'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  The Lennons laugh and tell us their father left the bogs a long time ago. Danny says, This is America, men. This is the music. But Paddy Arthur pulls Duke Ellington off the phonograph and puts on Frank Lee's Tara Ceilidhe Band and we sit around the living room, listening, tapping slightly, and not moving our faces. The Lennons laugh, and leave.

  29

  Sister Mary Thomas somehow found my new address and sent me a note to say it would be very nice if I came over and said good-bye to Mrs. Klein and Michael what's left of him and to pick up two books I'd left under my bed. There's an ambulance waiting outside the apartment house and upstairs Sister Mary Thomas is telling Mrs. Klein she has to put on her wig and, no, she can't have a rabbi, they don't have rabbis where she's going and she'd be better off on her knees saying a decade of the rosary and praying for forgiveness, and down the hall Sister Beatrice is crooning to Michael what's left of him and telling him a brighter day is dawning, that where he's going there will be birds and flowers and trees and a risen Lord. Sister Mary Thomas calls down the hall, Sister, you're wasting your time. He doesn't understand a word you're saying. But Sister Beatrice answers back, It doesn't matter, Sister. He's a child of the Lord, a Jewish child of the Lord, Sister.

  He's not Jewish, Sister.

  Does it matter, Sister? Does it matter?

  It matters, Sister, and I'd advise you to consult your confessor.

  Yes, Sister, I will. And Sister Beatrice goes on with her cheerful words and hymns to Michael what's left of him who may or may not be Jewish.

  Sister Mary Thomas says, Oh, I nearly forgot your books. They're under the bed.

  She hands me the books and rubs her hands together as if to clean them. Don't you know, she says, that Anatole France is on the Index of the Catholic Church and D. H. Lawrence was a completely depraved Englishman who is now howling in the depths of hell, the Lord save us all? If that's what you're reading at New York University I fear for your soul and I'll light a candle for you.

  No, Sister, I'm reading Penguin Island for myself and Women in Love for one of my classes.

  She rolls her eyes to heaven. Oh, the arrogance of youth. I feel sorry for your poor mother.

  There are two men in white coats at the door with a stretcher and they go down the hall for Michael what's left of him. Mrs. Klein sees them and calls, Rabbi, Rabbi, help me in my hour, and Sister Mary Thomas pushes her back into her chair. They shuffle back down the hall, the men in white with Michael what's left of him on the stretcher and Sister Beatrice stroking the top of his head that looks like a skull. Alannah, alannah, she says in her Irish accent, sure there's nothing left of you. But you'll see the sky now and the clouds in it. She goes down with him in the elevator and I'd like to go myself to get away from Sister Mary Thomas and her remarks on the state of my soul and the terrible things I'm reading but I have to say good-bye to Mrs. Klein all dressed up in her wig and hat. She takes my hand, Take care of Michael what's left of him, won't you, Eddie?

  Eddie. I feel a fierce pain in my heart because of this and a terrible memory of Rappaport and the laundry at Dachau and I wonder if I'll ever know anything in the world but darkness. Will I ever know what Sister Beatrice promised Michael what's left of him, birds, flowers, trees and a risen Lord?

  What I learned in the army comes in useful at NYU. Never raise your hand, never let them know your name, never volunteer. Students just graduated from high school, eighteen years of age, raise their hands regularly to tell the class and the professor what they think. If professors look directly at me and ask questions I can never finish the answers with the way they always say, Oh, do I detect a brogue? After that I have no peace. Whenever an Irish writer is mentioned, or anything Irish, everyone turns to me as if I'm the authority. Even the professors seem to think I know all about Irish literature and history. If they say anything about Joyce or Yeats they look at me as if I am the expert, as if I should nod and confirm what they say. I nod all the time because I don't know what else to do. If ever I shook my head in doubt or disagreement the professors would dig deeper with their questions and expose my ignorance for all to see, especially the girls.

  It's the same with Catholicism. If I answer a question they hear my accent and that means I'm a Catholic and ready to defend Mother Church to the last drop of my blood. Some professors like to taunt me by sneering at the Virgin Birth, the Holy Trinity, the celibacy of St. Joseph, the Inquisition, the priest-ridden people of Ireland. When they talk like that I don't know what to say because they have the power to lower my grade and damage my average so that I won't be able to follow the American dream and that might drive me to Albert Camus and the daily decision not to commit suicide. I fear professors with their high degrees and the way they might make me look foolish before the other students, especially the girls.

  I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library, trying to write term papers with footnotes and bibliographies on a typewriter that betrays me with the letters "a" and "j" so that I have to go back and retype whole pages since it's impossible to avoid "a" and "j," falling asleep on subway trains all the way to the last stop so that I'm embarrassed I have to ask people where I am when I don't even know what borough I'm in.

  If I didn't have red eyes and an Irish accent I could be purely American and I wouldn't have to put up with professors tormenting me with Yeats and Joyce and the Irish Literary Renaissance and how clever and witty the Irish are and what a beautiful green country it is though priest-ridden and poor with a population ready to vanish from the face of the earth due to puritanical sexual repression and what do you have to say to that, Mr. McCourt?

  I think you're right, Professor.

  Oh, he thinks I'm right. And, Mr. Katz, what do you say to that?

  I guess I agree, Professor. I don't know too many Irish.

  Ladies and gentlemen, you must consider what has just been said by Mr. McCourt and Mr. Katz. Here we have the intersection of the Celtic and the Hebraic, both ready to accommodate and compromise. Isn't that right, Mr. McCourt, Mr. Katz?

  We nod and I remember what my mother used to say, A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. I'd like to say this to the professor but I can't take the risk of offending him with all the power he has to keep me from the American dream and make me look foolish before the class, especially the girls.

  Monday and Wednesday mornings in the fall term Professor Middlebrook teaches the Literature of England. She mounts the little platform, sits, places the heavy textbook on the desk, reads from it, comments and looks at the class only to ask an occasional question. She starts with Beowulf and ends with John Milton who, she says, is sublime, somewhat in disfavor in our time but his day will come, his day will come. Students read newspapers, work at crossword puzzles, pass notes to each other, study for other courses. After my all-night shifts at various jobs it's hard to stay awake and when she asks me a question Brian McPhillips jabs me with his elbow, whispers the question and the answer and I stammer it back to her. Sometimes she mutters into the textbook and I know I'm in trouble and that trouble takes the form of a C at the end of the term.

  With all my latenesses and absences and falling asleep in class I know I deserve a C and I'd like to tell the professor how guilty I feel and if she failed me completely I wouldn't blame her. I'd like to explain that even if I'm not a model student she should see the way I am with the Literature of England textbook, all excited reading it in the NYU library, on subway trains, even on piers and warehouse platforms during lunch hour. She should know I'm probably the only student in the world who ever got into trouble with men on warehouse platforms over a literature book. The men taunt me, Hey, look at the college boy. Too good to talk to us, eh? and when I tell them about the strangeness of the Anglo-Saxon language they tell me I am full of shit, that isn't English at all and who the fuck do you think y
ou're kiddin', kid? Maybe they never went to college, they say, but they aren't gonna have the wool pulled over their eyes by a half-ass shithead just off the boat from Ireland telling them this is the English language when you could see there isn't an English word on the whole goddam page.

  After that they won't talk to me and the platform boss shifts me inside to run the elevator so that the men won't be pulling tricks on me, dropping loads to jerk the arms out of my sockets or pretending to run me down with forklift trucks.

  I'd like to tell the professor how I look at the authors and poets in the textbook and ask myself which of them I'd like to have a pint with in a Greenwich Village pub and the one that stands out is Chaucer. I'd buy him a pint anytime and listen to his stories about the Canterbury pilgrims. I'd like to tell the professor how much I love the sermons of John Donne and how I'd like to buy him a pint except that he was a Protestant priest and not known for sitting in taverns knocking back the pint.

  I can't talk about this because it's dangerous to raise your hand in any class to say how much you love anything. The professor will look at you with a pitying little smile and the class will see that and the pitying little smile will travel around the room till you feel so foolish the face turns red and you promise you'll never love anything in college again or if you do keep it to yourself. I can say this to Brian McPhillips sitting next to me but someone in the seat before me turns and says, Aren't we being a little paranoid?

  Paranoid. That's another word I have to look up with the way everyone at NYU uses it. From the way this student looks at me with his superior left eyebrow nearly up to his hairline I can only guess he's accusing me of being demented and there's no use trying to answer him till I find out what that word means. I'm sure Brian McPhillips knows what that word means but he's busy talking to Joyce Timpanelli on his left. They're always looking at each other and smiling. That means there's something going on and I can't bother them with the word paranoid. I should carry a dictionary and when anyone throws a strange word at me I could look it up on the spot and shoot back with a smart answer that would collapse the superior eyebrow.

  Or I could practice the silence I learned in the army and go my own way which is the best thing of all because people who torment other people with strange words don't like it when you go your own way.

  Andy Peters sits next to me in Introduction to Philosophy and tells me about a job in a bank, Manufacturer's Trust Company down on Broad Street. They're looking for people to work with personal loan applications and I could choose a four to midnight shift or a midnight to eight A.M. He says the best thing about this job is once you finish the work you can leave, that no one works a full eight hours.

  There's a typing test and I have no trouble with that because of the way the army dragged me away from my dog and made me a company clerk typist. The bank says, Okay, I can work the four to midnight shift so that I can take my classes in the morning and sleep at night. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no classes and I can shape up at the warehouses and piers and make extra money against the day my brother Michael is out of the air force and the allotment to my mother ends. I can put the Wednesday-Friday money in a separate account and when the time comes she won't have to be running to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for food or shoes.

  There are seven women and four men on the shift at the bank and all we have to do is take piles of applications for personal loans and send notices to the applicants that they've been accepted or rejected. Andy Peters tells me during a coffee break that if I ever see an application from a friend that's been rejected I can change it to acceptance. There's a little code the daytime loan officers use and he'll show me how to alter it.

  Night after night we see hundreds of applications for loans. People want them for new babies, vacations, cars, furniture, consolidation of debts, hospital expenses, funerals, decorating apartments. Sometimes there are letters attached and if there's a good one we all stop typing and read them back and forth. There are letters that make the women cry and the men want to cry. Babies die and there are expenses and would the bank help. A husband runs away and the applicant doesn't know what to do, where to turn. She never had a job in her life, how could she with raising three kids, and she needs three hundred dollars to tide her over till she finds work and a cheap baby-sitter.

  One man promises that if the bank loans him five hundred dollars they can take a pint of his blood every month for the rest of his life and it's a good deal, he says, because he has a rare blood type which he's not ready to divulge at this moment but if the bank helps him out they're getting blood that's as good as gold, the best collateral in the world.

  The blood man is rejected and Andy lets it pass but he changes the code for the desperate woman with the three kids who was rejected for having no collateral. Andy says, I don't understand how they can give loans to people who want to spend two weeks lying on the sand at the goddam Jersey shore and then turn down a woman with three kids hanging on by her fingernails. This, my friend, is where the revolution starts.

  He changes a few applications every night to prove how stupid a bank can be. He says he knows what happens during the day when asshole loan people go through the applications. Harlem address? Negro? Points off. Puerto Rican? Mucho points off. He tells me there are dozens of Puerto Ricans around New York who think they were accepted for their good credit but it was Andy Peters all the time feeling sorry for them. He says it's a big thing in PR neighborhoods to get out there on the weekend and polish the car. They might never go anywhere but it's the polishing that matters, old guys on the stoop watching the polishing and drinking the old cerveza from bodegas in quart bottles, the radio blasting away with Tito Puente, the old guys checking out the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, man, that's living, man, that's living and what more do you want?

  Andy talks about Puerto Ricans all the time. He says they're the only people who know how to live in this goddam tight-ass city, that it's a tragedy the Spaniards didn't sail up the Hudson instead of the goddam Dutch and the goddam limeys. We'd have siestas, man, we'd have color. We wouldn't have The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. If he had his way he'd give a loan to every Puerto Rican applying for a car loan so that all over the city you'd have them polishing their new cars, drinking their beer out of brown paper bags, digging Tito and flirting with the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, girls with those see-through peasant blouses and Jesus medallions nestling in their cleavage, and wouldn't that be a city to live in?

  The women in the office laugh at the way Andy talks but they tell him be quiet because they want to finish the work and get outa here. They have kids at home and husbands waiting.

  When we finish early we go for a beer and he tells me why he's a thirty-one-year-old student studying philosophy at New York University. He was in the war, not Korea, the big one in Europe, but he has to work nights in this goddam bank because of his dishonorable discharge in the spring of 1945, just before the war ended and isn't that a bitch.

  Taking a shit, that's what he was, a nice quiet shit in a French ditch, all wiped and ready to button up when who comes along but a goddam lieutenant and a sergeant and the lieutenant has nothing else to do but march up to Andy and accuse him of an unnatural act with that sheep standing there a few feet away. Andy admits that in a way the lieutenant had a right to jump to the wrong conclusion since just before pulling up his pants Andy had a hard-on which made it difficult to pull up the aforesaid pants and even though he hated anything in the shape of an officer he felt an explanation would help.

  Well, Lieutenant, I may have fucked that sheep or I may not have fucked that sheep but what's interesting here is your peculiar concern with me and my relationship with that sheep. There's a war on, Lieutenant. I come out here to take a shit in a French ditch and there's a sheep at eye level and I'm nineteen years old and I haven't been laid since my high school prom and a sheep, especially a French sheep, looks very tempting and if I looked like I was ready to jump on that sheep you'r
e right, Lieutenant, I was, but I didn't. You and the sergeant interrupted a beautiful relationship. I thought the lieutenant would laugh, instead he said I was a goddam liar, that I had sheep written all over me. I wanted sheep all over me. I dreamed of it but it hadn't happened and what he said was so unfair I pushed him, didn't hit him, just pushed, and the next thing, Jesus, they had all kinds of artillery sticking in my face, pistols, carbines, M1 rifles, and before you know it there was a court-martial where I had a drunken captain defending me who told me in private that I was a disgusting sheep fucker and he was sorry he couldn't be at the other end prosecuting me because his father was a Basque from Montana where they respected their sheep, and I still don't know if I was sent to the stockade for six months for assaulting an officer or screwing a sheep. What I got out of it was a dishonorable discharge and when that happens you might as well study philosophy at NYU.

  30

  Because of Mr. Calitri I scribble memories of Limerick in notebooks. I make lists of streets, schoolmasters, priests, neighbors, friends, shops.

  After "The Bed" essay I'm sure people in Mr. Calitri's class are looking at me in a different way. The girls are probably telling each other they'd never go out with someone who spent his life in a bed a man might have died in. Then Mike Small tells me she heard about the essay and how it moved so many people in the class, boys and girls. I didn't want her to know what I came from but now she wants to read the essay and afterward her eyes fill up and she says, Oh, I never knew. Oh, it must have been awful. It reminds her of Dickens though I don't know how that can be because everything in Dickens always ends well.