'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  I don't know.

  I despair sometimes and you know why?

  Why?

  I despair I might push too far with Plato and John and find them wanting. I might come to a nowhere. You know?

  No.

  You ever read Plato?

  I did.

  St. John?

  They read the Gospels all the time at Mass.

  Not the same. You have to sit down and read St. John, hold him in your hands. No other way. John is an encyclopedia. He changed my life. Promise me you'll read John and not that goddam stuff you brought home in the bag. Sorry, there's that ego popping up again.

  He cackles into the mirror, pats himself where his belly should be, and rocks from book to book reading verses from John and paragraphs from Plato, squeaks with pleasure, Eek, eek, oh the Greek and the Jew, the Greek and the Jew.

  He talks to me again. I take it back, he says. There's no nowhere with these guys. No nowhere. The form, the cave, the shadow, the cross. Jesus, I need a banana. He takes half a banana from behind the mirror and after mumbling something over it eats it. He crosses his legs under him, rests the backs of his hands on his knees, lotus position. When I cross behind him to drop my bean can into the garbage I can see he's staring at the tip of his nose. When I tell him good night he doesn't respond and I know I'm not in his world anymore, that I might as well go to bed and read. I'll read Hesse to keep the mood.

  41

  Alberta talks about marriage. She'd like to settle down, have a husband, go to antique shops on weekends, make dinner, get a decent apartment some day, be a mother.

  But I'm not ready yet. I see Malachy and Michael having their grand times uptown. I see the Clancy Brothers singing in the back room of the White Horse Tavern, acting in plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre, recording their songs, being discovered and moving on to glamorous clubs where beautiful women invite them to parties. I see the Beats in cafes all over the Village reading their work with jazz musicians in the background. They're all free and I'm not.

  They drink. They smoke pot. The women are easy.

  Alberta follows her grandmother's Rhode Island routines. Every Saturday you make coffee, smoke a cigarette, put your hair up in pink curlers, go to the supermarket, get a big order, stock the refrigerator, take soiled things to the Laundromat and wait till they're cleaned and ready to be folded, go to the dry cleaner with garments which look clean to me and when I object she simply says, What would you know about dry cleaning? clean the house whether it needs it or not, have a drink, make a big dinner, go to a movie.

  Sunday morning you sleep late, have a big lunch, read the paper, look at antiques on Atlantic Avenue, come home, prepare lessons for the week, correct papers, make a big dinner, have a drink, correct more papers, have tea, smoke a cigarette, go to bed.

  She works harder at teaching than I do, prepares her lessons carefully, corrects papers conscientiously. Her students are more academic than mine and she can encourage them to talk about literature. If I mention books, poetry, plays my students groan and whine for the lavatory pass.

  The supermarket depresses me because I don't want a big dinner every night. It exhausts me. I want to roam the city, drink coffee in cafes and beer in bars. I don't want to face the Zoe routine every weekend the rest of my life.

  Alberta tells me things have to be taken care of, that I have to grow up and settle down or I'll be like my father, a mad wanderer drinking myself to death.

  This leads to an argument where I tell her I know my father drank too much and abandoned us but he's my father, not hers, and she'll never understand how it was when he didn't drink, mornings I had with him by the fire, listening to his talk about Ireland's noble past and Ireland's great sufferings. She never had mornings like that with her father who left her with Zoe when she was seven and I wonder how she could ever get over that. How could she ever forgive her mother and father for dumping her on the grandmother?

  The argument is so bad I walk out and live in my Village flat, ready for the wild bohemian life. Then I hear she has found someone else and suddenly I want her, I'm desperate, I'm mad for her. I can think only of her virtues, her beauty and energy and the sweetness of her weekend routines. If she takes me back I'll be the perfect husband. I'll take coupons to the supermarket, wash the dishes, vacuum the whole apartment every day of the week, chop vegetables for the big dinners every night. I'll wear a tie, polish my shoes, turn Protestant.

  Anything.

  I don't care anymore about the wild life of Malachy and Michael uptown, the scruffy Beats in the Village with their useless lives. I want Alberta, crisp and bright and womanly, all warm and secure. We'll be married, oh we will, and we'll grow old together.

  She agrees to meet me in Louis' Bar near Sheridan Square and when she walks in the door she's more beautiful than ever. The bartenders stop pouring to look at her. Necks are craned. She's wearing the rich blue coat with a light gray fur collar her father bought her as a peace offering after he punched her in the mouth years ago. There's a silken lavender scarf over the collar and I know I'll never look at that color again without thinking of this moment, that scarf. I know she's going to sit on the stool beside me and tell me it was all a mistake, that we were made for each other and I should come with her now to her apartment, she'll make dinner and we'll live happily ever after.

  Yes, she'll have a martini and no she won't go with me to my apartment and no I won't go with her to her apartment because it's over. She's had enough of me and my brothers, the uptown scene and the Village scene, and she wants to get on with her life. It's hard enough teaching every day without the strain of putting up with me and my whining about how I want to do this that and the other thing, how I want to be everything but responsible. Too much complaining, she says. Time to grow up. She tells me I'm twenty-eight years old but I act like a kid and if I want to waste my life in bars like my brothers it's my business but she'll have no part of it.

  The more she talks the angrier she grows. She won't let me hold her hand or even kiss her on the cheek and, no, she won't have another martini.

  How can she talk to me like this with my heart breaking there on the bar stool? She doesn't care that I was the first man in her life, the first ever in the bed, the one a woman never forgets. All that doesn't matter because she's found someone who is mature, who loves her, who will do anything for her.

  I'll do anything for you.

  She says it's too late. You had your chance.

  My heart is banging away, and there's a great pain in my chest and all the dark clouds in the world are gathered in my head. I want to cry into my beer there in Louis' Bar but there would be talk, oh, yeah, another lovers' quarrel and we'd be asked to leave or at least I would. I'm sure they'd like Alberta to stay to adorn the place. I don't want to be out on the street with all those happy couples strolling to dinners and movies and a little snack later before they climb into the bed all naked and, Jesus, is this her plan for tonight when I'm alone in my cold-water flat and no one in the world to talk to but Bill Galetly?

  I appeal to her. I invoke my miserable childhood, brutal schoolmasters, the tyranny of the Church, my father who chose the bottle over the babies, my defeated mother moaning by the fire, my eyes blazing red, my teeth crumbling in my head, the squalor of my flat, Bill Galetly tormenting me with people in Platonic caves and the Gospel According to St. John, my hard days at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, older teachers telling me whip the little bastards into shape, the younger ones declaring our students are real people and it's up to us to motivate them.

  I plead with her to have another martini. It might soften her so much she'll come to my apartment where I'll tell Bill, Take a walk, Bill, we need privacy. We want to sit in the candlelight and plan a future of Saturday shopping, vacuuming, cleaning, Sunday antique hunting, lesson planning and hours romping in the bed.

  No, no, she won't have another martini. She's meeting her new man and she has to go.

  Oh, God, no. It's a kn
ife in my heart.

  Stop the whining. I've heard enough about you and your miserable childhood. You're not the only one. I was dumped on my grandmother when I was seven. Do I complain? I just get on with it.

  But you had hot and cold running water, thick towels, soap, sheets on the bed, two clear blue eyes and fine teeth and your grandmother packed your little lunch box to capacity every day.

  She climbs from the bar stool, lets me help her with her coat, drapes the lavender scarf around her neck. She has to go.

  Oh, Christ. I could easily whimper like a kicked dog. My belly is cold and there's nothing in the world but dark clouds with Alberta in the middle all blonde, blue-eyed, lavender-scarved, ready to leave me forever for her new man and it's worse than having doors shut in my face, worse than dying itself.

  Then she kisses my cheek. Good night, she says. She doesn't say good-bye. Does that mean she's leaving a door open? Surely if she's finished with me forever she should be saying good-bye.

  It doesn't matter. She's gone. Out the door. Up the steps with every man in the bar looking at her. It's the end of the world. I might as well be dead. I might as well jump into the Hudson River and let it carry my corpse past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty across the Atlantic and up the River Shannon where at least I'd be among my own people and not rejected by Rhode Island Protestants.

  The bartender is about fifty and I'd like to ask him if he's ever suffered the way I'm suffering now and what did he do about it? Is there a cure? He might even be able to tell me what it means when a woman who's leaving you forever says good night instead of good-bye.

  But this man has a great bald head and massive black eyebrows and I have a feeling he has his own troubles and there's nothing for it but to get off the bar stool and leave. I could go uptown and join Malachy and Michael in their exciting lives but I walk home to Downing Street instead hoping happy passing couples won't hear the escaping whimpers of a man whose life is over.

  Bill Galetly is there with his candles, his Plato, his Gospel According to St. John and I wish I could have my own place to myself for a night of whimpering into my pillow but he's sitting on the floor staring at himself in the mirror and pinching whatever flesh he can find on his belly. He looks up and tells me I look heavy-laden.

  What do you mean?

  The burden of the ego. You're sagging. Remember, the Kingdom of God is within you.

  I don't want God or His Kingdom. I want Alberta. She gave me up. I'm going to bed.

  Bad time to go to bed. To lie down is to lie down.

  It irritates me to have to listen to the obvious and I tell him, Of course it is. What are you talking about?

  To lie down is to succumb to gravity at a time when you could spiral to the perfect form.

  I don't care. I'm lying down.

  Okay. Okay.

  I'm in the bed a few minutes when he sits on the edge and tells me of the madness and emptiness of the advertising business. Plenty of money and everyone wretched with stomach ulcers. All ego. No purity. He tells me I'm a teacher and I could save many lives if I studied Plato and St. John but first I have to save my own life.

  I'm not in the mood.

  Not in the mood to save your own life?

  No, I don't care.

  Yeah, yeah, that's what happens when you're rejected. You take it personally.

  Of course I take it personally. How else would I take it?

  Look at her side of the story. She's not rejecting you, she's accepting herself.

  He's going around in circles and the Alberta pain is so great I have to get away. I tell him I'm going out.

  Oh, you don't have to go out. Sit on the floor with the candle behind. Look at the wall. Shadows. Are you hungry?

  No.

  Wait, and he brings a banana from the kitchen. Have this. The banana is good for you.

  I don't want a banana.

  It makes you peaceful. All that potassium.

  I don't want a banana.

  You only think you don't want a banana. Listen to your body.

  He follows me into the hallway preaching bananas. He's naked but he follows me down the stairs, three flights, along the hallway that leads to the front door. He keeps talking about bananas, the ego and Socrates happy under a tree in Athens and when we reach the front door he stands on the top step waving the banana while children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk whoop and scream and point and women with bosoms and elbows resting on windowsill pillows scream at him in Italian.

  Malachy isn't at his bar. He's at home and happy with his wife, Linda, planning the life of the baby to come. Michael is off for the night. There are women at the bar and the tables but they're with men. The bartender says, Oh, you're Malachy's brother, and won't let me pay for my drinks. He introduces me to couples at the bar, This is Malachy's brother.

  Really? We didn't know he had another brother. Oh, yeah, we know your brother Michael. And your name is?

  Frank.

  And what do you do?

  I'm a teacher.

  Really? You're not in the bar business?

  They laugh. And when do you think you'll go into the bar business?

  When my brothers become teachers.

  That's what I say but what flows through my head is different. I want to tell them they're condescending twits, that I knew their likes in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, that they probably flicked their cigarette ash on the floor for me to clean up and looked through me the way you look through people who clean up. I'd like to tell them to kiss my arse and if I had a few more drinks I would but I know that inside I'm still plucking at my forelock and shuffling my feet in the presence of superior people, that they'd laugh at anything I said to them because they know what I am inside and if they don't know they don't care. If I fell dead off the bar stool they'd move to a table to avoid the unpleasantness and tell the world later how they ran into a drunken Irish schoolteacher.

  None of this matters anyway. Alberta is surely in a romantic little Italian restaurant with her new man, the two of them smiling at each other across the glow of the light from the candle stuck in a Chianti bottle. He's telling her what's good on the menu and after they order their dinner they talk about what they'll do tomorrow, maybe tonight, and if I think about that my bladder will move near my eye.

  Malachy's bar is at Sixty-third Street and Third Avenue, five blocks from my first furnished room at Sixty-eighth Street. Instead of going home straightway I can sit on Mrs. Austin's steps and look back over the contents of my ten years in New York, the trouble I had trying to see Hamlet at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse with my lemon meringue pie and my bottle of ginger ale.

  Mrs. Austin's house is gone. There's a large new building, the New York Foundling Hospital, and it brings me to tears the way they're tearing down my early days in the city. At least the cinema is here and it must be the night of beer because I have to press my whole body against the cinema wall with arms stretched out till a head calls from a police car, Hey, buddy, what's going on?

  What if I told him about Hamlet and the pie and Mrs. Austin and the night of glug and how her house is gone and my furnished room with it and how the woman in my life is with another man and is it against the law, Officer, to kiss a cinema of sad and happy memories when it's the only comfort you have left, is it, Officer?

  Of course I'm not going to say this to a New York cop or anyone else. I just tell him, It's all right, Officer, and he tells me move on, the favorite words of the police department.

  I move on and all along Third Avenue music pours through the doors of Irish pubs with the smells of beer and whiskey and snatches of talk and laughter.

  Good man yourself, Sean.

  Arrah, Jasus, we might as well be drunk as the way we are.

  God above, I can't wait to get back to Cavan for the decent pint that's in it.

  Do you think you'll ever go back, Kevin?

  I will when they build a bridge.

  They laugh and Mickey Carton on the j
ukebox pumps his accordion with Ruthie Morrissey's voice sailing over all the noise of the night, It's my old Irish home, far across the foam, and I'm tempted to turn in, sit up on a stool and tell the bartender, Give us an oul' drop of the craythur there, Brian, or make it two because bird never flew on one wing, good lad yourself. And wouldn't that be better than sitting on Mrs. Austin's steps or kissing the walls of the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse and wouldn't I be among my own, wouldn't I?

  My own. The Irish.

  I could drink Irish, eat Irish, dance Irish, read Irish. My mother often warned us, Marry your own, and now old-timers tell me, Stick with your own. If I listened to them I wouldn't be rejected by a Rhode Island Episcopalian who once said, What would you do with yourself if you weren't Irish? And when she said that I would have walked out except that we were halfway through the dinner she'd cooked, stuffed chicken with a bowl of pink new potatoes tossed in salt butter and parsley and a bottle of Bordeaux that gave me such shivers of pleasure I could have tolerated any number of barbs at myself and the Irish in general.