'Tis

by Frank McCourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  21

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

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

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

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

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

  Is he inside?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sir, what kind of company is that?

  Insurance.

  But.

  But what?

  Oh, it’s all right, sir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  22

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

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

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

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

  Once again I feel like calling Emer and telling her about my big job at Blue Cross and the apartment I’m getting in Queens but her face is fading in my memory and there’s another place in my mind that tells me I’m glad t
o be single in New York.

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

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

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