My grandmother says, Och, don’t you look grand in your uniform, and Aunt Emily says, Och, you’re a man now.
My father says, Och, you’re here. How’s your mother?
She’s grand.
And your brother Malachy and your brother Michael and your wee brother what’s his name?
Alphie.
Och, aye, Alphie. How’s your wee brother Alphie?
They’re all grand.
He lets out a small Och and sighs, That’s grand.
Then he wants to know if I take a drink and my grandmother says, Now, Malachy, enough of that talk.
Och, I only wanted to warn him of the bad company to be found in pubs.
This is my father who left us when I was ten to spend every penny he earned in the pubs of Coventry with German bombs dropping all around him, his family next to starvation in Limerick and here he is putting on the air of one in the grip of sanctifying grace and all I can think of is there must be some truth to the story he was dropped on his head or the other story that he had a disease like meningitis.
That might be an excuse for the drinking, the dropping on the head or the meningitis. German bombs couldn’t be an excuse because there were other Limerickmen sending money home from Coventry, bombs or no bombs. There were even men who fell in with Englishwomen and still sent money home though that money would slow down to nothing because Englishwomen are notorious for not wanting their Irishmen to support their families at home when they have three or four snotty-nosed English brats of their own running around demanding bangers and mash. Many an Irishman at the end of the war was so desperate trapped between his Irish and English families there was nothing for him to do but jump on a ship to Canada or Australia never to be heard from again.
That wouldn’t be my father. If he had seven children with my mother it was only because she was there in the bed doing her wifely duty. Englishwomen are never that easy. They’d never suffer an Irishman who would leap on them in the bravery of a few pints and that means there are no little McCourt bastards running the streets of Coventry.
I don’t know what to say to him with his little smile and his Och aye because I don’t know if I’m talking to a man in his right mind or the man dropped on his head or the one with meningitis. How can I talk to him when he gets up, sticks his hands deep into his trouser pockets and marches around the house whistling “Lily Marlene”? Aunt Emily whispers he hasn’t had a drink in ages and it’s a great struggle for him. I want to tell her it was a greater struggle for my mother to keep us all alive but I know he has the sympathy of his whole family and anyway what use is there going over the past. Then she tells me how he suffered over my mother’s disgraceful doings with her cousin, how the story drifted back to the North that they were living as man and wife, that when my father heard about it in Coventry, with the bombs dropping all around him, it drove him so mad he was in the pubs day, night and in between. Men home from Coventry would tell how my father would run into the streets during the air raids lifting his arms to the Luftwaffe and begging them to drop one on his poor tormented head.
My grandmother nods her head, agreeing with Aunt Emily, Och, aye. I want to remind them my father drank long before the bad days in Limerick, that we had to hunt him in pubs all over Brooklyn. I want to tell them that if he’d only sent money we could have stayed in our own house instead of being evicted and having to move in with Mam’s cousin.
But my grandmother is frail and I have to control myself. My face feels tight and there are dark clouds in my head and all I can do is stand and tell them my father drank all through the years, drank when babies were born and babies died and drank because he drank.
She says, Och, Francis, and shakes her head as if to disagree with me, as if to defend my father, and that causes such a rage in me I hardly know what to do till I’m pulling my duffel bag down the stairs and out on the road to Toome, Aunt Emily at the hedge calling, Francis, oh, Francis, come back, your grandmother wants to talk to you, but I keep walking though I’m aching to go back, that bad as my father is I’d at least like to know him, that my grandmother was doing only what any mother would do, defending her son who was dropped on his head or had meningitis, and I might go back except that a car stops and a man offers me a lift to the bus station in Toome and once I’m in the car there’s no going back.
I’m not in the mood for talk but I have to be polite to the man even when he says the McCourts of Moneyglass are a fine family even if they’re Catholics.
Even if they’re Catholics.
I’d like to tell the man stop the car and let me out with my duffel bag but if I do I’ll be only halfway to Toome and I’d be tempted to walk back to my grandmother’s house.
I can’t go back. The past won’t go away in this family and there would surely be talk again of my mother and her great sin and then we’d have an explosion and I’d be dragging my duffel bag along the Toome road again.
The man lets me out and when I say thanks I wonder to myself if he marches around on the twelfth of July beating a drum with the other Protestants but he has a kind face and I can’t imagine him beating a drum for anything.
All the way on the bus to Belfast and the train from Belfast to Dublin I have the ache to go back to the grandmother I might never see again and to see if I could get past my father’s little smiles and the Och ayes but once I’m on the train to Limerick there’s no going back. My head is cluttered with images of my father, my Aunt Emily, my grandmother, and the sadness of their lives in the farmhouse with seven useless acres. Then there’s my mother in Limerick, forty-four years of age with seven children, three dead, and all she wants, as she says, is a little peace, ease and comfort. There’s the sadness of Corporal Dunphy’s life in Fort Dix and Buck in Lenggries, the two of them who found a home in the army because they wouldn’t know what to do with the outside world, and I’m afraid if I don’t stop thinking this way the tears will come and I’ll disgrace myself in this carriage with five people gawking at me in my uniform saying, Jaysus, who’s the Yank weeping in the corner? My mother would say, Your bladder is near your eye, but the people in the carriage might say, Is this a specimen of what’s fighting the Chinese hand to hand over there in Korea?
Even if there weren’t another soul in the carriage I’d have to control myself because the slightest hint of a tear and the salt in it makes my eyes redder than they are and I don’t want to get off the train and walk the streets of Limerick with eyes like two piss holes in the snow.
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 every 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.
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