'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  There's no use making a statement about my troubles with the teacher who mocked me the first week and praised me the second week, so I write that even though I dread elevators I'll take them from this day out. I know this is what they want to hear and I learned from the army it's easier to tell people in offices what they want to hear because if you don't there's always someone higher up who wants you to fill out a longer form.

  25

  Tom says he's tired of New York, he's going to Detroit where he knows people and he can make good money working on assembly lines in car factories. He tells me I should come with him, forget college, I won't get a degree for years and even if I do I won't make much money. If you're fast on the assembly line you're promoted to foreman and supervisor and before you know it you're in an office telling people what to do, sitting there in your suit and tie with your secretary in a chair opposite tossing her hair, crossing her legs and asking if there's anything you'd like, anything.

  Of course I'd like to go with Tom. I'd like to have money to drive around Detroit in a new car with a blonde beside me, a Protestant with no sense of sin. I could go back to Limerick in bright American clothes except that they'd want to know what kind of work I was doing in America and I could never tell them I stood all day sticking bits and pieces into Buicks rolling past on the assembly line. I'd prefer to tell them I'm a student at New York University even though some would say, University? How in God's name did you ever get into a university, you that left school at fourteen and never set foot inside secondary school? They might say in Limerick I always had the makings of a swelled head, that I was too big for my boots, that I had a great notion of myself, that God put some of us here to hew wood and draw water and who do I think I am anyway after my years in the lanes of Limerick?

  Horace, the black man I nearly died with in the fumigation chamber, tells me if I leave the university I'm a fool. He works to keep his son in college in Canada and that's the only way in America, mon. His wife cleans offices on Broad Street and she's happy because they've got a good boy up there in Canada and they're saving a few dollars for his graduation day in two years. Their son, Timothy, wants to be a child doctor so that he can go back to Jamaica to heal the sick children.

  Horace tells me I should thank God I'm white, a young white man with the GI Bill and good health. Maybe a little trouble there with the eyes but still, better in this country to be white with bad eyes than black with good eyes. If his son ever told him he wanted to quit school to stand on an assembly line sticking cigarette lighters into cars he'd go up to Canada and break his head.

  There are men in the warehouse who laugh at me and want to know why the hell I sit there with Horace during lunch hour. What is there to talk about with a guy whose grandparents just fell out of a tree? If I sit off at the end of the platform reading a book for my classes they ask if I'm some kind of a fairy and they let their hands go limp at the wrists. I'd like to sink my baling hook into their skulls but Eddie Lynch tells them cut it out, leave the kid alone, that they're ignorant slobs whose grandparents were still in the mud and wouldn't know a tree if it was rammed up their asses.

  The men won't answer Eddie but they get back at me when we're unloading trucks by suddenly dropping boxes or crates so that my arms are jerked down and there's pain. If one is operating the forklift he'll try to pin me to the wall and laugh, Whoops, didn't see you there. After lunch they might act friendly and ask how I enjoyed my sandwich and if I say fine they'll say, Shit, man, didn't you taste the pigeon shit Joey spread on your ham?

  There are dark clouds in my head and I want to go after Joey with my baling hook but the ham rises in my throat and I'm throwing up off the platform with the men clutching each other and laughing, the only ones not laughing are Joey at the river end of the platform looking at the sky because everyone knows he's not right in the head and Horace at the other end watching and saying nothing.

  But after all the ham comes up and the retching stops I know what Horace is thinking. He's thinking that if this were his son, Timothy, he'd tell him walk away from this and I know that's what I have to do. I walk to Eddie Lynch and pass him my baling hook, making sure to offer him the handle to avoid the insult of the hook itself. He takes it and shakes hands with me. He says, Okay, kid, good luck, and we'll send your paycheck. Eddie might be a platform boss with no education who worked his way up but he knows the situation, he knows what I'm thinking. I walk to Horace and shake hands with him. I can't say anything because I have a strange feeling of love for him that makes it hard to talk and I wish he could be my father. He doesn't say anything either because he knows there are times like this when words have no meaning. He pats my shoulder and nods and the last sound I hear at Port Warehouses is Eddie Lynch, Get back to work, you bunch of limp pricks.

  On a Saturday morning Tom and I ride the train to the bus station in Manhattan. He's on his way to Detroit and I'm taking my army duffel bag to a boarding house in Washington Heights. Tom gets his ticket, stows his bags in the luggage compartment, steps up on the bus and says, Are you sure? Are you sure you don't want to come to Detroit? You could have a hell of a life.

  I could easily get on that bus. Everything I own is in the duffel bag and I could throw it in there with Tom's bags, get a ticket and be on my way to a great adventure with money and blondes and secretaries offering me everything, anything, but I think of Horace telling me what a fool I'd be and I know he's right and I shake my head at Tom before the bus door closes and he makes his way to his seat, smiling and waving.

  All the way up to Washington Heights on the A train I'm caught between Tom and Horace, Detroit and New York University. Why couldn't I just get a job in a factory, eight to five, an hour for lunch, two weeks vacation every year? I could go home in the evening, take a shower, go out with a girl, read a book when I felt like it. I wouldn't have to worry about professors mocking me one week, praising me the next. I wouldn't have to worry about papers and reading assignments from fat textbooks and exams. I'd be free.

  But if I traveled on trains and buses in Detroit I might see students with their books and I'd wonder what kind of a fool I was to give up New York University for the sake of making money on the assembly line. I know I'd never be content without a college degree and always wondering what I missed.

  Every day I'm learning how ignorant I am especially when I go for a coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at NYU. There are always crowds of students who drop their books on the floor and seem to have nothing to do but talk about their courses. They complain about professors and curse them for giving low grades. They brag about how they used the same term paper for more than one course or they laugh over the ways you can fool a professor with papers copied directly from encyclopedias or paraphrased from books. Most of the classes are so big the professors can only skim the papers and if they have assistants they don't know from shit. That's what the students say and going to college seems to be a great game with them.

  Everyone talks and no one listens and I can see why. I'd like to be an ordinary student talking and complaining but I wouldn't be able to listen to people talking about something called the grade average. They talk about the average because that's what gets you into good graduate schools and that's what the parents fret over.

  When they're not talking about their averages the students argue about the meaning of everything, life, the existence of God, the terrible state of the world, and you never know when someone is going to drop in the one word that gives everyone the deep serious look, existentialism. They might talk about how they want to be doctors and lawyers till one throws up his hands and declares everything is meaningless, that the only person in the world who makes any sense is Albert Camus who says your most important act every day is deciding not to commit suicide.

  If ever I'm to sit with a group like this with my books on the floor and turn gloomy over how empty everything is I'll have to look up existentialism and find out who Albert Camus is. That's what I intend to do till th
e students start talking about the different colleges and I discover I'm in the one everyone looks down on, the School of Education. It's good to be in business school or the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences but if you're in the School of Ed you're at the bottom of the scale. You're going to be a teacher and who wants to be a teacher. Some of the students' mothers are teachers and they don't get paid shit, man, shit. You break your ass for a bunch of kids who don't appreciate you and what do you get? Bubkes, that's what you get.

  I know from the way they say it that bubkes isn't good and that's another word I have to look up along with existentialism. It gives me a dark feeling sitting there in the cafeteria listening to all the bright talk around me knowing I'll never catch up with the other students. There they are with their high school diplomas and their parents working away to send them to NYU to be doctors and lawyers but do their parents know how much time their sons and daughters spend in the cafeteria going on about existentialism and suicide? Here I am, twenty-three with no high school diploma, bad eyes, bad teeth, bad everything and what am I doing here at all. I feel lucky I didn't try to sit with the clever suicidal students. If they ever found out I wanted to be a teacher I'd be the laughingstock of the group. I should probably sit in some other part of the cafeteria with future teachers from the School of Education though that would show the world I'm with the losers who couldn't get into the good colleges.

  The only thing to do is finish my coffee and grilled cheese sandwich and go to the library to look up existentialism and find out what makes Camus so sad, just in case.

  26

  My new landlady is Mrs. Agnes Klein and she shows me a room for twelve dollars a week. It's a real room, not like the end of a hallway Mrs. Austin rented me on Sixty-eighth Street. There's a bed, a desk, a chair, a small couch in the corner by the window where my brother Michael can sleep when he comes from Ireland in a few months.

  I'm hardly in the door when Mrs. Klein is telling me her history. She tells me I'm not to jump to any conclusions. Her name might be Klein but that was her husband who was Jewish. Her own name is Canty and I should know very well you can't get more Irish than that and if I have no place to go at Christmas I can spend it with her and her son, Michael, what's left of him. Her husband, Eddie, was the cause of all her troubles. Just before the war he ran off to Germany with their four-year-old son, Michael, because his mother was dying and he expected to inherit her fortune. Of course they were rounded up, the whole tribe of Kleins, mother and all, and ended up in a camp. No use telling the damn Nazis Michael was an American citizen born in Washington Heights. The husband was never seen again, but Michael survived and, at the end of the war, the poor kid was able to tell the Americans who he was. She tells me what's left of him is in a little room down the hall. She says I should come to her kitchen Christmas Day about two in the afternoon and have a little drink before dinner. There won't be turkey. She'd like to cook European, if I don't mind. She tells me don't say yes unless I mean it, that I don't have to come for Christmas dinner if I have some place to go, some Irish girl making mashed potatoes. Don't worry about her. It wouldn't be her first Christmas with no one but Michael at the end of the hall, what's left of him.

  On Christmas Day there are strange smells from the kitchen and there's Mrs. Klein pushing things around in a frying pan. Pierogi, she says, Polish. Michael loves them. Have a vodka with a little orange juice. Good for you this time of year with the flu coming on.

  We sit in her living room with our drinks, and she talks about her husband. She says we wouldn't be sitting around drinking vodka and cooking up the old pierogi if he were here. For him Christmas was business as usual.

  She leans over to adjust a light and her wig falls off and the vodka in me makes me laugh out loud at the sight of her skull with little tufts of brown hair. Go ahead, she says. Some day your mother's wig will fall off and we'll see if you laugh then. And she claps the wig back on her head.

  I tell her my mother has a fine head of hair and she says, No wonder. Your mother never had a lunatic husband that walked into the arms of the Nazis, for Christ's sakes. If it wasn't for him Michael what's left of him would be out of that bed there, having a vodka with his poor mouth watering for his pierogi. Oh, my God, the pierogi.

  She jumps from her chair and runs to the kitchen. Well, they're a little burned, but that only makes them nice and crisp. My philosophy is, do you want to know my philosophy? is whatever goes against you in the kitchen you can turn it to your advantage. We might as well have another vodka while I cook the sauerkraut and kielbasa.

  She pours the drinks and barks at me when I ask her what kielbasa is. She says she can't believe the ignorance in the world. Two years in the U.S. Army and you don't know from kielbasa? No wonder the Communists are taking over. It's Polish, for Christ's sakes, sausage, and you should watch me fry it in case you marry someone who's not Irish, a nice girl who might demand her kielbasa.

  We stay in the kitchen with another vodka while the kielbasa sizzles and the sauerkraut stews with a vinegar smell. Mrs. Klein puts three plates on a tray and pours a glass of Manischewitz for Michael what's left of him. He loves it, she says, loves the Manischewitz with the pierogi and kielbasa.

  I follow her through her bedroom into a small dark room where Michael, what's left of him, sits up in the bed, staring ahead. We bring in chairs and use his bed as a table. Mrs. Klein turns on the radio and we listen to oompah oompah accordion music. That's his favorite music, she says. Anything European. He gets nostalgic, you know, nostalgic for Europe, for Christ's sakes. Don't you, Michael? Don't you? I'm talking to you. Merry Christmas, Michael, merry goddam Christmas. She tears off her wig and throws it into a corner. No more pretending, Michael. I've had it. Talk to me or next year I cook American. Next year the turkey, Michael, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the works, Michael.

  He stares straight ahead and the kielbasa grease glistens around his plate. His mother fiddles with the radio till she finds Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."

  Better get used to it, Michael. Next year Bing and the stuffing. To hell with kielbasa.

  She pushes her plate aside on the bed and falls asleep with her head by Michael's elbow. I wait awhile, take my dinner to the kitchen, dump it into the garbage, return to my room and fall into my own bed.

  Timmy Coin works at Merchants Refrigerating Company and lives at Mary O'Brien's boarding house at 720 West 180 Street around the corner from where I live. He tells me drop in any time for a cup of tea, Mary is that friendly.

  It's not a real boarding house, it's a big apartment, and there are four boarders each paying eighteen dollars a week. They get a decent breakfast any time they like not like Logan's in the Bronx where we had to go to Mass or be in a state of grace. Mary herself would rather sit in her kitchen on a Sunday morning, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and smiling over the boarders and their stories of how they got these desperate hangovers that make them swear never again. She tells me I can always move in there if one of the boys leaves to go back to Ireland. They're always going back, she says. They think they can get a few dollars together and settle down on the old farm with some girl from the village but what do you do night after night with nothing but the wife opposite you knitting by the light of the fire and you thinking of the lights of New York, the dance halls on the East Side and the lovely cozy bars on Third Avenue.

  I'd like to move into Mary O'Brien's to get away from Mrs. Agnes Klein who seems to stand forever on the other side of her door waiting for me to turn the key in the lock so that she can shove a vodka and orange juice into my hand. It doesn't matter to her that I have to read or write papers for my classes at NYU. It doesn't matter that I'm worn out from the midnight shift on the piers or warehouse platforms. She wants to tell me the story of her life, how Eddie charmed her ass off better than any Irishman and watch out for the Jewish girls, Frank, they can be very charming, too, and very what-do-youcall-it? very sensual and before you know it you're stepping on the gla
ss.

  Stepping on the glass?

  That's right, Frank. Do you mind if I call you Frank? They won't marry you without you stepping on the wineglass, smashing it. Then they want you to convert so the kids will be Jewish and inherit everything. But I wouldn't. I was going to but my mother said if I ever turned Jewish she'd throw herself off the George Washington Bridge and between you and me I didn't give a shit if she jumped and bounced off a passing tugboat. She's not the one that stopped me from turning Jewish. I kept the faith for my dad, decent man, little problem with the drink, but what could you expect with a name like Canty that's all over the County Kerry which I expect to see some day if God grants me health. They say the County Kerry is so green and pretty and I never see green. I see nothing but this apartment and the supermarket, nothing but this apartment and Michael what's left of him at the end of the hall. My father said it would break his heart if I became Jewish, not that he had anything against them, poor suffering people, but hadn't we suffered, too, and was I going to turn my back on generations of people getting hanged and burned right and left? He came to the wedding but not my mother. She said what I was doing was putting Christ back up there suffering on the cross, wounds an' all. She said people in Ireland starved to death before they'd take the Protestant soup and what would they say about my behavior? Eddie held me in his arms and told me he had trouble with his family, too, told me when you love someone you can tell the whole world kiss your ass, and look what happened to Eddie, wound up in a goddam oven, God forgive the language.