'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  My mother opens the door and clutches at her chest. Mother o' God, I thought you were an apparition. What are you doing back so soon? Sure, didn't you leave only yesterday morning. Gone one day, back the next?

  I can't tell her how I'm home because of the bad things they were saying in the North about her and her terrible sin. I can't tell her how they had my father nearly canonized for his suffering over that same sin. I can't tell her because I don't want to be tormented by the past and I don't want to be trapped between the North and the South, Toome and Limerick.

  I have to lie and tell her my father is drinking and that makes her face go white again and her nose pointed. I ask her why she acts so surprised. Isn't this the way he always was?

  She says she hoped he might have given up the drink so that we'd have a father we could talk to, even in the North. She'd like Michael and Alphie to see this father they barely knew and she wouldn't want them to see him in his wildness. When he was sober he was the best husband in the world, the best father. He'd always have a song or a story or a comment about the state of the world that made her laugh. Then everything was destroyed with the drink. The demons came, God help us, and children were better off without him. She's better off now by herself with the few pounds coming in and the peace, ease and comfort that's in it and the best thing now would be a nice cup of tea for I must be famished after my travels to the North.

  All I can do with the days left in Limerick is walk around again knowing I'll have to make my way in America and I won't return for a long time. I kneel in St. Joseph's Church by the box where I made my First Confession. I move to the altar rail to look at the place where the bishop patted my cheek at Confirmation and made me a soldier of the True Church. I wander up to Roden Lane where we lived for years and wonder how families can still live there all sharing the one lavatory. The Downes house is a shell and that's a sign there are other places to go besides the slums. Mr. Downes brought his whole family over to England and that's what comes of working and not drinking the wages that should go to wife and children. I could wish I had a father like Mr. Downes but I didn't and there's no use complaining.

  19

  With the months left in Lenggries there is nothing to do most of the day but run the supply room and read books from the base library.

  There are no more laundry trips to Dachau. Rappaport told someone about our visit to the refugee camp and when the story reached the captain we were hauled in and reprimanded for unsoldierly conduct and confined to barracks for two weeks. Rappaport says he's sorry. He didn't mean for some asshole to spill the beans but he felt terrible over the women in the camp. He tells me I shouldn't go around with the likes of Weber. Buck is okay but Weber fell out of a tree. Rappaport says I should concentrate on getting an education, that if I were Jewish that's all I'd be thinking about. How would he know about the times I looked at college students in New York and dreamed I'd be like them. He tells me when I'm discharged I'll have the Korean GI Bill and I can go to college but what use is that when I don't even have the high school diploma? Rappaport says I shouldn't think about why I can't do something. I should think about why I can do it.

  That's the way Rappaport talks and I suppose that's the way it is when you're Jewish.

  I tell him I can't go back to New York and go to high school if I have to earn a living.

  Nights, says Rappaport.

  And how long will it take me to get a high school diploma that way?

  A few years.

  I can't do that. I can't spend years working by day, going to school by night. I'd be dead in a month.

  So what else are you going to do?

  I don't know.

  So? says Rappaport.

  *

  My eyes are red and oozing and Sergeant Burdick sends me on sick call. The army doctor wants to know about my last treatment and when I tell him about the doctor in New York who said I had a disease from New Guinea he says that's it, that's what you got, soldier, go get your head shaved and report back in two weeks. It's not so bad getting your head shaved in the army with the way you have to wear a cap or helmet except that if you go to a bierstube the Lenggries girls might call out, Oh, Irishman's got the clap, and if you try to explain it's not the clap they only pat your cheek and tell you come to them any time clap or no clap. In two weeks there's no improvement in my eyes and the doctor says I have to go back to the military hospital in Munich for observation. He doesn't say he's sorry for making a great mistake, for making me get my head shaved, that it probably wasn't the dandruff at all or anything from New Guinea. He says these are desperate times, Russians massing on the border, our troops have to be healthy, and he's not going to take a chance on this eye disease from New Guinea spreading all over the European Command.

  They send me in a jeep again but the driver now is a Cuban corporal, Vinnie Gandia, who is asthmatic and plays drums in civilian life. It was hard for him being in the army but the music business was slow and he needed some way to send money to the family in Cuba. They were going to kick him out of the army in basic training because his shoulders were so bony he couldn't carry a rifle or a fifty-millimeter machine gun barrel till he saw a picture of a Kotex on a box and a light went on in his head. Jesus. That was it. Slip the Kotex pads under his shirt as a pad on his shoulders and he was ready for anything the army could throw at him. After remembering Rappaport did the same thing I wonder if Kotex knew how they were helping the fighting men of America. All the way to Munich Vinnie guides the steering wheel with his elbows so that he can tap with his drumsticks on every hard surface. He gasps bits of songs, Mister Whatyoucallit whatcha doin' tonight, and bap bap da do bap do do de do bap to go along with the beat and then he's so excited the asthma hits him and he's gasping so hard he has to stop the jeep and pump his inhaler. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel and when he looks up there are tears on his cheeks from the strain of trying to breathe. He tells me I should be grateful all I have is sore eyes. He wishes he had sore eyes instead of asthma. He could still play the drums without stopping for his goddam inhaler. Sore eyes never stopped a drummer. He wouldn't care if he went blind long as he could play the drums. What's the use of living if you can't play your goddam drums? People don't appreciate not having asthma. They sit around moaning and bitching about life and all the time breathing breathing nice and normal and taking it for granted. Give 'em one day of asthma and they'll spend the rest of their lives thanking God with every breath they take, just one day. He's gonna have to invent some kind of gadget you hang on your head so you can breathe when you play, some kind of helmet maybe, and you're in there breathing like a baby in fresh air and you're rapping away on them drums, shit, man, that would be heaven. Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, they don't have asthma, lucky bastards. He says if I can still see when I get out of the army he'll take me to joints on Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. If I can't see he'll still take me. Shit, you don't have to see to hear the sounds, man, and wouldn't that be something, him gasping and me with a white cane or a seeing-eye dog up and down Fifty-second Street. I could sit with this blind guy, Ray Charles, and we could compare notes. That makes Vinnie laugh and brings on the attack again and when he gets his breath back he says asthma is a bitch because if you think of something funny you laugh and that takes your breath away. That pisses him off, too, the way people go around laughing and taking it for granted and never think what it would be like to play drums with asthma, never think what it's like when you can't laugh. People just don't think about things like that.

  The army doctor in Munich says the doctors in New York and Lenggries are full of shit and pours something silvery into my eyes that feels like acid. He tells me stop whining, be a man, you're not the only unit to get this infection, goddammit. I should be thankful I'm not a unit in Korea getting my ass shot off, that half these fat-ass units in Germany should be over there fighting with their paisans in Korea. He tells me look up, look down, look right, look left, and that will get the drops into eve
ry corner of my eyes. And how the hell, he wants to know, how the hell did they let these two eyes into this man's army? Good thing they sent me to Germany. In Korea I'd need a seeing-eye dog to fight off the goddam Chink units. I'm to stay in the hospital a few days and if I keep my eyes open and my mouth shut I'll be an okay unit.

  I don't know why he keeps calling me a unit and I'm beginning to wonder if eye doctors in general are different from other doctors.

  The best part of being in the hospital is that even with the bad eyes I can read all day and into the night. The doctor says I'm supposed to rest the eyes. He tells the medic to pour the silvery liquid into the eyes of this unit every day until further notice but the medic, Apollo, tells me the doctor is full of shit and brings a tube of penicillin ointment which he smears on my eyelids. Apollo says he knows a thing or two because he went to medical school himself but had to drop out because of a broken heart.

  In a day the infection disappears and now I'm afraid the doctor will send me back to Lenggries and that will be the end of my easy days reading Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Herman Melville. Apollo tells me not to worry. If the doctor comes into my ward I should rub my eyes with salt and they'll look like

  Two piss holes in the snow, I say.

  Right.

  I tell him my mother made me rub salt on my eyes a long time ago to make them look sore so that we'd get money for food from a mean man in Limerick. Apollo says, Yeah, but this is now.

  He wants to know about my coffee and cigarette ration which, obviously, I'm not using and he'll be glad to take them off my hands in return for the penicillin ointment and the salt treatment. Otherwise the doctor will come with the silvery stuff and in no time I'll be back in Lenggries counting out sheets and blankets till my discharge in three months. Apollo says Munich is crawling with women and it's easy to get laid but he wants high-class stuff not some whore in a bombed-out building.

  The cause of all my misfortunes is a book by Herman Melville called Pierre, or the Ambiguities which isn't a bit like Moby Dick and so dull it puts me to sleep in the middle of the day and there's the doctor shaking me awake and waving the tube of penicillin left behind by Apollo.

  Wake up, goddammit. Where did you get this? Apollo, right? That unit, Apollo. That goddam dropout from a half-ass medical school in Mississippi.

  He marches to the door and roars down the hall, Apollo, get your ass in here, and there's Apollo's voice, Yes, sir, yes, sir.

  You, goddammit, you. Did you supply this unit with this tube?

  In a way, sir, yes, sir.

  What the hell are you talking about?

  He was suffering, sir, screaming with his eyes.

  How the hell do you scream with your eyes?

  I mean, sir, the pain. He would scream. I would apply the penicillin.

  Who told you, eh? You a goddam doctor?

  No, sir. It's just something I saw them doing in Mississippi.

  Fuck Mississippi, Apollo.

  Yes, sir.

  And you, soldier, what are you reading there with those eyes?

  Pierre, or the Ambiguities, sir.

  Christ. What the hell is it about?

  I don't know, sir. I think it's about this Pierre who's caught between a dark-haired woman and a fair-haired woman. He's trying to write a book in a room in New York and he's so cold the women have to heat up hot bricks for his feet.

  Christ. You're going back to your outfit, soldier. If you can lie on your ass here reading books about units like that you can be an active unit again. And you, Apollo, you're lucky I don't have your ass before a firing squad.

  Yes, sir.

  Dismissed.

  Next day Vinnie Gandia drives me back to Lenggries and he drives without his drumsticks. He says he can't do it anymore, that he nearly got himself killed after he brought me to Munich the last time. You can't drive, drum and handle your asthma, simple as that. You gotta choose, and the drumsticks had to go. If he got into an accident and had damaged hands and couldn't play he'd stick his head in the oven, simple as that. He can't wait to get back to New York and hang out around Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. He makes me promise we'll meet in New York and he'll take me to all the great jazz joints, no charge, no cost, because he knows everyone and they know if he didn't have this goddam asthma he'd be right up there with Krupa and Rich, right up there.

  There's a law that says I can sign up for another nine months in the army and avoid the six-year army reserve requirement. If I re-up they can't call me back any time the United States decides to defend democracy in distant places. I could stay here in the supply room for the nine months doling out sheets, blankets, condoms, drinking beer in the village, going home with an occasional girl, reading books from the base library. I could journey back to Ireland to tell my grandmother my sorrow over walking out in anger. I could take dancing lessons in Munich so that all the girls in Limerick would be queueing up to get out on the floor with me in my sergeant's stripes which I'd surely get.

  But I can't afford another nine months in Germany with the letters coming from Emer telling me how she's counting the days till my return. I never knew she liked me that much and now I like her for liking me because that's the first time in my life I've heard that from a girl. I'm so excited over being liked by Emer I write and tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me, too, and that puts me in heaven and makes me want to pack my duffel bag and jump on a plane to her side.

  I write and tell her how I long for her and how I'm here in Lenggries inhaling the perfume from her letters. I dream of the life we'll have in New York, how I'll go to my job every morning, a warm indoor job where I'll sit at a desk and scribble important decisions. Every night we'll have dinner and go to bed early so that we'll have plenty of time for the excitement.

  Of course I can't mention the excitement part in the letters because Emer is pure and if her mother ever knew I had such dreams the door would be slammed in my face forever and there I'd be, deprived of the company of the only girl ever to say she liked me.

  I can't tell Emer about the way I coveted college girls at the Biltmore Hotel. I can't tell her about the excitement I've had with girls in Lenggries and Munich and the refugee camp. She'd be so shocked she might tell her whole family, especially her big brother Liam, and there would be threats on my life.

  Rappaport says that before you get married it's your obligation to tell the bride about all the things you've done with other girls. Buck says, That's bullshit, the best thing in life is to keep your mouth shut especially with someone you're going to marry. It's like the army, never tell, never volunteer.

  Weber says, I wouldn't tell nobody nothing, and Rappaport tells him go swing from a tree. Weber says when he gets married he'll do one thing for the girl, he'll make sure he doesn't have the clap because that can be passed on and he wouldn't want any kid of his born with the clap.

  Rappaport says, Jesus, the beast has feelings.

  The night before I go stateside there's a party in a Bad Tolz restaurant. Officers and noncoms bring their wives and that means ordinary soldiers cannot bring their German girlfriends. Officers' wives would disapprove knowing that certain ordinary soldiers have wives waiting back home and it's not proper to sit with German girls who might be destroying good American families.

  The captain makes a speech and says I was one of the finest soldiers he ever had under his command. Sergeant Burdick makes a speech and presents me with a scroll honoring me for my tight control of sheets, blankets and protective devices.

  When he says protective devices there is snickering along the table till the officers give the warning glares that tell the men, Cut it out, our wives are here.

  One officer has a wife, Belinda, who is my age. If she didn't have a husband I might have a few beers to give me the courage to talk to her but I don't have to because she leans over and whispers that all the wives think I'm handsome. That makes me blush so hard I have to go out to the lavatory and when I return Belinda is sayi
ng something to the other wives that makes them laugh and when they look at me they laugh even harder and I'm sure they're laughing over what Belinda said to me. That makes me blush again and I wonder if there's anyone you can trust in this world.

  Somehow Buck seems to know what happened. He whispers, The hell with these women, Mac. They shouldn't mock you like that.

  I know he's right but I'm sad that the last memory of Lenggries I'll carry away with me is Belinda and the mocking officers' wives.

  20

  The day of my discharge from the army at Camp Kilmer I met Tom Clifford at the Breffni Bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan. We had corned beef and cabbage slathered with mustard and beer galore to cool our mouths. Tom had found an Irish bed-and-breakfast place in the South Bronx, Logan's Boarding House, and once I dropped off my duffel bag there we could come back down and see Emer after work in her apartment at East Fifty-fourth Street.

  Mr. Logan seemed to be an old man with a bald head and a meaty red face. He might have been old but he had a young wife, Nora from Kilkenny, and a baby a few months old. He told me he was high up in the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus and I should make no mistake about where he stood on religion and morality in general, that none of his twelve boarders could expect a Sunday morning breakfast unless they could show they had attended Mass and, if at all possible, Holy Communion. For those who attended Communion and had at least two witnesses to prove it there would be sausages with the breakfast. Of course every boarder had two other boarders to testify he went to Communion. There was testifying right and left and Mr. Logan was so upset over what he had to pay out in sausages he disguised himself in Nora's hat and coat and shuffled up to the middle of the church to discover not only that the boarders hadn't gone to Communion but that Ned Guinan and Kevin Hayes were the only ones to go to Mass at all. The rest were over on Willis Avenue slipping in the back door of a bar for an illegal drink before noon opening time and when they came streeling back for the breakfast, reeking, Mr. Logan wanted to smell their breath. They told him feck off, this was a free country, and if they had to get their breaths smelled for the sake of a sausage they'd stay content with the watery eggs and milk, the stale bread and watery tea.