'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  She lives in a house with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a pink bird on the little front lawn. We stand at the small iron gate and I'm wondering if I should kiss her and get her into such a state we might go behind a tree for the excitement but there's a roar from inside, Goddammit, Dolores, get your ass in here, hell of a nerve you have coming home at this goddam hour and tell that goddam shithead run for his life, and she says, Oh, and runs inside.

  By the time I get back to Mary O'Brien's everyone is up and having bacon and eggs followed by rum and slices of pineapple in heavy syrup. Mary puffs on her cigarette and gives me the knowing smile.

  You look like you had a good time last night.

  32

  When the day workers at the bank leave their offices Bridey Stokes comes in with her mop and bucket to clean three floors. She pulls a large canvas bag behind her, fills it with trash from the wastepaper baskets and drags it to the freight elevator to empty it somewhere in the basement. Andy Peters tells her she should have extra canvas bags so that she won't have to travel up and down so much and she says the bank won't supply even one more canvas bag they're that cheap. She could buy them herself but she's working nights to keep her son, Patrick, at Fordham University and not to be supplying the Manufacturer's Trust Company with canvas bags. Every night on each floor she fills the bag twice and that means six trips to the basement. Andy tries to explain to her that if she had six canvas bags she could fill the elevator once and that would save so much time and energy she could finish earlier and go home to Patrick and her husband.

  Husband? He drank himself to death ten years ago.

  I'm sorry to hear that, says Andy.

  I'm not a bit sorry. He was too handy with his fists and I bear the marks to this day. Patrick, too. He'd think nothing of knocking little Patrick around the house till the little fella couldn't even cry anymore and it was so bad one night I took him from the house and begged the man in the subway booth to let us in and I asked a cop where was Catholic Charities and they took care of us and got me this job and I'm grateful even if there's only one canvas bag.

  Andy tells her she doesn't have to be a slave.

  I'm not a slave. I'm up in the world since I got away from that lunatic. God forgive me but I didn't even go to his funeral.

  She lets out a sigh and leans on the handle of the mop which comes up to her chin she's that small. She has large brown eyes and no lips and when she tries to smile there's nothing to smile with. She's so thin that when Andy and I go out to the coffee shop we bring her a cheeseburger with french fries and a milk shake to see if we could put some fat on her bones till we realize she's not touching the food but taking it home to Patrick who's studying accounting at Fordham.

  Then one night we find her crying and stuffing the freight elevator with six bulging canvas bags. There's room for us with the bags and we ride down with her wondering if the bank suddenly turned generous and lavished canvas bags on her.

  No. 'Tis my Patrick. One more year and he'd be graduated from Fordham but he left me a note to say he's in love with a girl from Pittsburgh and they're gone off to start a new life in California and I said to myself if that's the way I'm going to be treated I'm not going to kill myself with the one canvas bag anymore and I went up and down the streets of Manhattan till I found a place on Canal Street that sells them, a Chinese place. You'd think in a city like this you wouldn't have trouble finding canvas bags and I don't know what I'd do without the Chinese.

  She cries harder and pulls the sleeve of her sweater across her eyes. Andy says, All right, Mrs. Stokes.

  Bridey, she says. I'm Bridey now.

  All right, Bridey. We'll go across the street and you can eat something for your strength.

  Ah, no. I have no appetite.

  Take off the apron, Bridey. We're going across the street.

  She tells us in the coffee shop she doesn't even want to be Bridey anymore. She's Brigid. Bridey is a name for skivvies and Brigid has the bit of dignity. No, she could never manage a cheeseburger but she eats it and all the french fries slathered with ketchup and tells us her heart is broken while she sucks her milk shake through a straw. Andy wants her to explain why she suddenly decided to get the canvas bags. She doesn't know. There was something about Patrick leaving like that and the memories of the way her husband beat her that opened a little door in her head and that's all she can say about it. The days of the one bag are over. Andy says there's no rhyme nor reason to it. She agrees but she doesn't care anymore. She got off the Queen Mary over twenty years ago, a healthy girl excited over America, and look at her now, a scarecrow. Well, her scarecrow days are over, too, and she'd love a piece of apple pie if they have it. Andy says he studies rhetoric, logic, philosophy but this is beyond him and she says they're very slow with the apple pie.

  *

  There are books to be read, term papers written, but I'm so obsessed with Mike Small I sit at the library window and watch her movements along Washington Square between the main university building and the Newman Club where she goes between classes even though she's not a Catholic. When she's with Bob the football player my heart sinks and that song runs through my head, "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now," though I know very well who's kissing her now, Mr. Football Player himself, two hundred pounds of him bending to plant his lips on her and even though I know I'd like him if there were no Mike Small in the world, he's that decent and good-humored, I still want to find the back of a comic book where Charles Atlas promises to help me build muscles that will let me kick sand in Bob's face the first time I meet him at a beach.

  When summer comes he puts on his ROTC uniform and travels to North Carolina for training and Mike Small and I are free to meet and roam Greenwich Village, eating at Monte's on MacDougal Street, drinking beer at the White Horse or the San Remo. We ride the Staten Island Ferry and it's lovely to stand on deck, hand in hand, to watch the Manhattan skyline recede and loom even though I can't stop thinking again of the ones who were sent back with the bad eyes and the bad lungs and wondering what it was like for them in towns and villages all over Europe once they had a glimpse of New York, the tall towers over the water and the way the lights twinkle at dusk with tugboats hooting and ships blaring in the Narrows. Did they see and hear all this through the windows at Ellis Island? Did the memory bring pain and did they ever again try to slip into this country through a place where there weren't men in uniform rolling back their eyelids and tapping at their chests?

  When Mike Small says, What are you thinking about? I don't know what to say for fear she might think I'm peculiar the way I wonder about the ones who were sent back. If my mother or father had been sent back I wouldn't be on this deck with the lights of Manhattan a sparkling dream before me.

  Besides, it's only Americans who ask questions like that, What are you thinking about? or What do you do? In all my years in Ireland no one ever asked me such questions and if I weren't madly in love with Mike Small I'd tell her mind her own business about what I'm thinking or what I do for a living.

  I don't want to tell Mike Small too much about my life because of the shame and I don't think she'd understand especially when she grew up in a small American town where everyone had everything. But when she starts talking about her days in Rhode Island with her grandmother there are clouds. She talks about swimming in the summer, ice skating in the winter, hay rides, trips to Boston, dates, proms, editing her high school yearbook, and her life sounds like a Hollywood movie till she goes back to the time her father and mother separated and left her with his mother in Tiverton. She talks about how much she missed her mother and how she cried herself to sleep for months and now she cries again. This makes me wonder if ever I had been sent to live in comfort with a relation would I have missed my family? It's hard to think I would have missed the same tea and bread every day, the collapsed bed swarming with fleas, a lavatory shared by all the families in the lane. No, I wouldn't have missed that but I would have missed the way it was with my mother and brothers, the t
alk around the table and the nights around the fire when we saw worlds in the flames, little caves and volcanoes and all kinds of shapes and images. I would have missed that even if I lived with a rich grandmother and I felt sorry for Mike Small who had no brothers and sisters and no fire to sit at.

  She tells me how excited she was the day she graduated from elementary school, how her father was to travel all the way up from New York for the party but called at the last minute to say he had to go to a picnic for tugboat men and the memory of that brings the tears again. That day on the phone her grandmother blasted her father, told him he was a no-good skirt-chasing bastard and not to set foot in Tiverton again. At least her grandmother was there. She was there for everything, always. She wasn't much for the kissing and hugging and tucking in but she kept the house clean, the clothes laundered, the lunch box well stuffed every day for school.

  Mike wipes her tears and says you can't have everything and even if I say nothing I wonder why you can't have everything or at least give everything. Why can't you clean the house, launder the clothes, stuff the lunch box and still kiss, hug and tuck in? I can't say this to Mike because she admires her grandmother for being tough and I'd prefer to hear that Grandma might have hugged, kissed and tucked in.

  With Bob away at ROTC camp Mike invites me to visit her family. She lives on Riverside Drive near Columbia University with her father, Allen, and her new stepmother, Stella. Her father is a tugboat captain for the Dalzell Towing Company in New York Harbor. Her stepmother is pregnant. Her grandmother, Zoe, is here from Rhode Island for a while till Mike settles in and gets used to New York.

  Mike tells me her father likes to be called Captain and when I say, Hello, Captain, he growls till the phlegm rattles in his throat and squeezes my hand till the knuckles crack so that I'll know how manly he is. Stella says, Hi, honey, and kisses my cheek. She tells me she's Irish, too, and it's nice to see Alberta going out with Irish boys. Even she says boys and she's Irish. Grandmother lies on the living room couch with her hands joined under her head and when Mike introduces me Zoe's hairline twitches forward and she says, Howya doin'?

  It slips out of my mouth, Nice easy life you have there on the couch.

  She glares at me and I know I've said the wrong thing and it's awkward when Mike and Stella go to another room to look at a dress and I'm left standing in the middle of the living room with the Captain smoking a cigarette and reading the Daily News. No one speaks to me and I'm wondering how Mike Small can go off and leave me standing here with the father and the grandmother ignoring me. I never know what to say to people at times like this. Should I say, How's the tugboat business? or should I tell the grandmother she did a wonderful job raising Mike.

  My mother in Limerick would never leave anyone standing in the middle of the room like this. She'd say, Sit down there and we'll have a nice cup of tea, because in the lanes of Limerick it's a bad thing to ignore anyone and even worse to forget the cup of tea.

  It's strange that a man with a good job like the Captain and his mother on the couch wouldn't bother to ask me if I had a mouth in my head or if I'd like to sit down. I don't know how Mike can leave me standing like this though I know if this ever happened to her she'd simply sit down and make everyone feel cheerful the way my brother Malachy does.

  What would happen if I sat down? Would they say, Oh, you're feeling pretty relaxed sitting down without being asked? Or would they say nothing and wait till I leave to talk behind my back?

  They'll talk behind my back anyway and tell each other Bob is a much nicer boy and looks handsome in his ROTC uniform though they might have said as much if they'd seen me in my summer khakis with my corporal's stripes. I doubt it. They probably prefer him with his high school diploma and his clear healthy eyes and his bright future and his cheerful nature all done up in his officer's uniform.

  And I know from the history books the Irish were never liked up there in New England, that there were signs everywhere saying, No Irish Need Apply.

  Well, I don't want to beg anyone for anything and I'm ready to turn on my heel and walk out when Mike bounces down the hall all blonde and smiling and ready for a walk and dinner in the Village. I'd like to tell her I don't want to have anything to do with people who leave you standing in the middle of the floor and hang out signs rejecting the Irish but she's so bright and blue-eyed and cheerful, so clean and American, I think if she told me stand there forever I'd be like a dog and wag my tail and do it.

  Then on the way down in the elevator she tells me I said the wrong thing to Grandma, that Grandma is sixty-five and works very hard cooking and keeping the house clean and doesn't like people's smartass remarks about taking a few minutes on the couch.

  What I want to say is this, Oh, fuck your grandma and her cooking and cleaning. She has plenty of food and drink and clothes and furniture and hot and cold running water and no shortage of money and what the bloody hell is she complaining about? There are women all over the world raising large families and not whining and there's your grandmother lying on her arse complaining she has to take care of an apartment and a few people. Fuck your grandma again.

  That is what I want to say except that I have to swallow my words in case Mike Small might be offended and never see me again and it's very hard going through life not saying what comes to your tongue. It's hard being with a beautiful girl like her because she'd never have any trouble getting someone else and I'd probably have to find a girl not as good-looking who didn't mind my bad eyes and my lack of a high school diploma though a girl not as good-looking might offer me a chair and a cup of tea and I wouldn't have to swallow my words all the time. Andy Peters is always telling me life is easier with plain-looking girls, especially ones with small tits or no tits, because they're always grateful for the least bit of attention and one might even love me for myself, as they say in the movies. I can't even think of Mike Small having tits the way she's reserving the whole body for the wedding night and the honeymoon and it gives me a pain to picture Bob the football player having the excitement with her on the wedding night.

  The platform boss from the Baker and Williams Warehouse sees me on the subway train and tells me I can get work during the summer with men going on vacation. He lets me work eight to noon and when I'm finished on the second day I walk over to Port Warehouses to see if I can have a sandwich with Horace. I often think he's the father I'd like to have even if he's black and I'm white. If ever I said that to anyone at the warehouse I'd be laughed off the platform. He must know himself the way they talk about black people and he surely hears the word nigger floating through the air. When I worked on the platform with him I wondered how he could keep his fists to himself. Instead he'd put his head down and have a little smile and I thought he might be a bit deaf or simple in his mind but because I knew he wasn't deaf and the way he talked about his son getting an education in Canada showed that if he'd had a chance he would have been in a university himself.

  He's coming out of a diner on Laight Street and when he sees me he smiles, Oh, mon. I must have known you were coming. I got a hero sandwich a mile long and beer. We eat on the pier, okay?

  I'm ready to walk back down Laight Street to the pier but he steers me away. He doesn't want the men at the warehouse to see us. They'd ride him all day. They'd laugh and ask Horace when he knew my mother. That makes me want to defy them and walk Laight Street even more. No, mon, he says. Save your emotions for bigger things.

  This is a big thing, Horace.

  It's nothing, mon. It's ignorance.

  We should fight back.

  No, son.

  God, he's calling me son.

  No, son. I don't have time for fighting back. I won't step on their ground. I pick my own fights. I have a son in college. I have a wife who is ailing and still cleaning offices at night on Broad Street. Eat your sandwich, mon.

  It's ham and cheese slathered with mustard and we wash it down with a quart of Rheingold passing the bottle back and forth, and I have a sudden thought
and a feeling that I'll never forget this hour on the pier with Horace with seagulls circling for what might come and ships strung along the Hudson waiting for tugboats to dock them or push them out to the Narrows, traffic rushing behind us and over our heads on the West Side Highway, a radio in a pier office with Vaughn Monroe singing "Buttons and Bows," Horace offering me another chunk of sandwich telling me I could use a few pounds on my bones and his surprised look when I nearly drop the sandwich, nearly drop it because of the weakness in my heart and the way tears are dropping on the sandwich and I don't know why, can't explain it to Horace or myself with the power of this sadness that tells me this won't come again, this sandwich, this beer on the pier with Horace that makes me feel so happy all I can do is weep with the sadness in it and I feel so foolish I'd like to rest my head on his shoulder and he knows that because he moves closer, puts his arm around me as if I were his own son, the two of us black or white or nothing, and it doesn't matter because there's nothing to do but put down the sandwich where a seagull swoops in and gobbles it and we laugh, Horace and I, and he puts in my hand the whitest handkerchief I've ever seen and when I offer it back he shakes his head, keep it, and I tell myself I'll keep that handkerchief till my last breath.