'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  There’s a croak from Hannah as she coughs and puffs on a cigarette.

  They go back down the stairs and I want to call after Mrs. Austin to see if there’s any chance she could spare me a doughnut from the Greek’s bag since I’m so empty from all the throwing up last night but they’re out the door and from my window I can see them loading Christmas parcels into a car and driving off.

  I can stand at the window all day looking at the happy people with children by the hand going off to church, as they say in America, or I can sit up in the bed with Crime and Punishment and see what Raskolnikov is up to but that will stir up all kinds of guilt and I don’t have the strength for it and it’s not the right kind of reading for a Christmas Day anyway. I’d like to go up the street for Communion at St. Vincent Ferrer’s but it’s years since I went to confession and my soul is as black as Mrs. Austin’s glug. The happy Catholic people with children by the hand are surely going to St. Vincent’s and if I follow them I’m bound to have a Christmas feeling.

  It’s lovely to go into a church like St. Vincent’s where you know the Mass will be just like the Mass in Limerick or anywhere in the world. You could go to Samoa or Kabul and they’d have the same Mass and even if they wouldn’t let me be an altar boy in Limerick I still have the Latin my father taught me and no matter where I go I can respond to the priest. No one can scoop out the contents of my head, all the saints’ feast days I know by heart, the Mass Latin, the chief towns and products of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, songs galore of Ireland’s sufferings and Oliver Goldsmith’s lovely poem “The Deserted Village.” They could put me in jail and throw away the key but they could never stop me from dreaming my way around Limerick and out along the banks of the Shannon or thinking about Raskolnikov and his troubles.

  The people who go to St. Vincent’s are like the ones who go to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse for Hamlet and they know the Latin responses the way they know the play. They share prayer books and sing hymns together and smile at each other because they know Brigid the maid is back there in the Park Avenue kitchen keeping an eye on the turkey. Their sons and daughters have the look of coming home from school and college and they smile at other people in the pews also home from school and college. They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in snow they’d be lost forever.

  The church is so crowded there are people standing in the back but I’m so weak with the hunger and the long Christmas Eve of whiskey, glug and throwing up I want to find a seat. There’s an empty spot at the end of a pew far up the center aisle but as soon as I slip into it a man comes running at me. He’s all dressed up in striped trousers, a coat with tails, and a frown over his face and he whispers to me, You must leave this pew at once. This is for regular pew holders, come on, come on. I feel my face turning red and that means my eyes are worse and when I go down the aisle I know the whole world is looking at me, the one who sneaked into the pew of a happy family with children home from school and college.

  There’s no use even standing at the back of the church. They all know and they’ll be giving me looks, so I might as well leave and add another sin to the hundreds already on my soul, the mortal sin of not going to Mass on Christmas Day. At least God will know I tried and it’s not my fault if I wandered into a happy family from Park Avenue pew.

  I’m so empty now and hungry I want to go mad with myself and have a feast at the Horn & Hardart Automat but I don’t want to be seen there for fear people might think I’m like the ones who sit there half the day with a cup of coffee, an old newspaper and nowhere to go. There’s a Chock Full o’ Nuts a few blocks away and that’s where I have a bowl of pea soup, a nutted cheese on raisin bread, a cup of coffee, a doughnut with white sugar and a read of the Journal-American that someone left behind.

  It’s only two in the afternoon and I don’t know what to do with myself when all the libraries are closed. People walking by with children by the hand might think I have nowhere to go so I keep my head up and walk up one street and down the other as if I were rushing for a turkey dinner. I wish I could open a door somewhere and have people say, Oh, hi, Frank, you’re just in time. The people walking here and there on the streets of New York take it all for granted. They bring presents and get presents and have their big Christmas dinners and they never know there are people walking up one street and down the other on the holiest day of the year. I wish I could be an ordinary New Yorker stuffed after my dinner, talking to my family with Christmas carols on the radio in the background. Or I wouldn’t mind being back in Limerick with my mother and brothers and the nice goose but here I am in the place I always dreamed about, New York, and I’m worn out with all these streets where there isn’t even a bird to be seen.

  There’s nothing to do but go back to my room, listen to the radio, read Crime and Punishment and fall asleep wondering why Russians have to drag things out. You’d never find a New York detective wandering around with the likes of Raskolnikov talking about everything but the murder of the old woman. The New York detective would nab him, book him and the next thing is the electric chair in Sing Sing, and that’s because Americans are busy people with no time for detectives to be chatting with people they already know committed the murder.

  There’s a knock on the door and it’s Mrs. Austin. Mr. McCourt, she says, would you come downstairs a minute?

  I don’t know what to say. I’d like to tell her kiss my arse after the way her sister talked to me and the way she talked to me herself this morning but I follow her down and there she has all kinds of food laid out on the table. She says she brought it from her sister’s, that they were worried I might have no place to go or nothing to eat on this beautiful day. She’s sorry about the way she talked to me this morning and hopes I’m in a forgiving mood.

  There’s turkey and stuffing and all kinds of potatoes, white and yellow, with cranberry sauce to make everything sweet and all this puts me in a forgiving mood. She’d give me some glug but her sister threw it out and it’s just as well. It made everyone sick.

  When I’m finished she invites me to sit and watch her new television set where there’s a program about Jesus that’s so holy I fall asleep in the armchair. When I awake the clock on her mantelpiece says twenty past four in the morning and Mrs. Austin is in the other room letting out little cries, Eugene, Eugene, and that proves you can have a sister and go to her house for Christmas dinner but if you don’t have your Eugene you’re as lonely as anyone sitting in the Automat and it’s a great comfort to know my mother and brothers in Limerick have a goose and next year when I’m promoted to busboy at the Biltmore I’ll send them the money that will let them stroll around Limerick dazzling the world with their new shoes.

  10

  Eddie Gilligan tells me go to the lockers and get into my street clothes because there’s a priest in Mr. Carey’s office who met me coming over on the ship and now wants to take me to lunch. Then he says, What are you blushing for? It’s only a priest and you’re getting the free lunch.

  I wish I could say I don’t want to meet the priest for lunch but Eddie and Mr. Carey might ask questions. If a priest says come to lunch you have to go and it doesn’t matter what happened in the hotel room even if it wasn’t my fault. I could never tell Eddie or Mr. Carey how the priest came at me. They’d never believe me. People sometimes say things about priests, that they’re fat or pompous or mean, but no one would ever believe a priest would interfere with you in a hotel room especially people like Eddie or Mr. Carey with sick wives always running to confession in case they die in their sleep. People like that wouldn’t be surprised if priests walked on water.

  Why can’t this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That’s what priests are for. It’s four months since he went off to that retreat house in Virginia to beg forgiveness and here he is still on this side of the continent with nothing on his mind but lunch.

/>   Now Eddie comes to me in the locker room and tells me the priest had another idea, meet him across the street in McAnn’s.

  It’s hard to walk into a restaurant and sit down opposite a priest who came at you in a hotel room four months ago. It’s hard to know what to do when he looks at you directly, shakes your hand, holds your elbow, eases you into your seat. He tells me I’m looking good, that I filled out a bit in the face and I must be eating right. He says America is a great country if you give it a chance but I could tell him how they won’t let the Puerto Ricans give me leftovers anymore and how I’m weary of bananas but I don’t want to say much in case he might think I’ve forgotten the Hotel New Yorker. I don’t have any grudge against him. He didn’t hit anyone or starve anyone and what he did came from the drink. What he did was not as bad as running off to England and leaving your wife and children to starve the way my father did but what he did was bad because he’s a priest and they’re not supposed to murder people or interfere with them in any way.

  And what he did makes me wonder if there are any other priests wandering the world going at people in hotel rooms.

  There he is gazing at me with his big gray eyes, his face all scrubbed and shiny, with his black suit and his gleaming white collar, telling me he wanted to make this one stop before returning to Los Angeles forever. It’s easy to see how pleased he is to be in a state of grace after his four months in the retreat house and I know now it’s hard for me to eat a hamburger with someone in such a state of grace. It’s hard to know what to do with my own eyes when he gazes at me as if I were the one who went at someone in a hotel room. I’d like to be able to look right back at him but all I know of priests is what I’ve seen of them on altars, pulpits and in the darkness of confessionals. He’s probably thinking I’ve been up to all kinds of sin and he’s right but at least I’m not a priest and I never bothered anyone else.

  He tells the waiter, Yes, a hamburger is fine and no, no, Lord no, he won’t have a beer, water is fine, nothing alcoholic will ever cross his lips again, and he smiles at me as if I should understand what he’s talking about and the waiter smiles, too, as if to say isn’t this a saintly priest.

  He tells me he went to confession to a bishop in Virginia and even though he received absolution and spent four months in work and prayer he feels it wasn’t enough. He has given up his parish and he’ll spend the rest of his days with the poor Mexicans and Negroes in Los Angeles. He calls for the bill, tells me he never wants to see me again, it’s too painful, but he’ll remember me in his Masses. He says I should be careful of the Irish curse, the drink, and whenever I’m tempted to sin I should meditate like him on the purity of the Virgin Mary, good luck, God bless, go to night school, and he’s into a taxi to Idlewild Airport.

  There are days the rain is so heavy I have to spend a dime on the subway and I see people my own age with books and bags that say Columbia, Fordham, NYU, City College, and I know I want to be one of them, a student.

  I know I don’t want to spend years in the Biltmore Hotel setting up banquets and meetings and I don’t want to be the houseman cleaning up in the Palm Court. I don’t even want to be a busboy getting a share of the waiters’ tips which they get from the rich students who drink their gin and tonic, talk about Hemingway and where should they have dinner and should they go to Vanessa’s party on Sutton Place, it was such a bore last year.

  I don’t want to be houseman where people look at me as if I were part of a wall.

  I see the college students in the subway and I dream that some day I’ll be like them, carrying my books, listening to professors, graduating with a cap and gown, going on to a job where I’ll wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase, go home on the train every night, kiss the wife, eat my dinner, play with the kids, read a book, have the excitement with the wife, go to sleep so that I’ll be rested and fresh the next day.

  I’d like to be a college student in the subway because you can see from the books they’re carrying their heads must be stuffed with all kinds of knowledge, that they could sit down with you and chat forever about Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson and Dostoyevsky. If I could go to college I’d make sure to ride the subways and let people see my books so that they could admire me and wish they could go to college, too. I’d hold up the books to let people see I was reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It must be grand to be a student with nothing to do but listen to professors, read in libraries, sit under campus trees and discuss what you’re learning. It must be grand to know you’ll be getting a degree that puts you ahead of the rest of the world, that you’ll marry a girl with a degree and you’ll be sitting up in bed the rest of your life having great chats about the important matters.

  But I don’t know how I’ll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and two eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me. Some old Irishmen tell me there’s nothing wrong with hard work. Many a man made his way in America by the sweat of his brow and his strong back and it’s a good thing to learn your station in life and not be getting above yourself. They tell me that’s why God put the pride at the top of the Seven Deadly Sins so that young fellas like me won’t be getting off the boat with big notions. There’s plenty of work in this country for anyone who wants to earn an honest dollar with his two hands and the sweat of his brow and no getting above himself.

  The Greek in the diner on Third Avenue tells me his cleaning-up Puerto Rican quit on him and would I like to work an hour every morning, come in at six, sweep out the place, mop it, clean out the toilets. I could have an egg, a roll, a cup of coffe and two dollars and, who knows, it might lead to something permanent. He says he likes the Irish, they’re like the Greeks, and that’s because they came from Greece a long time ago. That’s what a professor at Hunter College told him though when I said this to Eddie Gilligan at the hotel he said the Greek and the professor were full of shit, that the Irish were always there on their little island since the beginning of time and what the hell do Greeks know anyway? If they knew anything they wouldn’t be slinging hash in restaurants and babbling in their own language that no one understands.

  I don’t care where the Irish came from with the Greek feeding me every morning and paying me two dollars adding up to ten for the week, five for my mother and her shoes and five for me so that I can get proper clothes for myself and not look like Paddy-off-the-boat.

  I’m lucky to have an extra few dollars a week especially after Tom Clifford knocked on my door at Mrs. Austin’s and said, Let’s get the hell outa here. He says there’s a huge room the size of an apartment for rent up on Third Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street over a shop called Harry’s Hats and if we shared the rent we’d still be paying six dollars a week and we wouldn’t have Mrs. Austin watching every move. We could bring in anything we liked, food, drink, girls.

  Yeah, says Tom, girls.

  The new room has a front and a back and looks out on Third Avenue where we can watch the El pass right before us. We wave at the passengers and discover they don’t mind waving back in the evening on the way home from work though very few wave in the morning because of the bad mood they’re in going to work.

  Tom works on the night shift at an apartment building and that leaves me on my own in the room. It’s the first time in my life I ever had the feeling of freedom, no bosses, no Mrs. Austin telling me put out the light. I can walk around the neighborhood and look at the German shops, bars, cafés and all the Irish bars on Third Avenue. There are Irish dances at the Caravan, the Tuxedo, the Leitrim House, the Sligo House. Tom won’t go to the Irish dances. He wants to meet German girls because of his three happy years in Germany and because he’s able to speak German. He says the Irish can kiss his ass and I don’t understand that because every time I hear Irish music I feel tears coming and I want to be standing on the banks of the Shannon looking at swans. It’s easy for Tom to talk to German girls or Irish girls when he’s in the mood but it’s never easy for me to talk to anyone becau
se I know they’re looking at my eyes.

  Tom had a better education in Ireland than I did and he could go to college if he liked. He says he’d rather make money, that’s what America is there for. He tells me I’m a fool for breaking my ass working at the Biltmore Hotel when I could look around and find a job with a decent wage.

  He’s right. I hate working at the Biltmore Hotel and cleaning up for the Greek every morning. When I clean the toilet bowls I feel angry with myself because it reminds me of the time I had to empty the chamber pot of my mother’s cousin Laman Griffin for a few pennies and the loan of his bike. And I wonder why I’m so particular about the toilet bowls, why I want them to be spotless when I could give them a swish of the mop and let them be. No, I have to use plenty of detergent and make them sparkle as if people were going to have their dinners out of them. The Greek is pleased though he gives me strange looks that say, Very nice but why? I could tell him this extra ten dollars a week and the morning food is a gift and I don’t want to lose it. Then he wants to know what I’m doing here in the first place. I’m a nice Irish boy, I know English, I’m intelligent, and why am I cleaning toilet bowls and working in hotels when I could be getting an education. If he knew English he’d be in a university studying the wonderful history of Greece and Plato and Socrates and all the great Greek writers. He wouldn’t be cleaning toilet bowls. Anyone who knows English should not be cleaning toilet bowls.