'Tis

by Frank McCourt

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

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

  17

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

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

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

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

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

  Why not?

  Well, I didn’t bother.

  Why didn’t you bother?

  Wisha, I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And that makes me feel happier than anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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