'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  I should be leaving the Meurot and taking the ferry to Manhattan where I’m having dinner with Alberta but the beers keep coming and it’s hard to say no to such generosity and when I leave my bar stool to call Alberta she screams at me that I’m a common Irish drunk and that’s the last time she’ll ever wait for me because she’s finished with me forever and there are plenty of men who’d like to go out with her, good-bye.

  All the beer in the world won’t relieve my misery. I struggle with five classes a day, I live in a flat Alberta calls a hovel, and now I’m in danger of losing her because of my hours at the Meurot. I tell Bob I have to go, it’s nearly midnight, we’ve been on the bar stools for nine hours and I have dark clouds fluttering in my head. He says, One more and then we’ll eat. You can’t go on that ferry without eating. He says it’s important to eat the kind of food that will ward off any unpleasant feeling in the morning, and the food he orders at the St. George Diner is fish with eggs sunny-side up, hash brown potatoes, toast and coffee. He says the combination of fish and eggs after a day and night of beer is miraculous.

  I’m on the ferry again where the old Italian patroling for shoeshine customers tells me my shoes look worse than ever and there’s no use telling him I can’t afford his offer of a shine, half price, if I’ll buy shoes from his brother up on Delancey Street.

  No, I don’t have money for shoes. I don’t have money for a shine.

  Ah, professore, professore, I give you free shine. Make you feel good, the shine. You go see my brother for the shoes.

  He sits on his box, pulls my foot to his lap and looks up at me. I smella beer, professore. Teacher come home late, eh? Terrible shoes, terrible shoes, but I shine. He dabs on the polish, draws the brush around the shoe, snaps the polishing cloth across the toe, taps my knee to say it’s done, replaces his things in the box and stands. He waits for the question and I don’t ask because he knows it, What about my other shoe?

  He shrugs. You go see my brother and I do your other shoe.

  If I buy new shoes from your brother I won’t need a shine for this.

  He shrugs again. You are the professore. You smart, eh, with the brains? You teach and think about the shine and the no shine.

  And he waddles away humming and calling shine shine to sleeping passengers.

  I’m a teacher with a college degree and this old Italian, with little English, toys with me and sends me ashore with one shoe shined, the other streaked with marks of rain, snow, mud. If I grabbed him and demanded a shine for the dirty shoe he might yell and bring crew members to his aid and how would I explain the offer of a free shine, the shining of one shoe and then the trick? I’m sober enough by now to know you can’t force an old Italian to shine your dirty shoe, that I was foolish to let him at my foot in the first place. If I protested to the crew members he might tell them he smelled beer and they’d laugh and walk away.

  He waddles up and down the aisles. He keeps saying shine to the other passengers and I have a great urge to grab him and his box and heave him over the side. Instead, when I’m leaving the ferry, I tell him, I’ll never buy shoes from your brother on Delancey Street.

  He shrugs. I don’t have a no brother on Delancey. Shine, shine.

  When I told the shoeshine man I had no money I wasn’t lying. I don’t have fifteen cents for the subway fare. Whatever I had went for beer and when we went to the St. George Diner I asked Bob Bogard to pay for my fish and eggs and I’ll pay him back next week and it won’t do me any harm to walk home, up Broadway, past Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Church where Robert Emmet’s brother, Thomas, is buried, past City Hall, up to Houston Street and over to my cold-water flat on Downing Street.

  It is two o’clock in the morning, few people, an occasional car. Broad Street, where I worked at the Manufacturer’s Trust Company, is over to my right and I wonder what became of Andy Peters and Brigid formerly Bridey. I walk and look back over the eight and a half years since I arrived in New York, days at the Biltmore Hotel, the army, NYU, jobs in warehouses, on the docks, in banks. I think of Emer and Tom Clifford and wonder what became of Rappaport and the men I knew in the army. I never dreamed I’d be able to get a college degree and become a teacher and now I’m wondering if I can survive a vocational high school. The office buildings I pass are dark but I know that during the day people sit at desks, study the stock market and make millions. They wear suits and ties, they carry briefcases, they go to lunch and talk about money money money. They live in Connecticut with their long-legged Episcopalian wives, who probably lolled in the lounge of the Biltmore Hotel when I cleaned up for them, and they drink martinis before dinner. They play golf at the country club and they have affairs and no one cares.

  I could do that. I could spend time with Stanley Garber to get rid of my accent though he told me already I’d be an ass to lose it. He said the Irish accent is charming, opens doors, reminds people of Barry Fitzgerald. I told him I didn’t want to remind people of Barry Fitzgerald and he said, Would you prefer to have a Jewish accent and remind people of Molly Goldberg? I asked him who Molly Goldberg was and he said if you don’t know who Molly Goldberg is there’s no use talking to you.

  Why can’t I have a bright carefree life like my brothers Malachy and Michael, uptown in the bar serving drinks to beautiful women and bantering with Ivy League graduates? I’d make more money than this forty-five hundred dollars a year for regular substitute teachers. There would be large tips, all the food I could eat, and nights in the beds of Episcopalian heiresses frolicking and dazzling them with bits of poetry and scraps of wit. I’d sleep late, have lunch at a romantic restaurant, walk the streets of Manhattan, there would be no forms to fill out, no papers to correct, the books I’d read would be for my own pleasure and I’d never have to worry about sullen high school teenagers.

  And what would I say if I ever met Horace again? Would I be able to tell him I went to college and became a teacher for a few weeks and it was so hard I became a bartender so that I could meet a better class of people on the Upper East Side? I know he’d shake his head and probably thank God I wasn’t his son.

  I think of the longshoreman in the coffee shop working for years so that his son can go to St. John’s University to become a teacher. What would I say to him?

  If I told Alberta I was planning to leave teaching for the exciting world of the bars she’d surely run off and marry a lawyer or a football player.

  So I won’t give up teaching, not because of Horace or the longshoreman or Alberta, but because of what I might say to myself at the end of a night of serving drinks and amusing the customers. I’d accuse myself of taking the easy way and all because I was defeated by boys and girls resisting Your World and You and Giants in the Earth.

  They don’t want to read and they don’t want to write. They say, Aw, Mr. McCourt, all these English teachers want us to write about dumb things like our summer vacation or the story of our life. Boring. Every year since our first grade we write the story of our life and teachers just give us a check mark and they say, Very Nice.

  In the English classes they’re cowed by the midterm test with its multiple choice questions on spelling, vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension. When I hand out the tests in Economic Citizenship there is muttering. There are hard words against Miss Mudd and how her ship should hit a rock and she should become fish food. I tell them, Do your best, and I’ll be reasonable with report card grades, but there is a coldness and resentment in the room as if I had betrayed them by forcing this test on them.

  Miss Mudd saves me. While my classes are taking the midterm test I explore the closets at the back of the room and find them stuffed with old grammar books, newspapers, Regents exams and hundreds of pages of uncorrected student compositions going back to 1942. I’m about to dump everything into the trash till I start reading the old compositions. The boys back then yearned to fight, to avenge the deaths of brothers, friends, neighbors. One wrote, I’m gonna kill five Japs for every one they killed from my neighborh
ood. Another wrote, I don’t want to go in the army if they tell me kill Italians because I’m Italian. I could be killing my own cousins and I won’t fight unless they let me kill Germans or Japs. I’d prefer to kill Germans because I don’t want to go to the Pacific where there’s all kinds of jungles with bugs and snakes and crap like that.

  The girls would wait. When Joey comes home me and him gonna get married and move to Jersey and get away from his crazy mother.

  I pile the crumbling papers on my desk and begin reading to my classes. They sit up. There are familiar names. Hey, that was my father. He was wounded in Africa. Hey, that was my Uncle Sal that was killed in Guam.

  While I read the essays aloud there are tears. Boys run from the room to the toilets and return red-eyed. Girls weep openly and console one another.

  Dozens of Staten Island and Brooklyn families are named in these papers so brittle we worry they’ll fall apart. We want to save them and the only way is to copy them by hand, the hundreds still stacked in the closets.

  No one objects. We are saving the immediate past of immediate families. Everyone has a pen and all through the rest of the term, April till the end of June, they decipher and write. Tears continue and there are outbursts. This is my father when he was fifteen. This is my aunt and she died when she was having a baby.

  They are suddenly interested in compositions with the title “My Life,” and I want to say, See what you can learn about your fathers and uncles and aunts? Don’t you want to write about your lives for the next generation?

  But I let it pass. I don’t want to interfere with a room so quiet Mr. Sorola has to investigate. He walks around the room, looks at what the class is doing and says nothing. I think he’s grateful for the silence.

  In June I give everyone a passing grade, thankful I’ve survived my first months of teaching in a vocational high school, though I wonder what I would have done without the crumbling compositions.

  I might have had to teach.

  40

  Since I long ago lost the key the door of my flat is always open and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to steal. Strangers begin to appear, Walter Anderson, an aging public relations man, Gordon Patterson, aspiring actor, Bill Galetly, man in search of the truth. They are homeless bar patrons sent by Malachy in the largeness of his heart.

  Walter begins to steal from me. Good-bye, Walter.

  Gordon smokes in bed and causes a fire but worse than that his girlfriend complains to me at Malachy’s bar about Gordon’s discomfort and my hostility. He, too, goes.

  School is over and I have to work again, day by day, on piers and warehouse platforms. Every morning I shape up to replace men on vacation, men out sick, or when there’s a sudden rush of business and they need more help. When there’s no work I roam the docks and the streets of Greenwich Village. I can make my way to Fourth Avenue to browse in one bookshop after another and dream of the day I’ll come here and buy all the books I like. All I can afford now is cheap paperbacks and I’m content on my way home with my package of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a weekend of reading. I’ll heat up a can of beans on my electric ring and boil water for tea and read in the light that comes from the flat below. I’ll start with Hemingway because I saw the film with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, everyone having a fine time of it in Paris and Pamplona, everyone drinking, going to bullfights, falling in love even if there was a sadness between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley over his condition. It’s the way I’d like to live, roaming the world without a care, though I wouldn’t want to be Jake.

  I take my books home and there is Bill Galetly. After Walter and Gordon I want no more interlopers but Bill is harder to dislodge and after a while I don’t mind if he stays. He has already installed himself by the time Malachy calls to say his friend, Bill, who has renounced the world, left his job as an executive in an advertising agency, divorced his wife, sold his clothes books records, needs shelter for a short time and surely I won’t mind.

  Bill stands naked on a bathroom scale before a long mirror propped against the wall. On the floor are two flickering candles. He looks from the mirror to the scale and back again and again. He shakes his head and turns to me. Too much, he says. This too, too solid flesh. He points to his body, a collection of bones topped with a head of lank black hair and a bushy black beard flecked with gray. His eyes are blue wide staring. You’re Frank, eh? Hi. He steps from the scale, stands with his back to the mirror, twists to look at himself over his shoulder and tells himself, Thou art fat and pursy, Bill.

  He asks me if I’ve ever read Hamlet and tells me he’s read it thirty times.

  And I’ve read Finnegans Wake, that’s if anyone can read Finnegans Wake. I’ve spent seven years with the damn book and that’s why I’m here. Yeah, you’re wondering. Read Hamlet thirty times and you start talking to yourself. Read Finnegans Wake for seven years and you want to put your head under water. The thing to do with Finnegans Wake is to chant it. It might take you seven years but it’s something you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren. They’ll look up to you. What’s that you have there, beans?

  Would you like some? I’m heating them on the ring there.

  No, thanks. No beans for me. You have your beans and I’ll give you the message while you’re eating. I’m trying to reduce the body to bare necessity. The world is too much with me. Know what I mean? Too much flesh.

  I don’t see it.

  There you are. Through prayer, fasting and meditation I will drop below one hundred pounds, the despicable three digits. I want to be ninety-nine or nothing. Want. Did I say want? I shouldn’t say want. I shouldn’t say shouldn’t. You’re confused? Oh, have your beans. I’m trying to eliminate my ego but that action is ego itself. All action is ego. Are you following me? I’m not here with my mirror and scale for the good of my health.

  From the next room he brings two books and tells me all my questions will be answered in Plato and the Gospel According to St. John. Excuse me, he says, I gotta take a leak.

  He takes the key and goes naked to the hall toilet. He returns to stand on the scale to see how much he lost with the leak. Quarter pound, he says, and lets out a sigh of relief. He squats on the floor, faces the mirror again flanked by the candles, with Plato on his left, St. John on his right. He studies himself in the mirror and talks to me. Go ahead. Eat your beans. Books. That’s what you have there, eh?

  I eat my beans and when I tell him the book titles he shakes his head. Oh, no, oh, no. Hesse, maybe. Forget the rest. All Western ego. All Western crap. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with Hemingway. But I shouldn’t say that. Arrogant. Ego stuff. I take it back. No, wait. I said it. I’ll leave it out there. It’s gone. I read Hamlet. I read Finnegans Wake and here I am sitting on a floor in Greenwich Village with Plato, John and a man eating beans. What do you make of those ingredients?

  I don’t know.

  I despair sometimes and you know why?

  Why?

  I despair I might push too far with Plato and John and find them wanting. I might come to a nowhere. You know?

  No.

  You ever read Plato?

  I did.

  St. John?

  They read the Gospels all the time at Mass.

  Not the same. You have to sit down and read St. John, hold him in your hands. No other way. John is an encyclopedia. He changed my life. Promise me you’ll read John and not that goddam stuff you brought home in the bag. Sorry, there’s that ego popping up again.

  He cackles into the mirror, pats himself where his belly should be, and rocks from book to book reading verses from John and paragraphs from Plato, squeaks with pleasure, Eek, eek, oh the Greek and the Jew, the Greek and the Jew.

  He talks to me again. I take it back, he says. There’s no nowhere with these guys. No nowhere. The form, the cave, the shadow, the cross. Jesus, I need a banana. He takes half a banana from behind the
mirror and after mumbling something over it eats it. He crosses his legs under him, rests the backs of his hands on his knees, lotus position. When I cross behind him to drop my bean can into the garbage I can see he’s staring at the tip of his nose. When I tell him good night he doesn’t respond and I know I’m not in his world anymore, that I might as well go to bed and read. I’ll read Hesse to keep the mood.

  41

  Alberta talks about marriage. She’d like to settle down, have a husband, go to antique shops on weekends, make dinner, get a decent apartment some day, be a mother.

  But I’m not ready yet. I see Malachy and Michael having their grand times uptown. I see the Clancy Brothers singing in the back room of the White Horse Tavern, acting in plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre, recording their songs, being discovered and moving on to glamorous clubs where beautiful women invite them to parties. I see the Beats in cafés all over the Village reading their work with jazz musicians in the background. They’re all free and I’m not.