'Tis

Down in Greenwich Village I buy shirts and socks in shops called haberdasheries and I don’t know what material they’re made of even though there are people telling me you have to be careful what you put on your body nowadays, you might have allergies and break out in a rash. I never worried about such things in Limerick but here danger lurks even in the buying of socks and shirts.

Things in shop windows have names I don’t know and I don’t know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It’s strange to stand at a florist’s shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don’t even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people’s gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I’m sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I’d have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it’s not likely you’d be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.

All along the avenue there are shops with gourmet foods and if I ever enter such a place I’ll have to bring someone who grew up respectable and knows the difference between pâté de foie gras and mashed potatoes. All these shops are obsessed with French and I don’t know what they’re thinking of. Why can’t they say spuds instead of pommes or is it that you pay more for something printed in French?

There’s no sense at all looking in the windows of antique furniture shops. They’ll never let you know the price of something till you ask and they’ll never plant a sign on a chair to tell you what it is or where it came from. Most of the chairs you wouldn’t want to sit in anyway. They’re so upright and stiff they’d give you such a pain in your back you’d wind up in the hospital. Then there are little tables with curved legs so delicate they’d collapse under the weight of a pint and destroy a priceless carpet from Persia or wherever people sweat for the pleasure of rich Americans. There are delicate mirrors, too, and you wonder what it’s like in the morning to see your face in a frame agog with little Cupids and maidens frolicking and where would you look in such confusion? Would I look at the stuff oozing from my eyes or would I be enchanted with a maiden succumbing to a Cupid arrow?

With the dawn glimmering far down in Greenwich Village Fifth Avenue is nearly deserted except for people making their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to save their souls, mostly old women who seem to have greater fear than the old men mumbling along beside them or it may be that old women live longer and there are more of them. When the priest dispenses Communion the pews empty and I envy the people coming back down the aisles with the wafers in their mouths and the holy look that tells you they’re in a state of grace. They can go home now and have the big breakfast and if they fall dead while eating sausages and eggs they go straight to heaven. I’d like to make my peace with God but my sins are so terrible any priest would drive me from the confessional and I know once again my only hope for salvation is that I’ll have an accident where I’ll linger for a few minutes so that I can make an Act of Perfect Contrition that will open the gates of heaven.

Still, it’s comforting to sit in the cathedral in the hush of a dawn Mass especially when I can look around and put names on what I see, the pews, the Stations of the Cross, the pulpit, the tabernacle with the monstrance holding the Eucharist inside, the chalice, the ciborium, the cruets for wine and water at the altar’s right side, the paten. I know nothing about jewelry and the flowers in the shop but I can recite the priestly vestments, the amice, the alb, the girdle, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble, and I know the priest up there wearing the purple chasuble of Lent will change to white on Easter Sunday when Christ is risen and Americans give their children chocolate rabbits and yellow eggs.

After all the Sunday mornings in Limerick I can skip as easily as an altar boy from the Introit of the Mass to the Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed, the signal for the thirsty men of Ireland to rise from their knees and flock to the pubs for the Sunday pint, cure for the woes of the night before.

I can name the parts of the Mass and the priestly vestments and the parts of a rifle like Henry Reed in his poem but what use is all this if I rise in the world and sit in a stiff chair at a table where they’re serving fancy food and I can’t tell the difference between mutton and duck?

It’s full daylight on Fifth Avenue and there’s no one but myself sitting on the steps between the two great lions of the Forty-second Street public library where Tim Costello told me to go nearly ten years ago to read The Lives of the English Poets. There are little birds of different sizes and colors flitting from tree to tree telling me spring will soon be here and I don’t know their names either. I can tell the difference between a pigeon and a sparrow and there it ends except for the seagull.

If my students at McKee High School could look into my head they’d wonder how I ever became a teacher at all. They know already I never went to high school and they’d say, That’s it. Here’s a teacher who stands up there giving us vocabulary lessons and he doesn’t even know the names of the birds in the trees.

The library will be open in a few hours and I could sit in the Main Reading Room with big picture books that tell me the names of things but it’s still early morning and it’s a long way to Downing Street, Bill Galetly cross-legged and squinting at himself in the mirror, Plato and the Gospel According to St. John.

He’s flat on his back on the floor, naked and snoring, a candle guttering by his head, banana peels everywhere. It’s cold in the flat but when I place a blanket over him he sits up and pushes it away. Sorry about the bananas, Frank, but I had a little celebration this morning. Big breakthrough. Here it is.

He points to a passage in St. John. Read it, he says. Go ahead, read it.

And I read, It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing, the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life.

Bill stares at me. So?

What?

You get it? You dig?

I don’t know. I’d have to read it a few times and it’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been up all night.

I fasted for three days to get inside that. You have to get inside things. Like sex. But I’m not finished. I’m looking for the parallel world in Plato. Guess I’ll have to go to Mexico.

Why Mexico?

Great shit there.

Shit?

You know. Variety of chemicals to help the seeker.

Oh, yes. I’m going to bed for a while.

Wish I could offer you a banana but I had the celebration.

I sleep a few hours this Sunday morning and when I awake he’s gone leaving behind nothing but banana skins.

42

Alberta is back. She calls me and asks me to meet her over at Rocky’s for the sake of old times. She’s wearing a light spring coat with the lavender scarf she wore when she said good night instead of good-bye and this meeting must have been what she had in mind all the time.

All the men in Rocky’s stare at her and their women glare at them to stop looking at someone else and look back at them.

She slips off her coat and sits with the lavender scarf on her shoulders and my heart is beating so hard I can hardly talk. She’ll have a martini straight up with a twist and I’ll have a beer. She tells me it was all a mistake going off with someone else but he was mature and ready to settle down and I acted all the time like a single man with the hovel in the Village. She realized in no time it was me she loved and even though we have our differences we can work them out especially if we settle down and get married.

When she mentions marriage there’s a different sharp pain in my chest from the fear I’ll never have that free life I see everywhere in New York, the kind of life they had in Paris where everyone sat in cafés drinking wine, writing novels, sleeping with other men’s wives and beautiful rich American women eager for the passion.

If I say anything like this to Alberta she’ll say, Oh, grow up. You’re twenty-eight going on twenty-nine not a goddam Beatnik.

Of course neither one of us is going to talk like this in the middle of our reconciliation especially since I have a nagging feeling she’s right and I might be just a drifter like my father. Even though I’ve been a teacher for a year I still envy people who can sit in coffee shops and pubs and go to parties where there are artists and models and a jazz combo in the corner blowing cool and lowdown.

No use telling her anything of my freedom dreams. She’d say, You’re a teacher. You never dreamed when you got off the boat you’d come this far. Get on with it.

Once in Rhode Island we argued over something and Zoe the grandmother said, You’re nice people, but not together.

She won’t come to my cold water flat, the hovel, and she won’t let me come to hers with her father there for a short time because of a rift with his wife, Stella. She puts her hand on mine and we look at each other so hard she has tears and I’m ashamed of the redness she must be seeing and the oozing.

On the way to the subway she tells me that when the school term ends in a few weeks she’s going to Rhode Island to be with her grandmother for a while and sort out her life. She knows there’s a question in the air, Will I be invited? and the answer is no, I’m not in favor with the grandmother at this moment. She kisses me good night, tells me she’ll talk to me on the phone soon, and after she disappears into the subway I walk across Washington Square Park torn between my yearning for her and my dreams of the free life. If I don’t fit in with the way she wants to live, clean, organized, respectable, I’ll lose her and I’ll never find anyone like her. I never had women throwing themselves at me in Ireland, Germany or the U.S.A. I could never tell the world about the weekends in Munich where I consorted with the lowest whores in Germany or the time when I was fourteen and a half frolicking with a dying girl on a green sofa in Limerick. All I have is dark secrets and shame and it’s a wonder Alberta has anything to do with me at all. If I had any belief left in anything I could go to confession but where is the priest who could hear my sins without throwing his hands up in disgust and sending me to the bishop or some part of the Vatican reserved for the doomed?

The man at the Beneficial Finance Company says, Do I detect a brogue? He tells me where his mother and father came from in Ireland and how he plans to visit himself though that’d be hard with six kids, ha ha. His mother comes from a family of nineteen. Can you believe that? he says. Nineteen kids. Of course seven died but what the hell. That’s how it was in the old days in the Old Country. They had kids like rabbits.

So, back to the application. You want to borrow three hundred and fifty dollars to visit the Old Country, eh? You haven’t seen your mother in what, six years? The man congratulates me on wanting to see my mother. Too many people nowadays forget their mothers. But not the Irish. No, not us. We never forget our mothers. The Irishman that forgets his mother is no Irishman and should be drummed out, goddammit, excuse the language, Mr. McCourt. I see you’re a teacher and I admire you for that. It must be rough, big classes, low pay. Yeah, all I have to do is look at your application to see the low pay. Don’t know how you can live on it and that, I’m sorry to tell you, is the problem. That’s what causes the hitch in this application, the low pay and absence of any collateral if you know what I mean. They’re gonna shake their heads at the head office over this application but I’m gonna push it because you got two things in your favor, you’re an Irishman that wants to see his mother in the Old Country and you’re a teacher killing himself in a vocational high school and, as I say, I’m going to bat for you.

I tell him I’ll be shaping up at the warehouses in July to replace men going on vacation but that means nothing to the Beneficial Finance Company unless there’s proof of steady employment. The man advises me to say nothing about sending money to my mother. They’d shake their heads at the main office if there was anything that might threaten my monthly payments on the loan.

The man wishes me good luck. He says, It’s such a pleasure to do business with one of my own.

The platform boss at Baker and Williams looks surprised. Jesus, you back again. I thought you became a teacher or some goddam thing.

I did.

So what the hell you doin’ here?

I need the money. The teacher’s pay is not princely.

You shoulda stood in the warehouses or drove a truck or somethin’ an’ you’d be makin’ money an’ not strugglin’ with them goddam kids that don’t care.

Then he asks, Didn’t you used to hang around with that guy, Paddy McGovern?

Paddy Arthur?

Yeah. Paddy Arthur. So many Paddy McGoverns they have to get another name. You know what happened to him?

I don’t.

Dumb bastard is on the A train platform at 125th Street. Harlem, you know. What the hell was he doin’ in Harlem? Lookin’ for a little of that black stuff. So he gets bored standing on the platform like everybody else and decides to wait for the train down on the tracks. On the goddam tracks, avoiding the third rail. You could get killed with the third rail. Lights a cigarette and stands there with that stupid smile on his face till the A train comes in and ends his troubles. That’s what I heard. What was it with that dumb bastard?

He must have been drinking.

Course he was drinking. Goddam Irish are always drinking but I never heard of no Irishman waiting for the train on the tracks before. But your friend there, Paddy, always said he was going back. He’d save enough money and live in the Old Country. What happened? Know what I think? You wanna know what I think?

What do you think?

Some people should stay where they are. This country could drive you crazy. It drives people crazy that was born here. How come you’re not crazy? Or maybe you are, eh?

I don’t know.

Lissena me, kid. I’m Italian an’ Greek an’ we have our problems but my advice to a young Irishman is this, Stay away from the booze an’ you won’t have to wait for the train on the tracks. You got me?

I do.

At lunch I see a figure from the past washing dishes in the diner kitchen, Andy Peters. He sees me and tells me hold on, try the meat loaf and the mashed potatoes and he’ll be out in a minute. He sits beside me on a counter stool and asks how I like the gravy.

Fine.

Yeah, well I made it. It’s my practice gravy. I’m really the dishwasher here but the cook is a drunk and he lets me do gravy and salads though there isn’t much call for salads around here. Guys from docks and warehouses think salads are for cows. I came here to wash dishes so I can think, finished with that fucking NYU. I need to clear my head. What I’d really like to do is get a job vacuuming. I’ve gone from hotel to hotel offering to vacuum but there’s always the form, always the shitass investigation into my past which reveals my dishonorable discharge for not having congress with a sheep and that puts the kibosh on vacuuming. You take a shit in a French ditch and your life is ruined till you hit on the brilliant solution of reentering American life on the lowest level, dishwashing, and watch my speed, man. I’ll be the dishwasher supremo. They’ll blink in amazement and before you know it I’ll be salad man. How? Learning, watching in an uptown kitchen, promoted to salad man, assistant assistant chef and before you know it I’ll be on sauces. Sauces, for Christ’s sakes, because the sauce is the great bullshit ingredient in French cooking and Americans are suckers for it. So watch my style, Frankie boy, watch for my name in the papers, Andre Pierre, pronounced in the proper French way with your eyebrows up to your hairline, sauce man supreme, wizard with pot, pan and wire whisk, yacking away on all the talk shows on TV with no one giving a damn if I diddled every sheep in France and adjoining monarchies. People in fancy restaurants will ooh and ah, compliments to the chef, me, and I’ll be invited to visit their tables so they can patronize me in my white hat and apron and of course I’ll let the word slip out I was this close to a Ph.D. at NYU and the Park Avenue wives will have me up for sauce consultations and the meaning of it all while the husbands are in Saudi Arabia buying oil and I’m with their wives drilling for gold.

He takes a moment to ask me what I’m doing with my life.

Teaching.

I was afraid of that. I thought you wanted to be a writer.

I do.

So?

I have to earn a living.

You’re falling into the trap. I beg you, don’t fall into the trap. I nearly fell into it myself.

I have to earn a living.

You’ll never write while you’re teaching. Teaching is a bitch. Remember Voltaire? Cultivate your garden.

I remember.

And Carlyle? Make money and forget the universe.

I’m earning a living.

You’re dying.

A week later he is gone from the diner and no one knows where.

With the money from the Beneficial Finance Company and the wages from the warehouses I’m able to spend a few weeks in Limerick and it’s the same old feeling when the plane descends and follows the Shannon Estuary to the airport. The river gleams silver and the fields rolling away are somber shades of green except where the sun shines and emeralds the land. It’s a good time to be sitting near a window in case there are tears.

She’s at the airport with Alphie and a hired car and the morning is fresh and dewy on the road to Limerick. She tells me about Malachy’s visit with his wife, Linda, and what a wild party they had with Malachy going out to a field and riding home on a horse which he wanted to bring into the house till everyone persuaded him a house was no place for a horse. There was plenty of drink that night and more than drink, poteen, which someone got from a man out in the country and ’twas the luck o’ God the guards never came near the house for the possession of poteen is a serious offense that could land you in the Limerick Jail. Malachy said she and Alphie might be able to come to New York for a visit at Christmas and wouldn’t that be grand, we’d all be together.

They meet me on the streets and tell me I look grand, that I look more like a Yank all the time. Alice Egan argues, Frankie McCourt hasn’t changed one hour, not one hour. Isn’t that right, Frankie?

I don’t know, Alice.

You don’t have the slightest bit of an American accent.

Whatever friends I had in Limerick are gone, dead or emigrated, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I could read all day in my mother’s house but why did I come all the way from New York to sit on my arse and read? I could sit in pubs all night and drink but I could have done that in New York, too.

I walk from one end of the city to the other and out into the country where my father walked endlessly. People are polite but they’re working and they have families and I’m a visitor, a returned Yank.

Is that yourself, Frankie McCourt?

’Tis.

When did you come?

Last week.

And when are you going back?

Next week.

That’s grand. I’m sure your poor mother is glad to have you at home and I hope the weather keeps fine for you.

They say, I suppose you notice all kinds of changes in Limerick?

Oh, yes. More cars, fewer snotty noses and scabby knees. No barefoot children. No women in shawls.

Jesus, Frankie McCourt, them’s peculiar things to be noticing.

They’ll watch to see if I put on airs and they’ll cut me down but I have none to put on. When I tell them I’m a teacher they seem disappointed.

Only a teacher. Lord above, Frankie McCourt, we thought you’d be a millionaire by now. Sure wasn’t your brother Malachy here with his glamorous model of a wife and isn’t he an actor and everything.

The plane lifts into a western sun which touches the Shannon with gold and even though I’m happy to be returning to New York I hardly know where I belong anymore.

43

Malachy’s bar is so successful he provides passage for my mother and my brother Alphie, on the SS Sylvania which arrives in New York on December 21, 1959.

When they emerge from the customs shed there’s a piece of broken leather flapping from Mam’s right shoe so that you can see the small toe of a foot that was always swollen. Does it ever end? Is this the family of the broken shoe? We embrace and Alphie smiles with broken blackened teeth.

The family of broken shoes and teeth destroyed. Will this be our coat of arms?

Mam looks past me to the street beyond. Where’s Malachy?

I don’t know. He should be here in a minute.

She tells me I look fine, that it didn’t do me any harm to put on a bit of weight though I should do something about my eyes they’re that red. That irritates me because I know that if I even think of my eyes or anyone mentions them I can feel them flush red and of course she notices.

See, she says. You’re a bit old to be having bad eyes.

I want to snap at her that I’m twenty-nine and I don’t know the proper age for not having bad eyes and is this what she wants to talk about the minute she arrives in New York? but Malachy arrives in a taxi with his wife, Linda. More smiles and embraces. Malachy keeps the taxi while we retrieve the suitcases.

Alphie says, Will we put these in the boot?

Linda smiles. Oh, no, we put them in the trunk.

Trunk? We didn’t bring a trunk.

No, no, she says, we put your bags in the trunk of the taxi.

Isn’t there a boot in the taxi?

No, that’s the trunk.

Alphie scratches his head and smiles again, a young man understanding lesson number one in American English.

In the taxi Mam says, Lord above, look at all those motor cars. The roads are packed. I tell her it’s not so bad now. An hour earlier it was the height of the rush hour and traffic was even worse. She says she doesn’t see how it could ever be worse. I tell her it’s always worse earlier and she says, I don’t see how it could be worse than this the way the motor cars are crawling along this minute.

I am trying to be patient and I speak slowly. I am telling you, Mam, this is how the traffic is in New York. I live here.

Malachy says, Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s a lovely morning, and she says, I lived here, too, in case you’ve forgotten.

You did, I tell her. Twenty-five years ago and you lived in Brooklyn, not Manhattan.

Well, it’s still New York.

She won’t give up and I won’t though I’m looking at the pettiness of the two of us and wondering why I’m arguing instead of celebrating the arrival of my mother and my youngest brother in the city all of us dreamed of all our lives. Why does she pick on my eyes and why do I have to contradict her over the traffic?

Linda tries to ease the moment. Well, as Malachy says, it is a beautiful day.

Mam gives a little begrudging nod. ’Tis.

And how was the weather when you left Ireland, Mam?

A begrudging word, Raining.

Oh, it’s always raining in Ireland, isn’t it, Mam?

No, it’s not, and she folds her arms and stares straight ahead at the traffic that was much busier an hour earlier.

At the apartment Linda makes breakfast while Mam dandles the new baby, Siobhan, and croons to her the way she crooned to seven of us. Linda says, Mam, would you like tea or coffee?

Tea, please.

When the breakfast is ready Mam puts the baby down, comes to the table and wants to know what is that thing floating around in her cup. Linda tells her it’s a tea bag and Mam puts her nose in the air. Oh, I wouldn’t drink that. Sure, that’s not proper tea at all.

Malachy’s face tightens and he tells her through his teeth, That’s the tea we have. That’s the way we make it. We don’t have a pound of Lyons’ tea and a teapot for you.

Well, then, I won’t have anything. I’ll just eat my egg. I don’t know what kind of country this is where you can’t get a decent cup of tea.

Malachy is ready to say something but the baby cries and he goes to lift her from her crib while Linda flutters around Mam, smiling, trying to please. We could get a teapot, Mam, and we could get loose tea, couldn’t we, Malachy?

But he’s parading the living room with the baby whimpering on his shoulder and you can see that in the matter of tea bags he won’t yield, not this morning anyway. Like anyone who has ever had a decent cup of tea in Ireland he despises tea bags but he has an American wife who knows nothing but tea bags, he has a baby and things on his mind and little patience with this mother with her nose in the air over tea bags her first day in the United States of America and he doesn’t know why, after all his expense and trouble, he has to tolerate her picky ways for the next three weeks in this small apartment.

Mam pushes away from the table. Lavatory? she asks Linda. Where’s the lavatory?

What?

Lavatory. WC.

Linda looks at Malachy. The toilet, he says. The bathroom.

Oh, says Linda. In there.

While Mam is in the bathroom Alphie tells Linda the tea bag wasn’t that bad after all. If you didn’t see it floating in the cup you’d think it was all right, and Linda smiles again. She tells him that’s why the Chinese don’t serve great chunks of meat. They don’t like looking at the animal they’re eating. If they cook chicken they chop it into little pieces and mix it with other things so you barely know it’s chicken. That’s why you never see a chicken leg or breast in a Chinese restaurant.

Is that right? Alphie says.

The baby is still whimpering on Malachy’s shoulder but all is sweet at the table with Alphie and Linda discussing tea bags and the delicacy of Chinese cooking. Then Mam comes from the bathroom and tells Malachy, That child is full of wind, so she is. I’ll take her.

Malachy hands over Siobhan and sits at the table with his tea. Mam walks the floor with the piece of leather flapping from her broken shoe and I know I’ll have to take her down Third Avenue to a shoe shop. She pats the baby and there’s a powerful burp that makes us all laugh. She puts the baby back in the crib and leans over her. There, there, leanv, there, there, and the baby gurgles. She returns to the table, rests her hands in her lap and tells us, I’d give me two eyes for a decent cup of tea, and Linda tells her she’ll go out today and get a teapot and loose tea, right, Malachy?

He says, Right, because he knows in his heart there’s nothing like tea made in a pot which you rinse with water boiling madly, where there’s a heaping spoon for each cup, where you pour in the madly boiling water, keeping the pot warm with a tea cosy while the tea brews for six minutes exactly.

Malachy knows that’s how Mam will make tea and he softens his stand on tea bags. He knows also that in the matter of baby burping she has finer instincts and superior ways and it’s a fair exchange, a decent cup of tea for her and comfort for the baby Siobhan.

For the first time in ten years we’re all together, Mam and her four sons. Malachy has his wife, Linda, and his baby, Siobhan, the first of a new generation. Michael has a girlfriend, Jan, and Alphie will soon find one, too. I’m reconciled with Alberta and living with her in Brooklyn.

Malachy is the life of the party in New York and no party can start without him. If he doesn’t appear there’s restlessness and whimpering, Where’s Malachy? Where’s your brother? and when he roars in they’re happy. He sings and drinks and passes his glass for more drink and sings again till he rushes off to the next party.

Mam loves the life, the excitement of it. She loves having a highball at Malachy’s bar and being introduced as Malachy’s mother. Her eyes twinkle and her cheeks glow and she dazzles the world with a flash of false teeth. She follows Malachy to the parties, the oul’ hooleys, she calls them, basks in the mother spotlight and tries to join in Malachy’s songs till she runs out of breath with the first signs of emphysema. After all the years sitting by the fire in Limerick wondering where the next loaf of bread was coming from she’s having a lovely time and isn’t this a grand country altogether? Ah, maybe she’ll stay a little longer. Sure, what’s the use of going back to Limerick in the middle of the winter with nothing to do but sit there by the fire warming her poor shins? She’ll go back when the weather warms up, Easter maybe, and Alphie can get a job here to keep them going.

Malachy has to tell her if she wants to stay in New York even for a short time she can’t stay with him in his small apartment with Linda and the baby, four months old.

She calls me at Alberta’s and tells me, I’m hurted, so I am. Four sons in New York and no place for me to lay my head.

But we all have small apartments, Mam. No room.

Well, one would wonder what ye’re all doing with the money ye’re making. Ye should have told me this before ye dragged me from my own comfortable fireplace.

No one dragged you. Didn’t you say over and over you wanted to come for Christmas and didn’t Malachy pay your fare?

I came because I wanted to see my first grandchild and, don’t worry, I’ll pay Malachy back if I have to get down on my two knees and scrub floors. If I knew the way I was going to be treated here I would have stayed in Limerick and had a nice goose for myself and a roof over my head.

Alberta whispers I should invite Mam and Alphie for dinner on Saturday night. There’s a silence at the other end and then a sniffle.

Well, I don’t know what I’ll be doing on Saturday night. Malachy said there might be a party.

All right. We invited you to dinner but if you want to go to another party with Malachy, go.

You don’t have to sound so huffy. It’s an awful long distance to Brooklyn. I know because I used to live there.

It’s less than half an hour.

She whispers something to Alphie and he takes the phone. Francis? We’ll come.

When I open the door she brings her own chill along with the January chill. She acknowledges Alberta’s existence with a nod and asks if I have a match for her cigarette. Alberta offers her a cigarette but she says, no, she has her own and these American cigarettes barely have any taste anyway. Alberta offers her a drink and she’ll have a highball. Alphie says he’ll have a beer and Mam says, Oh, you’re starting, are you?

I tell her it’s only a beer.

Well, that’s how it starts. One beer and the next thing ye’re roaring and singing and waking the child.

There’s no child here.

There is in Malachy’s house and the roaring and singing, too.

Alberta calls us into dinner, tuna casserole with green salad. Mam takes her time coming to the table. She has to finish her cigarette and what’s the hurry anyway.

Alberta says it’s nice to eat casserole when it’s good and hot.

Mam says she hates hot food that burns the roof of your mouth.

I tell her, For Christ’s sake, finish your cigarette and come to the table.

She comes with her offended look. She pulls her chair in and pushes the salad away. She doesn’t like the lettuce in this country. I try to control myself. I ask her what the hell is the difference between the lettuce in this country and the lettuce in Ireland. She says there’s a big difference, that the lettuce in this country is tasteless.

Alberta says, Oh, never mind. Not everyone likes lettuce anyway.

Mam stares at her casserole and forks noodles and tuna aside while she hunts for peas. She says she loves peas though these are not as good as the ones in Limerick. Alberta asks if she’d like more peas.

No, thank you.

After which she probes the noodles for bits of tuna.

I ask her, Don’t you like the noodles?

What?

The noodles. Don’t you like them?

I don’t know what they are but I’m not fond of ’em.

I want to lean into her face and tell her she’s acting like a savage, that Alberta went to great lengths thinking of something that might please her and all she can do now is to sit with her nose in the air as if someone had done something to her and if she doesn’t like it she can put on her damn coat and go back to Manhattan to the party she’s missing and I’ll never bother her again with an invitation to dinner.

I want to say all this but Alberta makes peace. Oh, that’s all right. Maybe Mam is tired with the excitement of coming to New York and if we have a nice cup of tea and a piece of cake we’ll all relax.

Mam says, No, thank you to the cake, she couldn’t eat another morsel but she would like a cup of tea till, again, she sees the tea bag in her cup and tells us this isn’t a proper cup of tea at all.

I tell her that’s what we have and that’s what she’s getting though what I don’t tell her is that I’d like to throw the tea bag between her eyes.

She said no to the cake but here she is pushing it into her mouth and swallowing with hardly a chew and then picking up and eating the crumbs from around her plate, the woman who didn’t want the cake.

She glances at the teacup. Well, if that’s the only tea ye have I suppose I’ll have to drink it. She lifts the tea bag on her spoon and squeezes it till the water turns brown and wants to know why there’s a lemon on her saucer.

Alberta says some people like lemon with their tea.

Mam says she never heard the likes of that, it’s disgusting.

Alberta removes the lemon and Mam says she’d like milk and sugar, if you don’t mind. She asks for a match for her cigarette and smokes while she drinks only half the tea to show she doesn’t care for it.

Alberta asks if she and Alphie would like to see a movie in the neighborhood but Mam says, no, they have to be getting back to Manhattan and it’s too late.

Alberta says it isn’t that late and Mam says it’s late enough.

I walk with my mother and Alphie up Henry Street and over to the subway at Borough Hall. It’s a bright January night and all along the street there are still Christmas lights glowing and flickering in the windows. Alphie talks about the elegance of the houses and says thanks for the dinner. Mam says she doesn’t know why people can’t put the dinner in a bowl and give it to you without a plate under it. She thinks that kind of thing is putting on airs.

When the train comes in I shake hands with Alphie. I bend over to kiss my mother and hand her a twenty-dollar bill but she pulls her face away and sits in the train with her back to me and I walk away with the money back in my pocket.

44

For eight years I traveled on the Staten Island Ferry. I would take the RR train from Brooklyn to Whitehall Street in Manhattan, walk to the terminal, slip a nickel into a turnstile slot, buy coffee and a doughnut, plain no sugar, and wait on a bench with a newspaper filled with yesterday’s disasters.

Mr. Jones taught music at McKee High School though when you saw him on the ferry you might have thought he was a university professor or head of a law firm. You might have thought that even though he was a Negro who would become a black and, in later years, an African-American. Every day he wore a different three-piece suit and a hat to match. He wore shirts with collars or held in place with gold stick pins. His watch and rings were gold, too, and delicate. The old Italian shoeshine men loved him for the daily trade and generous tips and they left his shoes dazzling. Every morning he read the Times and held it with fingers protruding from little leather gloves that covered the area below the wrist to beyond the knuckles. He smiled when he told me of concerts and operas he’d attended the night before or of summer trips to Europe especially to Milan and Salzburg. He put his hand on my arm and told me I must not die before I sit in La Scala. Another teacher joked one morning that the kids at McKee must be impressed with his clothes, all that elegance, you know, and Mr. Jones said, I dress for what I am. The teacher shook his head and Mr. Jones went back to his Times. On the ferry back that day the other teacher told me Mr. Jones didn’t see himself as a Negro at all, that he’d call to the black kids to stop bopping down the hall. The black kids didn’t know what to make of Mr. Jones with all that elegance. They knew that whatever music they liked Mr. Jones would be up there talking about Mozart, playing his music on the phonograph or illustrating passages on the piano, and when it was time for the Christmas assembly he’d have his boys and girls up on the stage caroling like angels.

Every morning on the ferry I passed the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and thought of my mother and father coming to this country. When they sailed in were they excited as I was that first sunny October morning? Teachers going to McKee and other schools on Staten Island sat on the ferry and looked toward the statue and the island. They must have thought of their parents and grandparents coming into this place and they might have thought of all the hundreds who were sent back. It must have saddened them the way it saddened me to see Ellis Island neglected and crumbling and that ferry docked by the side low in the water, the ferry that took the immigrants from Ellis Island to the island of Manhattan and if they looked hard enough they saw ghosts hungry for the landing.

Mam had moved with Alphie to an apartment on the West Side. Then Alphie left to be his own man in the Bronx and Mam moved to Flatbush Avenue near Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Her building was shabby but she felt comfortable having a place of her own where she’d be under obligation to nobody. She could walk to any number of bingo games and she was content, thank you.

In my early years at McKee High School I enrolled at Brooklyn College for classes leading to a master’s degree in English. I started with summer courses and continued with afternoon and evening classes into the aca-demic year. I would take the ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan and walk to a subway train at Bowling Green that took me to the end of the Flatbush line near Brooklyn College. On ferry and train I could read for my classes or correct the work of my students at McKee.

I told my students I wanted neat, clean, legible work but they handed in whatever they had scribbled quickly on buses and trains, in shop classes when the teacher wasn’t looking, or in the cafeteria. The papers were dotted with the stains of coffee, Coke, ice cream, ketchup, sneezes, and a lusciousness where girls had blotted their lips. A set of such papers would so irritate me I’d fling them over the side of the ferry and watch with satisfaction while they sank below the water to create a Sargasso of illiteracy.

When they asked for their papers I told them they were so bad that if I had returned them each paper would have been given a zero and would they prefer that to nothing at all?

They weren’t sure and when I thought of it I wasn’t sure myself. Zero or nothing at all? We discussed it for a whole period and decided that nothing at all was better than zero on your report card because you can’t divide nothing at all by anything and you can divide zero if you use algebra or something like that because a zero is something and nothing at all is nothing at all and nobody could argue with that. Also, if your parents see a zero on your report card they’re upset, the ones who care, but if they see nothing they don’t know what to think and it’s better to have a father and mother who don’t know what to think than a father and mother looking at a zero and giving you a punch upside your head.

After my classes at Brooklyn College I would sometimes leave the train at Bergen Street to visit my mother. If she knew I was coming she’d make soda bread so warm and delicious it melted in the mouth as fast as the butter she slathered on it. She made tea in a teapot and couldn’t help sniffing at the idea of tea bags. I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said no one is so busy they can’t take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don’t deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

My brother Michael married Donna from California in Malachy’s apartment on West Ninety-third Street. Mam bought a new dress for the occasion but you could see she didn’t approve of the proceedings. There was her lovely son Michael getting married and no sign of a priest, nothing but a Protestant minister in the living room who could pass for a grocer or an off-duty policeman in his collar and tie. Malachy had rented two dozen folded chairs and when we took our places I noticed Mam’s absence. She was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. I told her the wedding was about to begin and she told me she had to finish her cigarette. Mam, for Christ’s sake, your son is getting married. She said that was his problem, she had to finish her fag and when I told her she was keeping everyone waiting her face tightened, the nose went up in the air, she stubbed out her butt in the ashtray and took her time going to the living room. On the way in she whispered she had to go to the bathroom and I hissed at her that she’d bloody well have to wait. She sat in her chair and stared over the head of the Protestant minister. No matter what was said, no matter what softness or sweetness surged here, she wouldn’t be part of it, wouldn’t yield, and when bride and groom were kissed and hugged Mam sat with her purse in her lap staring straight ahead so that the world would know she was seeing nothing, especially the sight of her lovely son Michael falling into the clutches of Protestants and their ministers.

When I visited Mam on Flatbush Avenue and we had the tea she said wasn’t it a peculiar thing she was back in this part of the world after all these years, a place where she had five children, though three would die, the little girl here in Brooklyn, and twin boys in Ireland. It might have been too much for her to think about that little girl, dead at twenty-one days, a short distance from here. She knew that if you walked down Flatbush Avenue to where it crossed Atlantic Avenue you’d still see the bars my father went wild in, spending his wages, forgetting his children. No, she wouldn’t talk about that, either. When I asked her about her days in Brooklyn she doled out scraps and then went silent. What was the use? The past is the past and it’s dangerous to go back.

She must have had nightmares alone in that apartment.

45

Stanley spends more time in the teachers’ cafeteria than anyone. When he sees me he sits with me, drinks coffee, smokes cigarettes and delivers monologues on everything.

Like most teachers he has five classes but his speech therapy students are often absent because of the shame of stammering and trying to make themselves understood with cleft palates. Stanley gives them inspirational speeches and even though he tells them they’re as good as anyone else they don’t believe him. Some are in my regular English classes and they write compositions saying it’s all right for Mr. Garber to talk, he’s a nice guy and all, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to walk up to a girl and ask her to dance when you can’t get the first word out of your mouth. Oh, yeah, it’s all right for Mr. Garber to help their stammer with singing in his class but what good is that when you go to the dance?

In the summer of 1961 Alberta wanted to be married at Grace Episcopal Church in Brooklyn Heights. I refused. I told her I’d rather be married in City Hall than in some pale imitation of the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Episcopalians irritated me. Why couldn’t they stop the damned nonsense? They’re up there with their statues and crosses and holy water and even confession, so why don’t they call Rome and tell them they want to return?

Alberta said, All right, all right, and we went to the Municipal Building in Manhattan. It wasn’t required but we had Brian McPhillips as best man and his wife, Joyce, as bridesmaid. Our ceremony was delayed because of a quarrel between the couple ahead of us. She said to him, You goin’ be married to me with that green umbrella on you arm? He said that was his umbrella and he wasn’t going to leave it out in this office to be stolen. She nodded toward us and told him, These people ain’t gonna steal you goddam green umbrella, excuse the language on my wedding day. He said he wasn’t accusin’ nobody of nothin’ but goddam he paid a lot for that umbrella on Chambers Street from a guy that steals them and he wasn’t givin’ it up for nobody. She told him, Well, then, marry you damn umbrella, and she picked up her bag and walked out. He told her if she walked out now that was the end and she turned to the four of us and the woman behind the desk and the official coming out of the small wedding chapel and said, The end? What you talkin’ about, man? We be livin’ together three years an’ you tell me this is the end? You don’t tell me this is the end. I tell you and I’m tellin’ you that umbrella ain’t goin’ to my weddin’ an’ if you insist there’s a certain party in South Carolina, a certain ex-wife, that would like to know where you at an’ I be glad to tell her if you know what I mean, certain party lookin’ for alimony an’ child support. So take you choice, Byron, me in that little room with the man an’ no umbrella or you back in South Carolina with you umbrella standin’ before a judge tellin’ you, Pay up, Byron, support you wife an’ child.

The official at the door of the wedding chapel asked if they were ready. Byron asked me if I was the one getting married today and would I mind holding his umbrella because he could see that I was like him, going nowhere but into that little room. End of the road, man, end of the road. I wished him good luck but he shook his head and said, Damn, why we all whupped like this?

In a few minutes they were back to sign papers, the bride smiling, Byron grim. We all wished them good luck again and followed the official into the room. He smiled and said, Are we all atthembled?

Brian looked at me, raised his eyebrows.

The official said, Do you promith to love, honor, cherith? and I struggled to keep myself from laughing. How could I survive this wedding conducted by a man with such a powerful lisp? I’d have to think of some way of controlling myself. That’s it. The umbrella on my arm. Oh, God, I’ll fall apart. I’m caught between the lisp and the umbrella and I can’t laugh. Alberta would kill me for laughing at our own wedding. You’re allowed to weep with joy but you must never laugh and here I am made helpless by this man with the lisp, promithing thith and that, first man ever in New York to be married with a green umbrella on his arm, solemn thought that kept me from laughing, and the ceremony was over, the ring on Alberta’s finger, groom and bride kissing and being congratulated by Brian and Joyce till the door opened and there was Byron. Man, you got my umbrella? You did that for me? Kep’ it right here? Wanna have a drink? Celebrate?

Alberta signaled no to me with a little shake of her head.

I told Byron I was sorry. We were meeting friends who were giving us a party.

You lucky, man, you have friends. Me an’ Selma goin’ out to have a sangwidge an’ go to a movie. I don’t mind. Movie keeps her quiet, ha ha ha. Thanks for watchin’ my umbrella.

Byron and Selma left and I fell against the wall, laughing. Alberta tried to keep a bit of dignity in the occasion but she gave way when she saw Brian and Joyce laughing, too. I tried to tell them how the thought of the green umbrella saved me from laughing over the lisp but the more I tried to talk the more helpless I became till we were clutching each other going down in the elevator and wiping our eyes outside in the August sun.

It was a short walk to Diamond Dan O’Rourke’s Saloon for drinks and sandwiches with friends, Frank Schwake and his wife, Jean, and Jim Collins and his new wife, Sheila Malone. After that there was to be a party out in Queens given by Brian and Joyce who would drive Alberta and me in their Volkswagen.

Schwake bought me a drink. So did Collins and Brian. The bartender bought us a round and I bought him a drink and left him a big tip. He laughed and said I should get married every day. I bought drinks for Schwake and Collins and Brian and they all wanted to buy me one again. Joyce whispered to Brian and I knew she was worried about the drinking. Alberta told me to slow down. She understood it was my wedding day but it was early and I should have respect for her and the guests at the reception later. I told her we were married barely five minutes and she was already telling me what to do. Of course I had respect for her and the guests. That’s all I ever had was respect and I was weary of having respect. I told her back off and there was such a state of tension Collins and Brian intervened. Brian said it was his job, that’s what best men are for. Collins said he knew me longer than Brian but Brian said, No, you don’t. I went to college with him. Collins said he didn’t know that. McCourt, how come you never told me you went to college with McPhillips? I told him I never saw a need to tell the world who I went to college with and for some reason that made us all laugh. The bartender said it was nice to see people happy on their wedding day and we laughed even harder thinking of lisps and green umbrellas and Alberta telling me have respect for her and the guests. Of course I had respect for her on our wedding day till I went to the toilet and started thinking of how she rejected me for another man and I was ready to go out and confront her till I slipped on the slimy floor of the toilet in Diamond Dan O’Rourke’s and banged my head so hard against the big urinal I had a headache that made me forget the rejection. Alberta wanted to know why the back of my jacket was damp and when I told her there was a leak in the men’s room she didn’t believe me. You fell, didn’t you? No, I didn’t fall. There was a leak. She wouldn’t believe me, told me I was drinking too much and that so irritated me I was ready to walk out and live with a ballerina in a loft in Greenwich Village till Brian said, Oh, come on, don’t be an ass, it’s Alberta’s wedding day, too.

Before going out to Queens we had to pick up a wedding cake at Schrafft’s on West Fifty-seventh Street. Joyce said she’d drive because Brian and I had been too enthusiastic with the celebrations at Diamond Dan’s while she and Alberta were saving themselves for the party that night. She stopped opposite Schrafft’s and said no when Brian offered to get the cake but he insisted and dodged the traffic. Joyce shook her head and said he was going to get killed. Alberta told me go help him but Joyce shook her head again and said that would only make things worse. Brian came out of Schrafft’s holding a big cake box against his chest and once more dodged cars till a taxi sideswiped him slightly at the street’s dividing line and the box fell to the ground. Joyce put her forehead against the steering wheel. Oh, God, she said, and I said I was going to help my best man, Brian. No, no, Alberta said, I’ll go. I told her this was man’s work, that I wouldn’t risk her life with these mad taxis on Fifty-seventh Street and I went to help Brian who was on his hands protecting the wrecked cake from the traffic zooming by him right and left. I knelt with him, tore a cardboard flap from the box, and we shoveled the cake back in with bits hanging here and there. The little bride and groom figures looked sad but we wiped them off and stuck them back on the cake, not the top, because we didn’t know where the top was anymore, but somewhere in the cake where we could push them in for the security. Joyce and Alberta called to us from the car that we’d better get off the street before the police came or we were killed and they were tired of waiting anyway, hurry up. When we got into the car Joyce told Brian pass the cake back to Alberta for safekeeping but he turned stubborn and said no, after all his troubles he’d hold on to it till we were at the apartment, and he did even if he had bits of cream and little green and yellow decorations all over his lap and his suit in general.

The wives treated us coolly the rest of the way in the car, talking only to each other and making comments on the Irish and how you can’t trust them with a simple task like crossing a street with a wedding cake, how these Irish couldn’t have one or two drinks and be content till the reception, oh, no, they had to talk and treat each other to rounds till they’re in such a condition you couldn’t send them to the grocery for a quart of milk.

Look at him, Joyce said, and when I saw Brian dozing away with his chin on his chest I nodded off while the wives went on with their lamentation about the Irish in general and this day in particular, Alberta saying, Everyone warned me that the Irish are great to go out with but never marry them. I would have defended my race and told her how her Yankee ancestors had nothing to be proud of the way they treated the Irish with those signs everywhere that said, No Irish Need Apply, except that I was weary from the strain of being married by a man with a lisp while I carried Byron’s green umbrella and my heavy responsibility as groom and host at Diamond Dan O’Rourke’s. If I hadn’t slumped with the weariness I would have reminded her how her ancestors hanged women right and left for being witches, how they were a dirty-minded lot, rolling their eyes in shock and horror at the mention of sex, but having a grand time between their thighs listening in court to hysterical Puritan maidens claiming the devil appeared in various forms and frolicked with them in the woods and how they became so devoted to him all decency went out the window. I would have told Alberta how the Irish never carried on like that. In the whole history of Ireland only one witch was hanged and she was probably English and deserved it. And, just to clinch it, I would have told her the first witch to be hanged in New England was Irish and they did it to her because she said her prayers in Latin and wouldn’t stop.

Instead of saying all this I fell asleep till Alberta shook me and told me we were there. Joyce insisted on taking the cake from Brian. She didn’t want him to fall forward on the stairs and crush the cake entirely and she still had hopes of reconstructing it so that we’d have some semblance of a cake and people could sing, The bride cuts the cake.

People arrived and there was eating, drinking, dancing and misunderstandings between all the couples, married and unmarried. Frank Schwake wouldn’t talk to his wife, Jean. Jim Collins quarreled in a corner with his wife, Sheila. There was still a coolness between Alberta and me and between Brian and Joyce. Other couples were affected and there were islands of tension all over the apartment. The night would have been ruined except for the way we all united against an outside danger.

One of Alberta’s friends, a German named Dietrich, drove off in his Volkswagen to replenish the beer supply and when he returned there was trouble with the owner of a Buick he had backed into. Someone told me about the trouble outside and since I was the bridegroom it was my duty to make peace. The Buick man was a giant and poking his fist into the face of Alberta’s friend. When I stepped between them he let loose with his big punch. His arm swung around the back of my head, into Dietrich’s eye and we all fell to the ground. We wrestled a bit, one with another, no one a bit particular, till Schwake, Collins and McPhillips separated us with the Buick man threatening to tear Dietrich’s head from his shoulders. When we dragged the German inside I discovered my trouser knee was ripped, the kneecap bleeding. The knuckles of my right hand bled, too, from being scraped along the ground.

Upstairs Alberta started to cry, telling me I was ruining the whole night. My blood boiled a bit and I told her I was only trying to be a peacemaker and it wasn’t my fault if I was knocked down by that baboon next door. Besides, I was helping her German friend and she should be grateful.

The argument would have continued if Joyce hadn’t stepped in to call everyone to the table for the cutting of the cake. When she slipped off the covering cloth Brian laughed and kissed her for being such a genius of an artist you’d never know this cake was scooped off the street a short time ago. The little bride and groom were secure though his head wobbled and fell and I told Joyce, Uneasy lies the groom that wears a head. Everyone sang, The bride cuts the cake, the groom cuts the cake, and Alberta looked mollified even though we couldn’t cut proper slices and the cake had to be dished out in chunks.

Joyce said she was making coffee and Alberta said that would be nice but Brian said we should have one more drink to toast the newlyweds and I agreed and Alberta got so angry she ripped the wedding ring from her finger and threw it out the window though she remembered suddenly that was her grandmother’s wedding ring from early in the century and now it was out the window, God knows where in Queens and what was she going to do, it was all my fault, and her great mistake for marrying me. Brian said we’d have to find that ring. We didn’t have a flashlight but we were able to light up the night with matches and cigarette lighters as we crawled across the lawn below Brian’s window till Dietrich shouted he had the ring and everyone forgave him for stirring up trouble with the big Buick man. Alberta refused to replace the ring on her finger. She’d keep it in her purse till she was sure of this marriage. She and I took a taxi with Jim Collins and Sheila. They would drop us at our apartment in Brooklyn and continue into Manhattan. Sheila wasn’t talking to Jim and Alberta wasn’t talking to me but as we swung into State Street I grabbed her and told her, I’m going to consummate this marriage tonight.

She said, Oh, consummate my ass, and I said, That’ll do.

The taxi stopped and I climbed from the backseat I had shared with Sheila and Alberta. Jim got out of the seat by the driver and came to where I stood on the sidewalk. He intended to say good night and get back in with Sheila but Alberta pulled the door shut and the taxi drove away.

Christ Almighty, said Collins, this is your goddam wedding night, McCourt. Where is your bride? Where is mine?

We climbed the stairs to my apartment, found a six-pack of Schlitz in the refrigerator, sat on the couch, the two of us, and watched television Indians drop from the bullets of John Wayne.

46

In the summer of 1963 Mam called to say she had a letter from my father. He claimed he was a new man, that he hadn’t had a drink in three years and worked now as a chef in a monastery.

I told her if my father was a monastery chef the monks must have been on a permanent fast.

She didn’t laugh and that said she was troubled. She read from the letter where he said he was coming with a three-week return ticket on the Queen Mary and how he looked forward to the day when we could all be together again, he and she sharing a bed and a grave for he knew and she knew that whatever God hath joined let no man put asunder.

She sounded uncertain. What should she do? Malachy had already told her, Why not? She wanted to know what I thought. I put it back to her. What do you think? After all, this was the man who put her through hell in New York and Limerick and now he wants to sail to her side, a safe harbor in Brooklyn.

I don’t know what to do, she said.

She didn’t know what to do because she was lonely in that dingy place on Flatbush Avenue and she was now illustrating that Irish saying, Contention is better than loneliness. She could take back this man or, at fifty-five, face the years alone. I told her I’d meet her for coffee at Junior’s Restaurant.

She was there before me, puffing and gasping on a strong American cigarette. No, she wouldn’t have tea. The Americans can send a man into space but they can’t make a decent cup of tea, so she’d have coffee and some of that nice cheesecake. She drew on the cigarette, sipped the coffee and told me she didn’t know under God what to do. She said the whole family was falling apart with Malachy separated from his wife, Linda, and the two small children, Michael off to California with his wife, Donna, and their child, Alphie disappeared into the Bronx. She said she could have a nice life for herself in Brooklyn with the bingo and the odd meeting of the Limerick Ladies’ Association in Manhattan and why should she let the man from Belfast upset that life.

I drank my coffee and ate my strudel knowing she’d never admit she was lonely though she might have been thinking, Ah, sure if it wasn’t for the drink he wouldn’t be bad to live with at all, at all.

I told her what I was thinking. Well, she said, he’d be company for me if he’s not drinking, if he’s a new man. We could take walks in Prospect Park and he could meet me after the bingo.

All right. Tell him to come for the three weeks and we’ll see if he’s a new man.

On the way back to her apartment she stopped often to press her hand against her chest. ’Tis my heart, she said, going a mile a minute so ’tis.

It must be the cigarettes.

Oh, I don’t know.

Then it must be nervousness over that letter.

Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know.

At her door I kissed her cold cheek and watched her gasping her way upstairs. My father had put years on her.

When Mam and Malachy went to meet the new man at the pier he arrived so drunk he had to be helped off the ship. The purser told them he had gone wild with the drink and had to be kept in restraint.

I was away that day and when I returned I took the subway to see him at Mam’s apartment but he had gone with Malachy to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. We drank tea and waited. She said again she didn’t know under God what to do. He was the same lunatic with the drink and all that talk about being a new man was a lie and she was glad he had a three-week return ticket. Still, there was a darkness in her eyes that told me she must have had hopes of a normal family, her man by her side with sons and grandchildren coming to her from all over New York.

They returned from the meeting, Malachy big, red-bearded and sober because of his troubles, my father older and smaller. Malachy had tea. My father said, Och, no, and lay on the couch with his hands joined under his head. Malachy left his tea to stand over him and lecture him. You have to admit you’re an alcoholic. That’s the first step.

Dad shook his head.

Why are you shaking your head? You are an alcoholic and you have to admit it.

Och, no. I’m not an alcoholic like those poor people at the meeting. I don’t drink kerosene.

Malachy threw up his hands and returned to his tea at the table. We didn’t know what to say to each other in the presence of this man on the couch, husband, father. I had my memories of him, mornings by the fire in Limerick, his stories and songs, his cleanliness, neatness and sense of order, the way he helped us with our schoolwork, his insistence on obedience and attention to our religious duties, all destroyed by his payday madness when he threw his money around the pubs buying pints for every hanger-on while my mother despaired by the fire knowing the next day she’d have to stick her hand out for charity.

I knew in the days that followed that if blood called to blood I’d drift to my father’s side of the family. My mother’s people had often said in Limerick I had the odd manner of my father and a strong streak of the North in my character. They may have been right because whenever I went to Belfast I felt at home.

The night before he left he asked if we’d like to go for a walk. Mam and Malachy said no, they were tired. They had spent more time with him than I and must have been weary of his shenanigans. I said yes because this was my father and I was a nine-year-old thirty-three-year-old.

He put on his cap and we walked down Flatbush Avenue. Och, he said, it’s a very warm kind of a night.

’Tis.

Very warm, he said. You’d be in danger of drying up on a night like this.

Ahead of us was the Long Island Railroad Station ringed with bars for the thirsty commuters. I asked if he remembered the bars.

Och, he said, why should I remember such places?

Because you drank in them and we searched for you.

Och, well, I might have worked in one or two when times were hard for the bread and meat they gave me to take home to you childer.

He remarked again on the heat of the night and surely it wouldn’t do us any harm to cool ourselves in one of these places.

I thought you didn’t drink.

That’s right. Gave it up.

Well, what about the ship? You had to be carried off.

Och, that was the seasickness. We’ll have something here for the coolness.

While we drank our beer he told me my mother was a fine woman and I should be good to her, that Malachy was a fine big lad though you’d hardly know him with that red beard and where did it come from, that he was sorry to hear I had married a Protestant though it wasn’t too late for her to convert nice girl that she was and he was happy to hear I was a teacher like all his sisters in the North and would there be any harm in having another beer?

No, there wouldn’t be any harm and there wasn’t any harm in the beers we had up and down Flatbush Avenue and when we arrived back at my mother’s apartment I left him at the door because I didn’t want to see the looks on the faces of Mam and Malachy that would accuse me of leading my father astray or vice versa. He wanted to continue the drinking up toward Grand Army Plaza but my guilt told me to say no. He was supposed to leave next day on the Queen Mary though he hoped my mother would say, Ah, stay. Sure we’ll find some way of getting along.

I said that would be lovely and he said we’d all be together again and things would be better because he was a new man. We shook hands and I left.

Next morning Mam called and said, He went pure mad, so he did.

What did he do?

You brought him home drunk as a lord.

He wasn’t drunk. He had a few beers.

He had more than that and I was here by myself with Malachy gone into Manhattan. A bottle of whiskey he had, your father, that he brought from the ship and I had to call the cops and he’s gone now, bag and baggage, and sailed away today on the Queen Mary because I called Cunard and they told me, oh, yes, they had him on board and they’d be watching closely for any signs of the lunacy he came with.

What did he do?

She wouldn’t tell me and she didn’t have to because it was easy to guess. He probably tried to get into bed with her and that was not part of her dream. She hinted and suggested that if I hadn’t spent hours with him in saloons he would have behaved himself and wouldn’t be on the Queen Mary now heading out into the Atlantic. I told her his drinking wasn’t my fault but she was sharp with me. Last night was the last straw, she said, and you were part of it.

47

For teachers Fridays are bright. You leave the school with a bag filled with papers to read and correct, books to read. This weekend you will surely catch up with all those uncorrected, unmarked papers. You don’t want to let them pile up in the closets like Miss Mudd so that decades hence a young teacher will pounce on them to keep his classes busy. You will take the papers home, pour a glass of wine, stack Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins and Hector Berlioz on the phonograph and try to read a hundred and fifty student compositions. You know that some don’t care what you do with their work as long as you give them a decent grade so that they can pass and get on with real life in their shops. Others fancy themselves as writers and want their papers back corrected and graded high. The class Romeos would like you to comment on their papers and read them aloud so that they can bask in the admiring glances of the girls. The ones who don’t care are sometimes interested in the same girls and verbal threats are passed from desk to desk because the ones who don’t care are weak in written expression. If a boy is a good writer you have to be careful about praising him too much because of the danger of accidents on the stairs. The ones who don’t care hate goody-goodies.

You intend to go straight home with your bag but you then discover Friday afternoon is the time for beer and teacher enlightenment. An occasional teacher might say he has to go home to his wife till he finds Bob Bogard standing by the time clock to remind us of first things first, that the Meurot Bar is a few steps away, next door in fact, and what harm would there be in one beer, one? Bob is not married and may not understand the dangers for a man who might go beyond the one beer, a man who might have to face the wrath of a wife who has cooked a fine Friday fish and now sits in the kitchen watching the grease congeal.

We stand at the Meurot Bar and order our beers. There is teacher small talk. When there’s a mention of good-looking women on our staff or even nubile students we roll our eyes. What we wouldn’t do if we were high school kids nowadays. We talk tough at the mention of troublesome boys. One more word out of that goddam kid and he’s gonna beg for a transfer. We unite in our hostility to authority, all the people who emerge from their offices to supervise and observe us and tell us what to do and how to do it, people who spent as little time as possible in the classroom themselves and don’t know their ass from their elbow about teaching.

A young teacher might drop in, just graduated from college, newly licensed. The drone of university professors and the chatter from college cafeterias is still in his ears and if he wants to discuss Camus and Sartre and how existence precedes essence or vice versa he’ll be talking to himself in the mirror of the Meurot Bar.

None of us had followed the Great American Path, elementary school, high school, college, and into teaching at twenty-two. Bob Bogard fought in the war in Germany and was probably wounded. He won’t tell you. Claude Campbell served in the navy, graduated from college in Tennessee, published a novel when he was twenty-seven, teaches English, has six children with his second wife, took a master’s degree at Brooklyn College with a thesis, Ideational Trends in the American Novel, fixes everything in his house, wiring, plumbing, carpentry. I look at him and think of Goldsmith’s lines on the village schoolmaster, “And all around the wonder grew/That one small head could carry all he knew.” And Claude hasn’t even reached the age of Christ at his crucifixion, thirty-three.

When Stanley Garber drops in for a Coke he tells us he often feels he made a mistake by not going into college teaching where you amble through life thinking you shit cream puffs and suffering if you have to teach more than three hours a week. He says he could have written a bullshit Ph.D. dissertation on the bilabial fricative in the middle period of Thomas Chatterton who died when he was seventeen because that’s the kind of crap that goes on in colleges while the rest of us hold the front lines with kids who won’t get their heads out from between their thighs and supervisors content to keep their heads up their asses.

There will be trouble tonight in Brooklyn. I’m supposed to have dinner with Alberta at an Arabic restaurant, the Near East, bring your own wine, but it’s six going on seven and if I call now she’ll complain she’s been waiting for hours, that I’m just an Irish drunk like my father and she doesn’t care if I stay on Staten Island the rest of my life, good-bye.

So I won’t call. Better not to. No use having two rows, one on the phone now, another when I get home. It’s easier to sit at the bar where’s there’s a glow and important matters are discussed.

We agree that teachers are sniped at from three fronts, parents, kids, supervisors, and you either have to be diplomatic or tell them all kiss your ass. Teachers are the only professionals who have to respond to bells every forty-five minutes and come out fighting. All right, class, sit down. Yes, you, sit down. Open your notebooks, that’s right, your notebooks, am I speaking a foreign language, kid? Don’t call you kid? Okay, I won’t call you kid. Just sit down. Report card grades are just around the corner and I can put you on the welfare rolls. All right, bring in your father, bring in your mother, bring in your whole damn tribe. You don’t have a pen, Pete? Okay, here’s a pen. Good-bye, pen. No, Phyllis, you can’t have the pass. I don’t care if you’re having a hundred periods, Phyllis, because what you really want to do is meet Eddie and disappear into the basement where your future could be determined by one smooth panty drop and one swift upward stroke from Eddie’s impatient member, the start of a little nine-month adventure that will end with you squawking Eddie better marry you, the shotgun aimed at his lower frontal region and his dreams dead. So I’m saving you, Phyllis, you and Eddie and no, you don’t have to thank me.

This is talk along the bar that will never be heard in the classroom unless a teacher loses his wits entirely. You know you can never deny the lavatory pass to a menstrual Phyllis for fear of being dragged before the highest court in the land where the black robes, all men, will excoriate you for insulting Phyllis and the future mothers of America.

There is talk along the bar about certain efficient teachers and we agree we don’t like them and the way their classes are so organized they hum from bell to bell. In these classes there are monitors for every activity, every part of the lesson. There is the monitor who goes immediately to the board to write the number and title of the day’s lesson, Lesson #32, Strategies in Dealing with the Dangling Participle. Efficient teachers are known for their strategies, the darling new word at the Board of Education.

The efficient teacher has rules for taking notes and the organization of the notebook and there are notebook monitors who roam the classroom to check for proper form, top of page filled with student’s name, homeroom class, title of course and date with the month written out, not numbers, it must be written out so that the student will have practice in writing out because there are too many people in this world that we live in, business people and others, who are too lazy to write out the months. There are to be prescribed margins and no scribbling. If the notebook doesn’t adhere to the rules the monitor will enter demerits on the student’s card and when report card time rolls around there will be suffering and no mercy.

Homework monitors collect and return assignments, attendance monitors preside over the little cards in the attendance book and collect excuses for absences and latenesses. Failure to submit written excuses leads to further suffering and no mercy.

Some students are known for their skill in writing excuse notes from parents and doctors and they’ll do it in return for favors in the cafeteria or the far reaches of the basement.

Monitors who take blackboard erasers to the basement to knock out the chalk must first promise they’re not taking this important job to sneak a smoke or make out with the boy or girl of their choice. The principal is already complaining there is too much activity in the basement and he’d like to know what’s going on there.

There are monitors to distribute books and collect receipts, monitors to handle the lavatory pass and the sign-in sign-out sheet, monitors to put everything in the room in alphabetical order, monitors to carry the trash can along the aisles in the war against litter, monitors who decorate the room to make it so bright and cheerful the principal brings in visitors from Japan and Lichtenstein.

The efficient teacher is monitor of monitors though he may lighten his monitor load by appointing monitors who monitor the other monitors or he may have dispute monitors who settle arguments between monitors accusing other monitors of interfering with their jobs. The dispute monitor has the most dangerous job of all because of what might happen on the stairs or the street.

A student caught trying to bribe a monitor is immediately reported to the principal who will enter a remark on his permanent record that will blacken his reputation. This is a warning to others that such a blot could be an impediment to a career in sheet metal, plumbing, auto mechanics, anything.

Stanley Garber snorts that with all this efficient activity there is little time for instruction but what the hell, the students are in their seats, completely monitored and behaving themselves, and that pleases the teacher, the chairman, the principal and his assistants, the superintendent, the Board of Education, the mayor, the governor, the President and God Himself.

So says Stanley.

* * *

If a university professor discusses Vanity Fair or anything else his classes listen with notebooks open and pens poised. If they dislike the novel they won’t dare complain for fear of lowered grades.

When I distributed Vanity Fair to my junior class at McKee Vocational and Technical High School there was moaning in the room. Why do we have to read this dumb book? I told them it was about two young women, Becky and Amelia, and their adventures with men, but my students said it was written in that old English and who can read that? Four girls read it and said it was beautiful and should be made into a movie. The boys pretended to yawn and told me English teachers were all the same. They just wanted to make you read that old stuff and how was that gonna help you if you was fixin’ a car or a busted air conditioner, ah?

I could threaten them with failure. If they refused to read this book they’d fail the course and they wouldn’t graduate and everyone knew girls didn’t want to go out with anyone who wasn’t a high school graduate.

For three weeks we toiled through Vanity Fair. Every day I tried to motivate and encourage them, to draw them into a discussion of what it’s like to make your way through the world when you’re a young nineteenth-century woman, but they didn’t care. One wrote on the board, Becky Sharp Drop Dead.

Then, as decreed by the school syllabus, it was on to The Scarlet Letter. This would be easier. I’d talk about the New England witch hunts, the accusations, the hysteria, the hangings. I’d talk about Germany in the 1930s and how a whole nation was brainwashed.

Not my students. They’d never be brainwashed. No, sir, they’d never be able to get away with that here. They’d never fool us like that.

I chanted to them, Winston tastes good like . . . and they finished the sentence.

I sang, My beer is Rheingold the dry beer . . . and they finished the jingle.

I chanted again, You wonder where the yellow went when . . . and they finished the line.

I asked if they knew any more and there was an eruption of jingles from radio and television, proof of the power of advertising. When I told them they were brainwashed they were indignant, Oh, no, they weren’t brainwashed. They could think for themselves and nobody could tell them what to do. They denied they’d been told what cigarette to smoke, what beer to drink, what toothpaste to use though they’d admit that when you’re in a supermarket you’ll buy the brand in your head. No, you’d never buy a cigarette called Turnip.

Yeah, they heard about Senator McCarthy and all that but they were too young and their fathers and mothers said he was a great man for getting rid of the Communists.

From day to day I struggled to make connections between Hitler and McCarthy and the New England witch hunts, trying to soften them up for The Scarlet Letter. From parents there were indignant calls. What is this guy telling our kids about Senator McCarthy? Tell him back off. Senator McCarthy was a good man, fought for his country. Tail gunner Joe. Got rid of the Communists.

Mr. Sorola said he didn’t want to interfere but would I please tell him was I teaching English or was I teaching history. I told him about my troubles trying to get the kids to read anything. He said I shouldn’t listen to them. Just tell them, You’re going to read The Scarlet Letter whether you like it or not because this is high school and that’s what we do here and that’s that and if you don’t like it, kid, you fail.

They complained when I distributed the book. Here we go again with the old stuff. We thought you was a nice guy, Mr. McCourt. We thought you was different.

I told them this book was about a young woman in Boston who got into trouble over having a baby with a man who wasn’t her husband though I couldn’t tell them who the man was in case it might ruin the story. They said they didn’t care who the father was. One boy said you never know who your father is anyway because he had a friend who discovered his father wasn’t his father at all, that his real father was killed in Korea, but the pretend father was the one he grew up with, a good guy, so who gives a shit about this woman in Boston.

Most of the class agreed though they wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning to find their fathers weren’t their real fathers. Some wished they had other fathers, their own fathers were so mean they made them come to school and read dumb books.

But that’s not the story of The Scarlet Letter, I said.

Aw, Mr. McCourt, do we have to talk about that old stuff? This guy Hawthorne don’t even know how to write so’s we can understand and you’re always saying write simple, write simple. Why can’t we read the Daily News? They have good writers. They write simple.

Then I remembered I was broke and that’s what led to Catcher in the Rye and Five Great Plays of Shakespeare and a change in my teaching career. I had forty-eight cents to get me home on the ferry and the subway, no money for lunch, not even for a cup of coffee on the ferry and I blurted to the class that if they wanted to read a good book that didn’t have big words and long sentences and was all about a boy their age who was mad at the world I’d get it for them but they’d have to buy it, a dollar twenty-five each which they could pay in installments starting now, so if you have a nickel or a dime or more you can pass it up and I’ll write your name and amount on a sheet of paper and order the books today from the Coleman Book Company in Yonkers, and they’d never know, my students, I’d have a pocketful of change for lunch and maybe a beer at the Meurot next door, though I didn’t tell them that, they’d be shocked.

Small change was passed up and when I called the book company I saved a dime by using the assistant principal’s phone because it’s illegal to have students buy books when bookrooms are spilling over with copies of Silas Marner and Giants in the Earth.

Catcher in the Rye arrived in two days and I passed them out, paid for or not. Some students never offered a penny, others less than their share, but the money collected kept me going till payday when I’d satisfy the book company.

When I handed out the books someone discovered the word crap on the first page and that brought silence to the room. That’s a word you’d never find in any book in the English bookroom. Girls covered their mouths and giggled and boys tittered over shocking pages. When the bell rang there was no stampede to the door. I had to ask them to leave, another class was coming in.

The class coming in were curious about the class going out and why was everyone looking at this book and if it was that good why couldn’t they read it. I reminded them they were seniors and the class going out were juniors. Yeah, but why couldn’t they read that small book instead of Great Expectations? I told them they could but they’d have to buy it and they said they’d pay anything not to read Great Expectations, anything.

Next day Mr. Sorola came into the room with his assistant, Miss Seested. They went from desk to desk snatching copies of Catcher in the Rye and dropping them into two shopping bags. If the books weren’t on the desks they demanded the students take them from their bags. They counted the books in the shopping bags and compared them with the class attendance and threatened the four students who hadn’t turned in their books with big trouble. Raise your hands, the four people who still have the book. No hands were raised and on the way out Mr. Sorola told me I was to see him in his office right after this class, not a minute later.

Mr. McCourt, you in trouble?

Mr. McCourt, that’s the only book I ever read and now that man took it.

They complained about the loss of their books and told me if anything happened to me they’d go on strike and that would teach the school a lesson. They nudged and winked over the strike and they knew I knew it would simply be another excuse for avoiding school and not any great concern for me.

Mr. Sorola sat behind his desk reading Catcher in the Rye, puffing on his cigarette and letting me wait while he turned the page, shook his head and put the book down.

Mr. McCourt, this book is not on the syllabus.

I know, Mr. Sorola.

You know I’ve had calls from seventeen parents and you know why?

They didn’t like the book?

That’s right, Mr. McCourt. There’s a scene in this book where the kid is in a hotel room with a prostitute.

Yes, but nothing happens.

That’s not what the parents think. You telling me that kid was in that room to sing? The parents don’t want their kids reading this kind of trash.

He warned me to be careful, that I was endangering my satisfactory rating on the yearly performance report and we wouldn’t want that, would we? He would have to place a note in my file as a record of our meeting. If there were no further incidents in the near future the note would be removed.

Mr. McCourt, what are we gonna read next?

The Scarlet Letter. We have tons of them in the bookroom.

Their faces fell. Aw, Gawd, no. All the kids in the other classes told us it’s that old stuff again.

All right, I said, jokingly. We’ll read Shakespeare.

Their faces fell even farther and the room was filled with moans and hisses. Mr. McCourt, my sister went to college for a year and dropped out because she couldn’t read Shakespeare and she can speak Italian and everything.

I said it again, Shakespeare. There was fear in the room and I felt myself drawn to the edge of a cliff with something in my head demanding, How can you move from Salinger to Shakespeare?

I told the class, It’s Shakespeare or The Scarlet Letter, kings and lovers or a woman having a baby in Boston. If we read Shakespeare we’ll act out the plays. If we read The Scarlet Letter we’ll sit here and discuss the deeper meaning and I’ll give you the big exam they keep in the department office.

Oh, no, not the deeper meaning. English teachers always be going on about the deeper meaning.

All right. It’s Shakespeare, no deeper meaning and no exams except what you decide. So, write your name on this paper and the amount you’re paying and we’ll get the book.

They passed up their nickels and dimes. They groaned when they thumbed the book, Five Great Plays of Shakespeare. Man, I can’t read this old English.

I wished I could have dominated my classes like other teachers, imposed on them classic English and American literature. I failed. I caved in and took the easy way with Catcher in the Rye and when that was taken dodged and danced my way to Shakespeare. We’d read the plays and enjoy ourselves and why not? Wasn’t he the best?

Still my students complained till someone called out, Shit, man, excuse the language, Mr. McCourt, but here’s this guy saying Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

Where? Where? The class wanted to know the page number and all around the room boys declaimed Mark Antony’s speech, flung out their arms and laughed.

Another discovered Hamlet’s To be or not to be soliloquy and soon the room was filled with ranting Hamlets.

The girls raised their hands. Mr. McCourt, the boys have all these great speeches and there’s nothing for us.

Oh, girls, girls, there’s Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Gertrude.

We spent two days plucking morsels from the five plays, Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Hamlet; Henry IV, Part One.

My students led and I followed because there was nothing else to do. Remarks had been passed in the hallways, in the students’ cafeteria.

Hey, wass dat?

It’s a book, man.

Oh, yeah? What book?

Shakespeare. We’re reading Shakespeare.

Shakespeare? Shit, man, you not reading Shakespeare.

When the girls wanted to act out Romeo and Juliet the boys yawned and obliged. This would be sissy romantic stuff till the fight scene where Mercutio dies in style, telling the world about his wound.

’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door/But ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

To be or not to be was the passage everyone memorized but when they recited it they had to be reminded this was a meditation on suicide and not an incitement to arms.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

The girls wanted to know why everyone picked on Ophelia especially Laertes, Polonious, Hamlet. Why didn’t she fight back? They had sisters like that who were married to bastard sons o’ bitches, excuse the language, and you wouldn’t believe what they put up with.

A hand went up. Why didn’t Ophelia run away to America?

Another hand. Because there was no America in the old days. It had to be discovered.

Whadda you talkin’ about? There was always an America. Where do you think the Indians lived?

I told them they’d have to look it up and the opposing hands agreed to go to the library and report next day.

One hand, There was an America in Shakespeare’s time and she coulda went.

The other hand, There was an America in Shakespeare’s time but no America in Ophelia’s time and she cuddena went. If she went in Shakespeare’s time there was nothing but Indians and Ophelia woulda been uncomfortable in a tepee which is what they called their houses.

We moved on to Henry IV, Part One, and all the boys wanted to be Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff. The girls complained again there was nothing for them except for Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude and look what happened to them. Didn’t Shakespeare like women? Did he have to kill everyone who wore a skirt?

The boys said that’s the way it is and the girls snapped back they were sorry we didn’t read The Scarlet Letter because one of them had read it and told the rest how Hester Prynne had her beautiful baby, Pearl, and the father was a jerk who died miserable and Hester got her revenge on the whole town of Boston and wasn’t that much better than poor Ophelia floating down a stream, out of her mind, talking to herself and throwin’ flowers around, wasn’t it?

Mr. Sorola came to observe me with the new head of the Academic Department, Mrs. Popp. They smiled and didn’t complain about this Shakespeare book not being on the syllabus though the next term Mrs. Popp took this class away from me. I lodged a grievance and had a hearing before the superintendent. I said that was my class, I had started them reading Shakespeare and I wanted to continue in the next term. The superintendent ruled against me on the grounds that my attendance record was spotty and erratic.

My Shakespeare students were probably lucky in having the head of the department as their teacher. She was surely more organized than I and more likely to discover deeper meanings.

48

Paddy Clancy lived around the corner from me in Brooklyn Heights. He called to see if I’d like to go to the opening of a new bar in the Village, the Lion’s Head.

Of course I’d like to go and I stayed till the bar closed at 4 A.M. and missed work the next day. The bartender, Al Koblin, thought for a while I was one of the singing Clancy Brothers and charged me nothing for the drinks till he discovered I was only Frank McCourt, a teacher. Now even though I had to pay for my drinks I didn’t mind because the Lion’s Head became my home away from home, a place where I could feel comfortable the way I never did in uptown bars.

Reporters from the offices of the Village Voice drifted in from next door and they attracted journalists from everywhere. The wall opposite the bar was soon adorned with the framed book jackets of writers who were regular customers.

That was the wall I coveted, the wall that haunted me and had me dreaming that some day I’d look up at a framed book jacket of my own. Up and down the bar writers, poets, journalists, playwrights talked about their work, their lives, their assignments, their travels. Men and women would have a drink while waiting for cars to planes that would take them to Vietnam, Belfast, Nicaragua. New books came out, Pete Hamill, Joe Flaherty, Joel Oppenheimer, Dennis Smith, and went up on the wall, while I hung on the periphery of the accomplished, the ones who knew the magic of print. At the Lion’s Head you had to prove yourself in ink or be quiet. There was no place here for teachers and I went on looking at the wall, envious.

Mam moved into a small apartment across the street from Malachy on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Now she could see Malachy, his new wife, Diana, their sons, Conor and Cormac, my brother Alphie, his wife, Lynn, and their daughter, Allison.

She could have visited all of us as often as she liked and when I asked her why she didn’t she barked at me, I don’t want to be beholden to anyone. It irritated me always when I called and asked her what she was doing and she said, Nothing. If I suggested that she get out of the house and visit a community center or a senior citizens’ center she’d say, Arrah, for the love o’ Jesus, will you leave me alone. Whenever Alberta invited her to dinner she always made a point of being late, complaining of the long journey from her Manhattan apartment to our house in Brooklyn. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to come at all if it was such a bother to her and the last thing she needed anyway was a dinner she was getting that fat, but I curbed my tongue so that there wouldn’t be tension at the table. Unlike the first time she came to dinner and pushed the noodles aside she now devoured everything before her though if you offered her a second helping she’d look prim and say no thanks as if she had the appetite of a butterfly and then pick at the crumbs on the table. If I told her she didn’t have to pick at crumbs, there was more food in the kitchen, she’d tell me leave her alone, that I was getting to be a right bloody torment. If I told her she’d be better off if she’d stayed in Ireland she’d bristle, What do you mean I’d be better off?

Well, you wouldn’t be lying in bed half the day with the radio stuck to your ear listening to every half-witted show they have.

I listen to Malachy on the radio and what’s wrong with that?

You listen to everything. You do nothing.

Her face would grow pale, her nose pointed, she’d pick at crumbs no longer there and there might be a hint of watery eyes. Then I’d be pricked with guilt and invite her to stay for the night so that she wouldn’t have to take that long subway ride to Manhattan.

No, thank you, I’d rather be in my own bed, if you don’t mind.

Oh, I suppose you’re afraid of the sheets, all those diseases from foreigners in the Laundromat?

And she’d say, I think now ’tis the drink talking. Where’s my coat?

Alberta would try to soften the moment with another invitation to stay, that we had new sheets and Mam needn’t be nervous.

’Tisn’t the sheets at all. I just want to go home, and when she saw me put on my coat she’d say, I don’t need anyone to walk me to the subway. I can find my own way.

You’re not going to walk these streets by yourself.

I walk the streets by myself all the time.

It was a long silent walk up Court Street to the subway at Borough Hall. I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to get past my irritation and my anger and ask her that simple question, How are you, Mam?

I couldn’t.

When we reached the station she said I didn’t have to pay a fare to get through the turnstiles. She’d be all right on the platform. There were people there and she’d be safe. She was used to it.

I went in with her thinking we might say something to each other but when the train arrived I let her go without even an attempt at a kiss and watched her stumble toward a seat as the train pulled from the station.

Down near Court Street and Atlantic Avenue I remembered something she had told me months ago while we sat waiting for Thanksgiving dinner. Isn’t it remarkable, she said, the way things turn out in people’s lives?

What do you mean?

Well, I was sitting in my apartment and I was feeling lonesome so I went up and sat on one of those benches they have in the grassy island in the middle of Broadway and this woman came along, a shopping bag woman, one of the homeless ones, all tattered and greasy, rootin’ around in the garbage can till she found a newspaper and sat beside me reading it till she asked me if she could borrow my glasses because she could only read the headlines with the sight she had and when she talked I noticed she had an Irish accent so I asked her where she came from and she told me Donegal a long time ago and wasn’t it lovely to be sitting on a bench in the middle of Broadway with people noticing things and asking where you came from. She asked if I could spare a few pennies for soup and I said instead she could come with me to the Associated supermarket and we’d get some groceries and have a proper meal. Oh, she couldn’t do that, she said, but I told her that’s what I was going to do anyway. She wouldn’t come inside the store. She said they wouldn’t want the likes of her. I got bread and butter and rashers and eggs and when we got home I told her she could go in and have a nice shower and she was delighted with herself though there wasn’t much I could do about her clothes or the bags she carried. We had our dinner and watched television till she started falling asleep on me and I told her lie down there on the bed but she wouldn’t. God knows the bed is big enough for four but she laid down on the floor with a shopping bag under her head and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and I missed her.

I know it wasn’t the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn’t I be like that to her?

49

Teaching nine hours a week at New York Technical College in Brooklyn was easier than twenty-five hours a week at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. Classes were smaller, students older, and there were none of the problems a high school teacher has to deal with, the lavatory pass, the moaning over assignments, the mass of paperwork created by bureaucrats who have nothing to do but create new forms. I could supplement my reduced salary by teaching at Washington Irving Evening High School or substituting at Seward Park High School and Stuyvesant High School.

The chairman of the English Department at the community college asked me if I’d like to teach a class of paraprofessionals. I said yes though I had no notion of what a paraprofessional was.

That first class I found out. Here were thirty-six women, African-American with a sprinkling of Hispanics, ranging in age from early twenties to late fifties, teacher aides in elementary schools and in college now with government help. They’d get two-year associate degrees and, perhaps, continue their education so that someday they might become fully qualified teachers.

That night there was little time for teaching. After I had asked the women to write a short autobiographical essay for the next class they gathered up their books and filed out, apprehensive, still unsure of themselves, of each other, of me. I had the whitest skin in the room.

When we met again the mood was the same except for one woman who sat with her head on the desk, sobbing. I asked what was the matter. She raised her head, tears on her cheeks.

I lost my books.

Oh, well, I said, you’ll get another set of books. Just go to the English Department and tell them what happened.

You mean I won’t get throwed out of college?

No, you won’t be throwed, thrown out of college.

I felt like patting her head but I didn’t know how to pat the head of a middle-aged woman who has lost her books. She smiled, we all smiled. Now we could begin. I asked for their compositions and told them I’d read some aloud though I wouldn’t use their real names.

The essays were stiff, self-conscious. As I read I wrote some of the more common misspelled words on the chalkboard, suggested changes in structure, pointed out grammatical errors. It was all dry and tedious till I suggested the ladies write simply and clearly. For their next assignment they could write on anything they liked. They looked surprised. Anything? But we don’t have anything to write about. We don’t have no adventures.

They had nothing to write about, nothing but the tensions of their lives, summer riots erupting around them, assassinations, husbands who so often disappeared, children destroyed by drugs, their own daily grind of housework, jobs, school, raising children.

They loved the strange ways of words. During a discussion on juvenile delinquency Mrs. Williams sang out, No kid o’ mine gonna be no yoot.

Yoot?

Yeah, you know. Yoot. She held up a newspaper where the headline howled, Youth Slays Mom.

Oh, I said, and Mrs. Williams went on, These yoots, y’know, runnin’ around slayin’ people. Killin’ ’em, too. Any kid o’ mine come home actin’ like a yoot an’ out he go on his you-know-what.

The youngest woman in the class, Nicole, turned the tables on me. She sat in the back in a corner and never spoke till I asked the class if they’d like to write about their mothers. Then she raised her hand. How about your mother, Mr. McCourt?

Questions came like bullets. Is she alive? How many children did she have? Where’s your father? Did she have all those children with one man? Where is she living? Who’s she living with? She’s living alone? Your mother’s living alone and she has four sons? How come?

They frowned. They disapproved. Poor lady with four sons shouldn’t be living alone. People should take care of their mothers but what do men know? You can never tell a man what it’s like to be a mother and if it wasn’t for the mothers America would fall apart.

In April Martin Luther King was killed and classes were suspended for a week. When we met again I wanted to beg forgiveness for my race. Instead I asked for the essays I had already assigned. Mrs. Williams was indignant. Look, Mr. McCourt, when they tryin’ to burn your house down you ain’t sittin’ around writin’ no cawm-po-zishuns.

In June Bobby Kennedy was killed. My thirty-six ladies wondered what was happening to the world but they agreed you have to carry on, that education was the only road to sanity. When they talked about their children their faces brightened and I became irrelevant to their talk. I sat on my desk while they told each other that now they were in college themselves they stood over their kids to make sure the homework was done.

On the last night of classes in June there was a final examination. I watched those dark heads bent over papers, the mothers of two hundred and twelve children, and I knew, that no matter what they wrote or didn’t write on those papers, no one would fail.

They finished. The last paper had been handed in but no one was leaving. I asked if they had another class here. Mrs. Williams stood and coughed. Ah, Mr. McCourt, I must say, I mean we must say, it was a wonderful thing to come to college and learn so much about English and everything and we got you this little something hopin’ you’ll like it an’ all.

She sat down, sobbing, and I thought, This class begins and ends in tears.

The gift was passed up, a bottle of shaving lotion in a fancy red and black box. When I sniffed it I was nearly knocked over but I sniffed again with gusto and told the ladies I’d keep the bottle forever in memory of them, this class, their yoots.

Instead of going home after that class I took the subway to West Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan and called my mother from a street telephone.

Would you like to have a snack?

I don’t know. Where are you?

I’m a few blocks away.

Why?

I just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Visiting Malachy?

No. Visiting you.

Me? Why should you be visiting me?

For Christ’s sake, you’re my mother and all I wanted to do was invite you out for a snack. What would you like to eat?

She sounded doubtful. Well, I love them jumbo shrimps they have in the Chinese restaurants.

All right. We’ll have jumbo shrimps.

But I don’t know if I’m able for them this minute. I think I’d prefer to go to the Greeks for a salad.

All right. I’ll see you there.

She came into the restaurant gasping for breath and when I kissed her cheek I could taste the salt of her sweat. She said she’d have to sit a minute before she could even think of food, that if she hadn’t given up the cigarettes she’d be dead now.

She ordered the feta salad and when I asked her if she liked it she said she loved it, she could live on it.

Do you like that cheese?

What cheese?

The goat cheese.

What goat cheese?

The white stuff. The feta. That’s goat cheese.

’Tis not.

’Tis.

Well, if I knew that was goat cheese I’d never touch it because I was attacked by a goat once out the country in Limerick and I’d never eat a thing that attacked me.

It’s a good thing, I told her, you were never attacked by a jumbo shrimp.

50

In 1971 my daughter Maggie was born at Unity Hospital in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. There would be no problem taking home the right infant since she seemed to be the only white one in the nursery.

Alberta wanted a natural Lamaze childbirth but the doctors and nurses at Unity Hospital had no patience with middle-class women and their peculiarities. They had no time for this woman and her breathing exercises and jabbed her with an anesthetic to hasten the birth. Instead, that slowed the rhythm so much the impatient doctor clamped forceps on Maggie’s head and yanked her from her mother’s womb and I wanted to punch him for the flatness he left on her temples.

The nurse took the child to a corner to clean and wash her and when she finished beckoned that I might now see my daughter with her red astonished face and her black feet.

The soles of her feet were black.

God, what kind of a birthmark have you inflicted on my child? I couldn’t say anything to the nurse because she was black and might be offended that I didn’t find my daughter’s black feet attractive. I had a vision of my child as a young woman lolling on a beach, lovely in a bathing suit, but forced to wear socks to conceal her disfigurement.

The nurse asked if the baby was to be breast-fed. No. Alberta had said she wouldn’t have the time when she went back to work and the doctor did something to dry up her milk. They wanted to know the child’s name and even though Alberta had toyed with Michaela she was still under anesthetic and powerless and I told the nurse, Margaret Ann, for my two grandmothers and my sister who had died at twenty-one days in this very borough of Brooklyn.

Alberta was wheeled back to her room and I called Malachy to tell him the good news, that a child had been born but that she was afflicted with black feet. He laughed in my ear and told me I was an ass, that the nurse probably took footprints instead of fingerprints. He said he’d meet me at the Lion’s Head where everyone bought me a drink and I got stocious drunk, so drunk Malachy had to hoist me home in a taxi which made me so sick I threw up the length of Broadway with the driver yelling that would cost me twenty-five dollars for the cleaning of the cab, an unreasonable demand that deprived him of a tip and had him threatening to call the cops and, What are you going to tell them? said Malachy, are you going to tell them that you’re a zigzag driver going from one side of Broadway to the other and making everyone sick, is that what you’re going to tell them? and the driver was so angry he wanted to step out and confront Malachy but changed his mind when my brother, holding me up, stood large and red-bearded on the sidewalk and asked the driver politely if he had any more comments before he went to meet his Maker. The driver uttered obscenities about us and the Irish in general and drove through a red light, his left arm at the window, his middle finger rigid in the air.

Malachy brought me aspirins and vitamins and told me I’d be as right as rain in the morning and I wondered what that meant, right as rain, though that question was pushed from my head by the image of Maggie and the forcep flatness of her temples and I was ready to jump from the bed to hunt down that damn doctor who wouldn’t let my daughter be born in her own good time but my legs wouldn’t oblige me and I fell asleep.

Malachy was right. There was no hangover, only delight that a little child in Brooklyn had my name and I’d have a lifetime watching her grow and when I called Alberta I could hardly talk with the tears in my throat and she laughed and quoted my mother, Your bladder is near your eye.

That same year Alberta and I bought the brownstone house where we’d been tenants on the parlor floor. We were able to buy it only because our friends Bobby and Mary Ann Baron lent us money and because Virgil Frank died and left us eight thousand dollars.

When we lived at 30 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights Virgil was two floors below us. He was over seventy, had a full head of combed-back white hair, a strong nose, his own teeth and hardly a scrap of flesh on his bones. I visited him regularly because an hour with him was better than movies, television and most books.

His apartment was one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. His bed was a cot against the wall and beyond that a desk and a window with an air conditioner. Opposite the bed was a bookcase filled with volumes on flowers, trees and birds which, he said, he’d get around to some day as soon as he bought a pair of binoculars. You have to be careful about buying binoculars because you go into a store and how are you gonna test them? Salesmen in the store say, Oh, they’re okay, they’re strong, and how can you tell? They won’t let you take them outside to look up and down Fulton Street in case you make a run for it with the binoculars and that’s dumb. How the hell you gonna make a run for it when you’re seventy? In the meantime he’d like to be able to see birds out his window but all you can see from this apartment is pigeons fornicating on top of his air conditioner and that pisses him off.

He watches them, oh yeah, he watches them, bangs on the window with a fly swatter, tells them, Get outa here, goddam pigeons. Go fornicate on someone else’s air conditioner. He tells me they’re just rats with wings, all they do is eat and fornicate and when they’re finished with fornicating they drop a load on the air conditioner, one load after another, like that crap the boids, I mean the birds, damn, I’m talkin’ Brooklyn again and that ain’t good when you’re selling watercoolers, like that bird crap in South America where the mountains are covered with it, what is it? guano, yeah, which is good for growing things but not for air conditioners.

Besides the books on outdoor life he had a three-volume set of The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and when I opened a volume he said, I didn’t know you liked that stuff. Wouldn’t you prefer the birds? I told him you can always get bird books but his Summa was rare and he said I could have it except I’d have to wait till he died. But don’t worry, Frank, I’ll put it in my will.

He also promised to leave me his collection of ties which dazzled me whenever he opened his closet door, the loudest, most colorful ties I had ever seen.

You like ’em, eh? Some of these ties go all the way back to the twenties and on down to the thirties and forties. Men knew how to dress then. They didn’t go around tippy-toe like the man in the gray flannel suit afraid of a little color. I always said never stint on the tie and the hat because you have to look good when you’re selling watercoolers which I did for forty-five years. I’d go into an office and I’d say, What? What? You telling me you still drinking tap water from these old cups and glasses. Do you know the danger to your health?

And Virgil would stand between bed and bookcase rocking like a preacher and delivering his sales spiel on watercoolers.

Yes, sir, I sell watercoolers and I wanna tell you there’s five things you can do with water. You can clean it, you can pollute it, you can heat it, you can cool it and, ha ha, you can sell it. You know and I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Office Manager, you can drink it and you can swim in it though there isn’t much call for swimming water in the average American office. I wanna tell you my company has made a study of offices that drink our water and offices that don’t drink our water and, you’re right, you’re right, Mr. Office Manager, the people who drink our water are healthier and more productive. Our water drives away the flu and improves digestion. We’re not saying, no we’re not saying, Mr. Office Manager, that our water is solely responsible for great productivity and the prosperity of America but we are saying that our studies show offices without our water are barely hanging on, desperate and wondering why. A copy of our study is available when you sign our yearly contract. At no extra charge we’ll survey your staff and give you an estimate of water consumption. I am happy to observe you don’t have air-conditioning because that means you’ll need extra water for your fine staff. And we know, Mr. Office Manager, that our watercoolers bring people together. Problems are settled over a paper cup of water. Eyes meet. Romances flourish. Everybody happy, everybody eager to come to work every day. Increased productivity. We get no complaints. Sign right here. A copy for you, a copy for me and we’re in business.

A knock on the door interrupted him.

Who is it?

A faint old voice. Virgil, it’s Harry.

Can’t talk to you now, Harry. I got the doctor here and I’m naked getting examined.

All right, Virgil. I’ll come back later.

Tomorrow, Harry, tomorrow.

Okay, Virgil.

He told me that was Harry Ball, eighty-five years old, so old you can’t hear his voice over a clothesline, who drives Virgil crazy with his parking problems. He’s got this big car, a Hudson that they don’t make no more, is that right, no more or anymore? You’re an English teacher. I dunno. Never went beyond the seventh grade. Ran away from the Sisters of St. Joseph Orphanage even if I’m leaving them money in my will. Anyway, Harry’s got this car and he goes nowhere with it. Says some day he’s gonna drive it to Florida to see his sister but he’s going nowhere because that car is so old it wouldn’t make it across the Brooklyn Bridge and that goddam Hudson is his life. He moves it from one side of the street to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes he brings the little aluminum beach chair and sits near his car looking for a parking spot to open for next day. Or he walks around the neighborhood looking for a spot and if he finds one he gets excited and gives himself a heart attack rushing to his car to drive it to the new spot which is now gone and so is the one he was in and there he is driving around with no spot, cursing the government. I was with him once and he nearly ran down a rabbi and two old women and I said, Christ, Harry, lemme out, and he wouldn’t, but I jumped out at the first red light and he yelled after me I was the type that flashed lights so the Japs could find Pearl Harbor till I told him he was a dumb bastard that didn’t know Pearl Harbor was bombed in broad daylight and he sat there contradicting me with the light turning green and people honking and yelling who gives a shit about Pearl Harbor, buddy, move your goddam Hudson. He could park that car in a garage for eighty-five bucks a month but that’s more than he pays for rent and that’ll be the day Harry Ball ever wastes a penny. I’m frugal myself, I admit that, but he could make Scrooge look like a spendthrift. Is that the right word, spendthrift? I ran away from the orphanage in seventh grade.

He asked me to go with him to a hardware store on Court Street so that he could get an egg timer for the telephone just installed.

An egg timer?

Yeah, this is a kind of hourglass with sand that runs for three minutes and that’s the way I like my egg and when I use the telephone I’ll know when the three minutes is up because that’s how they charge you at the phone company, the bastards. I’ll have the egg timer on my desk and I’ll hang up at the last grain of sand.

On Court Street I asked him if he’d like a beer and a sandwich at the Blarney Rose. He never went to bars and was shocked at the prices of beer and whiskey. Ninety cents for a little shot of whiskey. Never.

I went with him to a liquor store where he ordered cases of Irish whiskey and told the salesman his friend Frank liked it, and cases of wine, vodka and bourbon because he liked it himself. He told the man he wouldn’t pay the lousy taxes on his purchase. I’m giving you a big order here and you want me to support the goddam government on top of it. No, sir. Pay it yourself.

The man agreed and said he’d deliver the twenty-five cases.

Virgil called me next day. Even though his voice was weak he told me, I got the egg timer goin’ here, so I have to talk fast. Can you come down? I need a little help. The door is open.

He was sitting in his armchair in his bathrobe. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. Couldn’t get into the bed.

He couldn’t get into the bed because the liquor store man had piled up the twenty-five cases around his bed so high that Virgil couldn’t climb over. He said he had to try some of the Irish whiskey and the wine and that didn’t help much when it was time to climb. He said he needed soup, something in his stomach to keep him from being sick. When I opened a can of soup and poured it into a pot with an equal amount of water he asked me if I’d read the instructions on the can.

No.

Well, how do you know what to do?

It’s common sense, Virgil.

Common sense, my ass.

He was hangover cranky. Listen to me, Frank McCourt. You know why you’ll never be a success?

Why?

You never follow the instructions on the package. That’s why I have money in the bank and you don’t have a pot to piss in. I always followed the instructions on the package.

Another knock on the door. What? What? said Virgil.

Voigel, it’s me. Pete.

Pete who? Pete who? I can’t see through the door.

Pete Buglioso. I got something for you, Voigel.

Don’t talk Brooklyn to me, Pete. My name is Virgil, not Voigel. He was a poet, Pete. You should know, you’re Italian.

I don’t know nothin’ about that, Voigel. I got somethin’ for you, Voigel.

I don’t want nothin’, Pete. Call back next year.

But, Voigel, you’ll like what I have. Cost you a coupla bucks.

What is it?

Can’t tell you through the door, Voigel.

Virgil heaved himself from the armchair and stumbled to the egg timer on his desk. All right, Pete, all right. You can come in for three minutes. I’m setting my egg timer.

He tells me open the door and tells Pete the egg timer is working and even though grains of sand have already dropped Pete still has three minutes, so start talking, Pete, start talking and make it snappy.

All right, Voigel, all right, but how the hell can I talk when you’re talking. You talk more than anyone.

You’re wasting your time, Pete. You’re hanging yourself. Look at the egg timer. Look at that sand. Sands of time, Pete, sands of time.

Whadda you doin’ with all them boxes, Voigel. Rob a truck or somethin’?

The egg timer, Pete, the egg timer.

All right, Voigel, what I got here is, will you stop lookin’ at the goddam egg timer, Voigel, an’ lissena me. What I got here is prescription pads from a doctor’s office on Clinton Street.

Prescription pads. You been robbing them doctors again, Pete.

I didn’t rob ’em. I know a receptionist. She likes me.

She must be deaf dumb and blind. I don’t need no prescription pads.

Come on, Voigel. You never know. You might have a disease or a bad hangover and you’ll need something.

Bullshit, Pete. Your time is up. I’m busy.

But, Voigel.

Out, Pete, out. I have no control over that egg timer once it gets goin’ and I don’t want no prescription pads.

He pushed Pete out the door and yelled after him, You could get me in jail and you’re gonna wind up in jail yourself selling stolen prescription pads.

He slumped back into his armchair and said he’d try the soup even though I hadn’t followed the instructions on the can. He needed it to settle his stomach but if he didn’t like it he’d have a little wine and that would do the job. He tasted the soup and said, yeah, it was okay and he’d have it and the wine, too. When I popped the wine cork he barked that I was not to pour the wine now, I was to let it breathe, didn’t I know that and if I didn’t how could I teach school. He sipped his wine and remembered he had to call the air-conditioning company about his problems with pigeons. I told him stay in his chair and handed him the telephone and the number of the company but he wanted the egg timer, too, so that he could tell them they had three minutes to give him the information he needed.

Hello, you listenin’ to me? I got the egg timer goin’ and you got three minutes to tell me how I can stop these goddam pigeons, excuse the language, miss, how I can stop these pigeons from making love on the outside part of my air conditioner. They’re driving me crazy with the coo coo coo all day and they shit all over the window. You can’t tell me that now? You have to look it up? Whaddaya have to look up? Pigeons fornicating on my air conditioner and you have to look it up. Sorry, egg timer ran out and that’s the three minutes. Good-bye.

He handed me back the telephone. And I’ll tell you something else, he said. It’s that goddam Harry Ball that’s responsible for all them pigeons shitting on my air conditioner. He sits in his goddam aluminum beach chair when he’s looking for a parking spot and feeds them pigeons over at Borough Hall. I told him once cut it out, that they were just rats with wings, and he got so mad he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks and that suited me fine. These old guys feed pigeons because they don’t have wives no more, anymore? I dunno. I ran away from the orphanage but I don’t feed pigeons.

He knocked on our door one night and when I opened it he was in his ragged bathrobe, holding a sheaf of papers, and drunk. It was his will and he wanted to read me part of it. No, he wouldn’t have coffee. It killed him, but he’d have a beer.

So, you helped me out and Alberta had me up for dinner and no one ever has old guys up for dinner so I’m leaving you four thousand dollars and Alberta four thousand and I’m leaving you my Thomas Aquinas and my ties. Here’s what it says in the will, To Frank McCourt I leave my collection of ties which he has admired and which are anything but somber.

When we moved to Warren Street we lost touch with Virgil for a while though I wanted him to be godfather at Maggie’s christening. Instead there was a call from a lawyer telling me of Virgil Frank’s death and the terms of his will as it pertained to us. However, said the lawyer, he changed his mind about the Summa Theologica and the ties, so all you get is the money. Do you accept this?

Sure, yes, but why did he change it?

He heard you went to Ireland for a visit and that upset him because you contributed to the gold flow.

What do you mean?

According to Mr. Frank’s will President Johnson said a few years ago that Americans traveling abroad were draining the country of gold and weakening the economy and that’s why you’re not getting the ties that are anything but somber and the three volumes of Aquinas. Okay?

Oh, sure.

Now that we had a portion of a down payment we searched the neighborhood for a house. Our landlady, Hortensia Odones, heard we’d been looking and one day she climbed the outside fire escape at the back of the house and startled me when I saw her head at the kitchen window with the great curly wig.

Frankie, Frankie, open the window. It’s cold out here. Lemme in.

I reached out to help her in but she yelled, Watch my hair, watch my hair, and I had to do the heavy work of hauling her in the kitchen window while she hung on to her wig.

Whoo, she said, whoo. Frankie, you got any rum?

No, Hortensia, only wine or Irish whiskey.

Gimme a whiskey, Frankie. My ass is frozen.

Here, Hortensia. Tell me, why don’t you come up the stairs?

Because it’s dark down there, that’s why, and I can’t afford to keep lights goin’ night an’ day an’ I can see the fire escape day an’ night.

Oh.

And what’s this I hear? You an’ Alberta lookin’ for a house? Why don’t you buy this one?

How much?

Fifty thousand.

Fifty thousand?

That’s right. Is that too much?

Oh, no. That’s fine.

The day we signed the agreement we drank rum with her while she told us how sad she was to leave this house after all the years she was there, not with her husband, Odones, but her boyfriend, Louis Weber, who was famous for running the numbers game in the neighborhood and even though he was Puerto Rican he was afraid of nobody, not even the Cosa Nostra who tried to take over till Louis walked into the Don’s house down in Carroll Gardens and said, What is this shit? excuse the language, and the Don admired Louis for his balls and told his goombahs back off, don’t bother Louis, and you know, Frankie, no one messes with the Italians in Carroll Gardens. You don’t see no coloreds or PRs down there, no sir, and if you do they’re passing through.

The Mafia might have backed away from Louis but Hortensia said you couldn’t trust them and anytime she and Louis went for a drive they rode with two guns between them, his and hers, and he told her if anyone came with trouble and put him out of commission she was to take the steering wheel and yank it toward the sidewalk so that they’d hit a pedestrian instead of traffic and the insurance company would take care of things and if they didn’t and gave Hortensia any trouble he’d leave her with a set of phone numbers of a few guys, PRs, the goddam Mafia wasn’t the only game in town, and these guys would take care of the insurance companies, the greedy bastards, excuse the language, Alberta, is there any rum left, Frankie?

Poor Louis, she said, the Kefauver Commission was bothering him but he died in his bed and I never go for a ride no more but he left me a gun downstairs, you wanna see my gun, Frankie, no? well, I have it and anyone comes into my apartment without an invitation gets it, Frankie, right between the eyes, bang, boom, he’s gone.

Neighbors smiled and nodded and told us we had bought a gold mine, that everyone knew Louis had buried money in the basement of our new house where Hortensia still lived, or over our heads in the false ceiling of the living room. All we had to do was pull down that ceiling and we’d be up to our armpits in hundred-dollar bills.

When Hortensia moved out we dug up the basement to install a new waste line. No buried money. We pulled down false ceilings, exposed bricks and beams. We tapped on walls and someone suggested we consult a psychic.

We found an old doll with tufts of hair, no eyes, no arms, one leg. We kept it for our two-year-old, Maggie, who called it The Beast and loved it over all her other dolls.

Hortensia moved to a small street-level apartment on Court Street and stayed there till she died or moved back to Puerto Rico. I often wished I had spent more time with her and a bottle of rum or that I had introduced her to Virgil Frank so that we could have rum and Irish whiskey and talk about Louis Weber and the gold flow and ways of reducing your telephone bills with an egg timer.

51

It’s 1969 and I’m substitute teaching for Joe Curran, who is out for a few weeks with the drink. His students ask if I know Greek and seem disappointed that I don’t. After all, Mr. Curran would sit at his desk and read or recite from memory long passages from The Odyssey, yeah, in Greek, and he’d remind his students daily he was a graduate of Boston Latin School and Boston College and tell them anyone who didn’t know his Greek or Latin couldn’t consider himself educated, could never lay claim to being a gentleman. Yes, yes, this might be Stuyvesant High School, says Mr. Curran, and you might be the brightest kids from here to the foothills of the Rockies, your heads stuffed with science and mathematics, but all you need in this life is your Homer, your Sophocles, your Plato, your Aristotle, your Aristophanes for the lighter moments, your Virgil for the dark places, your Horace to escape the mundane, and your Juvenal when you’re completely pissed off with the world. The grandeur, boys, the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome.

It wasn’t the Greeks or the Romans his students loved, it was the forty minutes when Joe droned or declaimed and they could daydream, catch up on homework for other classes, doodle, nibble at sandwiches from home, carve their initials on desks that might have been occupied by James Cagney, Thelonius Monk or certain Nobel Laureates. Or they could dream of the nine girls who had just been admitted for the first time in the school’s history. The nine Vestal Virgins, Joe Curran called them, and there were complaints from parents that the suggestiveness of his language was inappropriate.

Oh, inappropriate my ass, said Joe. Why can’t they speak simple En-glish? Why can’t they use a simple word like wrong?

His students said, Yeah, wasn’t it something to see the girls in the hallway, nine girls, nearly three thousand boys and what about the boys in the school, fifty percent for Chrissakes, who didn’t want the girls, what about that? They had to be dead from the waist down, didn’t they?

Then you’d wonder about Mr. Curran himself up there shifting into English to talk about The Iliad and the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, he couldn’t stop talking about those two old Greeks, and how Achilles was so furious with Hector for killing Patroclus he killed Hector and dragged his body behind his chariot to show the power of his love for his dead friend, the love that dare not speak its name.

But, boys oh boys, is there a sweeter moment in all of literature than that moment when Hector removed his helmet to calm the fears of his child? Oh, if only all our fathers removed their helmets. And when Joe blubbered into his gray handkerchief and used words like piss you knew he’d left the school at lunch hour for a little tot around the corner at the Gashouse Bar. There were days he returned so excited from thoughts that had come to him on the bar stool he wanted to thank God for leading him to teaching so that he could forget the Greeks for a while to sing the praises of the great Alexander Pope and his Ode on Solitude.

Happy the man whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound

Content to breathe his native air,

In his own ground.

And remember, boys and girls, is there a girl here? raise your hand if you’re a girl, no girls? remember, boys, that Pope was indebted to Horace and Horace was indebted to Homer and Homer was indebted to God knows who. Will you promise on your mothers’ heads to remember that? If you remember Pope’s debt to Horace you’ll know no one springs full-blown from his father’s head. Will you remember?

We will, Mr. Curran.

What am I to tell Joe’s students who complain that they have to read The Odyssey and all this old stuff? Who cares what happened in ancient Greece or Troy with men dying right and left over that stupid Helen? Who cares? Boys in the class say you wouldn’t catch them fighting to the death over some girl that didn’t want them. Yeah, they could understand Romeo and Juliet because a lotta families are dumb about you going out with someone from another religion and they could understand West Side Story and the gangs but they could never believe grown men would leave home the way Odysseus left Penelope and Telemachus and go off to fight over this stupid chick who didn’t know enough to come inside. They have to admit Odysseus was cool the way he tried to dodge the draft, acting crazy an’ all and they like the way Achilles fooled him because Achilles is nowhere near as smart as Odysseus but like they can’t believe he’d stay away twenty years fighting and fooling around and expect Penelope to like sit there spinning and weaving and telling the suitors get lost. Girls in the class say they can believe it, they really can, that women can be true forever because that’s the way women are, and one girl tells the class what she read in a Byron poem, that man’s love is of his life a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence. Boys hoot at this but girls applaud and tell them what all the psychology books say, that boys their age are three years behind in mental development though there are some in this class who must be at least six years behind and they should therefore shut up. The boys try to be sarcastic, raising their eyebrows and telling each other, Oh, law de daw, smell me, I’m developed, but the girls look at each other, shrug, toss their hair and ask me in a lofty tone if we could please get back to the lesson.

Lesson? What are they talking about? What lesson? All I can remember is the usual high school whine about why we have to read this and why we have to read that, and my irritation, my unspoken response, is that you have to read it, goddammit, because it’s part of the curriculum and because I’m telling you read it, I’m the teacher, and if you don’t cut the whining and complaining you’ll get an English grade on your report card that will make zero look like a gift from the gods because I’m standing here listening to you and looking at you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who’d offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls.

That’s what I’d like to say and never will because I might be accused of using inappropriate language and that would give me a Joe Curran fit. No. I can’t talk like that because I have to find my way in this place, a far cry from McKee Vocational and Technical High School.

In the spring of 1972 the English Department chairman, Roger Goodman, offers me a permanent position at Stuyvesant High School. I’ll have my own five classes and a building assignment where, once more, I’ll keep order in the students’ cafeteria and make sure no one drops ice cream wrappers or bits of hot dog on the floor though boys and girls are allowed to sit together here and romance kills appetites.

I’ll have a small homeroom, the first nine girls, seniors and ready to graduate. The girls are kind. They bring me things, coffee, bagels, newspapers. They’re critical. They say I should do something about my hair, let the sideburns grow, this is 1972 and I should get with it, be cool, and do something about my clothes. They say I dress like an old man, and even though I have a few gray hairs I don’t have to look so old. They tell me I look uptight and one of them kneads my neck and shoulders. Relax, she says, relax, we’re harmless, and they laugh the way women laugh when they share a secret and you think it’s about you.

I’ll have five classes a day five days a week where I have to memorize the names of one hundred and seventy-five students along with the names of a full homeroom class next year, another thirty-five, and I’ll have to be particularly careful with the Chinese and Korean students with their sarcastic, That’s okay if you don’t know our names, Mr. McCourt, we all look the same. Or they might laugh, Yeah, and all you white people look the same.

I know all this from my days as a substitute teacher but now I watch my students, my very own, stream into my room this first day of February 1972, feast of St. Brigid, and I’m praying to you, Brigid, because these are kids I’ll be seeing five days a week for five months and I don’t know if I’m up to it. The times they are a-changin’ and you can see these Stuyvesant kids are worlds and years away from the ones I first met at McKee. We’ve had wars and assassinations since then, the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers. Boys at McKee wore short hair or pompadours greased back to a duck’s ass. Girls had blouses and skirts and their hair was permed to the stiffness of a helmet. Stuyvesant boys wear hair so long people on the streets sneer, You can hardly tell them from the girls, ha ha. They wear tie-dye shirts, jeans and sandals so that no one will ever guess they come from comfortable families all over New York. Stuyvesant girls let hair and breasts hang loose and drive the boys mad with desire and cut their jeans at the knees for that cool poverty effect because like you know they’ve had it with all that middle-class crap.

Oh, yeah, they’re cooler than the McKee kids because they’ve got it made. In eight months they’ll be at colleges and universities all over the country, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Williams, Harvard, lords and ladies of the earth, and here in my classroom they sit where they like, chatting, ignoring me, giving me their backs, one more teacher obstructing their way to graduation and the real world. Some stare as if to say, Who is this guy? They slump and slouch and gaze out the window or over my head. Now I have to get their attention and that’s what I say, Excuse me, may I have your attention? A few stop talking and look at me. Others look offended at the interruption and turn away again.

My three senior classes groan with the burden of the textbook they have to carry every day, an anthology of English literature. The juniors complain over the weight of their anthology of American literature. The books are sumptuous, richly illustrated, designed to challenge, motivate, illuminate, entertain, and they’re expensive. I tell my students that carrying textbooks strengthens their upper bodies and hope the contents seep up to their minds.

They glare at me. Who is this guy?

There are teaching guides so detailed and comprehensive I need never think for myself. They are packed with enough quizzes, tests, examinations to keep my students in a constant state of nervous tension. There are hundreds of multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank spaces, match column A with column B, peremptory questions ordering the student to explain why Hamlet was mean to his mother, what Keats meant by negative capability, what Melville was getting at in his chapter on the whiteness of the whale.

I’m ready, boys and girls, to march through the chapters from Haw-thorne to Hemingway, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Tonight you are to read the pages assigned. Tomorrow we’ll discuss. There may be a quiz. Then again there may not be a quiz. Just don’t gamble on it. Only the teacher knows for sure. On Tuesday there will be a test. Three Tuesdays from now there will be an exam, a big exam, and yes, it will count. Your whole report card grade hinges on this exam. You also have tests on physics and calculus? Sorry for your troubles. This is English, the queen of the curriculum.

And you don’t know it, boys and girls, but I am armed with my teaching guides on American and English literature. I have them safe here in my bag, all the questions that will have you scratching your little heads, gnawing your pencils, dreading report card day, and, I suppose, hating me because I’m the one who can thwart your high Ivy League ambitions. I’m the one who skulked around the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel cleaning up for your fathers and mothers.

This is Stuyvesant and isn’t this the best high school in the city, some say the best in the country? You asked for it. You could have gone to your neighborhood high schools where you’d be kings and queens, numero uno, top of your class. Here you’re just one of the crowd, scrambling for grades to bolster the precious average that will slip you into the Ivy League. It’s your great god, isn’t it, the average? Down in the Stuyvesant basement they should construct a sanctum with an altar. They should mount on that altar a great red blinking neon 9, blink blink blink, the sacred initial digit you’re desperate for on every grade, and you should pray and worship there. Oh, God, send me As and nineties.

Mr. McCourt, how come you only gave me a ninety-three on my report card?

I was kind.

But I did all the work, handed in the papers you assigned.

You were late with two papers. Two points off for each one.

But, Mr. McCourt, why two points?

That’s it. That’s your grade.

Aw, Mr. McCourt, how come you’re so mean?

It’s all I have left.

I followed the teacher guides. I launched the prefabricated questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college professors who assemble high school textbooks.

My students resisted and cheated and disliked me and I disliked them for disliking me. I learned the cheating games. Oh, the casual glance at the papers of students around you. Oh, the discreet little Morse code cough for your girlfriend and her sweet smile when she catches the multiple choice answer. If she’s behind you splay your fingers on the back of your head, three splays of five fingers would be question fifteen, a forefinger scratching the right temple is answer A and other fingers represent other answers. The room is alive with coughs and body movements and when I catch the cheaters I hiss in their ears they’d better cut it out or their papers will be shredded into the wastebasket, their lives ruined. I am lord of the classroom, a man who would never cheat, oh no, not if they flashed the answers in green letters on the bright side of the full moon.

Every day I teach with my guts in a knot, lurking behind my desk at the front of the room playing the teacher game with the chalk, the eraser, the red pen, the teacher guides, the power of the quiz, the test, the exam, I’ll call your father, I’ll call your mother, I’ll report you to the governor, I’ll damage your average so badly, kid, you’ll be lucky to get into a community college in Mississippi, weapons of menace and control.

A senior, Jonathan, bangs his forehead on his desk and wails, Why? Why? Why do we have to suffer with this shit? We’ve been in school since kindergarten, thirteen years, and why do we have to know what color shoes Mrs. Dalloway was wearing at her goddam party and what are we supposed to make of Shakespeare troubling deaf heaven with his bootless cries and what the hell is a bootless cry anyway and when did heaven turn deaf?

Around the room rumbles of rebellion and I’m paralyzed. They’re saying Yeah, yeah to Jonathan, who halts his head banging to ask, Mr. McCourt, did you have this stuff in high school? and there’s another chorus of yeah yeah and I don’t know what to say. Should I tell them the truth, that I never set foot in a high school till I began teaching in one or should I feed them a lie about a rigorous secondary school education with the Christian Brothers in Limerick?

I’m saved, or doomed, by another student who calls out, Mr. McCourt, my cousin went to McKee on Staten Island and she said you told them you never went to high school and they said you were an okay teacher anyway because you told stories and talked and never bothered them with all these tests.

Smiles around the room. Teacher unmasked. Teacher never even went to high school and look what he’s doing to us, driving us crazy with tests and quizzes. I’m branded forever with the label, teacher who never went to high school.

So, Mr. McCourt, I thought you had to get a license to teach in the city.

You do.

Don’t you have to get a college degree?

You do.

Don’t you have to graduate high school?

You mean graduate from high school, from high school, from from from.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Don’t you have to graduate from high school to get into college?

I suppose you do.

Tyro lawyer grills teacher, carries the day, and word spreads to my other classes. Wow, Mr. McCourt, you never went to high school and you’re teaching at Stuyvesant? Cool, man.

And into the trash basket I drop my teaching guides, my quizzes, tests, examinations, my teacher-knows-all mask.

I’m naked and starting over and I hardly know where to begin.

* * *

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. Blacks and curly-haired whites sprouted Afros, and the dashiki and the tie-dye shirt became the garb of the day. College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teach-ins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook.

On streets and in subways I’d meet former students from McKee High School who would tell me of the boys who went to Vietnam, heroes when they left and now home in body bags. Bob Bogard called to tell me about the funeral of a boy who had been in both our classes but I didn’t go because I knew that on Staten Island there would be pride in this blood sacrifice. The boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

In my classroom I wore no buttons, took no sides. There was enough ranting all around us and, for me, picking my way through five classes was minefield enough.

Mr. McCourt, why can’t our classes be relevant?

Relevant to what?

Well, you know, look at the state of the world. Look at what’s happening.

There’s always something happening and we could sit in this classroom for four years clucking over headlines and going out of our minds.

Mr. McCourt, don’t you care about the babies burned with napalm in Vietnam?

I do, and I care about the babies in Korea and China, in Auschwitz and Armenia, and the babies impaled on the lances of Cromwell’s soldiers in Ireland. I told them what I’d learned from my part-time teaching at New York Technical College in Brooklyn, from my class of twenty-three women, most from the Islands, and from my five men. There was a fifty-five-year-old working for a college degree so that he could return to Puerto Rico and spend the rest of his life helping children. There was a young Greek studying English so that he could work toward a Ph.D. in the literature of Renaissance England. There were three young African-American men in the class and when one, Ray, complained he’d been bothered by the police on a subway platform because he was black the women from the Islands had no patience with him. They told him if he stayed home and studied he wouldn’t be getting into trouble and no kid of theirs would come home with a story like that. They’d break his head. Ray was quiet. You don’t talk back to women from the Islands.

Denise, now in her late twenties, was often late to class and I threatened her with failure till she wrote an autobiographical essay which I asked her to read to the class.

Oh no, she couldn’t do that. She’d be ashamed to let people know she had two children whose father had left her to return to Montserrat and never sends her a penny. No, she wouldn’t mind if I read the essay to the class if I didn’t tell who wrote it.

She had described a day in her life. She’d wake early to do her Jane Fonda video exercises while thanking Jesus for the gift of another day. She’d take a shower, get her children up, her eight-year-old, her six-year-old, and take them to school and after that she’d rush to her college classes. In the afternoon she’d go straight to her job at a bank in downtown Brooklyn and from there to her mother’s house. Her mother had already picked up the children from school and without her Denise didn’t know what she’d do especially when her mother had that terrible disease that makes your fingers curl up in knots and Denise didn’t know how to spell. After taking the children home, putting them to bed and getting their clothes ready for the next morning, Denise would pray by the side of her bed, look up at the cross, thank Jesus once more for another wonderful day and try to fall asleep with His suffering image in her dreams.

The women from the Islands thought that was a wonderful story and looked at each other wondering who wrote it and when Ray said he didn’t believe in Jesus they told him shut up, what did he know hanging around subway platforms? They worked, took care of their families, went to school and this was a wonderful country where you could do what you liked even if you were black like the night and if he didn’t like it he could go back to Africa if he could ever find it without getting hassled by the police.

I told the women they were heroes. I told the Puerto Rican man he was a hero and I told Ray if he ever grew up he could be a hero, too. They looked at me, puzzled. They didn’t believe me and you could guess what was running through their minds, that they were doing only what they were supposed to do, getting an education, and why was this teacher calling them heroes?

My Stuyvesant students were not satisfied. Why was I telling them stories of women from the Islands and Puerto Ricans and Greeks when the world was going to hell?

Because the women from the Islands believe in education. You can demonstrate and shake your fists, burn your draft cards and block the traffic with your bodies, but what do you know in the end? For the ladies from the Islands there is one relevance, education. That is all they know. That is all I know. That is all I need to know.

Still, there was a confusion and a darkness in my head and I had to understand what I was doing in this classroom or get out. If I had to stand before those five classes I couldn’t let days dribble by in the routine of high school grammar, spelling, vocabulary, digging for the deeper meaning in poetry, bits of literature doled out for the multiple choice tests that would follow so that universities can be supplied with the best and the brightest. I had to begin enjoying the act of teaching and the only way I could do that was to start over, teach what I loved and to hell with the curriculum.

The year Maggie was born I told Alberta something my mother used to say, that a child gains her vision at six weeks and if that was true we should take her to Ireland so that her first image would be of moody Irish skies, a passing shower with the sun shining through.

Paddy and Mary Clancy invited us to stay on their farm in Carrick-on-Suir but newspapers were saying Belfast was in flames, a nightmare city, and I was anxious to see my father. I traveled north with Paddy Clancy and Kevin Sullivan and the night we arrived we walked the streets of Catholic Belfast. The women were out banging on the pavements with the lids of garbage cans, warning their men of approaching army patrols. They were suspicious of us till they recognized Paddy of the famous Clancy Brothers and we passed on without trouble.

Next day Paddy and Kevin stayed in the hotel while I went to my Uncle Gerard’s house so that he could take me to my father in Andersonstown. When my father opened his door he nodded at Uncle Gerard and looked through me. Uncle said, This is your son.

My father said, Is it little Malachy?

No. I’m your son Frank.

Uncle Gerard said, It’s a sad thing when your own father doesn’t know you.

My own father said, Come in. Sit down. Will you have a cup of tea?

He offered the tea but showed no signs of making it in his little kitchen till a woman came from next door and did it. Uncle Gerard whispered, See that. He never lifts a finger. He doesn’t have to with the way the ladies of Andersonstown wait on him hand and foot. They tempt him daily with soup and dainty things.

My father smoked his pipe but never touched his mug of tea. He was busy asking about my mother and three brothers. Och, your brother Alphie came to see me. Quiet lad your brother Alphie. Och, aye. Quiet lad. And you’re all well in America? Attending to your religious duties? Och, you have to be good to your mother and attend to your religious duties.

I wanted to laugh. Jesus, is this man preaching? I wanted to say, Dad, have you no memory?

No, what’s the use. I’d be better off leaving my father to his demons though you could see from the peaceful way he had with his pipe and his mug of tea that the demons wouldn’t cross his threshold. Uncle Gerard said we ought to leave before darkness fell on Belfast and I wondered how I should say good-bye to my father. Shake his hand? Embrace him?

I shook his hand because that’s all we ever did except for one time when I was in hospital with typhoid and he kissed my forehead. Now he drops my hand, reminds me once more to be a good boy, to obey my mother and remember the power of the daily rosary.

When we returned to his house I told my uncle I’d like to walk through the Protestant area, the Shankill Road. He shook his head. Quiet man. I said, Why not?

Because they’ll know.

What will they know?

They’ll know you’re a Catholic.

How will they know?

Och, they’ll know.

His wife agreed. She said, They have ways.

Do you mean to say you could spot a Protestant if he walked down this street?

We could.

How?

And my uncle smiled. Och, years of practice.

While we had another cup of tea there was shooting down Leeson Street. A woman screamed and when I went to the window Uncle Gerard said, Och, get your head away from the window. One little movement and the soldiers are so nervous they’ll spray it.

The woman screamed again and I had to open the door. She had a child in her arms and another one clinging to her skirt and she was being forced back by a soldier pushing his slanted rifle. She begged him to let her cross Leeson Street to her other children. I thought I’d help by carrying the child clinging to her but when I went to pick her up the woman dashed around the soldier and across the street. The soldier swung on me and put his rifle barrel against my forehead. Get inside, Paddy, or I’ll blow your fawking head off.

My uncle and his wife, Lottie, told me that was a foolish thing I did and it helped no one. They said that whether you were Catholic or Protestant there was a way of handling things in Belfast that outsiders would never understand.

Still, on my way back to the hotel in a Catholic taxi, I dreamed I could easily roam Belfast with an avenging flamethrower. I’d aim it at that bastard in his red beret and reduce him to cinders. I’d pay back the Brits for the eight hundred years of tyranny. Oh, by Jesus, I’d do my bit with a fifty-caliber machine gun. I would, indeed, and I was ready to sing “Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today,” till I remembered that that was my father’s song and decided instead I’d have a nice quiet pint with Paddy and Kevin in the bar of our Belfast hotel and before I went to sleep that night I’d call Alberta so that she could hold the phone to Maggie and I’d carry my daughter’s gurgle into my dreams.

Mam flew over and stayed with us awhile at our rented flat in Dublin. Alberta went shopping on Grafton Street and Mam strolled with me to St. Stephen’s Green with Maggie in her pram. We sat by the water and threw crumbs to ducks and sparrows. Mam said it was lovely to be in this place in Dublin in the latter end of August the way you could feel autumn coming in with the odd leaf drifting before you and the light changing on the lake. We looked at children wrestling in the grass and Mam said it would be lovely to stay here a few years and see Maggie grow up with an Irish accent, not that she had anything against the American accent, but wasn’t it a pure pleasure to listen to these children and she could see Maggie growing and playing on this very grass.

When I said it would be lovely a shiver went through me and she said someone was walking on my grave. We watched the children play and looked at the light on the water and she said, You don’t want to go back, do you?

Back where?

New York.

How do you know that?

I don’t have to lift the lid to know what’s in the pot.

The porter at the Shelbourne Hotel said it would be no bother at all to keep an eye on Maggie’s pram against the railings outside while we sat in the lounge, a sherry for Mam, a pint for me, a bottle of milk for Maggie on Mam’s lap. Two women at the next table said Maggie was a dote, a right dote she was, oh gorgeous, and wasn’t she the spittin’ image of Mam herself. Ah, no, said Mam, I’m only the grandmother.

The women were drinking sherry like my mother but the three men were lowering pints and you could see from their tweed caps, red faces and great red hands they were farmers. One, with a dark green cap, called to my mother, The little child might be a lovely child, missus, but you’re not so bad yourself.

Mam laughed and called back to him, Ah, sure, you’re not so bad either.

Begod, missus, if you were a little older I’d run away with you.

Well, said Mam, if you were a little younger I’d go.

People all around the lounge were laughing and Mam threw her head back and laughed herself and you could see from the shine in her eyes she was having the time of her life. She laughed till Maggie whimpered and Mam said the child had to be changed and we’d have to go. The man with the dark green cap put on a begging act. Yerra, don’t go, missus. Your future is with me. I’m a rich widow man with a farm o’ land.

Money isn’t everything, said Mam.

But I have a tractor, missus. We could ride together and how would that suit you?

It stirs me, said Mam, but I’m still a married woman and when I put on the widow’s weeds you’ll be the first to know.

Fair enough, missus. I live in the third house on the left as you enter the southwest coast of Ireland, a grand place called Kerry.

I heard of it, said Mam. ’Tis known for sheep.

And powerful rams, missus, powerful.

You’re never short of an answer, are you?

Come to Kerry with me, missus, and we’ll walk the hills wordless.

Alberta was already at the flat making lamb stew and when Kevin Sullivan dropped in with Ben Kiely, the writer, there was enough for everyone and we drank wine and sang because there isn’t a song in the world Ben doesn’t know. Mam told the story of our time in the Shelbourne Hotel. Lord above, she said, that man had a way with him and if it wasn’t for Maggie needing to be changed and wiped I’d be on my way to Kerry.

In the nineteen seventies Mam was in her sixties. The emphysema that came from years of smoking left her so breathless she dreaded leaving her apartment anymore and the more she stayed at home the heavier she grew. For a while she came to Brooklyn to take care of Maggie on weekends but that stopped when she could no longer climb the subway stairs. I accused her of not wanting to see her granddaughter.

I do want to see her but ’tis hard for me to get around anymore.

Why don’t you lose weight?

’Tis hard for an elderly woman to lose weight and anyway why should I?

Don’t you want to have some kind of life where you’re not sitting in your apartment all day looking out the window?

I had my life, didn’t I, and what use was it? I just want to be left alone.

There were attacks which left her gasping and when she visited Michael in San Francisco he had to rush her to the hospital. We told her she was ruining our lives the way she always got sick on holidays, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Easter. She shrugged and laughed and said, Pity about ye now.

No matter how her health was, no matter how breathless, she climbed the hill to the Broadway bingo hall till she fell one night and broke her hip. After the operation she was sent to an upstate convalescent home and then stayed with me at a summer bungalow in Breezy Point at the tip of the Rockaway Peninsula. Every morning she slept late and when she woke sat slumped on the side of her bed, staring out the window at a wall. After a while she’d drag herself into the kitchen for breakfast and when I barked at her for eating too much bread and butter, that she’d be the size of a house, she barked back at me, For the love o’ Jesus, leave me alone. The bread and butter is the only comfort I have.

52

When Henry Wozniak taught Creative Writing and English and American Literature he wore a shirt, a tie and a sports jacket every day. He was faculty adviser to the Stuyvesant High School literary magazine, Caliper, and to the students’ General Organization, and he was active in the union, the United Federation of Teachers.

He changed. On the first day of school in September 1973, he roared up Fifteenth Street on a Harley-Davidson motorbike and parked it outside the school. Students said, Hi, Mr. Wozniak, though they hardly recognized him with his shaved head, his earring, his black leather jacket, black collarless shirt, worn jeans so tight they didn’t need the wide belt with the large buckle, the bunch of keys that dangled from that belt, his black leather boots with the elevated heels.

He said Hi back to the students but he didn’t linger and smile the way he used to when he didn’t mind if students called him The Woz. Now he was reserved with them and with teachers at the time clock. He told the English Department chairman, Roger Goodman, he wanted regular En-glish classes, that he would even take freshmen and sophomores and drill them in grammar, spelling, vocabulary. He told the principal he was withdrawing from all nonteaching activities.

Because of Henry I became the Creative Writing teacher. You can do it, said Roger Goodman, and he bought me a beer and a hamburger at the Gashouse Bar around the corner to fortify me. You can handle it, he said. After all, hadn’t I written pieces for the Village Voice and other papers and wasn’t I planning to write more?

All right, Roger, but what the hell is Creative Writing and how do you teach it?

Ask Henry, said Roger, he did it before you.

I found Henry in the library and asked him how you teach creative writing.

Disneyland, he said.

What?

Take a trip to Disneyland. Every teacher should do it.

Why?

It’s an enlarging experience. In the meantime, remember one little nursery rhyme and take it as your mantra,

Little BoPeep has lost her sheep,

And cannot tell where to find them;

Leave them alone, and they’ll come home,

Wagging their tails behind them.

That was all I got from Henry and, except for an occasional hallway Hi, we never talked again.

I write my name on the board and think of Mr. Sorola’s remark that fifty percent of teaching is procedure and if so how should I proceed? This class is an elective and that means they’re here because they asked for it and if I ask them to write something there should be no whining.

I have to give myself breathing room. I write on the board, Funeral Pyres, two hundred words, do now.

What? Funeral pyres? What kinda topic is that to write about? What’s a funeral pyre anyway?

You know what a funeral is, don’t you? You know what a pyre is. You’ve seen pictures of women in India climbing on their husbands’ funeral pyres, haven’t you? It’s called suttee, a new word for your vocabulary.

A girl calls out, That’s disgusting, that’s really disgusting.

What?

Women killing themselves just because their husbands are dead. That really sucks.

It’s what they believe. Maybe it shows their love.

How could it show their love when the man is dead? Don’t these women have any self-respect?

Of course they do and they show it by committing suttee.

Mr. Wozniak would never tell us to write stuff like this.

Mr. Wozniak isn’t here, so write your two hundred words.

They write and hand in their scribbled lines and I know I’ve started off on the wrong foot though I know also that if I ever want a lively class discussion there’s always suttee.

On Saturday mornings, my daughter, Maggie, watches television cartoons with her friend Claire Ficarra from down the street. They giggle, scream, clutch each other, jump up and down while I sneer in the kitchen and read the paper. Between their chatter and the television noise I catch snatches of a Saturday morning all-American mythology, names repeated weekly, Roadrunner, Woody Woodpecker, Donald Duck, the Partridge Family, Bugs Bunny, the Brady Bunch, Heckel and Jeckel. The idea of mythology loosens my sneer and I take my coffee to join the girls before the television set.

Oh, Dad, are you going to watch with us?

I am.

Wow, Maggie, says Claire, your dad is cool.

I’m sitting with them because they helped me yoke violently two disparate characters, Bugs Bunny and Odysseus.

Maggie had said, Bugs Bunny, he’s so mean to Elmer Fudd, and Claire had said, Yeah, Bugs is nice and funny and clever but why is he so mean to Elmer?

When I returned to my classes on Monday morning I announced my great discovery, the similarities between Bugs Bunny and Odysseus, that they were devious, romantic, wily, charming, that Odysseus was the first draft dodger while Bugs showed no evidence of ever having served his country or of ever having done anything for anyone except to cause mischief, that the major difference between them was that Bugs simply drifted from one mischief to another while Odysseus had a mission, to get home to Penelope and Telemachus.

What prompted me then to ask the simple question that caused the class to explode, When you were a child what did you watch on Saturday mornings?

An eruption of Mickey Mouse, Flotsam and Jetsam, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse, Crusader Rabbit, dogs, cats, mice, monkeys, birds, ants, giants.

Stop. Stop.

I threw out pieces of chalk. Here, you and you and you, go to the board. Write the names of these cartoons and shows. Put them in categories. This is what scholars will be poring over a thousand years hence. This is your mythology. Bugs Bunny. Donald Duck.

The lists covered all the boards and there still wasn’t enough room. They could have covered floor and ceiling and continued into the hallway, thirty-five students in each class dredging up the detritus of countless Saturday morning shows. I called above the din, Did these shows have theme songs and music?

Another eruption. Songs, hummings, mood music, reminiscences of favorite scenes and episodes. They could have sung and chanted and acted well past the bell and into the night. From the board they copied lists into their notebooks and they didn’t ask why, they didn’t complain. They told each other and me they couldn’t believe they’d watched so much television in their lives. Hours and hours. Wow. I asked them, How many hours? and they said days, months, maybe years. Wow again. If you were sixteen you probably spent three years of your life before a TV set.

53

Before Maggie was born I dreamed of being a Kodak daddy. I’d wield a camera and assemble an album of milestone pictures, Maggie moments after her birth, Maggie on her first day of kindergarten, Maggie graduating from kindergarten, from elementary school, high school and, above all, college.

The college wouldn’t be some sprawling urban affair, NYU, Fordham, Columbia. No, my lovely daughter would spend four years in one of those sweet New England colleges so exquisite they find the Ivy League vulgar. She’d be blonde and tanned, strolling the greensward with an Episcopalian lacrosse star, scion of a Boston Brahmin family. His name would be Doug. He’d have bright blue eyes, powerful shoulders, a frank direct look. He’d call me sir and crush my hand in his manly honest way. He and Maggie would be married in the honest stone Episcopalian church on campus, showered with confetti under an arch of lacrosse sticks, the sport of a better class of people.

And I’d be there, proud Kodak dad, awaiting my first grandchild, half Irish Catholic, half Boston Brahmin Episcopalian. There would be a christening and a garden party, and I’d be snapping away with my Kodak, white tents, women in hats, everyone pasteled, Maggie with child, comfort, class, security.

That’s what I dreamed when I held her bottle, changed her diapers, bathed her in the kitchen sink, taped her infant gurglings. The first three years I secured her in a little basket and rode my bicycle around Brooklyn Heights. When she toddled I took her to the playground and while she discovered sand and other children I eavesdropped on mothers around me. They talked about kids, husbands, how they couldn’t wait to get back to their own careers in the real world. They’d lower their voices and whisper about affairs and I’d wonder if I should make a move. No. They were already suspicious of me. Who was this guy sitting around with mothers on a summer morning when real men were at work?

They didn’t know I was born lower class, using daughter and wife to ease myself into their world. They worried about something that comes before kindergarten, preschool, and I was learning that kids have to be kept busy. A few wild minutes in the sandbox is okay but play should really be structured and supervised. You just can’t have enough structure. If a child is aggressive you have to worry. Quiet? Same worry. It’s all antisocial behavior. Kids must learn to adjust, or else.

I wanted to send Maggie to a public elementary school or even the Catholic school down the street but Alberta insisted on an ivy-covered pile that had once been a school for Episcopalian girls and I didn’t have the stomach for the fight. It would surely be more respectable and we’d meet a better class of people.

Oh, we did. There were stockbrokers, investment bankers, engineers, heirs to old fortunes, professors, obstetricians. There would be parties where they’d say, And what do you do? and when I said I was a teacher they’d turn away. It didn’t matter that we had a mortgage on a Cobble Hill brownstone, that we kept in step with other gentrifying couples, exposing our bricks, our beams, ourselves.

It was too much for me. I didn’t know how to be a husband, a father, a house owner with two tenants, a certified member of the middle class. I didn’t know how to proceed, how to dress, how to chatter of the stockmarket at parties, how to play squash or golf, how to give a testosteronic handshake and look my man in the eye with a, Pleasure to meet you, sir.

Alberta would say she wanted nice things and I never knew what that meant. Or I didn’t care. She’d want to go antiquing along Atlantic Avenue and I’d want to chat with Sam Colton in his Montague Street bookshop or have a beer at the Blarney Rose with Yonk Kling. Alberta would talk about Queen Anne tables, Regency sideboards, Victorian ewers, and I didn’t give a fiddler’s fart. Her friends talked about good taste and rounded on me when I said good taste was what pops up when the imagination dies. The air was thick with good taste and I felt suffocated.

The marriage had become a sustained squabble and there was Maggie, trapped in the middle of it. After school every day she had to follow the routine passed down by a Yankee grandmother in Rhode Island. Change your clothes, drink milk, eat cookies, do your homework because you’re not getting out of the house till you do. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what your mother did. Then you can play with Claire till it’s dinnertime where you have to sit with parents who are civil only because of you.

Mornings redeemed the nights. When Maggie grew from toddler to walker to talker she’d come to the kitchen in her dream state, talking dream talk of a flight over the neighborhood with Claire and a landing in the street outside. In April she’d look at the magnolia tree that bloomed beyond the kitchen window and want to know why we couldn’t have that color forever. Why did the green leaves drive away the lovely pink? I told her all the colors must have their day in the world and that seemed to satisfy her.

Mornings with Maggie were as golden or pink or green as the mornings I had with my father in Limerick. Till he went away I had him to myself. Till everything fell apart I had Maggie.

Weekdays I’d walk her to school and then take the train to my classes at Stuyvesant High School. My teenage students wrestled with hormones or struggled with family problems, divorces, custody battles, money, drugs, the death of faith. I felt sorry for them and their parents. I had the perfect little girl and I’d never have their problems.

I did and Maggie did. The marriage crumbled. Slum-reared Irish Catholics have nothing in common with nice girls from New England who had little curtains at their bedroom windows, who wore white gloves right up to their elbows and went to proms with nice boys, who studied etiquette with French nuns and were told, Girls, your virtue is like a dropped vase. You may repair the break but the crack will always be there. Slum-reared Irish Catholics might have recalled what their fathers said, After a full belly all is poetry.

The old Irish had told me, and my mother had warned me, Stick with your own. Marry your own. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

When Maggie was five I walked out and stayed with a friend. It didn’t last. I wanted my mornings with my daughter. I wanted to sit on the floor before the fire, tell her stories, listen to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Surely, after all these years, I could work on this marriage, wear a tie, escort Maggie to birthday parties around Brooklyn Heights, charm wives, play squash, pretend an interest in antiques.

I walked Maggie to school. I carried her bookbag, she toted her Barbie lunch box. Around her eighth year she announced, Look, Dad, I want to go to school with my friends. Of course, she was pulling away, going independent, saving herself. She must have known her family was disintegrating, that her father would soon leave forever as his father had long ago and I left for good a week before her eighth birthday.

54

When I look at the framed book jackets on the wall at the Lion’s Head Bar I suffer with envy. Will I ever be up there? The writers travel the land, signing books, appearing on television talk shows. There are parties and women and romance everywhere. People listen. No one listens to teachers. They are pitied for their sad salaries.

But there are powerful days in room 205 at Stuyvesant High School, when discussion of a poem opens the door to a blazing white light and everyone understands the poem and understands the understanding and when the light fades we smile at each other like travelers returned.

My students don’t know it but that classroom is my refuge, sometimes my strength, the setting for my delayed childhood. We dip into the Annotated Mother Goose and the Annotated Alice in Wonderland, and when my students bring in the books of their early years there is delight in the room. You read that book, too? Wow.

A wow in any classroom means something is happening.

There is no talk of quizzes or tests and if grades have to be assigned for the bureaucrats well then students are capable of evaluating themselves. We know what’s going on in “Little Red Riding Hood,” that if you don’t follow the path the way your mother tells you you’re gonna meet that big bad wolf and there will be trouble, man, trouble, and like how come everyone complains about violence on television and no one says a word about the viciousness of the father and stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel,” how come?

From the back of the room a boy’s angry cry, Fathers are such assholes.

And for a whole class period there’s a heated discussion of “Humpty Dumpty.”

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

So, I ask, what’s going on in this nursery rhyme? The hands are up. Well, like, this egg falls off the wall and if you study biology or physics you know you can never put an egg back together again. I mean, like, it’s common sense.

Who says it’s an egg? I ask.

Of course it’s an egg. Everyone knows that.

Where does it say it’s an egg?

They’re thinking. They’re searching the text for egg, any mention, any hint of egg. They won’t give in.

There are more hands and indignant assertions of egg. All their lives they knew this rhyme and there was never a doubt that Humpty Dumpty was an egg. They’re comfortable with the idea of egg and why do teachers have to come along and destroy everything with all this analysis.

I’m not destroying. I just want to know where you got the idea that Humpty is an egg.

Because, Mr. McCourt, it’s in all the pictures and whoever drew the first picture musta known the guy who wrote the poem or he’d never have made it an egg.

All right. If you’re content with the idea of egg we’ll let it be but I know the future lawyers in this class will never accept egg where there is no evidence of egg.

As long as there’s no threat of grades they’re comfortable with the matter of childhood and when I suggest they write their own children’s books they don’t complain, they don’t resist.

Oh, yeah, yeah, what a great idea.

They are to write, illustrate and bind their books, original work, and when they’re finished I take them to an elementary school down the street on First Avenue to be read and evaluated by real critics, the ones who would read such books, third and fourth graders.

Oh, yeah, yeah, the little ones, that’d be cute.

On a bitter January day the little ones are brought to Stuyvesant by their teacher. Aw, gee, look at ’em. So c-u-t-e. Look at their little coats and earmuffs and mittens and their little colored boots and their little frozen faces. Aw, cute.

The books are laid out on a long table, books of all sizes, shapes, and the room blazes with color. My students sit and stand, giving up their seats to their little critics who sit on desks, their feet dangling far above the floor. One by one they come to the table to select the books they read and to comment. I’ve already warned my students these small children are poor liars, all they know for the moment is the truth. They read from sheets their teacher helped them prepare.

The book I read is Petey and the Space Spider. This book is okay except for the beginning, the middle and the end.

The author, a tall Stuyvesant junior, smiles weakly and looks at the ceiling. His girlfriend hugs him.

Another critic. The book I read was called Over There and I didn’t like it because people shouldn’t write about war and people shooting each other in the face and going to the bathroom in their pants because they’re scared. People shouldn’t write about things like that when they can write about nice things like flowers and pancakes.

For the little critic there is wild applause from her classmates, from the Stuyvesant authors a stony silence. The author of Over There glares over the head of his critic.

Their teacher had asked her pupils to answer the question, Would you buy this book for yourself or anyone else?

No, I wouldn’t buy this book for me or anyone. I already have this book. It was written by Dr. Seuss.

The critic’s classmates laugh and their teacher tells them shush but they can’t stop and the plagiarist, sitting on the windowsill, turns red and doesn’t know what to do with his eyes. He’s a bad boy, did the wrong thing, gave the little ones ammunition for their jeers, but I want to comfort him because I know why he did that bad thing, that he could hardly be in the mood for creating a children’s book when his parents separated during the Christmas break, that he’s caught in the bitterness of a custody battle, doesn’t know what to do when mother and father pull him in opposite directions, that he feels like running to his grandfather in Israel, that with all this he can meet his English assignment only by stapling together a few pages on which he has copied a Dr. Seuss story and illustrating it with stick figures, that this is surely the lowest point in his life and how do you handle the humiliation when you’re caught in the act by this smartass third grader who stands there laughing in the spotlight. He looks at me across the room and I shake my head, hoping he understands that I understand. I feel I should go to him, put my arm around his shoulder, comfort him, but I hold back because I don’t want third graders or high school juniors to think I condone plagiarism. For the moment I have to hold the high moral ground and let him suffer.

The little ones get into their winter clothes and leave and my classroom is quiet. A Stuyvesant author who suffered negative criticism says he hopes those damn kids get lost in the snow. Another tall junior, Alex Newman, says he feels okay because his book was praised but what those kids did to a few of the authors was disgraceful. He says some of those kids are assassins and there is agreement around the room.

But they’re softened up for the American Literature of the junior year, ready for the rant of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. We chant Vachel Lindsay and Robert Service and T. S. Eliot, who can be recruited for either side of the Atlantic. We tell jokes because every joke is a short story with a fuse and an explosion. We journey back into childhood for games and street rhymes, Miss Lucy and Ring-around-a-rosy, and visiting educators wonder what’s going on in this classroom.

And tell me, Mr. McCourt, how does that prepare our children for college and the demands of society?

55

On the table by the bed in my mother’s apartment there were bottles of pills, tablets, capsules, liquid medicines, take this for that and that for this three times a day when it’s not four but not when you’re driving or operating heavy machinery, take before, during and after meals avoiding alcohol and other stimulants and be sure you don’t mix your medications, which Mam did, confusing the emphysema pills with the pills for the pain of her new hip and the pills that put her to sleep or woke her up and the cortisone that bloated her and caused hair to grow on her chin so that she was terrified to leave the house without her little blue plastic razor in case she might be away awhile and in danger of sprouting all kinds of hair and she’d be ashamed of her life, so she would, ashamed of her life.

The city provided a woman to care for her, bathe her, cook, take her for walks if she was able for it. When she wasn’t able for it she watched television and the woman watched with her though she reported later that Mam spent much of her time staring at a spot on the wall or looking out the window delighting in the times her grandson, Conor, called up to her and they chatted while he hung from the iron bars that secured her windows.

The woman from the city lined up the pill bottles and warned Mam to take them in a certain order during the night but Mam would forget and become so confused no one knew what she might have done to herself and the ambulance would have to take her to Lenox Hill Hospital where she was now well known.

The last time she was in the hospital I called her from my school to ask how she was.

Ah, I dunno.

What do you mean you dunno?

I’m fed up. They’re sticking things in me and pulling things out of me.

Then she whispered, If you’re coming to see me, would you do me a favor?

I would. What is it?

You’re not to tell anyone about this.

I won’t. What is it?

Will you bring me a blue plastic razor?

A plastic razor? For what?

Never mind. Couldn’t you just bring it and stop asking questions?

Her voice broke and there was sobbing.

All right, I’ll bring it. Are you there?

She could barely talk with the sobbing. And when you come up give the razor to the nurse and don’t come in till she tells you.

I waited while the nurse took in the razor and screened Mam from the world. On her way out, the nurse whispered, She’s shaving. It’s the cortisone. She’s embarrassed.

All right, said Mam, you can come in now and don’t be asking me any questions even if you didn’t do what I asked you.

What do you mean?

I asked you for a blue plastic razor and you brought me a white one.

What’s the difference?

There’s a big difference but you wouldn’t know. I won’t say another word about it.

You look fine.

I’m not fine. I’m fed up, I told you. I just want to die.

Oh, stop. You’ll be out by Christmas. You’ll be dancing.

I will not be dancing. Look, there’s women running around this country getting abortions right and left and I can’t even die.

What in God’s name is the connection between you and women getting abortions?

Her eyes filled. Here I am in the bed, dying or not dying, and you’re tormenting me with theology.

My brother Michael came into the room, all the way from San Francisco. He prowled the area around her bed. He kissed her and massaged her shoulders and feet. That’ll relax you, he said.

I’m relaxed, she said. If I was any more relaxed I’d be dead and wouldn’t that be a relief.

Michael looked at her and at me and around the room and his eyes were watery. Mam told him he should be back in San Francisco with his wife and children.

I’ll be going back tomorrow.

Well, it was hardly worth your while, all this traveling, was it?

I had to see you.

She drifted off and we went to a bar on Lexington Avenue for a few drinks with Alphie and Malachy’s son, young Malachy. We didn’t talk about Mam. We listened to young Malachy, who was twenty and didn’t know what to do with his life. I told him since his mother was Jewish he could go to Israel and join the army. He said he wasn’t Jewish but I insisted he was, that he had the right of return. I told him if he went to the Israeli Consulate and announced he wanted to join the Israeli army it would be a publicity coup for them. Imagine, young Malachy McCourt, a name like that, joining the Israeli army. He’d be on the front page of every paper in New York.

He said no, he didn’t want his ass shot off by those crazy Arabs. Michael said he wouldn’t be up there on the front lines, he’d be back where he could be used for propaganda purposes and all those exotic Israeli girls would be throwing themselves at him.

He said no again and I told him it was a waste of time buying him drinks when he wouldn’t do a simple thing like joining the Israeli army and carving out a career for himself. I told him if I had a Jewish mother I’d be in Jerusalem in a minute.

That night I returned to Mam’s room. A man stood at the end of her bed. He was bald, he had a gray beard and a gray three-piece suit. He jingled the change in his trouser pocket and told my mother, You know, Mrs. McCourt, you have every right to be angry when you’re ill and you do have a right to express it.

He turned to me. I’m her psychiatrist.

I’m not angry, said Mam. I just want to die and ye won’t let me.

She turned to me. Will you tell him go away?

Go away, Doctor.

Excuse me, I’m her doctor.

Go away.

He left and Mam complained they were tormenting her with priests and psychiatrists and even if she was a sinner she’d done penance a hundred times over, that she was born doing penance. I’m dying for something in my mouth, she said, something tarty like lemonade.

I brought her an artificial lemon filled with concentrated juice and poured it into a glass with a little water. She tasted it. I asked you for lemonade and all you gave me was water.

No, that’s lemonade.

She’s tearful again. One little thing I ask you, one little thing and you can’t do it for me. Would it be too much to ask you to shift my feet, would it? They’re in the one place all day.

I want to ask her why she doesn’t move her feet herself but that will only lead to tears so I move them.

How’s that?

How’s what?

Your feet.

What about my feet?

I moved them.

You did? Well, I didn’t feel it. You won’t give me lemonade. You won’t shift my feet. You won’t bring me a proper blue plastic razor. Oh, God, what use is it having four sons if you can’t get your feet shifted?