'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  It wouldn't kill me to walk over to my grandmother's house this one last time. I'm sure my brothers Michael and Alphie are bragging to the whole world that I'm coming home and they'll be sad if I don't stroll down the lane in my corporal's stripes.

  The minute I go down the steps of the National Hotel the boys at the Lyric Cinema call across Pery Square, Hoi, Yankee soldier, yoo hoo, do you have any choon gum? Do you have a spare shilling in your pocket or a bar of candy in your pocket?

  They pronounce candy like Americans and that makes them laugh so hard they fall against each other and the wall.

  There's one boy off to the side who stands with his hands in his pockets and I can see he has two red scabby eyes in a face full of pimples and a head shaved to the bone. It's hard for me to admit that's the way I looked ten years ago and when he calls across the square, Hoi, Yankee soldier, turn around so we can all see your fat arse, I want to give him a good fong in his own scrawny arse. You'd think he'd have respect for the uniform that saved the world even if I'm only a supply clerk now with dreams of getting my dog back. You'd think Scabby Eyes would notice my corporal's stripes and have a bit of respect but no, that's the way it is when you grow up in a lane. You have to pretend you don't give a fiddler's fart even when you do.

  Still, I'd like to cross the square to Scabby Eyes and shake him and tell him he's the spitting image of me when I was his age but I didn't stand outside the Lyric Cinema tormenting Yanks over their fat arses. I'm trying to convince myself that's the way I was myself, till another part of my mind tells me I wasn't a bit different from Scabby Eyes, that I was just as liable as him to torment Yanks or Englishmen or anyone with a suit or a fountain pen in his top pocket riding around on a new bike, that I was just as liable to throw a rock through the window of a respectable house and run away laughing one minute and raging the next.

  All I can do now is walk away keeping myself twisted to the wall so that Scabby Eyes and the boys won't see my arse and have ammunition.

  It's all confusion and dark clouds in my head till the other idea comes. Go back to the boys like a GI from the films and give them change from your pocket. It won't kill you.

  They watch me coming and they look as if they're about to run though no one wants to be a coward and run first. When I dole out the change all they can say is, Ooh, God, and the different way they look at me makes me feel happy. Scabby Eyes takes his share and says nothing till I'm walking away and he calls after me, Hey, mister, sure you don't have any arse at all at all.

  And that makes me feel happier than anything.

  The minute I turn off Barrington Street and down the hill to the lane I hear people saying, Oh, God, here's Frankie McCourt in his American uniform. Kathleen O'Connell is at the door of her shop laughing and offering me a piece of Cleeve's toffee. Sure, didn't you always love that, Frankie, even if it destroyed the teeth of Limerick. Her niece is here, too, the one that lost an eye when the knife she was using to open a bag of potatoes slipped and went into her head. She's laughing over the Cleeve's toffee, too, and I'm wondering how you can still laugh with an eye gone.

  Kathleen calls down to the little fat woman at the corner of the lane, He's here, Mrs. Patterson, a regular film star he is. Mrs. Patterson takes my face in her hands and tells me, I'm happy for your poor mother, Frankie, the terrible life she had.

  And there's Mrs. Murphy who lost her husband at sea in the war, living now in sin with Mr. White, nobody in the lanes the slightest bit shocked, and smiling at me, You are a film star, indeed, Frankie, and how's your poor eyes. Sure, they look grand.

  The whole lane is out standing at doors and telling me I'm looking grand. Even Mrs. Purcell is telling me I'm looking grand and she's blind. But I understand that's what she'd tell me if she could see and when I come near her she holds out her arms and tells me, Come here outa that, Frankie McCourt, and give me a hug for the sake of the days we listened to Shakespeare and Sean O'Casey on the wireless together.

  And when she puts her arms around me she says, Arrah, God above, there isn't a pick on you. Aren't they feeding you in the American army? But what matter, you smell grand. They always smell grand, the Yanks.

  It's hard for me to look at Mrs. Purcell and the delicate eyelids that barely flutter on the eyes set back in her head and remember the nights when she let me sit in the kitchen listening to plays and stories on the wireless and the way she'd think nothing of giving me a mug of tea and a big cut of bread and jam. It's hard because the people in the lane are at their doors delighted and I'm ashamed of myself for walking away from my mother and sulking on the bed in the National Hotel. How could she explain to the neighbors that she met me at the station and I wouldn't come home? I'd like to walk the few steps to my mother at her door and tell her how sorry I am but I can't say a word for fear the tears might come and she'd say, Oh, your bladder is near your eye.

  I know she'd say that to bring on a laugh and keep her own tears back so that we wouldn't all feel shy and ashamed of our tears. All she can do now is say what any mother would in Limerick, You must be famished. Would you like a nice cup of tea?

  My Uncle Pat is sitting in the kitchen and when he lifts his face to me it makes me sick to see the redness of his eyes and the yellow ooze. It reminds me of little Scabby Eyes over at the Lyric Cinema. It reminds me of myself.

  Uncle Pat is my mother's brother and he's known all over Limerick as Ab Sheehan. Some people call him the Abbot and no one knows why. He says, That's a grand uraform you have there, Frankie. Where's your big gun? He laughs and shows the yellow stubs of teeth in his gums. His hair is black and gray and thick on his head from not being washed and there's dirt in the creases on his face. His clothes, too, shine with the grease of not being washed and I wonder how my mother can live with him and not keep him clean till I remember how stubborn he is about not washing himself and wearing the same clothes day and night till they fall from his body. My mother couldn't find the soap once and when she asked him if he had seen it he said, Don't be blamin' me for the soap. I didn't see the soap. I didn't wash meself in a week. And he said it as if everyone should admire him. I'd like to strip him in the backyard and hose him down with hot water till the dirt left the creases on his face and the pus ran from his eyes.

  Mam makes the tea and it's good to see she has decent cups and saucers now not like the old days when we drank from jam jars. The Abbot refuses the new cups. I want me own mug, he says. My mother argues with him that this mug is a disgrace with all the dirt in the cracks where all kinds of diseases might be lurking. He doesn't care. He says, That was me mother's mug that she left to me, and there's no arguing with him when you know he was dropped on his head in his infancy. He gets up to limp out to the backyard lavatory and when he's gone Mam says she did everything to move him out of this house and stay with her for a while. No, he won't go. He's not going to leave his mother's house and the mug she gave him long ago and the little statue of the Infant of Prague and the big picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus above in the bedroom. No, he's not going to leave all that. What matter. Mam has Michael and Alphie to take care of, Alphie still in school and poor Michael washing dishes down at the Savoy Restaurant, God help him.

  We finish our tea and I take a walk with Alphie down O'Connell Street so that everyone will see me and admire me. We meet Michael coming up the street from his job and there's a pain in my heart when I see him, the black hair falling down to his eyes and his body a bag of bones with clothes as greasy as the Abbot's from washing dishes all day. He smiles in his shy way and says, God, you're looking very fit, Frankie. I smile back at him and I don't know what to say because I'm ashamed of the way he looks and if my mother were here I'd yell at her and ask her why Michael has to look like this. Why can't she get him decent clothes or why can't the Savoy Restaurant at least give him an apron to save himself from the grease? Why did he have to leave school at fourteen to wash dishes? If he came from the Ennis Road or the North Circular Road he'd be in school now playing rugby and g
oing to Kilkee on his holidays. I don't know what's the use of coming back to Limerick where children are still running around in bare feet and looking at the world through scabby eyes, where my brother Michael has to wash dishes and my mother takes her time moving to a decent house. This is not the way I expected it to be and it makes me so sad I wish I were back in Germany drinking beer in Lenggries.

  Some day I'll get them out of here, my mother, Michael, Alphie, over to New York where Malachy is already working and ready to join the air force so that he won't be drafted and sent to Korea. I don't want Alphie to leave school at the age of fourteen like the rest of us. At least he's at the Christian Brothers and not a National school like Leamy's, the one we went to. Some day he'll be able to go to secondary school so that he'll know Latin and other important things. Now at least he has clothes and shoes and food and he needn't be ashamed of himself. You can see how sturdy he is, not like Michael, the bag of bones.

  We turn and make our way back up O'Connell Street and I know people are admiring me in my GI uniform till some call out, Jesus, is that you, Frankie McCourt? and the whole world knows I'm not a real American GI, that I'm just someone from the back lanes of Limerick all togged out in the American uniform with the corporal's stripes.

  My mother is coming down the street all smiles. The new house will have electricity and gas tomorrow and we can move in. Aunt Aggie sent word she heard I'd arrived and she wants us to come over for tea. She's waiting for us now.

  Aunt Aggie is all smiles, too. It's not like the old days when there was nothing in her face but bitterness over not having children of her own and even if there was bitterness she was the one who made sure I had decent clothes for my first job. I think she's impressed with my uniform and my corporal's stripes the way she keeps asking if I'd like more tea, more ham, more cheese. She's not that generous with Michael and Alphie and you can see it's up to my mother to make sure they have enough. They're too shy to ask for more or they're afraid. They know she has a fierce temper from not having children of her own.

  Her husband, Uncle Pa Keating, doesn't sit at the table at all. He's over by the coal range with a mug of tea and all he does is smoke cigarettes and cough till he's weak, clutching at himself and laughing, These feckin' fags will kill me in the end.

  My mother says, You should give 'em up, Pa, and he says, And if I did, Angela, what would I do with myself? Would I sit here with my tea and stare at the fire?

  She says, They'll kill you, Pa.

  And if they do, Angela, I won't give a fiddler's fart.

  That's the part of Uncle Pa I always loved, the way he doesn't give a fiddler's fart about anything. If I could be like him I'd be free though I wouldn't want his lungs the way they were destroyed by German gas in the Great War, then years working in the Limerick Gas Works and now fags by the fireplace. I'm sad he's sitting there killing himself when he's the only man who ever told the truth. He's the one that told me don't get caught taking tests for the post office when I could save my money and go to America. You could never imagine Uncle Pa telling a lie. It would kill him faster than gas or the fags.

  He's still all black from shoveling coke and coal at the Gas Works and there's no flesh on his bones. When he looks up from his place by the fire the whites of his eyes are dazzling around the blue. You can see when he looks over at us he has a special fondness for my brother Michael. I wish he had that fondness for me but he doesn't and it's enough to know he bought me my first pint long ago and told me the truth. I'd like to tell him the way I feel about him. No, I'm afraid someone would laugh.

  After the tea at Aunt Aggie's I'm thinking of going back to my room at the National Hotel but I'm afraid my mother will get the hurt look in her eyes again. Now I'll have to doss in my grandmother's bed with Michael and Alphie and I know the fleas will drive me mad. Ever since I left Limerick there hasn't been a flea in my life but now that I'm a GI with a bit of flesh on my bones I'll be eaten alive.

  Mam says, No. There's a powder called DDT that kills everything and she has it sprinkled all over the house. I tell her it's what we were sprayed with from small planes flying over our heads in Fort Dix so that we'd be saved from the torment of mosquitoes.

  Still, it's crowded in the bed with Michael and Alphie. The Abbot is in his bed across the room grunting and eating from a paper of fish and chips the way he always did. I can't sleep listening to him and thinking of the days when I licked the grease from the newspaper that held his fish and chips. Here I am in the old bed with my uniform hanging over the back of a chair with nothing changed in Limerick but the DDT that keeps the fleas away. It's a comfort to think of the children who can sleep now with the DDT and not have the torment of the fleas.

  The next day my mother tries for the last time to get Uncle Pat, her brother, to move up to Janesboro with us. He says, Noah, noah. That's the way he talks from being dropped on his head. He won't go. He'll stay here and when we're all gone he'll move into the big bed, his mother's bed that all of us slept in for years. He always wanted that bed and now he'll have it and he'll have his tea from his mother's mug every morning.

  My mother looks at him and the tears are there again. It makes me impatient and I want her to take her things and go. If the Abbot wants to be that stupid and stubborn let him be. She says, You don't know what it is to have a brother like this. You're lucky all your brothers are whole.

  Whole? What is she talking about?

  Lucky you are to have brothers that are sensible and healthy and never dropped on their heads.

  She cries again and asks the Abbot if he'd like a nice cup of tea and he says, Noah.

  Wouldn't he like to come up to the new house and have a nice warm bath in the new bathtub?

  Noah.

  Oh, Pat, oh, Pat, oh, Pat.

  She's so helpless with tears she has to sit down and he does nothing but stare at her out of his oozing eyes. He stares at her without a word till he reaches for his mother's mug and says, I'll have me mother's mug and me mother's bed that ye kept me out of all these years.

  Alphie goes over to Mam and asks her if we can go to our new house. He's only eleven and he's excited. Michael is already at the Savoy Restaurant washing dishes and when he's finished he can come to the new house where he'll have hot and cold running water and he can take the first bath of his life.

  Mam dries her eyes and stands. Are you sure now, Pat, you won't come? You can bring the mug if you like but we can't bring the bed.

  Noah.

  And that's the end of it. She says, This is the house I grew up in. When I went to America I didn't even look back going up the lane. 'Tis all different now. I'm forty-four years of age and 'tis all different.

  She puts on her coat and stands looking at her brother and I'm so tired of her moaning I want to pull her out of the house. I tell Alphie, Come on, and we move out the door so that she has to follow us. Whenever she's hurt her face grows whiter and her nose sharper and that's the way it is now. She won't talk to me, treats me as if I had done something wrong by sending the allotment so that she could have some kind of a decent life. I don't want to talk to her either because it's hard to feel sympathy for someone, even your mother, who wants to stay in a slum with a brother who's simple from being dropped on his head.

  She's like that in the bus all the way up to Janesboro. Then, at the door of the new house, she starts foostering in her bag. Oh, God, she says, I must have left the key behind, which shows she didn't want to leave her old house in the first place. That's what Corporal Dunphy told me once in Fort Dix. His wife had that habit of forgetting keys and when you have that habit it means you don't want to go home. It means you have a dread of your own door. Now I have to knock next door to see if they'll let me go around to the back in case there's a window open for me to climb in.

  That puts me in such a bad mood I can barely enjoy the new house. It's different with her. The minute she steps into the hall the paleness goes from her face and the sharpness from her nose. The house is already furn
ished, at least she did that, and now she says what every mother in Limerick would say, Well, we might as well have a nice cup of tea. She's like Captain Boyle yelling at Juno in Juno and the Paycock, Tay, tay, tay, if a man was dyin', you'd be tryin' to make him swally a cup o' tay.

  18

  All the years I grew up in Limerick I watched people go to dances at Cruise's Hotel or the Stella Ballroom. Now I can go myself and I needn't be a bit shy with the girls with my American uniform and my corporal's stripes. If they ask me was I ever in Korea and was I wounded I'll give them a small smile and act as if I don't want to talk about it. I might limp a little and that might be enough of an excuse for not being able to dance properly which I never could anyway. There might be at least one nice girl who will be sensitive about my wound and take me to a table for a glass of lemonade or stout.