When Mike Small says, What are you thinking about? I don’t know what to say for fear she might think I’m peculiar the way I wonder about the ones who were sent back. If my mother or father had been sent back I wouldn’t be on this deck with the lights of Manhattan a sparkling dream before me.
Besides, it’s only Americans who ask questions like that, What are you thinking about? or What do you do? In all my years in Ireland no one ever asked me such questions and if I weren’t madly in love with Mike Small I’d tell her mind her own business about what I’m thinking or what I do for a living.
I don’t want to tell Mike Small too much about my life because of the shame and I don’t think she’d understand especially when she grew up in a small American town where everyone had everything. But when she starts talking about her days in Rhode Island with her grandmother there are clouds. She talks about swimming in the summer, ice skating in the winter, hay rides, trips to Boston, dates, proms, editing her high school yearbook, and her life sounds like a Hollywood movie till she goes back to the time her father and mother separated and left her with his mother in Tiverton. She talks about how much she missed her mother and how she cried herself to sleep for months and now she cries again. This makes me wonder if ever I had been sent to live in comfort with a relation would I have missed my family? It’s hard to think I would have missed the same tea and bread every day, the collapsed bed swarming with fleas, a lavatory shared by all the families in the lane. No, I wouldn’t have missed that but I would have missed the way it was with my mother and brothers, the talk around the table and the nights around the fire when we saw worlds in the flames, little caves and volcanoes and all kinds of shapes and images. I would have missed that even if I lived with a rich grandmother and I felt sorry for Mike Small who had no brothers and sisters and no fire to sit at.
She tells me how excited she was the day she graduated from elementary school, how her father was to travel all the way up from New York for the party but called at the last minute to say he had to go to a picnic for tugboat men and the memory of that brings the tears again. That day on the phone her grandmother blasted her father, told him he was a no-good skirt-chasing bastard and not to set foot in Tiverton again. At least her grandmother was there. She was there for everything, always. She wasn’t much for the kissing and hugging and tucking in but she kept the house clean, the clothes laundered, the lunch box well stuffed every day for school.
Mike wipes her tears and says you can’t have everything and even if I say nothing I wonder why you can’t have everything or at least give everything. Why can’t you clean the house, launder the clothes, stuff the lunch box and still kiss, hug and tuck in? I can’t say this to Mike because she admires her grandmother for being tough and I’d prefer to hear that Grandma might have hugged, kissed and tucked in.
With Bob away at ROTC camp Mike invites me to visit her family. She lives on Riverside Drive near Columbia University with her father, Allen, and her new stepmother, Stella. Her father is a tugboat captain for the Dalzell Towing Company in New York Harbor. Her stepmother is pregnant. Her grandmother, Zoe, is here from Rhode Island for a while till Mike settles in and gets used to New York.
Mike tells me her father likes to be called Captain and when I say, Hello, Captain, he growls till the phlegm rattles in his throat and squeezes my hand till the knuckles crack so that I’ll know how manly he is. Stella says, Hi, honey, and kisses my cheek. She tells me she’s Irish, too, and it’s nice to see Alberta going out with Irish boys. Even she says boys and she’s Irish. Grandmother lies on the living room couch with her hands joined under her head and when Mike introduces me Zoe’s hairline twitches forward and she says, Howya doin’?
It slips out of my mouth, Nice easy life you have there on the couch.
She glares at me and I know I’ve said the wrong thing and it’s awkward when Mike and Stella go to another room to look at a dress and I’m left standing in the middle of the living room with the Captain smoking a cigarette and reading the Daily News. No one speaks to me and I’m wondering how Mike Small can go off and leave me standing here with the father and the grandmother ignoring me. I never know what to say to people at times like this. Should I say, How’s the tugboat business? or should I tell the grandmother she did a wonderful job raising Mike.
My mother in Limerick would never leave anyone standing in the middle of the room like this. She’d say, Sit down there and we’ll have a nice cup of tea, because in the lanes of Limerick it’s a bad thing to ignore anyone and even worse to forget the cup of tea.
It’s strange that a man with a good job like the Captain and his mother on the couch wouldn’t bother to ask me if I had a mouth in my head or if I’d like to sit down. I don’t know how Mike can leave me standing like this though I know if this ever happened to her she’d simply sit down and make everyone feel cheerful the way my brother Malachy does.
What would happen if I sat down? Would they say, Oh, you’re feeling pretty relaxed sitting down without being asked? Or would they say nothing and wait till I leave to talk behind my back?
They’ll talk behind my back anyway and tell each other Bob is a much nicer boy and looks handsome in his ROTC uniform though they might have said as much if they’d seen me in my summer khakis with my corporal’s stripes. I doubt it. They probably prefer him with his high school diploma and his clear healthy eyes and his bright future and his cheerful nature all done up in his officer’s uniform.
And I know from the history books the Irish were never liked up there in New England, that there were signs everywhere saying, No Irish Need Apply.
Well, I don’t want to beg anyone for anything and I’m ready to turn on my heel and walk out when Mike bounces down the hall all blonde and smiling and ready for a walk and dinner in the Village. I’d like to tell her I don’t want to have anything to do with people who leave you standing in the middle of the floor and hang out signs rejecting the Irish but she’s so bright and blue-eyed and cheerful, so clean and American, I think if she told me stand there forever I’d be like a dog and wag my tail and do it.
Then on the way down in the elevator she tells me I said the wrong thing to Grandma, that Grandma is sixty-five and works very hard cooking and keeping the house clean and doesn’t like people’s smartass remarks about taking a few minutes on the couch.
What I want to say is this, Oh, fuck your grandma and her cooking and cleaning. She has plenty of food and drink and clothes and furniture and hot and cold running water and no shortage of money and what the bloody hell is she complaining about? There are women all over the world raising large families and not whining and there’s your grandmother lying on her arse complaining she has to take care of an apartment and a few people. Fuck your grandma again.
That is what I want to say except that I have to swallow my words in case Mike Small might be offended and never see me again and it’s very hard going through life not saying what comes to your tongue. It’s hard being with a beautiful girl like her because she’d never have any trouble getting someone else and I’d probably have to find a girl not as good-looking who didn’t mind my bad eyes and my lack of a high school diploma though a girl not as good-looking might offer me a chair and a cup of tea and I wouldn’t have to swallow my words all the time. Andy Peters is always telling me life is easier with plain-looking girls, especially ones with small tits or no tits, because they’re always grateful for the least bit of attention and one might even love me for myself, as they say in the movies. I can’t even think of Mike Small having tits the way she’s reserving the whole body for the wedding night and the honeymoon and it gives me a pain to picture Bob the football player having the excitement with her on the wedding night.
The platform boss from the Baker and Williams Warehouse sees me on the subway train and tells me I can get work during the summer with men going on vacation. He lets me work eight to noon and when I’m finished on the second day I walk over to Port Warehouses to see if I can have a sandwich with Hor
ace. I often think he’s the father I’d like to have even if he’s black and I’m white. If ever I said that to anyone at the warehouse I’d be laughed off the platform. He must know himself the way they talk about black people and he surely hears the word nigger floating through the air. When I worked on the platform with him I wondered how he could keep his fists to himself. Instead he’d put his head down and have a little smile and I thought he might be a bit deaf or simple in his mind but because I knew he wasn’t deaf and the way he talked about his son getting an education in Canada showed that if he’d had a chance he would have been in a university himself.
He’s coming out of a diner on Laight Street and when he sees me he smiles, Oh, mon. I must have known you were coming. I got a hero sandwich a mile long and beer. We eat on the pier, okay?
I’m ready to walk back down Laight Street to the pier but he steers me away. He doesn’t want the men at the warehouse to see us. They’d ride him all day. They’d laugh and ask Horace when he knew my mother. That makes me want to defy them and walk Laight Street even more. No, mon, he says. Save your emotions for bigger things.
This is a big thing, Horace.
It’s nothing, mon. It’s ignorance.
We should fight back.
No, son.
God, he’s calling me son.
No, son. I don’t have time for fighting back. I won’t step on their ground. I pick my own fights. I have a son in college. I have a wife who is ailing and still cleaning offices at night on Broad Street. Eat your sandwich, mon.
It’s ham and cheese slathered with mustard and we wash it down with a quart of Rheingold passing the bottle back and forth, and I have a sudden thought and a feeling that I’ll never forget this hour on the pier with Horace with seagulls circling for what might come and ships strung along the Hudson waiting for tugboats to dock them or push them out to the Narrows, traffic rushing behind us and over our heads on the West Side Highway, a radio in a pier office with Vaughn Monroe singing “Buttons and Bows,” Horace offering me another chunk of sandwich telling me I could use a few pounds on my bones and his surprised look when I nearly drop the sandwich, nearly drop it because of the weakness in my heart and the way tears are dropping on the sandwich and I don’t know why, can’t explain it to Horace or myself with the power of this sadness that tells me this won’t come again, this sandwich, this beer on the pier with Horace that makes me feel so happy all I can do is weep with the sadness in it and I feel so foolish I’d like to rest my head on his shoulder and he knows that because he moves closer, puts his arm around me as if I were his own son, the two of us black or white or nothing, and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to do but put down the sandwich where a seagull swoops in and gobbles it and we laugh, Horace and I, and he puts in my hand the whitest handkerchief I’ve ever seen and when I offer it back he shakes his head, keep it, and I tell myself I’ll keep that handkerchief till my last breath.
I tell him what my mother used to say when we cried, Oh, your bladder must be near your eye, and he laughs. He doesn’t seem to mind if we go back up Laight Street, and the men on the platform say nothing about him and my mother because it’s hard to hurt people already laughing and beyond you.
33
Sometimes she’s invited to cocktail parties. She takes me along and I’m confused with the way people stand nose to nose chatting and eating little things on bits of stale bread and crackers, no one singing or telling a story the way they did in Limerick, till they start looking at their watches and saying, Are you hungry? Wanna go eat something? and out they drift and that’s what they call a party.
That’s the uptown New York and I don’t like it one bit especially when a man in a suit talks to Mike, tells her he’s a lawyer, nods toward me, asks her why in heaven’s name she’s going out with someone like me and invites her to go to dinner as if she should walk away and leave me with the empty glass, everything stale, and nobody singing. Of course she says, No, thanks, though you can see she’s flattered and I often wonder if she’d like to go with Mr. Lawyer in the Suit rather than stay with me, a man from a slum who never went to high school and gawks at the world with two eyes like piss holes in the snow. Surely she’d like to marry someone with clear blue eyes and spotless white teeth who would take her to cocktail parties and move to Westchester where they’d join the country club, play golf and drink martinis, and frolic in the night in the grip of the gin.
I know already what I prefer myself, the downtown New York where men with beards and women with long hair and beads are reading poetry in coffeehouses and bars. Their names are in the papers and magazines, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Brigid Murnaghan. When they’re not living in lofts and tenements they roam the country. They drink wine from great jugs, they smoke marijuana, they lie on floors and dig the jazz. Dig. That’s the way they talk and they click their fingers, cool, man, cool. They’re like my Uncle Pa in Limerick, they don’t give a fiddler’s fart about anything. If they had to go to a cocktail party or wear a tie they’d die.
A tie was the cause of our first disagreement and the first time I saw Mike Small’s temper. We were to go to a cocktail party and when I met her outside her apartment building on Riverside Drive she said, Where’s your tie?
It’s at home.
But this is a cocktail party.
I don’t like wearing ties. They don’t wear them down in the Village.
I don’t care what they wear in the Village. This is a cocktail party and all the men will be wearing ties. You’re in America now. Let’s go up to a men’s store on Broadway and get you a tie.
Why should I buy a tie when I have one at home?
Because I’m not going to that party with you in that condition.
She walked away from me, up 116th Street to Broadway, stuck her hand out, jumped into a taxi without giving me a second look to see if I was coming.
I took the Seventh Avenue train to Washington Heights in a blind agony, cursing myself for my stubbornness and worrying she might give me up completely for a Mr. Lawyer in a Suit, that she might spend the rest of the summer going to cocktail parties with him till Bob the football player returned from ROTC. She might even give up Bob for the lawyer, finish college and move to Westchester or Long Island where all the men wear ties, where some have ties for every day of the week and social functions on top of it. She might be happy going to the country club all dressed up and remembering what her father said, A lady is not properly dressed till she has white gloves up to her elbows.
Paddy Arthur was coming down the stairs, all dressed up, no tie, on his way to an Irish dance and why didn’t I go with him, I might meet Dolores again, ha ha.
I turned and went back downstairs telling him I didn’t care if I never saw Dolores again in this life or the next after what she did luring me onto the E train and all the way to Queens Village letting me think there might be a bit of excitement at the end of the night. Before getting on the downtown train Paddy and I stopped for a beer at a Broadway bar and Paddy said, Jesus, what’s up with you? Is it some kind of a bee you have up your arse?
When I told him about Mike Small and the tie he wasn’t a bit sympathetic. He said that’s what I get for running around with them fookin’ Protestants and what would my poor mother say back in Limerick.
I don’t care what my mother would say. I’m mad about Mike Small.
He asked for a whiskey and told me I should have one, too, loosen me up, calm me down, clear my head, and once I had two whiskeys in my system I told him how I’d like to lie on a Greenwich Village floor smoking marijuana, sharing a jug of wine with a long-haired girl, Charlie Parker on the phonograph floating us to heaven and easing us down again on a long low sweet wail.
Paddy gave me the fierce look. Arrah, for Jasus’ sake, is it coddin’ me you are? Do you know the trouble with you? Protestants and Negroes. Next thing it’ll be Jews and then you’re doomed altogether.
There was an old man smoking a pipe on the stool beside Paddy and he said, That’s righ
t, son, that’s right. Tell your friend there that you have to stick with your own. All me life I stuck with me own, dug holes for the phone company, all Irish, never a bit of trouble because, by Jesus, I stuck with me own and I seen young fellas comin’ over marryin’ all kinds an’ losin’ their faith an’ the next thing they’re goin’ to baseball games an’ that’s the end of them.
The old man said he knew a man from his own town who worked twenty-five years in a pub in Czechoslovakia and came home to settle down without a word of Czechoslovakian in his head and all because he stuck to his own kind, the few Irishmen he could find there, all sticking together, thank God an’ His Blessed Mother. The old man said he’d like to buy us a drink to honor the men and women of Ireland who stick with their own so that when a child is born they know who the father is and that, by Christ, God forgive the language, is the most important thing of all, knowing who the father is.
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