Teacher Man

by Frank McCourt

  Again the class erupted, embracing one another, high fiving.

  I wanted to erupt, too, but I had to maintain teacher dignity.

  Across the room, over the giggling and gasping and laughing, I called, Bob, Bob. It would make me happy if you read the world-literature book yourself and left your poor father in peace.

  He said he'd love to read the book cover to cover but it did not fit into his plans.

  And what are your plans, Bob?

  I'm going to be a farmer.

  He smiled and waved the pen and paper so kindly donated by Jonathan Greenberg and said he was sorry for disrupting the class and maybe we should start writing what I wanted them to write at the start of the period, which was quickly passing. He, Bob, was ready and suggested the class quiet down so Mr. McCourt could get on with his work. He told them teaching is the hardest work in the world and he should know because, once in summer camp, he tried to teach a bunch of small kids about things that grow in the ground but they wouldn't listen to him, just ran around chasing bugs till he got mad and said he'd kick their asses and that was the end of his teaching career, so have a little concern for Mr. McCourt. But before we got down to business he'd like to explain he had nothing against world literature except that now he read nothing but publications from the Department of Agriculture and magazines that had to do with farming. He said there's more to farming than meets the eye, but that's another subject, and he could see I wanted to get on with my lesson and what was that lesson, Mr. McCourt?

  What was I to do with this large boy on the windowsill, a Jewish Future Farmer of America? Jonathan Greenberg raised his hand and asked what was it about farming that didn't meet the eye?

  Bob looked gloomy for a moment. It's my dad, he said. He's having trouble with the corn and the pigs. He says Jews don't eat corn on the cob. He says you can go up one street and down the other in Williamsburg and Crown Heights and look in Jewish windows at dinnertime and you'll never see anyone chewing on corn on the cob. It just isn't a Jewish thing. Gets in the beard. Show me a Jew eating corn on the cob and I'll show you one who has lost the faith. That's my dad talking. But the last straw was pigs. I told my dad I like them. I'm not planning to eat them or anything but I'd like to raise them and sell them to the goyim. What's wrong with that? They're really pleasant little animals and they can be very affectionate. I told my dad I'll be married and have kids and they'll like the little piglets. He nearly went crazy and my mom had to go lie down. Maybe I shouldn't have told them but they taught me to tell the truth and it'll come out in the end anyway.

  The bell rang. Bob climbed off the windowsill and returned pen and paper to Jonathan. He said his father the rabbi would be in to see me on Open School Night next week and he was sorry about the disruption.

  The rabbi sat by my desk, heaved up his hands and said, Oy. I thought he was joking but the way he dropped his chin to his chest and shook his head told me this was not a happy rabbi. He said, Bob, how's he doing? He had a German accent.

  Fine, I said.

  He's killing us, breaking our hearts. Did he tell you? He wants to be a farmer.

  It's a healthy life, Mr. Stein.

  It's a scandal. We're not paying for him to go to college so he can raise pigs and corn. Fingers will be pointed on our street. It's gonna kill my wife. We told him he wants to go that way he's gonna pay for himself and that's final. He says don't worry. Big government programs have scholarships for kids who want to be farmers and he knows all about that. House full of books and stuff from Washington and some college in Ohio. So we're losing him, Mr. McCoot. Our son is dead. We can't have a son living with pigs every day.

  I'm sorry, Mr. Stein.

  Six years later I met Bob on Lower Broadway. It was a January day but he was attired as usual in short pants and Orson Welles jacket. He said, Hi, Mr. McCourt. Great day, isn't it?

  It's freezing, Bob.

  Oh, that's OK.

  He told me he was already working for a farmer in Ohio, but he couldn't go through with the pig thing, that would destroy his parents. I told him that was a good and loving decision.

  He paused and looked at me. Mr. McCourt, you never liked me, did you?

  Never liked you, Bob? Are you joking? It was a joy to have you in my class. Jonathan said you drove the gloom from the room.

  Tell him, McCourt, tell him the truth. Tell him how he brightened your days, how you told your friends about him, what an original he was, how you admired his style, his good humor, his honesty, his courage, how you would have given your soul for a son like him. And tell him how beautiful he was and is in every way, how you loved him then and love him now. Tell him.

  I did, and he was speechless and I didn't give a tinker's damn what people thought on Lower Broadway when they saw us in a long warm embrace, the high school teacher and the large Jewish Future Farmer of America.

  Ken was a Korean boy who hated his father. He told the class how he had to take piano lessons even though they had no piano. His father made him practice scales on the kitchen table till they could afford a piano and if his father suspected he wasn't practicing properly he whacked him across the fingers with a spatula. His six-year-old sister, too. When they got a real piano and she played "Chopsticks" he dragged her off the piano stool, into her room, tore a pile of her clothes from drawers, stuffed them into a pillowcase, dragged her down the hallway so that she could see him throwing her clothes into the incinerator.

  That would teach her to practice properly.

  When Ken was in elementary school he had to join the Boy Scouts and amass merit badges, more than anyone in his troop. Then, in high school, the father insisted he achieve Eagle Scout because that would look good when Ken applied to Harvard. Ken did not want to spend time trying to be an Eagle Scout but he had no choice. Harvard was on the horizon. Also, he was required by his father to excel in the martial arts, to rise from belt to belt till he reached black.

  In everything he obeyed till it came to choice of college. His father told him he was to concentrate on applying to two universities, Harvard and M.I.T. Even back in Korea everyone knew that's where you go.

  Ken said no. He was applying to Stanford in California. He wanted to live on the other side of the continent, as far from his father as possible. His father said no. He would not allow that. Ken said if he didn't go to Stanford he wasn't going to college at all. The father moved toward him in the kitchen and threatened him. Ken, martial arts expert, said, Just try it, Dad, and Dad backed off. Dad could have said, All right. Do what you like, but what would his neighbors say? What would they say in his church? Imagine having a son graduating from Stuyvesant High School and refusing to go to college. Dad would be disgraced. His friends were proudly sending their children to Harvard and M.I.T. and if Ken had any regard for the reputation of his family he'd forget Stanford.

  He wrote me from Stanford. He liked the sunshine out there. College life was easier than Stuyvesant High School, less pressure, less competition. He had just had a letter from his mother, who said he was to concentrate on his studies and participate in no extracurricular activities, no sports, no clubs, nothing, and unless he had straight As in his courses he was not to come home for Christmas. He said, in the letter, that would suit him fine. He didn't want to come home for Christmas anyway. He came home only to see his sister.

  He appeared at my classroom door a few days before Christmas and told me I had helped him get through the last year of high school. At one time he had a dream of going into a dark alleyway with his father and only one of them would come out. He'd be the one, of course, but out there in Stanford he began to think about his father and what it was like coming from Korea, working day and night selling fruit and vegetables when he knew barely enough English to get through the day, hanging on, desperate for his children to get the education he never had in Korea, that you couldn't even dream of in Korea, and then, in an English class at Stanford, when Ken was called on by the professor to talk about a favorite poem, what popped u
p in his memory was "My Papa's Waltz" and, Jesus, it was too much, he broke down and wept in front of all those people, and the professor was terrific, put his arm around Ken's shoulder and led him down the hallway to his office till he could recover. He stayed an hour in the professor's office, talking and crying, the professor saying it was OK, he had a father he thought was a mean son-of-a-bitch Polish Jew, forgetting that that mean son-of-a-bitch survived Auschwitz and made his way to California and raised the professor and two other kids, ran a delicatessen in Santa Barbara, every organ in his body threatening to collapse, undermined in the camp. The professor said their two fathers would have a lot to talk about but that would never happen. The Korean grocer and the Polish-Jewish delicatessen man could never find the words that come so easily in a university. Ken said a huge weight was lifted in the professor's office. Or you could say all kinds of poison had flowed out of his system. Something like that. Now he was going to buy his father a tie for Christmas and flowers for his mother. Yeah, it was crazy buying her flowers since they sold them in the store, but there was a big difference between the flowers you bought from the Korean corner grocery and the flowers you bought from a real florist. He kept thinking of one remark of the professor's, that the world should let the Polish-Jewish father and the Korean father sit in the sun with their wives, if they were lucky enough to have them. Ken laughed over how excited the professor became. Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won't let them because there's nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep 'em busy or they might start thinking.

  16

  I'm learning. The mick from the lanes of Limerick letting the envy hang out. I'm dealing with first-and second-generation immigrants, like myself, but I've also got the middle classes and the upper middle classes and I'm sneering. I don't want to sneer but old habits die hard. It's the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it's too hot, it's too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower. I'm reading a man named Krishnamurti and what I like about him is that he doesn't hold himself up as a guru like some of these characters who come storming out of India with tin cups that collect millions. He refuses to be guru or wise man or anything else. He tells you, suggests, that in the long run, baby, you're on your own. There's a chilling essay by Thoreau called "Walking," where he says when you go out the door for a walk you should be so free, so unencumbered, you need never return to the starting place. You just keep walking because you're free. I had the kids read this essay and they said, Oh, no, they could never do that. Just walk away? You kiddin'? Which is strange because when I talked to them about Kerouac and Ginsberg hitting the road, they thought it was wonderful. All that freedom. Marijuana and women and wine for three thousand miles. When I talk to those kids I'm talking to myself. What we have in common is urgency. Christ, I'm middle-aged and making discoveries the average intelligent American knew at twenty. The mask is mostly off and I can breathe.

  The kids are opening up in their writing and classroom discussions and I'm getting a written tour of American family life from East Side town houses to Chinatown tenements. It's a pageant of the settled and the new and everywhere there are dragons and demons.

  Phyllis wrote an account of how her family gathered the night Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, how they shuttled between the living room television and the bedroom where her father lay dying. Back and forth. Concerned with the father, not wanting to miss the moon landing. Phyllis said she was with her father when her mother called to come and see Armstrong set foot on the moon. She ran to the living room, everyone cheering and hugging till she felt this urgency, the old urgency, and ran to the bedroom to find her father dead. She didn't scream, she didn't cry, and her problem was how to return to the happy people in the living room to tell them Dad was gone.

  She cried now, standing in front of the classroom. She could have stepped back to her seat in the front row and I hoped she would because I didn't know what to do. I went to her. I put my left arm around her. But that wasn't enough. I pulled her to me, embraced her with both arms, let her sob into my shoulder. Faces around the room were wet with tears till someone called, Right on, Phyllis, and one or two clapped and the whole class clapped and cheered and Phyllis turned to smile at them with her wet face and when I led her to her seat she turned and touched my cheek and I thought, This isn't earthshaking, this touch on the cheek, but I'll never forget it: Phyllis, her dead father, Armstrong on the moon.

  Listen. Are you listening? You're not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing.

  Every moment of your life, you're writing. Even in your dreams you're writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. There's the principal. You have to make a decision, a greeting decision. Will you nod? Will you smile? Will you say, Good morning, Mr. Baumel? or will you simply say, Hi? You see someone you dislike. Furious writing again in your head. Decision to be made. Turn your ahead away? Stare as you pass? Nod? Hiss a Hi? You see someone you like and you say, Hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.

  I'll do this as a male because women, for me, still remain the great mystery. I could tell you stories. Are you listening? There's a girl in this school you've fallen in love with. You happen to know she's broken up with someone else so the field is clear. You'd like to go out with her. Oh, the writing now sizzles in your head. You might be one of those cool characters who could saunter up to Helen of Troy and ask her what she's doing after the siege, that you know a nice lamb-and-ouzo place in the ruins of Ilium. The cool character, the charmer, doesn't have to prepare much of a script. The rest of us are writing. You call her to see if she'll go out with you on Saturday night. You're nervous. Rejection will lead you to the edge of the cliff, the overdose. You tell her, on the phone, you're in her physics class. She says, doubtfully, Oh, yeah. You ask if she's busy Saturday night. She's busy. She has something planned, but you suspect she's lying. A girl cannot admit she has nothing to do on Saturday night. It would be un-American. She has to put on the act. God, what would the world say? You, writing in your head, ask about the following Saturday night and all the other Saturdays stretching into infinity. You'll settle for anything, you poor little schmuck, anything as long as you can see her before you start collecting Social Security. She plays her little game, tells you call her again next week and she'll see. Yeah, she'll see. She sits home on Saturday night watching TV with her mother and Aunt Edna, who never shuts up. You sit home Saturday night with your mother and father, who never say anything. You go to bed and dream that next week, oh, God, next week, she might say yes and if she does you have it all planned, that cute little Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue with the red and white checked tablecloth and the Chianti bottles holding those dripping white candles.

  Dreaming, wishing, planning: it's all writing, but the difference between you and the man on the street is that you are looking at it, friends, getting it set in your head, realizing the significance of the insignificant, getting it on paper. You might be in the throes of love or grief but you are ruthless in observation. You are your material. You are writers and one thing is certain: no matter what happens on Saturday night, or any other night, you'll never be bored again. Never. Nothing human is alien to you. Hold your applause and pass up your homework.

  Mr. McCourt, you're lucky. You had that miserable childhood so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or
something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the two point three kids you're always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like fifty percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.

  Jonathan, that is the most miserable scenario of American life I've heard in a high school classroom. But you've supplied the ingredients for the great American novel. You've encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  They said I must be joking.

  I said, You know the ingredients of the McCourt life. You have your ingredients, too, what you'll use if you write about your life. List your ingredients in your notebook. Cherish them. This is urgent. Jewish. Middle class. New York Times. Classical music on radio. Harvard on the horizon. Chinese. Korean. Italian. Spanish. A foreign-language newspaper on the kitchen table. Ethnic music pouring out of the radio. Parents dream of trips to the Old Country. Grandmother, sitting silent in a corner of the living room, remembers glimpses of cemeteries in Queens. Thousands of headstones and crosses. Begs: Please, please, don't put me there. Take me to China. Please. So, sit with your grandmother. Let her tell her story. All the grandmothers and grandfathers have stories and if you let them die without taking down their stories you are criminal. Your punishment is banishment from the school cafeteria.

  Yeah. Haw, haw.

  Parents and grandparents are suspicious of this sudden interest in their lives. Why you asking me so many questions? My life is nobody's business, and what I did I did.

  What did you do?

  Nobody's business. Is it that teacher again? Stickin' his nose in?

  No, Grandma. I just thought you'd want to tell me about your life so I can tell my kids and they can tell their kids and you won't be forgotten.

  You tell that teacher mind his own business. All these Americans the same, always asking questions. We got privacy in this family.

  But, Grandma, this teacher is Irish.

  Oh, yeah? Well, they're the worst, always talking and singing about green things or getting shot and hung.