Teacher Man

by Frank McCourt

  I have to show who's in charge in this classroom. People can't just walk in here and reduce their sons to jelly. I repeat, Excuse me.

  The man drags Augie back to his seat and turns to me. He gives you trouble again, mister, I kick his ass here to New Jersey. He was brought up to give respect.

  He turns to the class. This teacher here to learn youse kids. Youse don't lissena the teacher youse don't graduate. Youse don't graduate youse wind up on the piers in some dead-end job. Youse don't lissena teacher youse doin' yourselves no favor. Unnerstand what I'm tellin' youse?

  They say nothing.

  Y'unnerstand what I'm tellin' youse or youse a bunch o' dummies? Or is there some tough guy here wants to say something?

  They say they understand, and all the tough guys are silent.

  OK, teacher, youse can go back to work now.

  On the way out he slams the door so hard chalk dust slides down the blackboard, and windows rattle. There is a cold hostile silence in the room that says, We know you called Augie's father. We don't like teachers who call people's fathers.

  No use saying, Oh, look. I didn't ask Augie's father to do that. I just spoke to his mother and thought they'd talk to him and tell him behave in class. It's too late. I've gone behind their backs, shown I can't handle the situation myself. There's no respect for teachers who send you to the office or call parents. If you can't handle it yourself you shouldn't even be a teacher. You should get a job sweeping the streets or picking up the garbage.

  Sal Battaglia smiled every morning and said, Hi, teach. Sal sat with his girlfriend, Louise, and looked happy. When they held hands across the aisle everyone walked around them because it was understood this was the real thing. Someday Sal and Louise would be married and that was sacred.

  Sal's Italian family and Louise's Irish family didn't approve, but at least the wedding would be Catholic and that was OK. Sal joked to the class his family worried he might starve to death with an Irish wife on account of how the Irish can't cook. He said his mother wondered how the Irish survived at all. Louise spoke up, said they could say what they liked, but the Irish had the most beautiful babies in the world. Sal blushed. Cool Italian, nearly eighteen, with the mass of black curly hair, actually blushed. Louise laughed and we all laughed when she reached across the aisle to touch the redness of his face with her delicate white hand.

  The class went quiet when Sal took her hand and kept it against his face. You could see his eyes glistening with tears. What came over him? I stood with my back to the blackboard, not knowing what to say or do, not wanting to break the spell. At a time like this how could I go on with our discussion of The Scarlet Letter?

  I went behind my desk, pretended to be busy, silently took the attendance again, filled out a form, waited for the bell to ring in ten minutes, watched Sal and Louise leave, hand in hand, and envied them the way everything was laid out. After graduation there would be an engagement. Sal would become a master plumber, Louise a legal stenographer, the highest you can go in the secretarial world unless you got the crazy notion to become a lawyer. I told Louise she was bright enough to be anything, but she said no no, what would her family say? She had to earn a living, get ready for her life with Sal. She'd learn Italian cooking so she wouldn't be beholden all the time to Sal's mother. A year after the wedding a baby would appear, a little round well-fed Italian-Irish-American baby and that would bring the two families together forever and who cared what countries their parents came from.

  None of that happened because of an Irish kid who went after Sal in a Prospect Park gang rumble and clobbered him with a two-by-four. Sal didn't even belong to a gang. He was just passing through delivering an order from the restaurant where he worked nights and weekends. He and Louise knew these gang wars were stupid, especially with the Irish and Italians, who were all Catholic and white. So why? What was it all about? Something called turf, territory, even worse, girls. Hey, get your guinea hands off my girl. Get your fat mick ass out of our neighborhood. Sal and Louise could understand rumbling with the Puerto Ricans or the Negroes, but not one another, for Christ's sakes.

  Sal returned wearing a bandage to cover his stitches. He swung over to the right side of the room, well away from Louise. He ignored the class and no one looked at him or spoke to him. Louise took her old seat, tried to catch his eye. She turned toward me as if I had answers or could fix things. I felt inadequate and indecisive. Should I go back there, squeeze her shoulder, whisper encouraging words about how Sal would get over this? Should I go to Sal, apologize for the Irish race, tell him you can't judge a whole people by the actions of one lout in Prospect Park, remind him Louise was still lovely, still loved him?

  How are you supposed to discuss the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter, the happy end for Hester and Pearl, with Louise sitting a few rows back, her heart broken, Sal staring straight ahead ready to murder the first Irishman to cross his path?

  Ray Brown raised his hand. Good old Ray, always stirring the pot. Hey, Mr. McCourt, how come no Negroes in this book?

  I must have looked blank. Everyone but Louise and Sal laughed. I don't know, Ray. I don't think they had Negroes in old New England.

  Sal jumped from his seat. Yeah, they had Negroes, Ray, but the Irish killed them all. Snuck up behind them and busted their heads.

  Oh, yeah? said Ray.

  Yeah, said Sal. He picked up his bag, walked out, made his way to the guidance office. The counselor told me Sal asked for a transfer to Mr. Campbell's class, who at least wasn't Irish, and didn't have that stupid accent. You could never imagine Mr. Campbell hitting you from behind with a two-by-four, but, That McCourt. He's Irish and you can never trust those sneaky bastards.

  I did not know what to do about Sal. It was three months to graduation and I should have tried to talk to him but I was unsure of what to say. In the school hallways I often saw teachers comforting kids. Arm around the shoulder. The warm hug. Don't worry, everything will be OK. Boy or girl saying thank you, tears, teacher squeezing shoulder one last time. That's what I wanted to do. Should I have told Sal I was not a two-by-four-wielding lout? Should I have insisted on telling him how unfair it was to make Louise suffer for the actions of someone who was probably drunk? Oh, you know how the Irish are, Sal. And he would have laughed and said, OK, Irish have that problem, and made up with Louise.

  Or should I have talked to Louise, trotted out a few platitudes like, Oh, you'll get over it in time or There's more than one fish in the ocean or You won't be single long, Louise. Boys are going to be knocking on your door.

  I knew if I tried to talk to either one I would have fumbled and stammered. The best thing was to do nothing, which is all I was capable of anyway. Someday I'd comfort someone in the hall with the strong arm around the shoulder, the soft word, the hug.

  Teachers refuse to have Kevin Dunne in their classes. The kid is just a royal pain in the ass, troublemaker, out of control. If the principal insists on sticking him in their classes they'll throw in their papers, demand their pensions, walk out. That kid belongs in a zoo, monkey section, not a school.

  So they send him to the new teacher, the one who cannot say no: me. Also, you can see with that red hair, freckles all over, that name, the kid is Irish, and surely an Irish teacher with a genuine brogue can handle the little bastard. Guidance counselor says he is counting on something, you know, atavistic, something that might strike a chord. A real Irish teacher could surely stir something ethnic in Kevin's genes. Right? Guidance counselor says Kevin is going on nineteen and should be graduating this year but after being kept back two years there is no chance he'll ever wear cap and gown. No chance at all. The school is playing a waiting game, hoping he'll drop out, join the army or something. They'll take anyone in the army these days, the lame, the halt, the blind, the Kevins of the world. They say he'll never make it to my classroom alone, so would I please pick him up at the guidance office.

  He sits in an office corner, lost in a parka too big for him, his face deep in the
hood. The guidance counselor says, Here he is, Kevin. Here's your new teacher. Pull your hood down so he can see you.

  Kevin doesn't move.

  Oh, come on, Kevin. Drop the hood.

  Kevin shakes his head. The head moves but the hood stays in place.

  OK, you go with Mr. McCourt, and try to cooperate.

  Guidance counselor whispers, He might, you know, identify with you a little.

  He identifies with nothing. He sits at his desk drumming with his fingers, hidden inside his hood. The principal, on his rounds, sticks his head in the door and tells him, Son, take off that hood. Kevin ignores him. The principal turns to me. We having a little discipline problem here?

  That's Kevin Dunne.

  Oh, and he backs out.

  I feel trapped in some kind of mystery. When I mention him to other teachers they roll their eyes and tell me new teachers are often stuck with the impossible cases. The guidance counselor tells me don't worry about it. Kevin is trouble but he's dysfunctional and won't be around long. Just be patient.

  Next day, just before noon, he asks for the pass. He says, How come you give me the pass just like that? How come? You wanna get rid of me, right?

  You said you wanted the pass. Here it is. Go.

  Why you telling me go?

  It's just an expression.

  That's not fair. I didn't do nothing wrong. I don't like people saying go like I was some kind of dog.

  I wish I could take him aside for a talk, but I know I'm no good at that. It's easier to talk to the whole class than to one boy. It isn't so intimate.

  He disrupts the class with irrelevant remarks: English has more dirty words than any other language; If you wear your right shoe on your left foot and your left shoe on your right foot it'll make your brain more powerful and all your children will be twins; God has a pen that never needs ink; Babies know everything when they're born. That's why they can't talk because if they talked we'd all be stupid.

  He says beans make you fart and it's a good thing to feed them to small children because the bean growers train dogs to track down the small children in case they're lost or kidnapped. He knows for a fact that rich families feed their children a lotta beans because rich children were always in fear of being kidnapped and when he got out of high school he was going into business training dogs who would find the little rich bean-eating children through their farts and he'd be in all the newspapers and all over TV and could he now have the pass.

  His mother visits on Open School Day. She can do nothing with him, doesn't know what's wrong with him. His father ran off when Kevin was four, the bastard, and now lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a woman who raises white mice for experiments. Kevin loves the white mice but hates his stepmother for selling them to people who stick things in them or cut them open just to see if they lost or gained weight. When he was ten he threatened to go after the stepmother and the police had to be called. Now his mother wonders how he's doing in my class. Is he learning anything? Do I require homework? Because he never brings home book, notebook or pencil?

  I tell her he's a bright boy with a lively imagination. She says, Yeah, that's fine for you, having a bright boy in class, but what about his future? She's worried he'll drift into the army and wind up in Vietnam, where he'll stand out with his mop of red hair and be a moving target for the gooks. I tell her I didn't think they'd take him in the army, and she looks offended. She says, What do you mean? He's as good as any kid in this school. His father had a year of college, you know, and he used to read newspapers.

  I mean I don't think he's the military type.

  My Kevin can do anything. My Kevin is as good as any kid in the school, and if I was you I wouldn't underestimate him.

  I try to talk to him but he ignores me or pretends not to hear me. I send him to the guidance counselor, who returns him with a note suggesting I keep him busy. Make him wash the blackboards. Send him to the basement to clean the erasers. Maybe, says the guidance counselor, he could fly into space with the next astronaut and just keep orbiting. That's a guidance joke.

  I tell Kevin I'm making him classroom manager in charge of everything. He finishes his chores in a few minutes and tells the class to observe how fast he is. Danny Guarino says he's faster at everything every time, and he'll see Kevin outside after school. I separate them and make them promise they won't fight. Kevin asks for the pass, then refuses it, saying he isn't a baby like some people in the room who have to go every few minutes.

  His mother adores him, other teachers won't have him, the guidance counselor passes the buck and I do not know what to do with him.

  In the closet he finds hundreds of little watercolor jars, with contents dried and cracked. He says, Wha'. Wha'. Oh, man. Jars, jars. Colors, colors. Mine, mine.

  OK, Kevin. Would you like to clean them? You can stay right here by the sink with this special table and you don't have to sit at your desk anymore.

  It's a risk. He might take offense at being offered a task of pure drudgery.

  Yeah, yeah. My jars. My table. Gonna take off my hood.

  He pushes back the hood and the hair flames. I tell him I've never seen such red hair and he grins. He works at the sink for hours, spooning out the old paste into a large pickle jar, scrubbing the caps, arranging the jars on the shelves. At the end of the year he is still working, still not finished. I tell him he won't be able to stay during the summer and he cries out of frustration. Could he take the jars home? His cheeks are wet.

  All right, Kevin. Take them home.

  He touches my shoulder with his multicolored hand, tells me I'm the greatest teacher in the world and if anyone ever gives me trouble he'll take care of them because he has ways of dealing with people who bother teachers.

  He takes home dozens of glass jars.

  He does not return in September. Guidance people at the Board of Education send him to a special school for incorrigibles. He runs away and lives awhile with the white mice in his father's garage. Then the army takes him and his mother comes to the school to tell me he's missing in Vietnam and she shows me a picture from his room. On the table the glass jars are arranged in a series of letters that say MCCORT OK.

  See, his mother says. He liked you for helping him, but the Communists got him, so tell me, what was the use? Look at all the moms have kids blown to bits. Jesus, you don't even have a finger to bury and will you tell me what's goin' on in that country over there nobody ever heard of? Will you tell me that? One war finishes, another one starts and you're lucky if you just have daughters won't be sent over there.

  From a canvas bag she pulls the large pickle jar filled with Kevin's dried paints. She says, Look at that. Every color in the rainbow in that jar. And you know what? He cut off all his hair and you can see where he mixed it in with those paints. That's a work of art, right? And I know he'd want you to have it.

  I could have been honest with Kevin's mother, told her I did little for her son. He seemed like a lost soul, floating around looking for a place to drop anchor, but I didn't know enough, or I was too shy to show affection.

  I kept the jar on my desk, where it glowed, incandescent, and when I looked at clumps of Kevin's hair I felt sorry over the way I let him drift out of the school and off to Vietnam.

  My students, especially the girls, said the jar was beautiful, yeah, a work of art, and it must have taken a lot of work. I told them about Kevin and some of the girls cried.

  A maintenance man cleaning the classroom thought the jar was junk and took it away to the trash in the basement.

  I talked to teachers in the cafeteria about Kevin. They shook their heads. They said, Too bad. Some of these kids slip through the cracks but what the hell is the teacher supposed to do? We have huge classes, no time, and we're not psychologists.

  8

  At thirty I married Alberta Small and started courses at Brooklyn College for the Master of Arts in English Literature, a degree that would help me rise in the world, earn respect, increase my teacher s
alary.

  To fulfill the requirements for the degree I wrote a thesis on Oliver St. John Gogarty, doctor, poet, playwright, novelist, wit, athlete, champion drinker at Oxford, memoirist, senator, friend (briefly) of James Joyce, who turned him into the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses and made him famous worldwide and forever.

  My thesis title was "Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Critical Study." There was nothing critical about the thesis. I chose Gogarty because of my admiration for him. If I read him and wrote about him, some of his charm, talent and learning would surely rub off on me. I might develop some of his dash and flair, his flamboyant air. He was a Dublin character, and I hoped I might become a debonair, hard-drinking, poetic Irishman like him. I'd be a New York character. I'd set the table on a roar and dominate the bars of Greenwich Village with song and story. At the Lion's Head Bar I drank whiskey after whiskey to give myself the courage to be colorful. Bartenders suggested I slow down. Friends said they didn't understand a word coming out of my mouth. They lifted me out of the bar and into a taxi, paid the driver and told him to drive nonstop till I reached my door in Brooklyn. I tried to be Gogarty-witty with Alberta but she told me for God's sakes be quiet, and all I got for my efforts to be Gogartian was a hangover so agonizing I fell to my knees and asked God to take me.

  Professor Julian Kaye accepted my thesis despite "a repetitiousness of style and a solemnity which conflicts with the subject, Gogarty."

  My first and favorite professor at Brooklyn College was Morton Irving Seiden, Yeats scholar. He wore a bow tie, he could lecture three hours on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles or Chaucer or Matthew Arnold, the material perfectly organized in his head. He was there to lecture, pour knowledge into empty vessels, and if you had any questions you could see him in his office. He would not waste class time.

  He had written his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on Yeats and a book, Paradox of Hate, in which he argued that fear of Jewish sexuality was a major cause of anti-Semitism in Germany.

  I took his year-long course on the History of English Literature, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, from warrior to worrier. You could see he wanted us to know and understand how English literature had developed and the language along with it. He insisted we should know the literature the way a doctor knows the body.