wives, their husbands and they dream about the two-week vacation.

I’m sent to an import-export firm on Fourth Avenue. I’m given a pile of papers that have to do with importing Japanese dolls. I’m supposed to copy this paper to that paper. It’s 9:30 A.M. by the office clock. I look out the window. The sun is shining. A man and woman are kissing outside a coffee shop across the avenue. It’s 9:33 A.M. by the office clock. The man and woman separate and walk in opposite directions. They turn. They run toward each other to kiss again. It’s 9:36 A.M. by the office clock. I take my jacket from the back of the chair and slip it on. The office manager stands at his cubicle door and says, Hey, what’s up? I don’t answer. People are waiting for the elevator but I head for the stairs and run as fast as I can down seven flights. The kissing people have disappeared and I’m sorry. I wanted to see them once more. I hope they’re not going to offices where they’ll be typing lists of Japanese dolls or telling everyone they’re engaged so that the officer manager will allow them an hour of wine and cheese and crackers.

* * *

With my brother Malachy in the air force sending a monthly allotment my mother is comfortable in Limerick. She has the house with gardens front and back where she can grow flowers and onions if she likes. She has enough money for clothes and bingo and excursions to the seaside at Kilkee. Alphie is in school at the Christian Brothers where he’ll get a secondary school education and all kinds of opportunities. With the comfort of the new house, beds, sheets, blankets, pillows, he doesn’t have to worry about battling fleas all night, there’s DDT, and he doesn’t have to struggle to light a fire in the grate every morning, there’s the gas stove. He can have an egg every day if he likes and not even think about it the way we did. He has decent clothes and shoes and he’s warm no matter how bad it is outside.

It’s time for me to send for Michael so that he can come to New York and get on in the world. When he arrives he’s so thin I want to take him out and fill him with hamburgers and apple pie. He stays with me awhile at Mrs. Klein’s and works at different jobs but there’s the threat of being drafted into the army and he thinks it’s better to join the air force because the uniform is a nice shade of blue, more glamorous than the shitty brown of the army uniform and more likely to attract girls. Once Malachy is out of the air force Michael can continue the monthly allotment that will keep my mother going for another three years and I will have only myself to worry about till I finish at NYU.

28

When she saunters into the psychology class the professor himself lets his jaw drop and he grips a piece of chalk so hard it cracks and breaks. He says, Excuse me, miss, and she gives him such a smile all he can do is smile back. Excuse me, miss, he says, but we’re seated alphabetically and I’d need to know your name.

Alberta Small, she says, and he points to a row behind me and we don’t mind one bit if she takes all day getting to her seat because we’re feasting on her blonde hair, blue eyes, luscious lips, a bosom that is an occasion of sin, a figure that makes you throb in the middle of your body. A few rows back she whispers, Excuse me, and there’s a shuffle and a flutter where students have to stand to let her get to her seat.

I’d like to be one of the students standing to let her by, to have her brush against me and touch me.

When the class ends I want to make sure I let her pass up the aisle so that I can watch her coming and see her going with that figure you see only in films. She passes and gives me a little smile and I wonder why God is so kind to me that He lets me have a smile from the loveliest girl in all of NYU, so blonde and blue-eyed she must hail from a tribe of Scandinavian beauties. I wish I could say to her, Hi, would you like to go for a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich and discuss existentialism? but I know that will never happen especially when I see who’s meeting her in the hallway, a student the size of a mountain wearing a jacket that says New York University Football.

At the next meeting of the psychology class the professor asks me a question about Jung and the collective unconscious and the moment I open my mouth I know everyone is staring at me as if to say, Who’s the one with the Irish brogue? The professor himself says, Oh, do I detect an Irish accent? and I have to admit he does. He tells the class that, of course, the Catholic Church has been traditionally hostile to psychoanalysis. Isn’t that right, Mr. McCourt? and I feel he’s accusing me. Why is he talking about the Catholic Church just because I tried to answer his question on the collective unconscious and am I supposed to defend the Church?

I don’t know, Professor.

There’s no use telling him that one Redemptorist priest in Limerick ranted from the pulpit on Sunday mornings denouncing Freud and Jung and promising they’d wind up in the deepest hole in hell, the two of them. If I talk in class I know no one is listening to what I’m saying. They’re listening only to my accent and there are times when I wish I could reach into my mouth and tear my accent out by the roots. Even when I try to sound American people look puzzled and say, Do I detect an Irish brogue?

At the end of the class I wait for the blonde to pass by but she stops, the blue eyes smile at me, and she says, Hi, and my heart bangs in my chest. She says, My name is Mike.

Mike?

Well, actually, my name is Alberta but they call me Mike.

There is no football player outside and she says she has two hours till her next class and would I like to have a drink at Rocky’s?

I have a class in ten minutes but I’m not going to miss this chance to be with this girl everyone is staring at, this girl who picked me out of all the people in the world to say hello to. We have to walk quickly to Rocky’s so that we won’t run into Bob the football player. He might be upset if he knew she was having a drink with another boy.

I wonder why she calls all males boy. I’m twenty-three.

She says she’s kinda engaged to Bob, that they’re pinned, and I don’t know what she’s talking about. She says a girl who’s pinned is engaged to be engaged and you can tell if a girl is pinned when she wears her boyfriend’s high school graduation ring on a necklace. It makes me wonder why she’s not wearing Bob’s ring. She says he gave her a gold bracelet with her name on it to wear around her ankle that would show she’s taken but she doesn’t wear it because it’s what Puerto Rican girls do and they’re too flashy. The bracelet is what you get just before the engagement ring and she’ll wait for that, thank you very much.

She tells me she’s from Rhode Island. She was reared there from the age of seven by her father’s mother. Her own mother was only sixteen when she was born and her father twenty so you can guess what happened there. Shotgun. When the war came and he was drafted and sent to Seattle it was the end of the marriage. Even though Mike was a Protestant she graduated from a Catholic convent school in Fall River, Massachusetts, and she smiles at the memory of that graduation summer when she had a different date nearly every night. She might be smiling but I feel a great surge of rage and envy and I’d like to kill the boys who ate popcorn with her and probably kissed her in drive-in movies. Now she’s living with her father and stepmother up on Riverside Drive and her grandmother is here for a while till she settles in and gets used to the city. She’s not a bit shy about telling me she likes my Irish accent and she even liked looking at the back of my head in class the way my hair is black and wavy. This makes me blush and even though it’s dark in Rocky’s she can see the blush and she thinks it’s cute.

I have to get used to the way they say cute in New York. If you say someone is cute in Ireland you’re saying he’s cunning and sneaky.

I’m in Rocky’s and I’m in heaven drinking beer with this girl who could have stepped down from a movie screen, another Virginia Mayo. I know I’m the envy of every man and boy in Rocky’s, that it’ll be the same on the streets, heads turning and wondering who I am that I’m with the loveliest girl in NYU and Manhattan itself.

After two hours she has to go to her next class. I’m ready to carry her books the way they do in the movies but she says, No, better that I stay here awhile in case we run into Bob who wouldn’t be a bit pleased to see her with the likes of me. She laughs and reminds me he’s big, thanks for the beer, see you next week in class, and she’s gone.

Her glass is still on the table and it’s marked with pink lipstick. I put it to my lips for the taste of her and dream that some day I’ll kiss the lips themselves. I press her glass against my cheek and think of her kissing the football player and there are dark clouds in my head. Why would she sit with me in Rocky’s if she’s kinda engaged to him? Is that the way it is in America? If you love a woman you’re supposed to be loyal to her at all times. If you don’t love her then it’s all right to drink beer in Rocky’s with someone else. If she goes to Rocky’s with me then she doesn’t love him and that makes me feel better.

Is it that she feels sorry for me with my Irish accent and my red eyes? Is she able to guess that it’s hard for me to talk to girls unless they talk to me first?

All over America there are men who walk up to girls and say, Hi. I could never do that. I’d feel foolish saying Hi in the first place because I didn’t grow up with it. I’d have to say Hello or something grown-up. Even when they talk to me I never know what to say. I don’t want them to know I never went to high school and I don’t want them to know I grew up in an Irish slum. I’m so ashamed of the past that all I can do is lie about it.

The lecturer in English Composition, Mr. Calitri, would like us to write an essay on a single object from our childhood, an object that had significance for us, something domestic, if possible.

There isn’t an object in my childhood I’d want anyone to know about. I wouldn’t want Mr. Calitri or anyone in the class to know about the slum lavatory we shared with all those families in Roden Lane. I could make up something but I can’t think of anything like the things other students talk about, the family car, Dad’s old baseball mitt, the sled they had so much fun with, the old icebox, the kitchen table where they did their homework. All I can think of is the bed I shared with my three brothers and even though I’m ashamed of it I have to write about it. If I make up something that’s nice and respectable and don’t write about the bed I’ll be tormented. Besides, Mr. Calitri will be the only one reading it and I’ll be safe.

THE BED

When I was growing up in Limerick my mother had to go to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to see if she could get a bed for me and my brothers, Malachy, Michael, and Alphie who was barely walking. The man at the St. Vincent de Paul said he could give her a docket to go down to the Irishtown to a place that sold secondhand beds. My mother asked him couldn’t we get a new bed because you never know what you’re getting with an old one. There could be all kinds of diseases.

The man said beggars can’t be choosers and my mother shouldn’t be so particular.

But she wouldn’t give up. She asked if it was possible at least to find out if anyone had died in the bed. Surely that wasn’t asking too much. She wouldn’t want to be lying in her own bed at night thinking about her four small sons sleeping on a mattress that someone had died on, maybe someone that had a fever or consumption.

The St. Vincent de Paul man said, Missus, if you don’t want this bed give me back the docket and I’ll give it to someone that’s not so particular.

Mam said, Ah, no, and she came home to get Alphie’s pram so that we could carry the mattress, the spring and the bedstead. The man in the shop in the Irishtown wanted her to take a mattress with hair sticking out and spots and stains all over but my mother said she wouldn’t let a cow sleep on a bed like that, didn’t the man have another mattress over there in the corner? The man grumbled and said, All right, all right. Bejesus, the charity cases is gettin’ very particular these days, and he stayed behind his counter watching us drag the mattress outside.

We had to push the pram up and down the streets of Limerick three times for the mattress and the different parts of the iron bedstead, the head, the end, the supports and the spring. My mother said she was ashamed of her life and wished she could do this at night. The man said he was sorry for her troubles but he closed at six sharp and wouldn’t stay open if the Holy Family came for a bed.

It was hard pushing the pram because it had one bockety wheel that wanted to go its own way and it was harder still with Alphie buried under the mattress screaming for his mother.

My father was there to drag the mattress upstairs and he helped us put the spring and the bedstead together. Of course he wouldn’t help us push the pram two miles from the Irishtown because he’d be ashamed of the spectacle. He was from the North of Ireland and they must have a different way of bringing home the bed.

We had old overcoats to put on the bed because the St. Vincent de Paul Society wouldn’t give us a docket for sheets and blankets. My mother lit the fire and when we sat around it drinking tea she said at least we’re all off the floor and isn’t God good.

The next week Mr. Calitri sits on the edge of his desk on the platform. He pulls our essays from his bag and tells the class, Not a bad set of essays, some a little too sentimental. But there’s one I’d like to read you if the author doesn’t mind, “The Bed.”

He looks toward me and lets his eyebrows go up as if to say, Do you mind? I don’t know what to say though I’d like to tell him, No, no, please don’t tell the world what I came from, but the heat is in my face already and I can only shrug to him as if I don’t care.

He reads “The Bed.” I can feel the whole class looking at me and I’m ashamed. I’m glad Mike Small isn’t in this class. She’d never look at me again. There are girls in the class and they’re probably thinking they should move away from me. I want to tell them this is a made-up story but Mr. Calitri is up there talking about it now, telling the class why he gave it an A, that my style is direct, my subject matter rich. He laughs when he says rich. You know what I mean, he says. He tells me I should continue to explore my rich past, and he smiles again. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m sorry I ever wrote about that bed and I’m afraid everyone will pity me and treat me like a charity case. The next time I have to take a class in English Composition I’ll put my family in a comfortable house in the suburbs and I’ll make my father a postman with a pension.

At the end of the class students nod to me and smile and I wonder if they’re already feeling sorry for me.

Mike Small came from another world, she and her football player. They might be from different parts of America but they were teenagers and it was the same all over. They went on dates on Saturday nights where the boy would have to meet the girl at her house and of course she would never be at the door waiting for him because that would show she was too eager and word would get around and she’d be alone every Saturday night the rest of her life. The boy would have to wait in the living room with a silent dad who always looked disapproving behind his newspaper knowing what he did on dates in the old days himself and wondering what was going to be done to his little daughter. The mother would fuss and want to know what movie they were going to and what time they’d be home because her daughter was a nice girl who needed a good night’s sleep to keep that glow in her complexion for church tomorrow morning. At the movies they held hands and if the boy was lucky he might get a kiss and accidentally touch her breast. If that happened she’d give him a sharp look and that meant the body was being reserved for the honeymoon. After the movie they’d have hamburgers and milk shakes at the soda fountain with all the other high school kids, the boys in crew cuts and the girls in skirts and bobby sox. They’d sing along with the jukebox and the girls would squeal over Frankie. If the girl liked the boy she might let him have a long kiss at her door, maybe one dart of a tongue in the mouth, but if he tried to keep the tongue in there she’d back away and tell him good night, she had a nice time, thank you, and that was another reminder the body was being reserved for the honeymoon.

Some girls would let you touch and feel and kiss but they wouldn’t let you go all the way and they were known as ninety percenters. There was some hope for ninety percenters but the all-the-way girls had such a reputation no one in town would want to marry them and they were the ones who would pack up one day and go to New York where everyone does everything.

That is what I saw in the movies or what I heard in the army from GIs who came from all over the country. If you had a car and a girl said yes she’d go with you to a drive-in movie you knew she was expecting more than popcorn and the doings up there on the screen. There was no sense in just going for a kiss. You could get that in a regular movie house. The drive-in was where you got the tongue into the mouth and the hand on the breast and if she let you get to the nipple, man, she was yours. The nipple was like a key that opened the legs and if you weren’t with another couple it was into the backseat and who cared about the goddam movie?

The GIs said there were funny nights when you might be making out but your friend was having trouble in the backseat with his girl who was sitting up and watching the movie or it might be vice versa where your buddy is making out and you’re so frustrated you want to explode in your pants. Sometimes your buddy might be finished with his girl and she’s ready to take you on and that’s pure heaven, man, because not only are you getting laid the one who rejected you is sitting there stonefaced pretending to watch the movie but really listening to you back there and sometimes she can’t stand it anymore and climbs on you and you’re caught between two broads in the backseat. Goddam.

Men in the army said you’d have no respect later for the girl who let you go all the way and you’d have only a little respect for the ninety percenter. Of course you’d have complete respect for the girl who said no and sat up watching the movie. That’s the girl that was pure, not damaged goods, and the girl you’d want to be the mother of your children. If you married a girl who fooled around how would you ever know you were the real father of your kids?

I know that if Mike Small ever went to a drive-in she was the one who sat up and watched the movie. Anything else would be too much of a pain to think about especially when it’s hard to think of her even kissing the football player at her own door with her father inside waiting.

The nuns tell me Mrs. Klein is losing her wits with the drink and neglecting poor Michael what’s left of him. They’re moving them to places where they can be cared for, Catholic homes, though it’s better not to tell anyone about Michael for fear some Jewish organization would claim him. Sister Mary Thomas is not against Jews but she doesn’t want to lose a precious soul like Michael’s.

One of Mary O’Brien’s boarders is gone back to Ireland to settle on his father’s five acres and marry a girl from down the road. I can have his bed for eighteen dollars a week and help myself in the morning to whatever is in the fridge. The other Irish boarders work on the piers and warehouses and they bring home canned fruits or bottles of rum and whiskey from cases that accidentally fell when ships were being unloaded. Mary says isn’t it wonderful that when you say there’s something you’d like a whole case of it is accidentally dropped the next day on the docks. There are Sunday mornings we don’t bother cooking breakfast we’re that happy in the kitchen with slices of pineapple in heavy syrup and glasses of rum to wash it down. Mary reminds us about Mass but we’re content enough with our pineapple and rum and soon Timmy Coin is calling for a song even if it’s a Sunday morning. He works in Merchants Refrigerating and often brings home a great side of beef on Friday nights. He’s the only one who cares about going to Mass though he makes sure he’s back in no time for the pineapple and rum which can’t last forever.

Frankie and Danny Lennon are twins, Irish-Americans. Frankie lives in another apartment and Danny is a boarder with Mary. Their father, John, lives on the streets, wanders around with a pint of wine in a brown paper bag, and cleans Mary’s apartment in exchange for a shower, a sandwich and a few drinks. His sons laugh and sing, “Oh, my papa, to me he was so wonderful.”

Frankie and Danny take classes at City College, one of the best colleges in the country and free. Even though they’re studying accounting they’re always excited over their courses in literature. Frankie talks about seeing a girl on the subway reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and how anxious he was to sit beside her and discuss Joyce. All the way from 34th Street to 181st Street he would leave his seat and move toward her, never having the courage to talk to her, and losing his seat each time to another passenger. At last when the train pulled in to 181st Street he bent to her and said, Great book, isn’t it? and she jerked back from him and let out a cry. He wanted to tell her, Sorry, sorry, but the doors were closing and he was out on the platform with people in the train glaring at him.

They love jazz and they’re like two mad professors in the living room, putting records on the phonograph, clicking their fingers to the beat, telling me all about the great musicians on this Benny Goodman record, Gene Krupa, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Benny himself. They tell me this was the greatest jazz concert of all time and the first time a black man was allowed on the Carnegie Hall stage. And listen to him, listen to Lionel Hampton, all velvet and glide, listen to him and Benny coming in, listen, and here comes Harry sending in a few notes to tell you watch out, I’m flying, I’m flying, and Krupa going bap-bap-bap-do-bap-de-bap, hands, feet going, sing sing sing, and the whole damn band wild, man, wild, and the audience, listen to that audience, outa their mind, man, outa their everlovin’ mind.

They play Count Basie, point their fingers and laugh when the Count hits those single notes, and when they play Duke Ellington they’re all over the living room clicking fingers and stopping to tell me, listen, listen to this and I listen because I never listened like this before and now I hear what I never heard before and I have to laugh with the Lennons when the musicians take passages from tunes and turn them upside down and inside out and put them back again as if to say, look, we borrowed your little tune awhile to play our own way but don’t worry, here it’s back again and you go hum it, honey, you sing that mother, man.

The Irish boarders complain this is just a lot of noise. Paddy Arthur McGovern says, Shure, yeer not Irish at all with that stuff. What about some Irish songs on that machine? What about a few Irish dance tunes?

The Lennons laugh and tell us their father left the bogs a long time ago. Danny says, This is America, men. This is the music. But Paddy Arthur pulls Duke Ellington off the phonograph and puts on Frank Lee’s Tara Ceilidhe Band and we sit around the living room, listening, tapping slightly, and not moving our faces. The Lennons laugh, and leave.

29

Sister Mary Thomas somehow found my new address and sent me a note to say it would be very nice if I came over and said good-bye to Mrs. Klein and Michael what’s left of him and to pick up two books I’d left under my bed. There’s an ambulance waiting outside the apartment house and upstairs Sister Mary Thomas is telling Mrs. Klein she has to put on her wig and, no, she can’t have a rabbi, they don’t have rabbis where she’s going and she’d be better off on her knees saying a decade of the rosary and praying for forgiveness, and down the hall Sister Beatrice is crooning to Michael what’s left of him and telling him a brighter day is dawning, that where he’s going there will be birds and flowers and trees and a risen Lord. Sister Mary Thomas calls down the hall, Sister, you’re wasting your time. He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. But Sister Beatrice answers back, It doesn’t matter, Sister. He’s a child of the Lord, a Jewish child of the Lord, Sister.

He’s not Jewish, Sister.

Does it matter, Sister? Does it matter?

It matters, Sister, and I’d advise you to consult your confessor.

Yes, Sister, I will. And Sister Beatrice goes on with her cheerful words and hymns to Michael what’s left of him who may or may not be Jewish.

Sister Mary Thomas says, Oh, I nearly forgot your books. They’re under the bed.

She hands me the books and rubs her hands together as if to clean them. Don’t you know, she says, that Anatole France is on the Index of the Catholic Church and D. H. Lawrence was a completely depraved Englishman who is now howling in the depths of hell, the Lord save us all? If that’s what you’re reading at New York University I fear for your soul and I’ll light a candle for you.

No, Sister, I’m reading Penguin Island for myself and Women in Love for one of my classes.

She rolls her eyes to heaven. Oh, the arrogance of youth. I feel sorry for your poor mother.

There are two men in white coats at the door with a stretcher and they go down the hall for Michael what’s left of him. Mrs. Klein sees them and calls, Rabbi, Rabbi, help me in my hour, and Sister Mary Thomas pushes her back into her chair. They shuffle back down the hall, the men in white with Michael what’s left of him on the stretcher and Sister Bea-trice stroking the top of his head that looks like a skull. Alannah, alannah, she says in her Irish accent, sure there’s nothing left of you. But you’ll see the sky now and the clouds in it. She goes down with him in the elevator and I’d like to go myself to get away from Sister Mary Thomas and her remarks on the state of my soul and the terrible things I’m reading but I have to say good-bye to Mrs. Klein all dressed up in her wig and hat. She takes my hand, Take care of Michael what’s left of him, won’t you, Eddie?

Eddie. I feel a fierce pain in my heart because of this and a terrible memory of Rappaport and the laundry at Dachau and I wonder if I’ll ever know anything in the world but darkness. Will I ever know what Sister Beatrice promised Michael what’s left of him, birds, flowers, trees and a risen Lord?

What I learned in the army comes in useful at NYU. Never raise your hand, never let them know your name, never volunteer. Students just graduated from high school, eighteen years of age, raise their hands regularly to tell the class and the professor what they think. If professors look directly at me and ask questions I can never finish the answers with the way they always say, Oh, do I detect a brogue? After that I have no peace. Whenever an Irish writer is mentioned, or anything Irish, everyone turns to me as if I’m the authority. Even the professors seem to think I know all about Irish literature and history. If they say anything about Joyce or Yeats they look at me as if I am the expert, as if I should nod and confirm what they say. I nod all the time because I don’t know what else to do. If ever I shook my head in doubt or disagreement the professors would dig deeper with their questions and expose my ignorance for all to see, especially the girls.

It’s the same with Catholicism. If I answer a question they hear my accent and that means I’m a Catholic and ready to defend Mother Church to the last drop of my blood. Some professors like to taunt me by sneering at the Virgin Birth, the Holy Trinity, the celibacy of St. Joseph, the Inquisition, the priest-ridden people of Ireland. When they talk like that I don’t know what to say because they have the power to lower my grade and damage my average so that I won’t be able to follow the American dream and that might drive me to Albert Camus and the daily decision not to commit suicide. I fear professors with their high degrees and the way they might make me look foolish before the other students, especially the girls.

I’d like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I’m too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I’m working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library, trying to write term papers with footnotes and bibliographies on a typewriter that betrays me with the letters “a” and “j” so that I have to go back and retype whole pages since it’s impossible to avoid “a” and “j,” falling asleep on subway trains all the way to the last stop so that I’m embarrassed I have to ask people where I am when I don’t even know what borough I’m in.

If I didn’t have red eyes and an Irish accent I could be purely American and I wouldn’t have to put up with professors tormenting me with Yeats and Joyce and the Irish Literary Renaissance and how clever and witty the Irish are and what a beautiful green country it is though priest-ridden and poor with a population ready to vanish from the face of the earth due to puritanical sexual repression and what do you have to say to that, Mr. McCourt?

I think you’re right, Professor.

Oh, he thinks I’m right. And, Mr. Katz, what do you say to that?

I guess I agree, Professor. I don’t know too many Irish.

Ladies and gentlemen, you must consider what has just been said by Mr. McCourt and Mr. Katz. Here we have the intersection of the Celtic and the Hebraic, both ready to accommodate and compromise. Isn’t that right, Mr. McCourt, Mr. Katz?

We nod and I remember what my mother used to say, A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. I’d like to say this to the professor but I can’t take the risk of offending him with all the power he has to keep me from the American dream and make me look foolish before the class, especially the girls.

Monday and Wednesday mornings in the fall term Professor Middlebrook teaches the Literature of England. She mounts the little platform, sits, places the heavy textbook on the desk, reads from it, comments and looks at the class only to ask an occasional question. She starts with Beowulf and ends with John Milton who, she says, is sublime, somewhat in disfavor in our time but his day will come, his day will come. Students read newspapers, work at crossword puzzles, pass notes to each other, study for other courses. After my all-night shifts at various jobs it’s hard to stay awake and when she asks me a question Brian McPhillips jabs me with his elbow, whispers the question and the answer and I stammer it back to her. Sometimes she mutters into the textbook and I know I’m in trouble and that trouble takes the form of a C at the end of the term.

With all my latenesses and absences and falling asleep in class I know I deserve a C and I’d like to tell the professor how guilty I feel and if she failed me completely I wouldn’t blame her. I’d like to explain that even if I’m not a model student she should see the way I am with the Literature of England textbook, all excited reading it in the NYU library, on subway trains, even on piers and warehouse platforms during lunch hour. She should know I’m probably the only student in the world who ever got into trouble with men on warehouse platforms over a literature book. The men taunt me, Hey, look at the college boy. Too good to talk to us, eh? and when I tell them about the strangeness of the Anglo-Saxon language they tell me I am full of shit, that isn’t English at all and who the fuck do you think you’re kiddin’, kid? Maybe they never went to college, they say, but they aren’t gonna have the wool pulled over their eyes by a half-ass shithead just off the boat from Ireland telling them this is the English language when you could see there isn’t an English word on the whole goddam page.

After that they won’t talk to me and the platform boss shifts me inside to run the elevator so that the men won’t be pulling tricks on me, dropping loads to jerk the arms out of my sockets or pretending to run me down with forklift trucks.

I’d like to tell the professor how I look at the authors and poets in the textbook and ask myself which of them I’d like to have a pint with in a Greenwich Village pub and the one that stands out is Chaucer. I’d buy him a pint anytime and listen to his stories about the Canterbury pilgrims. I’d like to tell the professor how much I love the sermons of John Donne and how I’d like to buy him a pint except that he was a Protestant priest and not known for sitting in taverns knocking back the pint.

I can’t talk about this because it’s dangerous to raise your hand in any class to say how much you love anything. The professor will look at you with a pitying little smile and the class will see that and the pitying little smile will travel around the room till you feel so foolish the face turns red and you promise you’ll never love anything in college again or if you do keep it to yourself. I can say this to Brian McPhillips sitting next to me but someone in the seat before me turns and says, Aren’t we being a little paranoid?

Paranoid. That’s another word I have to look up with the way everyone at NYU uses it. From the way this student looks at me with his superior left eyebrow nearly up to his hairline I can only guess he’s accusing me of being demented and there’s no use trying to answer him till I find out what that word means. I’m sure Brian McPhillips knows what that word means but he’s busy talking to Joyce Timpanelli on his left. They’re always looking at each other and smiling. That means there’s something going on and I can’t bother them with the word paranoid. I should carry a dictionary and when anyone throws a strange word at me I could look it up on the spot and shoot back with a smart answer that would collapse the superior eyebrow.

Or I could practice the silence I learned in the army and go my own way which is the best thing of all because people who torment other people with strange words don’t like it when you go your own way.

Andy Peters sits next to me in Introduction to Philosophy and tells me about a job in a bank, Manufacturer’s Trust Company down on Broad Street. They’re looking for people to work with personal loan applications and I could choose a four to midnight shift or a midnight to eight A.M. He says the best thing about this job is once you finish the work you can leave, that no one works a full eight hours.

There’s a typing test and I have no trouble with that because of the way the army dragged me away from my dog and made me a company clerk typist. The bank says, Okay, I can work the four to midnight shift so that I can take my classes in the morning and sleep at night. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no classes and I can shape up at the warehouses and piers and make extra money against the day my brother Michael is out of the air force and the allotment to my mother ends. I can put the Wednesday-Friday money in a separate account and when the time comes she won’t have to be running to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for food or shoes.

There are seven women and four men on the shift at the bank and all we have to do is take piles of applications for personal loans and send notices to the applicants that they’ve been accepted or rejected. Andy Peters tells me during a coffee break that if I ever see an application from a friend that’s been rejected I can change it to acceptance. There’s a little code the daytime loan officers use and he’ll show me how to alter it.

Night after night we see hundreds of applications for loans. People want them for new babies, vacations, cars, furniture, consolidation of debts, hospital expenses, funerals, decorating apartments. Sometimes there are letters attached and if there’s a good one we all stop typing and read them back and forth. There are letters that make the women cry and the men want to cry. Babies die and there are expenses and would the bank help. A husband runs away and the applicant doesn’t know what to do, where to turn. She never had a job in her life, how could she with raising three kids, and she needs three hundred dollars to tide her over till she finds work and a cheap baby-sitter.