Teacher Man

by Frank McCourt

  Was he joking? I'd have to get used to the ways of Dublin men.

  It was dawning on me that I was an outsider, foreigner, returned Yank and, on top of it, a Limerickman. I thought I'd come back a conquering hero, a returned Yank with college degrees, bachelor and master, man who survived nearly ten years in the high schools of New York. I made the mistake of thinking I'd fit into the warm life of Dublin pubs. I thought I'd move in a circle so bright, witty and literary that American scholars, prowling its periphery, would relay my every bon mot to academia back home and I'd be invited to lecture on the Irish literary scene to irresistible coeds at Vassar and Sarah Lawrence.

  It was not to be. If there was a circle I was never part of it. I prowled the periphery.

  I stayed in Dublin for two years. My first apartment was at Sea-view Terrace off Ailesbury Road, where Anthony Trollope lived when he rode his horse around Ireland as a postal inspector and every morning wrote three thousand words. My landlady told me his ghost still walked and she was convinced the manuscript of a major novel was hidden in the walls of his old house. I knew the ghost of Mr. Trollope was in residence because of the way the grease would suddenly congeal around my fried eggs and rashers when he made his midnight rounds. I explored the apartment looking for that manuscript till the neighbors complained about my knocking on the walls at all hours. I floundered in Dublin. I started every day with the best intentions. I had morning coffee at Bewley's and worked at the National Library or the Trinity College library. At noon I told myself I was hungry and strolled out for a sandwich at a nearby pub: Neary's, McDaid's, the Bailey. A sandwich needs to be washed down with a pint and, as the wags said, Bird never flew on one wing. Another pint might loosen my tongue and help me chat with other customers and soon I convinced myself I was enjoying myself. When the pubs closed for the afternoon holy hour I had coffee again at Bewley's. It was all procrastination. Weeks passed and my research into Irish-American literary relations was going nowhere. I told myself I was an ignoramus who knew nothing of American literature and had a sketchy grasp of Irish literature. I would need background and that meant reading the histories of both countries. When I read Irish history I filled index cards with any reference to America. When I read American history I filled index cards with any reference to Ireland.

  Reading the histories was not enough. Now I had to read the major authors and discover how they influenced or were influenced by their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course Yeats had American connections and influences. Of course Edmund Dowden, of Trinity College, was one of the first Europeans to champion Walt Whitman, but what was I to do with all this? What was I to say? And, after all my troubles, would anyone give a fiddler's fart?

  I had made other discoveries, and off I went snuffling down paths far from American Transcendentalism and the Irish Literary Revival. Here were accounts of the Irish hacking and digging and fighting and singing on the Erie Canal, on the Union Pacific Railroad and in the American Civil War itself. On opposite sides, Irishmen often fought their own brothers and cousins. It seemed that wherever there was a war the Irish fought on both sides, even in Ireland. At school in Limerick we heard repeatedly the long sad story of Ireland's sufferings under the Saxon heel, but barely a word about the Irish in America, their building and fighting and singing. Now I read about Irish music in America, the power and genius of the Irish in American politics, the exploits of the Fighting 69th, the millions who cleared a path to the Oval Office for John F. Kennedy. I read accounts of how mean Yankees discriminated against the Irish all over New England and how the Irish fought back and became mayors, governors, party bosses.

  I kept a separate pile of index cards for the story of the Irish in America, a pile that grew higher than the one on literary relations. It was all enough to keep me away from the pubs at lunchtime, enough to keep me from the work I should have been doing on Irish-American literary relations.

  Could I change my dissertation topic? Would Trinity allow me to present some aspect of the Irish in America, politics, music, the military, entertainment?

  Professor Walton said that would not be possible in the English Department. I seemed to be straying into history and that would require approval of the History Department, which he doubted would be possible since I had no background in history. I had already spent a year at Trinity and would have only one more year to finish my dissertation on Irish-American literary relations. The professor said one must keep one's hand firmly on the helm.

  How could I tell my wife in New York I'd squandered a year exploring the ditches and railbeds of Irish-American history when I should have been improving my knowledge of literature?

  I hung on in Dublin making feeble attempts at shaping some kind of dissertation. If I went to a pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else.

  I sat on a bench in St. Stephen's Green coveting the office girls of Dublin. Would they run away with me to Coney Island, Far Rockaway, the Hamptons?

  I watched the ducks in the pond and envied them. All they had to do in the world was quack, paddle and open their mouths for morsels. They didn't have to worry about the dissertation that was killing me. How and why did I ever get into this? Jesus! I could be in New York, grateful for my lot, teaching my five classes a day, going home, having a beer, going to a movie, reading a book, cooing to the wife and so to bed.

  Oh, but no. Little snotty-nosed Frankie from the lanes of Limerick tried to rise above his station, climb the social ladder, mingle with a better class of people, the quality of Trinity College.

  This is what you get, Frankie, for your paltry ambition. Why don't you run down the street and buy yourself a Trinity scarf? See if that will lift your spirits, help you write that grand original study of Irish-American literary relations, 1889 to 1911.

  There is an activity called "pulling yourself together." I tried, but what was there to pull together?

  The second year in Dublin dribbled away. I couldn't find my niche there. I didn't have the personality or the self-confidence to shoulder my way into a group, be one of the lads, buy my round and make the witty comments you're supposed to hear in Irish pubs.

  I sat in the library and added to my mountain of index cards. Drinking added to my addleheadedness. I went for long walks around the city, up one street and down the other. I met a woman, a Protestant, and we went to bed. She fell in love with me, and I didn't know why.

  I wandered the streets of Dublin looking for the door. I had a notion that in any city there was a way in for the outsider and the traveler. In New York, for me, it was schools and bars and friendship. There was no door for me in Dublin and I had to admit, finally, what ailed me: I missed New York. At first, I resisted the feeling. Go away. Leave me alone. I love Dublin. Look at the history. Every street is brimming with the past. I dreamt of Dublin when I was a child in Limerick. Yes, but, yes, but yes, as my Uncle Pa Keating would say, You're going on forty, so it's time to shit or get off the pot.

  Before I left Trinity, Professor Walton glanced over the index cards and said, My, my.

  In January of 1971, I returned to New York, a failing doctoral candidate. Alberta was pregnant. We had conceived the summer before, during our fortnight stay in Nantucket. I told her I could continue research at the Forty-second Street Library in New York. She was impressed with my bag of index cards, but wanted to know what purpose they served.

  Every Saturday I sat in the South Reading Room of the Forty-second Street Library. I should have sat in the North Reading Room in the literature section but I found the Lives of the Saints in the South and they were too gripping to be ignored. Then I happened on accounts of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, how the Irish and the Chinese, coming from opposite directions, competed, how the Irish drank and undermined their health while the Chinese smoked opium and rested, how the Irish didn't care what they ate while the Chinese nourished themse
lves on the food they knew and loved, how the Chinese never sang while they worked and how the Irish never stopped, for all the good it did them, the poor crazy Irish.

  Alberta went on maternity leave and I took her place back at Seward. But a month after I started at Seward Park High School the principal died of a heart attack. Then I met the new principal in the elevator, the department chairman who had fired me from Fashion Industries High School. I said, Are you following me? and when his mouth tightened I knew, once again, my days were numbered.

  A few weeks later I sealed my doom. In the presence of other teachers, the principal asked, So, Mr. McCourt, are you a father yet?

  No, not yet.

  Well, what do you want, a boy or a girl?

  Oh, it's all the same to me.

  Well, he said, as long as it's not a neuter.

  Well, if it is, I'll train it to grow up and be a principal.

  The letter that I was being "excessed" soon followed, signed by Assistant Principal (Acting) Mitchel B. Schulich.

  A failed everything, I looked for my place in the world. I became an itinerant substitute teacher, drifting from school to school. High schools called me for day-to-day work to replace sick teachers. Some schools needed me when teachers were called for long spells of jury duty. I was assigned classes in English or wherever a teacher was needed: biology, art, physics, history, mathematics. Substitute teachers like me floated somewhere on the fringes of reality. I was asked daily, And who are you today?

  Mrs. Katz.

  Oh.

  And that's what you were: Mrs. Katz or Mr. Gordon or Ms. Newman. You were never yourself. You were always Oh.

  In the classroom I had no authority. Assistant principals sometimes told me what to teach, but students paid no attention and there was nothing I could do. The ones who came to class ignored me and chatted, asked for the pass, rested their heads on desks and dozed, floated paper airplanes, studied for other subjects.

  I learned how to discourage them from coming to class at all: If you want an empty classroom all you have to do is stand at the classroom door and scowl. They'll decide you're mean and run. Only Chinese came to class. They must have been warned by their parents. They sat in the back and studied, resisting my subtle hints that they disappear, too. Principals and their assistants looked displeased when they saw me sitting at the teacher's desk reading the paper or a book in a near-empty room. They said I should be teaching. That's what I was hired for. I would gladly teach, I said, but this is a physics class and my license is in English. They knew it was a silly question, but they were supervisors and had to ask, Where are the kids? Everyone in every school knew the rule: When you see a substitute teacher, run, baby, run.

  Part III

  Coming Alive

  in Room 205

  12

  A year after I returned from Dublin, our old friend R'lene Dahlberg introduced me to Roger Goodman, head of the English Department at Stuyvesant High School. He asked if I would be interested in covering the classes of Mr. Joe Curran for a month or so while he convalesced from something. Stuyvesant was said to be the top high school in the city, the Harvard of high schools, alma mater of various Nobel Prize winners, of James Cagney himself, a school where, as soon as a boy or girl was admitted, doors opened to the best universities in the country. Thirteen thousand candidates sat every year for the Stuyvesant admissions test and the school skimmed off the top seven hundred.

  Now I taught where I could never have been one of the seven hundred.

  When Joe Curran returned after a few months Roger Goodman offered me a permanent position. He said the kids liked me, that I was a vital, engaging teacher, that I'd be a valuable addition to the English Department. I was embarrassed by this praise but I said yes and thank you. I promised myself I'd stay only two years. Teachers all over the city vied for jobs at Stuyvesant High School, but I wanted to be out in the world. At the end of a school day you leave with a head filled with adolescent noises, their worries, their dreams. They follow you to dinner, to the movies, to the bathroom, to the bed.

  You try to put them out of your mind. Go away. Go away. I'm reading a book, the paper, the writing on the wall. Go away.

  I wanted to be doing something adult and significant, going to meetings, dictating to my secretary, sitting with glamorous people at long mahogany boardroom tables, flying to conventions, unwinding in trendy bars, sliding into bed with luscious women, entertaining them before and after with witty pillow talk, commuting to Connecticut.

  When my daughter was born in 1971 my fantasies faded before her sweet reality and I began to feel at home in the world. Every morning I gave Maggie her bottle, changed her diaper, dipped her bottom in warm soapy water in the kitchen sink, resisted the morning newspaper because of the time it would consume, stood with the rush-hour crowd on the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, walked along Fifteenth Street to Stuyvesant, made my way through a crowd of waiting students to the front door, pushed in, said good morning to the guard, punched in at the time clock, took a pile of papers from my mailbox, said good morning to teachers punching in, opened the door to my empty classroom, room 205, opened windows with the long pole, sat and looked over the empty desks, relaxed for the few minutes before my first class, thought of my daughter gurgling that morning in the kitchen sink, watched dust dancing in the shaft of sunlight piercing the room, took the attendance book from a drawer and spread it on the desk, erased from the blackboard grammar notes from last night's French lesson in the adult evening school, opened the classroom door, said hi to the surge of students in the first class.

  Roger Goodman said it was important to teach diagramming. He loved the structure and Euclidian beauty of it. I said, Oh, because I knew nothing about diagramming. He told me these things at lunch in the Gas House Bar and Restaurant around the corner from the school.

  Roger was short and bald, his baldness offset by rich bushy black-and-gray eyebrows and a short beard, which lent him a twinkling impishness.

  He lunched with teachers. That made him unusual among assistant principals, who reminded me of the Cabots and Lodges.

  In Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,

  Where Cabots speak only to Lodges

  And Lodges speak only to God.

  Some afternoons Roger came to the Gas House to drink with us. He had no affectations, always cheerful, always encouraging, a supervisor you could feel comfortable with. He put on no airs, no intellectual pretensions, and mocked bureaucratic gobbledygook. I don't think he could have uttered "pedagogical strategizing" without chuckling.

  He trusted me. He seemed to think I could teach on any of the four levels of high school: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. He even asked what I'd like to teach and took me to the room where books were organized by grade. It was dazzling to see them ranged on shelves reaching to the twenty-foot ceilings and stacked on carts for delivery to classrooms. There were anthologies of English, American and world literature, piles of The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, The Painted Bird, Moby-Dick, Arrowsmith, Intruder in the Dust, Lie Down in Darkness, Introduction to Poetry by X. F. Kennedy. There were dictionaries, collections of poetry, short stories, plays, textbooks on journalism and grammar.

  Take whatever you want, said Roger, and if there's anything else you'd like we can order it. Take your time. Think about it tonight. Let's go to the Gas House for lunch.

  School, books, lunch. It was all one to Roger. He did not change hats. At day's end when teachers lined up to punch out and rush home he'd waggle his eyebrows and invite you around the corner for a stirrup cup, one for the road. For the long journey to his apartment at the far end of Brooklyn a man needed sustenance. He would sometimes drive me home, on three-martini days a drive slow and deliberate. Perched on the cushion that elevated his short body he would hold the steering wheel as if guiding a tugboat. Next day he'd confess he didn't remember much about the drive.

  In my years of teaching this was the first time I felt free in the classroom. I c
ould teach whatever I liked. If outsiders stuck their heads in the door it didn't matter. When Roger came for a rare observation he wrote enthusiastic positive reports. He broke down my resistance to anyone in the world a step or two above me. I told him what I was doing in my classes and all I got was encouragement. Sometimes he'd slip in a word or two about the necessity of teaching diagramming and I'd promise to try it. After a while it was a joke.

  I tried but failed. I made lines vertical, horizontal, slanting, and then I stood, adrift at the blackboard, till a Chinese student volunteered to take over and teach the teacher what the teacher should have known.

  My students were patient, but I could tell from the looks they exchanged, and the traffic in notes passing back and forth, that I was in a grammar wilderness. At Stuyvesant they had to know grammar for their classes in Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin.

  Roger understood. He said, Maybe diagramming is not your strong point. He said some people just don't have it. R'lene Dahlberg had it. Joe Curran certainly had it. After all, he was a graduate of Boston Latin, a school two and a half centuries older than Stuyvesant and, he claimed, more prestigious. Teaching at Stuyvesant for him was a step down in the world. He could diagram in Greek and Latin and probably French and German. That's the kind of training you get at Boston Latin. Jesse Lowenthal had it, too, but of course he would. He was the oldest teacher in the department with his elegant three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his old-world manners, his scholarship, Jesse who did not want to retire but, when he did, planned to spend his days studying Greek and drifting into the next life with Homer on his lips. It pleased Roger to know he had in his department a solid core of teachers who could be relied on to diagram at a moment's notice.