'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  He marches to the door and roars down the hall, Apollo, get your ass in here, and there’s Apollo’s voice, Yes, sir, yes, sir.

  You, goddammit, you. Did you supply this unit with this tube?

  In a way, sir, yes, sir.

  What the hell are you talking about?

  He was suffering, sir, screaming with his eyes.

  How the hell do you scream with your eyes?

  I mean, sir, the pain. He would scream. I would apply the penicillin.

  Who told you, eh? You a goddam doctor?

  No, sir. It’s just something I saw them doing in Mississippi.

  Fuck Mississippi, Apollo.

  Yes, sir.

  And you, soldier, what are you reading there with those eyes?

  Pierre, or the Ambiguities, sir.

  Christ. What the hell is it about?

  I don’t know, sir. I think it’s about this Pierre who’s caught between a dark-haired woman and a fair-haired woman. He’s trying to write a book in a room in New York and he’s so cold the women have to heat up hot bricks for his feet.

  Christ. You’re going back to your outfit, soldier. If you can lie on your ass here reading books about units like that you can be an active unit again. And you, Apollo, you’re lucky I don’t have your ass before a firing squad.

  Yes, sir.

  Dismissed.

  Next day Vinnie Gandia drives me back to Lenggries and he drives without his drumsticks. He says he can’t do it anymore, that he nearly got himself killed after he brought me to Munich the last time. You can’t drive, drum and handle your asthma, simple as that. You gotta choose, and the drumsticks had to go. If he got into an accident and had damaged hands and couldn’t play he’d stick his head in the oven, simple as that. He can’t wait to get back to New York and hang out around Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. He makes me promise we’ll meet in New York and he’ll take me to all the great jazz joints, no charge, no cost, because he knows everyone and they know if he didn’t have this goddam asthma he’d be right up there with Krupa and Rich, right up there.

  There’s a law that says I can sign up for another nine months in the army and avoid the six-year army reserve requirement. If I re-up they can’t call me back any time the United States decides to defend democracy in distant places. I could stay here in the supply room for the nine months doling out sheets, blankets, condoms, drinking beer in the village, going home with an occasional girl, reading books from the base library. I could journey back to Ireland to tell my grandmother my sorrow over walking out in anger. I could take dancing lessons in Munich so that all the girls in Limerick would be queueing up to get out on the floor with me in my sergeant’s stripes which I’d surely get.

  But I can’t afford another nine months in Germany with the letters coming from Emer telling me how she’s counting the days till my return. I never knew she liked me that much and now I like her for liking me because that’s the first time in my life I’ve heard that from a girl. I’m so excited over being liked by Emer I write and tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me, too, and that puts me in heaven and makes me want to pack my duffel bag and jump on a plane to her side.

  I write and tell her how I long for her and how I’m here in Lenggries inhaling the perfume from her letters. I dream of the life we’ll have in New York, how I’ll go to my job every morning, a warm indoor job where I’ll sit at a desk and scribble important decisions. Every night we’ll have dinner and go to bed early so that we’ll have plenty of time for the excitement.

  Of course I can’t mention the excitement part in the letters because Emer is pure and if her mother ever knew I had such dreams the door would be slammed in my face forever and there I’d be, deprived of the company of the only girl ever to say she liked me.

  I can’t tell Emer about the way I coveted college girls at the Biltmore Hotel. I can’t tell her about the excitement I’ve had with girls in Lenggries and Munich and the refugee camp. She’d be so shocked she might tell her whole family, especially her big brother Liam, and there would be threats on my life.

  Rappaport says that before you get married it’s your obligation to tell the bride about all the things you’ve done with other girls. Buck says, That’s bullshit, the best thing in life is to keep your mouth shut especially with someone you’re going to marry. It’s like the army, never tell, never volunteer.

  Weber says, I wouldn’t tell nobody nothing, and Rappaport tells him go swing from a tree. Weber says when he gets married he’ll do one thing for the girl, he’ll make sure he doesn’t have the clap because that can be passed on and he wouldn’t want any kid of his born with the clap.

  Rappaport says, Jesus, the beast has feelings.

  The night before I go stateside there’s a party in a Bad Tolz restaurant. Officers and noncoms bring their wives and that means ordinary soldiers cannot bring their German girlfriends. Officers’ wives would disapprove knowing that certain ordinary soldiers have wives waiting back home and it’s not proper to sit with German girls who might be destroying good American families.

  The captain makes a speech and says I was one of the finest soldiers he ever had under his command. Sergeant Burdick makes a speech and presents me with a scroll honoring me for my tight control of sheets, blankets and protective devices.

  When he says protective devices there is snickering along the table till the officers give the warning glares that tell the men, Cut it out, our wives are here.

  One officer has a wife, Belinda, who is my age. If she didn’t have a husband I might have a few beers to give me the courage to talk to her but I don’t have to because she leans over and whispers that all the wives think I’m handsome. That makes me blush so hard I have to go out to the lavatory and when I return Belinda is saying something to the other wives that makes them laugh and when they look at me they laugh even harder and I’m sure they’re laughing over what Belinda said to me. That makes me blush again and I wonder if there’s anyone you can trust in this world.

  Somehow Buck seems to know what happened. He whispers, The hell with these women, Mac. They shouldn’t mock you like that.

  I know he’s right but I’m sad that the last memory of Lenggries I’ll carry away with me is Belinda and the mocking officers’ wives.

  20

  The day of my discharge from the army at Camp Kilmer I met Tom Clifford at the Breffni Bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan. We had corned beef and cabbage slathered with mustard and beer galore to cool our mouths. Tom had found an Irish bed-and-breakfast place in the South Bronx, Logan’s Boarding House, and once I dropped off my duffel bag there we could come back down and see Emer after work in her apartment at East Fifty-fourth Street.

  Mr. Logan seemed to be an old man with a bald head and a meaty red face. He might have been old but he had a young wife, Nora from Kilkenny, and a baby a few months old. He told me he was high up in the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus and I should make no mistake about where he stood on religion and morality in general, that none of his twelve boarders could expect a Sunday morning breakfast unless they could show they had attended Mass and, if at all possible, Holy Communion. For those who attended Communion and had at least two witnesses to prove it there would be sausages with the breakfast. Of course every boarder had two other boarders to testify he went to Communion. There was testifying right and left and Mr. Logan was so upset over what he had to pay out in sausages he disguised himself in Nora’s hat and coat and shuffled up to the middle of the church to discover not only that the boarders hadn’t gone to Communion but that Ned Guinan and Kevin Hayes were the only ones to go to Mass at all. The rest were over on Willis Avenue slipping in the back door of a bar for an illegal drink before noon opening time and when they came streeling back for the breakfast, reeking, Mr. Logan wanted to smell their breath. They told him feck off, this was a free country, and if they had to get their breaths smelled for the sake of a sausage they’d stay content with the watery eggs and mi
lk, the stale bread and watery tea.

  Also, there was to be no swearing or any kind of blaguarding in Mr. Logan’s house or we’d be asked to desist and depart. He would not allow his wife and child, Luke, to be exposed to any kind of disgraceful behavior from the twelve young Irish boarders. Our beds might be in the basement but he would always know about disgraceful behavior. No, indeed, it takes years to build up a boarding house business and he was not going to let twelve laborers from the Old Country tear it down. Bad enough that Negroes were moving in right and left and destroying a neighborhood, people with no morality, no jobs and no fathers for their children running the streets like savages.

  The weekly rate was eighteen dollars for bed and breakfast and if I wanted dinner that would be an extra dollar a day. There were eight beds for twelve boarders and that was because everyone worked different shifts on the docks and various warehouses and what was the use of having extra beds cluttering up the two rooms in the basement, the only time all the beds were filled was Saturday night and then you had to bunk in with someone else. It didn’t matter because Saturday night was the night to get drunk up on St. Nicholas Avenue and you wouldn’t care if you slept with man, woman or sheep.

  There was one bathroom for all of us, bring your own soap, and two long narrow towels that used to be white. Each towel had a black line to separate the top from the bottom and that was how you were supposed to use them. There was a handwritten sign on the wall telling you the top was for anything above your navel, the bottom for anything below, signed J. Logan, prop. The towels were changed every two weeks though there were always fights between the boarders who were careful about the rules and the ones who might have had a drink.

  Chris Wayne from Lisdoonvarna was the oldest boarder, forty-two, working in construction and saving to bring over his girlfriend, twenty-three, so that they could get married and have children while he still had a tittle of power in himself. The boarders called him Duke because of his last name and because of the silliness in it. He didn’t drink or smoke, went to Mass and Communion every Sunday, and avoided the rest of us. He had tufts of gray in his curly black hair and he was gaunt from piety and frugality. He had his own towel, soap and two sheets he carried around in a bag for fear we might use them. Every night he knelt by his bed and said the entire rosary. He was the only one who had secured a bed of his own since no one, drunk or sober, would climb in with him or use the bed in his absence because of the odor of sanctity around it. He worked from eight to five every workday and ate dinner with the Logans every night. They loved him for that because it brought in an extra seven dollars a week and they loved him even more for the small amounts he put into his scrawny frame. They didn’t love him later when he started coughing and spitting and there were specks of blood on his handkerchief. They told him they had a child to think of and he’d better find another place. He told Mr. Logan he was a son-of-a-bitch and a pathetic bastard that he felt sorry for. If he thought he was really the father of that child Mr. Logan should look around at his boarders and if he wasn’t completely blind he’d detect a marked resemblance to the child on the face of one of the boarders. Mr. Logan struggled out of his armchair gasping that if he didn’t have the bad heart he’d kill Chris Wayne on the spot. He tried to rush at the Duke but his heart wouldn’t let him and he had to listen to Nora from Kilkenny screeching at him, begging him to stop or she’d be a widow with an orphan child.

  The Duke laughed till he gasped at Nora, Don’t worry, that child will always have a father. Sure, isn’t he in this room.

  He coughed his way out of the room and down the stairs to the basement and no one ever saw him again.

  It was hard to live there after that. Mr. Logan was suspicious of everyone and you could hear him roaring at Nora from Kilkenny at all hours. He took away one of the towels and saved money by buying old bread at the bakery and serving powdered milk and eggs for breakfast. He wanted to make us all go to confession so that he could watch our faces and know if what the Duke said was true. We refused. There were only four boarders long enough in the house to be suspects and Peter McNamee, the longest one there, told Mr. Logan to his face that fooling around with Nora from Kilkenny was the last thing he’d ever think of. She was such a bag of bones from running the house you could hear her rattle and clank coming up the stairs.

  Mr. Logan gasped in his armchair and told Peter, That hurt me, Peter, that you’d say my wife clanks and you the finest boarder we ever had even if we were fooled a long time by the false piety of the fella that just left, thank God.

  I’m sorry to hurt you, Mr. Logan, but Nora from Kilkenny is not by any means a morsel. No one here would give her a second look on a dance floor.

  Mr. Logan looked around the room at us. Is that right, lads? Is that right?

  ’Tis, Mr. Logan.

  Are you sure of that, Peter?

  I am, Mr. Logan.

  Thank God for that, Peter.

  The boarders earn good money on the docks and in the warehouses. Tom works at Port Warehouses loading and unloading trucks and if he works extra hours he goes on time and a half or double time so that his pay is well over a hundred dollars a week.

  Peter McNamee works at Merchants Refrigerating Company unloading and storing the meat from the freezer trucks from Chicago. The Logans like him for the slabs of beef or pork he hauls home every Friday night, drunk or sober, and that meat takes the place of the eighteen dollars. We never see this meat and some boarders swear Mr. Logan sells it to a butcher shop on Willis Avenue.

  All the boarders drink even though they say they want to save money and go back to Ireland for the peace and quiet that’s in it. Only Tom says he’ll never go back, that Ireland is a miserable bog of a place, and they take that as a personal insult and offer to settle it if he’ll step outside. Tom laughs. He knows what he wants and it’s not a life of fighting and drinking and moaning about Ireland and sharing towels in flophouses like this. The only one who agrees with Tom is Ned Guinan and it doesn’t matter with him because he has the consumption like the Duke and he’s not long for this world. He’s saving enough money so that he can go home to Kildare and die in the house he was born in. He has dreams of Kildare where he’s leaning on a fence at the Curragh watching the horses training in the morning, trotting through the mist that clouds the track till the sun breaks through and turns the whole world green. When he talks like this his eyes glisten and there’s a slight pink flush on his cheeks and he smiles in such a way you’d like to go over and hold him a minute though that’s the kind of thing they might frown on in an Irish boarding house. It’s remarkable that Mr. Logan allows him to stay but Ned is so delicate Mr. Logan treats him like a son and forgets the baby who might be threatened by coughs, spits and flecks of blood. It’s remarkable the way they keep him on the payroll at the Baker and Williams Warehouse where they have him in the office answering the phone because he’s so weak he can’t lift a feather. When he’s not answering the phone he studies French so that he can talk to St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, when he goes to heaven. Mr. Logan tells him very gently he might be on the wrong track in this matter, that Latin is the language you need in heaven and that leads to a long discussion among the boarders as to what language Our Lord spoke, Peter McNamee declaring for a fact it was Hebrew. Mr. Logan says you might be right there, Peter, because he doesn’t want to contradict the man who brings the Sunday meat home on a Friday night. Tom Clifford laughs that we should all brush up on our Irish in case we run into St. Patrick or St. Brigid and everyone glares at him, everyone but Ned Guinan who smiles at everything because it doesn’t matter one way or the other when you’re dreaming of the horses in Kildare.

  Peter McNamee says it’s a wonder a single one of us is alive with all the things against us in this world, the weather in Ireland, the TB, the En-glish, the De Valera government, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and now the way we have to break our arses to make a few dollars on the docks and the warehouses. Mr. Logan begs him to m
ind his language in the presence of Nora from Kilkenny and Peter says he’s sorry, he gets carried away.

  Tom tells me of a job unloading trucks at Port Warehouses. Emer says no, I should work in an office where I can use my brains. Tom says warehouse jobs are better than office jobs that pay less and make you wear a suit and tie and have you sitting so much you get an arse on you the size of a cathedral door. I’d like to work in an office but the warehouse pays seventy-five dollars a week and that’s more than I ever dreamed of after my thirty-five dollars a week at the Biltmore Hotel. Emer says that’s fine as long as I save something and get an education. She talks like that because everyone in her family went to school and she doesn’t want me lifting and hauling till I’m a broken old man at the age of thirty-five. She knows from the way Tom and I talk about the boarders that there’s drinking and all kinds of blaguarding and she wouldn’t like me to be spending my time in bars when I could be making something of myself.

  Emer has a clear head because she doesn’t drink or smoke and the only meat she eats is an occasional morsel of chicken for her blood. She goes to a business school at Rockefeller Center so that she can earn a living and make something of herself in America. I know her clear head is good for me but I want that warehouse money and I promise her and myself I’ll go to school someday.