'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  All right. Look. I’m moving your feet.

  Look? How can I look? ’Tis hard for me to lift my head from the pillow to be looking at my feet. Are you done tormenting me?

  Is there anything else?

  It’s a furnace in here. Would you open the window?

  But it’s freezing outside.

  There are tears. Can’t get me lemonade, can’t . . .

  All right, all right. I open the window to a blast of cold air from Seventy-seventh Street that freezes the sweat on her face. Her eyes are closed and when I kiss her there is no taste of salt.

  Should I stay awhile or even all night? The nurses don’t seem to mind. I could push this chair back, rest my head against the wall and doze. No. I might as well go home. Maggie will be singing tomorrow with the choir at the Plymouth Church and I don’t want her to see me slouching and red-eyed.

  All the way back to Brooklyn I feel I should return to the hospital but a friend is having an opening night party for his bar, the Clark Street Station. There is music and merry chatter. I stand outside. I can’t go in.

  When Malachy calls at three in the morning he doesn’t have to say the words. All I can do is make a cup of tea the way Mam did at unusual times and sit up in the bed in a dark darker than darkness knowing by now they’ve moved her to a colder place, that gray fleshly body that carried seven of us into the world. I sip my hot tea for the comfort because there are feelings I didn’t expect. I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man, the fine high mourning, the elegiac sense to suit the occasion. I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.

  I’m sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won’t come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.

  For once, Mam, my bladder is not near my eye and why isn’t it?

  Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day. Her life was Purgatory enough and surely she’s in the better place with her three children, Margaret, Oliver, Eugene.

  After the service I tell Maggie her grandmother has died and she wonders why I’m dry-eyed. You know, Dad, it’s all right if you cry.

  My brother Michael has returned to San Francisco and I’m meeting Malachy and Alphie for breakfast on West Seventy-second Street near the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home. When Malachy orders a hearty meal Alphie says, I don’t know how you can eat so much with your mother dead, and Malachy tells him, I have to sustain my grief, don’t I?

  Afterward, at the funeral home, we meet Diana and Lynn, wives of Malachy and Alphie. We sit in a semicircle at the desk of the funeral counselor. He wears a gold ring, a gold watch, a gold tie clasp, gold spectacles. He wields a gold pen and flashes a consoling golden smile. He places a large book on the desk and tells us the first casket is a very elegant item and would be somewhat less than ten thousand dollars, very nice indeed. We don’t linger. We tell him keep turning the pages till he reaches the last item, a coffin for less than three thousand. Malachy inquires, What is the absolute rock-bottom price?

  Well, sir, will this be interment or cremation?

  Cremation.

  Before he answers I try to lighten the moment by telling him and my family of the conversation I had with Mam a week ago.

  What do you want us to do with you when you go?

  Oh, I’d like to be brought back and buried with my family in Limerick.

  Mam, do you know the cost of transporting someone your size?

  Well, she said, reduce me.

  The funeral counselor is not amused. He says we could do it for eighteen hundred dollars, embalming, viewing, cremation. Malachy asks why we have to pay for a coffin if it’s going to be burned anyway and the man says it’s the law.

  Then, says Malachy, why can’t we just put her in a Hefty trash bag and leave her outside for collection?

  We all laugh and the man has to leave the room for a while.

  Alphie observes, There goes a life of extreme unctuousness, and when the man returns he looks puzzled at our laughter.

  It is arranged. My mother’s body will be laid out in her coffin for a day so that the children can see and say good-bye to a dead grandmother. The man inquires if we’d like to hire a limousine to attend the cremation but no one except for Alphie is inclined to travel to North Bergen, New Jersey, and even he changes his mind.

  In Limerick Mam had a friend, Mary Patterson, who said, Do you know what, Angela?

  No, what, Mary?

  I often wondered what I’d look like when I died and do you know what I did, Angela?

  I don’t, Mary.

  I got myself all dressed up in my brown habit from the Third Order of St. Francis and do you know what I did next, Angela?

  I don’t, Mary.

  I laid down on the bed with a mirror at the end, crossed my hands with the rosary beads around them, and closed my eyes and do you know what I did next, Angela?

  I don’t, Mary.

  I opened one eye and took a little look at myself in the mirror and do you know what, Angela?

  I don’t, Mary.

  I looked very peaceful.

  No one can say my mother looks peaceful in her coffin. All the misery of her life is in the face bloated from hospital drugs and there are stray tufts of hair that escaped her plastic razor.

  Maggie kneels by me, looking on her grandmother, the first dead body in her ten years. She has no vocabulary for this, no religion, no prayer, and that’s another sadness. She can only look at her grandmother and say, Where is she now, Dad?

  If there’s a heaven, Maggie, she’s there and she’s queen of it.

  Is there a heaven, Dad?

  If there isn’t, Maggie, I don’t understand God’s ways.

  She doesn’t understand my babbling and neither do I because the tears erupt and she tells me again, It’s all right to cry, Dad.

  When your mother is dead you can’t be sitting around looking mournful, recalling her virtues, receiving the condolences of friends and neighbors. You have to stand before the coffin with your brothers Malachy and Alphie and Malachy’s sons, Malachy, Conor, Cormac, link arms and sing the songs your mother loved and the songs your mother hated because that’s the only way you can be sure she’s dead, and we sang

  A mother’s love is a blessing

  No matter where you roam,

  Keep her while she’s living,

  You’ll miss her when she’s gone.

  and

  Goodbye, Johnny dear, when you’re far away,

  Don’t forget you dear old mother

  Far across the sea.

  Write a letter now and then

  And send her all you can

  And don’t forget where’er you roam

  That you’re an Irishman.

  Visitors look at each other and you know what they’re thinking. What kind of mourning is this where sons and grandsons sing and dance before the poor woman’s casket? Don’t they have any respect for their mother?

  We kiss her and I place on her breast a shilling I had borrowed from her long ago and when we walk the long corridor to the elevator I look back at her in the coffin, my gray mother in a cheap gray coffin, the color of beggary.

  56

  In January 1985 my brother Alphie called to say there was sad news from our cousins in Belfast, that our father, Malachy McCourt, had died early that morning at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

  I don’t know why Alphie used the word sad. It wouldn’t describe how I felt myself and I thought of a line from Emily Dickinson, After great pain a formal feeling comes.

  I had the formal feeling, but no pain
.

  My father and mother are dead and I’m an orphan.

  As a grown man Alphie had visited our father out of curiosity or love or whatever the reasons he had for wanting to see a father who had abandoned us when I was ten and Alphie barely one. Now Alphie was saying he was taking a flight that night for the funeral next day and there was something in his voice that said, Aren’t you coming?

  That was softer than, Are you coming? less demanding, because Alphie knew the tangled emotions of himself and his brothers, Frank, Malachy, Michael.

  Coming? Why should I fly to Belfast to the funeral of a man who went off to work in England and drank every penny of his wages? If my mother were alive would she go to the funeral of one who had left her in beggary?

  No, she might not go to the funeral herself but she’d tell me to go. She’d say no matter what he did to us he had the weakness, the curse of the race, and a father dies and is buried only once. She’d say he wasn’t the worst in the world and who are we to judge, that’s what God is for, and out of her charitable soul she’d light a candle and offer a prayer.

  I flew to my father’s funeral in Belfast in the hope I might discover why I was flying to my father’s funeral in Belfast.

  We drove from the airport through the troubled streets of Belfast, armored cars, military patrols, young men stopped, pushed against walls, searched. My cousins said it was quiet now but one bomb anywhere, Protestant or Catholic, and you’d think you were in a world war. No one remembered anymore what it was like to walk the streets in an ordinary way. If you went out for a pound of butter you might come back without a leg or you might not come back. Once they said this it was better not to talk about it anymore. Someday it would end and they’d all saunter out for the pound of butter or even the saunter for its own sake.

  My cousin, Francis MacRory, took us to see our father laid out in his coffin at the Royal Victoria Hospital and when we drove up to the death house I realized I was the oldest son, the chief mourner, and all these cousins were watching me, cousins I scarcely remembered, some I had never known, McCourts, MacRorys, Foxes. Three of my father’s living sisters were there, Maggie and Eva and Sister Comgall, whose name before she took the veil was Moya. Aunt Vera, the other sister, was too ill to travel from Oxford.

  Alphie and I, the youngest and the oldest sons of that man in the coffin, knelt on the prie-dieu. Our aunts and the cousins looked on these two men who had traveled a long way to a mystery and surely they wondered if there was any grief.

  How could there be sorrow with my father shrunken there in the coffin, his teeth gone, his face collapsed and his body in a fancy black suit with a little white silken bow tie he would have scorned, all this giving me the sudden impression I was looking at a seagull so that I shook with spasms of silent laughter so hard that all assembled, including Alphie, must have been convinced I was overcome with a grief beyond control.

  A cousin touched my shoulder and I wanted to say thank you but I knew if I removed my hands from my face I’d break into such laughter I’d shock everyone and be drummed out of the clan forever. Alphie blessed himself and rose from his knees. I controlled myself, dried my laugh tears, blessed myself and stood to face the sad looks around the little death house.

  Outside in the Belfast night there were tears with the embraces of my frail aging aunts. Oh, Francis, Francis, Alphie, Alphie, he loved you boys, he did, oh, he did, talked about you all the time.

  Oh, he did, indeed, Aunt Eva and Aunt Maggie and Aunt Sister Comgall, and he raised many a glass to us in three countries not that we want to whine and whimper at a time like this, after all it’s his funeral, and if I could control myself in the presence of my father, that seagull in the coffin, I can surely keep a bit of dignity before my three sweet aunts and cousins galore.

  We milled around ready to drive away but I had to return to my father, to satisfy myself, to tell him that if I hadn’t laughed to myself over the seagull my heart might have burst with the piling up of the past, images of the day he left us with high hopes of money coming soon from England, remembrances of my mother by the fire waiting for the money that never came and having to beg from the St. Vincent de Paul Society, memories of my brothers asking if they could have one more cut of fried bread. All this was your doing, Dad, and even if we came out of it, your sons, you inflicted a life of misfortune on our mother.

  I could only kneel by his coffin again and recall mornings in Limerick when the fire glowed and he talked softly for fear of waking my mother and brothers, telling me of Ireland’s sufferings and the great deeds of the Irish in America and those mornings are now pearls that turn into three Hail Marys there by the coffin.

  We buried him next day on a hill overlooking Belfast. The priest prayed and as he sprinkled the coffin with holy water shots rang out somewhere in the city. They’re at it again, someone said.

  There was a gathering at the house of our cousin, Theresa Fox, and her husband, Phil. There was talk about the day, a radio report that three IRA men trying to ram through a British army barricade had been shot by the troops. In the next world my father would have the escort of his dreams, three IRA men, and he’d envy them the manner of their going.

  We had tea and sandwiches and Phil brought out a bottle of whiskey to start the stories and the songs for there’s nothing else to do the day you bury your dead.

  In August of 1985, the year my father died, we brought my mother’s ashes to her last resting place, the graveyard at Mungret Abbey outside Limerick City. My brother Malachy was there with his wife, Diana, and their son, Cormac. My fourteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, was there along with neighbors from the old days in Limerick and friends from New York. We took turns dipping our fingers into the tin urn from the New Jersey crematorium and sprinkling Angela’s ashes over the graves of the Sheehans and Guilfoyles and Griffins while watching the breeze eddy her white dust around the grayness of their old bone bits and across the dark earth itself.

  We said a Hail Mary and it wasn’t enough. We had drifted from the church but we knew that for her and for us in that ancient abbey there would have been comfort and dignity in the prayers of a priest, proper requiem for a mother of seven.

  We had lunch at a pub along the road to Ballinacurra and you’d never know from the way we ate and drank and laughed that we’d scattered our mother who was once a grand dancer at the Wembley Hall and known to one and all for the way she sang a good song, oh, if she could only catch her breath.