'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  My mother said to me, Is this the right plot?

  ’Tis.

  She walked the length of it and back. The other women were busy bending over and picking things out of the ground. I could see she wanted to say something to them but I could see also she knew it was no use. I went to pick up the spade and fork and she barked at me, Leave them. They’re no use to us now with everything gone. I wanted to say something but her face was so white I was afraid she’d hit me and I backed away, over the wall.

  She came over the wall herself, sitting, swinging her legs, sitting again till Michael said, Mam, can I go hunting berries?

  You can, she said. You might as well.

  If Mr. Calitri likes this story he might make me read it to the class and they’ll roll their eyes and say, More misery. The girls might have felt sorry for me over the bed but that’s enough, surely. If I go on writing about my miserable childhood they’ll say, Stop, stop, life is hard enough, we have our own troubles. So, from now on, I’ll write stories about my family moving to the suburbs of Limerick where everyone is well fed and clean from taking a bath at least once a week.

  31

  Paddy Arthur McGovern warns me that if I keep on listening to that noisy jazz music I’ll wind up like the Lennon brothers so American I’ll forget I’m Irish altogether and what will I be then. It’s no use telling him how the Lennons could be so excited about James Joyce. He’d say, Oh, James Joyce, me arse. I grew up in the County Cavan and no one there ever heard of him and if you don’t watch your step you’ll be running to Harlem and jitterbuggin’ with Negro girls.

  He’s going to an Irish dance on Saturday night and if I have any sense I’ll go with him. He wants to dance only with Irish girls because if you dance with Americans you never know what you’re getting.

  At the Jaeger House on Lexington Avenue Mickey Carton is up there with his band Ruthie Morrissey singing “A Mother’s Love Is a Blessing.” A great crystal ball revolves on the ceiling, flecking the ballroom with floating silver spots. Paddy Arthur is no sooner in the door than he’s waltzing around with the first girl he asks to dance. He has no trouble getting girls to dance and why should he with his six feet one, his black curly hair, his rich black eyebrows, his blue eyes, the dimple on his chin, the cool way he has of offering his hand that says, Come up, girl, so that the girl would never dream of saying no to this vision of a man and when they move out on the floor, no matter what class of a dance it is, waltz, fox-trot, lindy, two-step, he steers her around with hardly a glance at her and when he leads her back to her seat she’s the envy of every giggling girl on the seats along the wall.

  He comes to the bar where I’m having a beer for the courage that might be in it. He wants to know why I’m not up dancing. Sure what’s the use of coming here if you don’t dance with them grand girls along the wall?

  He’s right. The grand girls sitting along the wall are like the girls in Cruise’s Hotel in Limerick except they’re wearing dresses the likes of which you’d never see in Ireland, silk and taffeta and materials strange to me, pink, puce, light blue, ornamented here and there with lacy bows, dresses with no shoulders so stiff at the front that when the girl turns to the right the dress stays where it is. Their hair is trapped with pins and combs for fear it might tumble rich to the shoulders. They sit with their hands in their laps holding fancy purses and they smile only when they talk to each other. Some sit dance after dance, ignored by the men, till they’re forced to dance with the girls beside them. They clump across the floor and when the dance ends move to the bar for lemonade or orange squash, the drink of girl couples.

  I can’t tell Paddy I’d rather stay where I am, safe at the bar. I can’t tell him that going to any kind of a dance gives me a sick empty feeling, that even if a girl got up to dance with me I wouldn’t know what to say to her. I could manage a waltz, oompah, oompah, but I could never be like the men on the floor who whisper and make girls laugh so hard they can hardly dance for a whole minute. Buck used to say in Germany that if you can make a girl laugh you’re halfway up her leg.

  Paddy dances again and comes to the bar with a girl named Maura and tells me she has a friend, Dolores, who’s shy because she’s Irish-American and would I dance with her since I was born here and we’d make a good match with her ignorance of Irish dancing and my listening to that jazz music all the time.

  Maura looks at Paddy and smiles. He smiles down at her and winks at me. She says, Excuse me. I want to make sure Dolores is okay, and when she’s gone Paddy whispers she’s the one he’s going home with. She’s a head waitress in Schrafft’s Restaurant with her own apartment, saving money to go back to Ireland and this will be Paddy’s lucky night. He says I should be nice to Dolores, you never know, and he winks again. I think I’ll be gettin’ me hole tonight, he says.

  Me hole. Of course that’s what I’d like myself but that’s not the way I’d say it. I prefer Mikey Molloy’s way of saying it in Limerick when he called it the excitement. If you’re like Paddy with Irish women jumping into your arms you probably don’t remember one from another and they all become one hole until you meet the girl you like and she makes you realize she wasn’t put into the world to fall on her back for your pleasure. I could never think about Mike Small like that or even Dolores who’s standing there blushing and shy, the way I feel myself. Paddy nudges me and talks out of the side of his mouth, Ask her to dance, for Christ’s sake.

  All that comes out of me is a mumble and I’m lucky Mickey Carton is playing a waltz with Ruthie singing “There’s One Fair County in Ireland,” the only dance where I might not make a fool of myself. Dolores smiles at me and blushes and I blush back and there go the two of us blushing around the floor with little silver spots floating across our faces. If I stumble she steps along with me in such a way that the stumble becomes a dance step and after a while I think I’m Fred Astaire and she’s Ginger Rogers and I whirl her around sure the girls along the wall are admiring me and dying for a dance with me.

  The waltz stops and even though I’m ready to leave the floor for fear Mickey might start a lindy or a jitterbug Dolores pauses as if to say, Why don’t we dance this? And she’s so easy on her feet and so light with her touch I look at the other couples, how cool they are, and it’s no trouble at all to do it with Dolores, whatever it is, and I push her and pull and twirl her like a top till I’m sure all the girls are eyeing me and envying Dolores till I’m so full of myself I don’t notice there’s a girl sitting near the door with a crutch sticking out where it shouldn’t be and when my foot catches in it I go flying into the laps of the grand girls along the wall who push me off in a rough unfriendly way remarking that some people shouldn’t be allowed on the dance floor if they can’t hold their drink.

  Paddy is at the door with his arm around Maura. He’s laughing but she’s not. She looks at Dolores as if to sympathize with her but Dolores helps me to my feet, asking me if I’m all right. Maura comes over and whispers to her and turns to me. Will you take care of Dolores?

  I will.

  She and Paddy leave and Dolores says she’d like to leave, too. She lives in Queens and she says I really don’t have to see her all the way home, the E train is safe enough. I can’t tell her I’d like to take her home in the hope she might ask me in and there might be some excitement. She surely has her own apartment and she might feel so sorry about the way I tripped over the crutch she wouldn’t have the heart to turn me away and we’d be in her bed in no time, warm, naked, mad for each other, missing Mass, breaking the Sixth Commandment over and over and not giving a fiddler’s fart.

  When the E train rocks or stops quickly we’re thrown together and I can smell her perfume and feel her thigh against mine. It’s a good sign when she doesn’t pull away from me and when she lets me hold her hand I’m in heaven till she starts talking about Nick, her boyfriend in the navy, and I put her hand back in her lap.

  I can’t understand the women in this world, Mike Small who drinks beer with me in Rocky’s and
then runs to Bob, now this one who lures me onto the E train all the way to the last stop at 179th Street. Paddy Arthur would never have put up with this. Back at the dance hall he would have made certain there was no Nick in the navy and no one at home to interfere with his all-night plans. If there was any doubt he’d have jumped off the train at the next stop, so why don’t I? I was soldier of the week in Fort Dix, I trained dogs, I go to college, I read books, and look at me now sneaking through the streets around NYU to avoid Bob the football player and taking a girl home who’s planning to marry someone else. It seems everyone in the world has someone, Dolores her Nick, Mike Small her Bob, and Paddy Arthur is well into his night of excitement with Maura in Manhattan and what kind of a bloody fool am I traveling to the end of the line?

  I’m ready to jump off at the next stop and leave Dolores entirely when she takes my hand and tells me how nice I am, that I’m a good dancer, too bad about the crutch, we could have danced all night, that she likes the way I talk, the cute brogue, you can tell I was well brought up, it’s so nice that I go to college, and she doesn’t understand why I’m hanging around with Paddy Arthur who, it was easy to see, had no good on his mind with respect to Maura. She squeezes my hand and tells me I’m so nice to travel all the way home with her and she’ll never forget me and I feel her thigh against mine all the way to the last stop and when we stand to leave the train I have to bend to hide the excitement that’s throbbing in my trousers. I’m ready to walk her home but she stands by a bus stop and tells me she lives farther out, in Queens Village, and really, I don’t have to go all the way, she’ll be all right on the bus. She squeezes my hand again and I wonder if there’s any hope that this might be my lucky night and I’ll wind up wild in bed like Paddy Arthur.

  While we wait for the bus she holds my hand again and tells me all about Nick in the navy, how her father doesn’t like him because he’s Italian and calls him all kinds of insulting names behind his back, how her mother really likes Nick but would never admit it in case her father might come home in a drunken rage and smash the furniture which wouldn’t be the first time. The worst nights are when her brother, Kevin, visits and stands up to her father and you wouldn’t believe the swearing and the rolling on the floor. Kevin is a linebacker at Fordham and a good match for her father.

  What’s a linebacker?

  You don’t know what a linebacker is?

  I don’t.

  You’re the first boy I ever met who didn’t know what a linebacker is.

  Boy. I’m twenty-four years old and she’s calling me a boy and I’m wondering do you have to be forty to be a man in America?

  All along I’m hoping that things are so terrible with her father she might have her own place but, no, she lives at home and there go my dreams for a night of excitement. You’d think a girl her age would have her own place so that she could invite in the likes of me who see her to the end of the line. I don’t care if she squeezes my hand a thousand times. What’s the use of having your hand squeezed on a bus in the middle of the night in Queens if there’s no promise of a bit of excitement at the end of the journey?

  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.
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  * * *

  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?