'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  I'd like to be Irish when it's time for a song or a poem. I'd like to be American when I teach. I'd like to be Irish-American or American-Irish though I know I can't be two things even if Scott Fitzgerald said the sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

  I don't know what I'd like to be and what does it matter with Alberta over in Brooklyn with her new man?

  Then in a shop window I catch a glimpse of my sad face and I laugh when I remember what my mother would have called it, the gloomy puss.

  At Fifty-seventh Street I walk west toward Fifth Avenue for a taste of America and the richness that's in it, the world of the people who sit in the Palm Court of the Biltmore Hotel, people who don't have to go through life carrying ethnic hyphens. You could wake them in the middle of the night, ask them what they are and they'd say, Tired.

  I turn the gloomy puss south on Fifth Avenue and there's the dream I had all those years in Ireland, the avenue nearly deserted at this hour of the morning except for double-decker buses, one going north, the other south, jewelry shops, bookshops, women's shops with mannequins all dressed up for Easter, rabbits and eggs everywhere in windows and not a sign of the risen Jesus, and far down the avenue the Empire State Building, and I have my health, don't I? a little weak in the eye and teeth department, a college degree and a teaching job and isn't this the country where all things are possible, where you can do anything you like as long as you stop complaining and get off your ass because life, pal, is not a free lunch.

  If only Alberta came to her senses and back to me.

  Fifth Avenue tells me how ignorant I am. There are the window mannequins in their Easter garb and if one of them came to life and asked me what kind of fabric she was wearing I wouldn't have a notion. If they wore canvas I'd spot it straightway because of the coal bags I delivered in Limerick and used for cover when they were empty and the weather was desperate. I might be able to recognize tweed because of the coats people wore winter and summer though I'd have to admit to the mannequin I don't know the difference between silk and cotton. I could never point to a dress and say that's satin or wool and I'd be lost entirely if challenged to identify damask or crinoline. I know novelists like to hint at the wealth of their characters by dwelling on damask drapes though I don't know if anyone wears such material unless the characters fall on hard times and take the scissors to the damask. I know you can hardly pick up a novel set in the South where there isn't a white plantation family lolling on the verandah sipping bourbon or lemonade listening to the darkies singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the verandah women fanning themselves against the crinoline heat.

  Down in Greenwich Village I buy shirts and socks in shops called haberdasheries and I don't know what material they're made of even though there are people telling me you have to be careful what you put on your body nowadays, you might have allergies and break out in a rash. I never worried about such things in Limerick but here danger lurks even in the buying of socks and shirts.

  Things in shop windows have names I don't know and I don't know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It's strange to stand at a florist's shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don't even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people's gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I'm sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I'd have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it's not likely you'd be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.

  All along the avenue there are shops with gourmet foods and if I ever enter such a place I'll have to bring someone who grew up respectable and knows the difference between pate de foie gras and mashed potatoes. All these shops are obsessed with French and I don't know what they're thinking of. Why can't they say spuds instead of pommes or is it that you pay more for something printed in French?

  There's no sense at all looking in the windows of antique furniture shops. They'll never let you know the price of something till you ask and they'll never plant a sign on a chair to tell you what it is or where it came from. Most of the chairs you wouldn't want to sit in anyway. They're so upright and stiff they'd give you such a pain in your back you'd wind up in the hospital. Then there are little tables with curved legs so delicate they'd collapse under the weight of a pint and destroy a priceless carpet from Persia or wherever people sweat for the pleasure of rich Americans. There are delicate mirrors, too, and you wonder what it's like in the morning to see your face in a frame agog with little Cupids and maidens frolicking and where would you look in such confusion? Would I look at the stuff oozing from my eyes or would I be enchanted with a maiden succumbing to a Cupid arrow?

  With the dawn glimmering far down in Greenwich Village Fifth Avenue is nearly deserted except for people making their way to St. Patrick's Cathedral to save their souls, mostly old women who seem to have greater fear than the old men mumbling along beside them or it may be that old women live longer and there are more of them. When the priest dispenses Communion the pews empty and I envy the people coming back down the aisles with the wafers in their mouths and the holy look that tells you they're in a state of grace. They can go home now and have the big breakfast and if they fall dead while eating sausages and eggs they go straight to heaven. I'd like to make my peace with God but my sins are so terrible any priest would drive me from the confessional and I know once again my only hope for salvation is that I'll have an accident where I'll linger for a few minutes so that I can make an Act of Perfect Contrition that will open the gates of heaven.

  Still, it's comforting to sit in the cathedral in the hush of a dawn Mass especially when I can look around and put names on what I see, the pews, the Stations of the Cross, the pulpit, the tabernacle with the monstrance holding the Eucharist inside, the chalice, the ciborium, the cruets for wine and water at the altar's right side, the paten. I know nothing about jewelry and the flowers in the shop but I can recite the priestly vestments, the amice, the alb, the girdle, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble, and I know the priest up there wearing the purple chasuble of Lent will change to white on Easter Sunday when Christ is risen and Americans give their children chocolate rabbits and yellow eggs.

  After all the Sunday mornings in Limerick I can skip as easily as an altar boy from the Introit of the Mass to the Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed, the signal for the thirsty men of Ireland to rise from their knees and flock to the pubs for the Sunday pint, cure for the woes of the night before.

  I can name the parts of the Mass and the priestly vestments and the parts of a rifle like Henry Reed in his poem but what use is all this if I rise in the world and sit in a stiff chair at a table where they're serving fancy food and I can't tell the difference between mutton and duck?

  It's full daylight on Fifth Avenue and there's no one but myself sitting on the steps between the two great lions of the Forty-second Street public library where Tim Costello told me to go nearly ten years ago to read The Lives of the English Poets. There are little birds of different sizes and colors flitting from tree to tree telling me spring will soon be here and I don't know their names either. I can tell the difference between a pigeon and a sparrow and there it ends except for the seagull.

  If my students at McKee High School could look into my head they'd wonder how I ever became a teacher at all. They know already I never went to high school and they'd say, That's it. Here's a t
eacher who stands up there giving us vocabulary lessons and he doesn't even know the names of the birds in the trees.

  The library will be open in a few hours and I could sit in the Main Reading Room with big picture books that tell me the names of things but it's still early morning and it's a long way to Downing Street, Bill Galetly cross-legged and squinting at himself in the mirror, Plato and the Gospel According to St. John.

  He's flat on his back on the floor, naked and snoring, a candle guttering by his head, banana peels everywhere. It's cold in the flat but when I place a blanket over him he sits up and pushes it away. Sorry about the bananas, Frank, but I had a little celebration this morning. Big breakthrough. Here it is.

  He points to a passage in St. John. Read it, he says. Go ahead, read it.

  And I read, It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing, the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life.

  Bill stares at me. So?

  What?

  You get it? You dig?

  I don't know. I'd have to read it a few times and it's nearly nine o'clock in the morning. I've been up all night.

  I fasted for three days to get inside that. You have to get inside things. Like sex. But I'm not finished. I'm looking for the parallel world in Plato. Guess I'll have to go to Mexico.

  Why Mexico?

  Great shit there.

  Shit?

  You know. Variety of chemicals to help the seeker.

  Oh, yes. I'm going to bed for a while.

  Wish I could offer you a banana but I had the celebration.

  I sleep a few hours this Sunday morning and when I awake he's gone leaving behind nothing but banana skins.

  42

  Alberta is back. She calls me and asks me to meet her over at Rocky's for the sake of old times. She's wearing a light spring coat with the lavender scarf she wore when she said good night instead of good-bye and this meeting must have been what she had in mind all the time.

  All the men in Rocky's stare at her and their women glare at them to stop looking at someone else and look back at them.

  She slips off her coat and sits with the lavender scarf on her shoulders and my heart is beating so hard I can hardly talk. She'll have a martini straight up with a twist and I'll have a beer. She tells me it was all a mistake going off with someone else but he was mature and ready to settle down and I acted all the time like a single man with the hovel in the Village. She realized in no time it was me she loved and even though we have our differences we can work them out especially if we settle down and get married.

  When she mentions marriage there's a different sharp pain in my chest from the fear I'll never have that free life I see everywhere in New York, the kind of life they had in Paris where everyone sat in cafes drinking wine, writing novels, sleeping with other men's wives and beautiful rich American women eager for the passion.

  If I say anything like this to Alberta she'll say, Oh, grow up. You're twenty-eight going on twenty-nine not a goddam Beatnik.

  Of course neither one of us is going to talk like this in the middle of our reconciliation especially since I have a nagging feeling she's right and I might be just a drifter like my father. Even though I've been a teacher for a year I still envy people who can sit in coffee shops and pubs and go to parties where there are artists and models and a jazz combo in the corner blowing cool and lowdown.

  No use telling her anything of my freedom dreams. She'd say, You're a teacher. You never dreamed when you got off the boat you'd come this far. Get on with it.

  Once in Rhode Island we argued over something and Zoe the grandmother said, You're nice people, but not together.

  She won't come to my cold water flat, the hovel, and she won't let me come to hers with her father there for a short time because of a rift with his wife, Stella. She puts her hand on mine and we look at each other so hard she has tears and I'm ashamed of the redness she must be seeing and the oozing.

  On the way to the subway she tells me that when the school term ends in a few weeks she's going to Rhode Island to be with her grandmother for a while and sort out her life. She knows there's a question in the air, Will I be invited? and the answer is no, I'm not in favor with the grandmother at this moment. She kisses me good night, tells me she'll talk to me on the phone soon, and after she disappears into the subway I walk across Washington Square Park torn between my yearning for her and my dreams of the free life. If I don't fit in with the way she wants to live, clean, organized, respectable, I'll lose her and I'll never find anyone like her. I never had women throwing themselves at me in Ireland, Germany or the U.S.A. I could never tell the world about the weekends in Munich where I consorted with the lowest whores in Germany or the time when I was fourteen and a half frolicking with a dying girl on a green sofa in Limerick. All I have is dark secrets and shame and it's a wonder Alberta has anything to do with me at all. If I had any belief left in anything I could go to confession but where is the priest who could hear my sins without throwing his hands up in disgust and sending me to the bishop or some part of the Vatican reserved for the doomed?

  The man at the Beneficial Finance Company says, Do I detect a brogue? He tells me where his mother and father came from in Ireland and how he plans to visit himself though that'd be hard with six kids, ha ha. His mother comes from a family of nineteen. Can you believe that? he says. Nineteen kids. Of course seven died but what the hell. That's how it was in the old days in the Old Country. They had kids like rabbits.

  So, back to the application. You want to borrow three hundred and fifty dollars to visit the Old Country, eh? You haven't seen your mother in what, six years? The man congratulates me on wanting to see my mother. Too many people nowadays forget their mothers. But not the Irish. No, not us. We never forget our mothers. The Irishman that forgets his mother is no Irishman and should be drummed out, goddammit, excuse the language, Mr. McCourt. I see you're a teacher and I admire you for that. It must be rough, big classes, low pay. Yeah, all I have to do is look at your application to see the low pay. Don't know how you can live on it and that, I'm sorry to tell you, is the problem. That's what causes the hitch in this application, the low pay and absence of any collateral if you know what I mean. They're gonna shake their heads at the head office over this application but I'm gonna push it because you got two things in your favor, you're an Irishman that wants to see his mother in the Old Country and you're a teacher killing himself in a vocational high school and, as I say, I'm going to bat for you.

  I tell him I'll be shaping up at the warehouses in July to replace men going on vacation but that means nothing to the Beneficial Finance Company unless there's proof of steady employment. The man advises me to say nothing about sending money to my mother. They'd shake their heads at the main office if there was anything that might threaten my monthly payments on the loan.

  The man wishes me good luck. He says, It's such a pleasure to do business with one of my own.

  The platform boss at Baker and Williams looks surprised. Jesus, you back again. I thought you became a teacher or some goddam thing.

  I did.

  So what the hell you doin' here?

  I need the money. The teacher's pay is not princely.

  You shoulda stood in the warehouses or drove a truck or somethin' an' you'd be makin' money an' not strugglin' with them goddam kids that don't care.

  Then he asks, Didn't you used to hang around with that guy, Paddy McGovern?

  Paddy Arthur?

  Yeah. Paddy Arthur. So many Paddy McGoverns they have to get another name. You know what happened to him?

  I don't.

  Dumb bastard is on the A train platform at 125th Street. Harlem, you know. What the hell was he doin' in Harlem? Lookin' for a little of that black stuff. So he gets bored standing on the platform like everybody else and decides to wait for the train down on the tracks. On the goddam tracks, avoiding the third rail. You could get killed with the third rail. Lights a cigarette and stands the
re with that stupid smile on his face till the A train comes in and ends his troubles. That's what I heard. What was it with that dumb bastard?

  He must have been drinking.

  Course he was drinking. Goddam Irish are always drinking but I never heard of no Irishman waiting for the train on the tracks before. But your friend there, Paddy, always said he was going back. He'd save enough money and live in the Old Country. What happened? Know what I think? You wanna know what I think?

  What do you think?

  Some people should stay where they are. This country could drive you crazy. It drives people crazy that was born here. How come you're not crazy? Or maybe you are, eh?

  I don't know.

  Lissena me, kid. I'm Italian an' Greek an' we have our problems but my advice to a young Irishman is this, Stay away from the booze an' you won't have to wait for the train on the tracks. You got me?

  I do.

  At lunch I see a figure from the past washing dishes in the diner kitchen, Andy Peters. He sees me and tells me hold on, try the meat loaf and the mashed potatoes and he'll be out in a minute. He sits beside me on a counter stool and asks how I like the gravy.