'Tis

by Frank McCourt

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

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

  26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Stepping on the glass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That’s debatable, Mrs. Klein.

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

  27

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

  I have to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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