'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  There is silence. They know I lied and Julio knows I lied and the chairman surely suspects me of lying but he doesn’t know what to do. He says, We’ll get to the bottom of this, and leaves.

  The word goes from class to class and next day there is a book on every desk, Your World and You and Silas Marner, and when the chairman returns with Mr. Sorola he doesn’t know what to say. Mr. Sorola gives his little smile. So, Mr. McCourt, we’re back in business, eh?

  There may be books on every desk this one day when students and teacher present a united front to the outsiders, the chairman, the principal, but once they leave the honeymoon ends and there is a chorus of complaints about these books, how boring they are, how heavy, and why do they have to bring them to school every day? The English students say, Oh, Silas Marner’s a small book, but if they have to carry Giants in the Earth you need a big breakfast, it’s such a big book and it’s so boring. Will they have to carry it every day? Why can’t they leave it in the classroom closet?

  If you leave it in the closet how are you going to read it?

  Why can’t we read it in class? All the other teachers tell their classes, Okay, Henry, you read page nineteen, okay, Nancy, you read page twenty, an’ that’s how they finish the book and when they’re reading we can put our heads down an’ take a nap ha ha ha, just kidding, Mr. McCourt.

  38

  In Manhattan my brother Malachy is running a bar called Malachy’s with two partners. He acts with the Irish Players, appears on radio and television and gets his name into the newspapers. That brings me fame at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. Now my students know my name and I’m not Mr. McCoy anymore.

  Hey, Mr. McCourt, I seen your brother on TV. He’s a crazy guy.

  Mr. McCourt, my mother seen your brother on TV.

  Mr. McCourt, how come you’re not on TV? How come you’re just a teacher?

  Mr. McCourt, you got an Irish accent. Why can’t you be funny like your brother?

  Mr. McCourt, you could be on TV. You could be in a love story with Miss Mudd, holding her hands on a ship and kissing her old wrinkly face.

  Teachers who venture into the City, Manhattan, tell me they see Malachy in plays.

  Oh, he’s funny, your brother. We said hello to him after the play and told him we teach with you and he was very nice but, boy, does he like to drink.

  My brother Michael is out of the air force and working behind the bar with Malachy. If people want to buy my brothers a drink who are they to say no. It’s cheers, bottoms up, slainte and skoal. When the bar closes they don’t have to go home. There are after-hours joints where they can drink and trade stories with police inspectors and gracious madams from the finest brothels on the Upper East Side. They can breakfast at Rubin’s on Central Park South where there are always celebrities to keep your neck swiveling.

  Malachy was famous for his, Come in, girls, and to hell with the old farts up and down Third Avenue. The old bar owners looked with suspicion on a woman alone. She was up to no good and there was no place at the bar for her. Put her over there in a dark corner and give her no more than two drinks and if there’s a hint of a man going near her out she goes on the sidewalk and that’s that.

  When Malachy’s bar opened the word spread that girls from the Barbizon Women’s Residence were actually sitting up on his bar stools and soon the men flocked in from P. J. Clarke’s, Toots Shor’s, El Morocco, to be trailed by a snoop of gossip columnists eager to report celebrity sightings and Malachy’s latest wild doings. There were playboys and their ladies, pioneers of the jet set. There were heirs to fortunes so old and deep their tendrils curled in the dark depths of South African diamond mines. Malachy and Michael were invited to parties in Manhattan apartments so vast that guests emerged days later from forgotten rooms. There were skinny-dipping parties in the Hamptons and parties in Connecticut where rich men rode the rich women who rode the Thoroughbred horses.

  President Eisenhower takes time out from his golf to sign an occasional bill and to warn us of the industrial-military complex and Richard Nixon watches and waits while Malachy and Michael pour the drinks and keep everyone laughing and demanding more, more drinks, Malachy, more stories, Michael, you two are a riot.

  Meanwhile my mother, Angela McCourt, drinks tea in her comfortable kitchen in Limerick, hears stories from visitors about the great times in New York, sees newspaper clippings about Malachy on The Jack Paar Show, and she has nothing else to do but drink that tea, keep the house and herself nice and warm, look after Alphie now that he’s out of school and ready for a job whatever that may be, and wouldn’t it be lovely if she and Alphie could take a little trip to New York because she hasn’t been there in ages and her sons, Frank, Michael, Malachy, are there and doing so well.

  My cold-water flat on Downing Street is uncomfortable and there’s nothing I can do about it because of my small teacher’s salary and the few dollars I send my mother till my brother Alphie gets a job. When I moved in I bought kerosene for my cast-iron stove from the little Italian hunchback on Bleecker Street. He said, You ony need a leetle in the stove, but I must have put in too much because the stove turned into a great red living thing in my kitchen and since I didn’t know how to turn it down or off I fled the flat and went to the White Horse Tavern where I sat all afternoon in a terrible state of nerves waiting for the boom of the explosion and the wailing and honking of fire engines. I would have to decide then if I should go back to the smoking remains of 46 Downing Street with charred bodies being brought out and face fire inspectors and police or if I should call Alberta in Brooklyn, tell her my building was in ashes, my belongings all gone, and could she see her way to putting me up for a few days till I could find another cold-water flat.

  There was no explosion, no fire, and I felt so relieved I thought I deserved a bath, time in the tub, a little peace, ease and comfort, as my mother would say.

  It’s all right to loll in a tub in a cold-water flat but there’s a problem with the head. The flat is so cold that if you stay in the tub long enough your head begins to freeze and you don’t know what to do with it. If you slip under the water, head and all, you suffer when you emerge and the hot water on your head freezes and then you’re shivering and sneezing from the chin up.

  And you can’t read in comfort in a tub in a cold-water flat. The body submerged in the hot water might grow pink and wrinkled from the heat but the hands holding the book turn purple from the cold. If it’s a small book you can alternate the hands, holding the book with one hand while the other is in warm water. This could be a solution to the reading problem except that the hand that was in the water is now wet and threatening to make the book soggy and you can’t reach for the towel every few minutes because you want that towel to be warm and dry at the end of your time in the tub.

  I thought I could solve the head problem by wearing a knitted skier’s cap and the hand problem with a pair of cheap gloves but then I worried that if I ever died of a heart attack the ambulance people would wonder what I was doing wearing cap and gloves in the tub and of course they’d slip this discovery to the Daily News and I’d be the laughingstock of McKee Vocational and Technical High School and the patrons of various bars.

  I bought the cap and gloves anyway and on the day of no explosion I filled the tub with hot water. I decided to be good to myself, forget the reading and slide under the water as often as I liked to keep the head from freezing. I turned on the radio to music suitable for a man who had survived a nerve-wracking afternoon with a dangerous stove, plugged in my electric blanket and draped it across a chair beside the tub so that I could step out, dry myself quickly with the pink towel Alberta had given me, wrap myself in the electric blanket, put on my cap and gloves and lay on the bed cozy and warm. I watched the snow beat against my window, thanked God the stove had cooled by itself and read myself to sleep with Anna Karenina.

  The tenant under me is Bradford Rush who moved into the flat when I told him about it on the midnight shift at the Manufact
urer’s Trust Company. If anyone at the bank called him Brad he snapped at them, Bradford, Bradford, my name is Bradford, so mean that no one ever wanted to talk to him and when we went out for breakfast or lunch or whatever we called it at 3 A.M. he was never invited to join us. Then one of the women who was leaving to get married invited him to have a drink with us and he told us, after three drinks, he was from Colorado, a graduate of Yale and living in New York to get over the suicide of his mother who screamed for six months with bone cancer. The woman leaving to get married burst into tears over this story and we wondered why the hell Bradford had to hang such a cloud over our small party. That’s what I asked him on the train to Downing Street that night but all I got was a little smile and I wondered if he was right in the head. I wondered why he did clerical work in a bank when he had an Ivy League degree and could have been on Wall Street with his own kind.

  Later I wondered why he didn’t just say no to me in my time of crisis, the bitter February day my electricity was turned off for nonpayment. I came home to give myself the peace, ease and comfort of a hot bath in the kitchen tub. I draped the electric blanket over the chair, I turned on the radio. There was no sound. There was no warmth in the blanket, no light from the lamp.

  The water was steaming into the tub and I was naked. Now I had to put on cap, gloves and socks, wrap myself in an electric blanket with no heat and curse the company that turned off my electricity. It was still daylight but I knew I couldn’t stay in that condition.

  Bradford. Surely he wouldn’t mind doing me a little favor.

  I knocked on his door and he opened it with his usual grimness. Yes?

  Bradford, I have a bit of a crisis upstairs.

  Why are you wrapped up in that electric blanket?

  That’s what I came to talk to you about. They cut off my electricity and I have no heat but this blanket and I wondered if I dropped a long extension cord out my window you might take it and plug it in and I’d have electricity till I can pay my bill which I promise you will be very soon.

  I could tell he didn’t want to do it but he gave a little nod and pulled in my extension cord when I dropped it. I knocked on the floor three times hoping he’d understand that I was saying thank you but there was no response and whenever I saw him on the stairs he barely acknowledged me and I knew he was brooding on the extension cord. The Electrical Shop teacher at McKee told me an arrangement like this would cost a few measly pennies a day and couldn’t understand why anyone would resent it. He said I could offer the cheap bastard a few dollars for the great inconvenience of having a cord plugged into an outlet but people like that were so miserable anyway it wasn’t the money. It was the way they had of not being able to say no so that that no turned into acid in their guts and destroyed their lives.

  I thought the Electrical Shop teacher was exaggerating till I noticed Bradford was becoming more and more hostile. He used to smile a little or nod or grunt something. Now he passes me without a word and I’m worried because I still don’t have the money for the bills and I don’t know how long our arrangement will last. It makes me so nervous I always turn on the radio to make sure I can take a bath and have the blanket warming up.

  My cord stayed in his outlet for two months and then on a bitter night at the end of April there was an act of treachery. I turned on the radio, laid my electric blanket on a chair to warm up, put towel, cap and gloves on the blanket so that they’d be warm too, filled the tub, soaped myself and lay back listening to the Symphonie fantastique of Hector Berlioz and in the middle of the second movement when I’m ready to float out of the tub with the excitement everything stops, the radio is off, the light is out and I know the blanket will grow cold on the back of the chair.

  And I knew what he did, this Bradford, pulled the cord on a man in a tub of hot water in a cold-water flat. I knew I could never have done that to him or anyone else. I might do it to someone with central heating but never to a fellow cold-water-flat tenant, never.

  I leaned over the side of the tub and knocked on the floor hoping he might have made a mistake, that he’d have the decency to plug me back in, but no, not a sound from him and no radio, no light. The water was still warm so I could lie there awhile thinking about the villainy of the human race, how a man with a degree from Yale could deliberately take hold of an electric cord and yank it from the outlet leaving me to freeze to death upstairs. One act of treachery like that is enough to make you give up hope and think of revenge.

  No, it wasn’t revenge I wanted. It was electricity and I’d have to find another way to bring Bradford to his senses. There was a spoon and there was a long piece of string and if I tied string to spoon I could open the window and dangle spoon so that it tapped against Bradford’s window and he might understand that I was up there at the other end of the string, tapping, tapping for the gift of electricity. He might be annoyed and ignore my spoon but I remembered how he once told me that a dripping faucet was enough to keep him awake all night and if necessary I’d tap on his window with my spoon till he could stand it no longer. He could have climbed the stairs and banged on my door and told me to stop but I knew he could never be that direct and I knew I had him cornered. I felt sorry for him and the way his mother screamed for six months with bone cancer and I’d try to make all this up to him someday but this was a crisis and I needed my radio, my light, my electric blanket or I’d have to call Alberta for a night’s lodgings and if she asked me why I could never tell her about Bradford plugging me in all these weeks. She’d get into a state of righteous indignation, the New England kind, and tell me I should be paying my bills and not tapping on people’s windows with spoons on bitter nights, especially the windows of people whose mothers had died screaming of bone cancer. Then I’d tell her there was no connection between my spoon and Bradford’s dead mother and that would lead to more disagreement and a fight and I’d have to storm out, back to my flat in the cold and the dark.

  It was a Friday night, his night off from the bank, and I knew he couldn’t escape by going to work. I imagined him downstairs with the cord in his hand trying to decide what to do with the spoon at his window. He could have gone out but where would he go? Who would want to have a beer with him in a bar and listen to how his mother died screaming? On top of that he’d probably tell the world someone upstairs was tormenting him with a spoon and anyone in a bar with a beer would move away from him.

  I tapped on and off for a few hours and and suddenly there was light and music from the radio. Symphonie fantastique was long over and that irritated me but I turned the dial up on the electric blanket, put on cap and gloves and got back into bed with Anna Karenina which I couldn’t read because of the darkness in my head over Bradford and his poor mother in Colorado. If my mother were dying of bone cancer in Limerick and someone upstairs tormented me with a spoon at my window I’d go up and kill him. I felt so guilty now I thought of knocking on Bradford’s door and telling him, I’m sorry over the spoon and your poor mother and you can pull the plug, but I was so warm and cozy in the bed I fell asleep.

  The following week I met him loading his things into a van. I asked if I could help and all he said was, Prick. He moved out but he left me plugged in and I had weeks of electricity till I blew the cord with an electric heater and had to go to Beneficial Finance Company for a loan to pay my electricity bills so that I wouldn’t freeze to death.

  39

  The old-timers in the teachers’ cafeteria say the classroom is a battleground, that teachers are warriors bringing the light to these damn kids who don’t want to learn, who just want to sit on their asses and talk about movies and cars and sex and what they’re gonna do Saturday night. That’s the way it is in this country. We’ve got free education and no one wants it. Not like Europe where there’s respect for teachers. Parents of kids in this school don’t care because they never went to high school themselves. They were too busy struggling with the Depression and fighting wars, World War II and Korea. Then you have all these bureaucrats who n
ever liked teaching in the first place, all these goddam principals and assistant principals and chairmen who got out of the classroom as fast as their little legs could carry them and now spend their lives harassing the classroom teacher.

  Bob Bogard is at the time clock. Ah, Mr. McCourt, would you like to go for some soup?

  Soup?

  He has a little smile and I know he means something else. Yes, Mr. McCourt. Soup.

  We walk down the street and turn into the Meurot Bar.

  Soup, Mr. McCourt. Would you like a beer?

  We settle on our bar stools and drink beer after beer. It’s Friday and other teachers drift in and the talk is kids, kids, kids and the school, and I learn that in every school there are two worlds, the world of the classroom teacher and the world of the administrator and supervisor, that these worlds are forever at sword’s point, that when anything goes wrong the teacher is the scapegoat.

  Bob Bogard tells me don’t worry about Your World and You and the midterm test. Go through the motions. Distribute the test, watch the kids scribble what they don’t know, retrieve the tests, give the kids passing grades, it isn’t their fault Miss Mudd neglected them, the parents will be satisfied, and the chairman and principal will stay off my back.