Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

That night, when my father came home, he bumped into something and woke me up. I got up and tiptoed toward the kitchen, stopping in the dark of the next room. His face looked different, his jaw hanging loose, his slick black hair disheveled and wild. He sat down hard at the table and knocked over a glass of beer. My mother was no longer crying but she was what we kids called “cross.”

Ach, Billy, she said, and started wiping up the beer with a dishcloth.

Don’t say a thing! he said sharply. Just get me my bloody dinner.

She turned away and I thought she was going to cry again. Then he saw me.

What the hell are you looking at? he said to me. Get into bed.

Billy —

I saw how upset she was and I started to whimper.

You’ve got damn all to cry about! he said.

Leave him alone! she said. You’re upsetting him! And you’ll wake the baby.

He ignored her and pointed a finger at me.

Into bed! he said. Make it snappy!

I retreated into the darkness of the second room from the kitchen, and lay facedown on a bed beside Tommy and listened. I heard his voice, blurting and hard; then her voice; then his again; then silence. I heard water running and dishes clacking sharply against each other. Then silence again. I stated back toward the kitchen. My mother was at the sink. My father’s arm was straight out across the table, his head resting on it, a fork still in his hand, though his plate was gone. He was asleep.

IN SCHOOL that first year, I learned two things that began to give me some sense of self. One, I was Irish. At school, kids kept asking: What are you? I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called “Irish.” There were other Irish in 1A, a lot of them, along with Italians and Germans and Poles. But because my name wasn’t obviously Irish, like Kelly or Murphy or O’Connor, they kept on asking me. My mother had to explain it all to me.

She started with a book. For months, she had been buying an encyclopedia called the Wonderland of Knowledge, known to us simply as the Blue Books. Every week there was a coupon in the New York Post; for the coupon and a dime the newspaper sent us a volume. We would soon have them all, and they truly were wonderful. My mother found the right volume and turned to some maps and showed me where Ireland was: a tiny spot off the coast of a huge multicolored mass called Europe. Then she tried to explain what it meant to be Irish.

I can’t remember her exact words. But she had a strong sense of history and injustice, so I’m sure she told me that day (as she told me in so many ways in the years to come) that Ireland had been an independent country for more than a thousand years and then, about eight hundred years ago, the British had come with swords, horses, and treachery to take it for themselves. They destroyed the language of the Irish and made them speak English. They tried to destroy their religion too, particularly during the reign of the wicked Queen Elizabeth. But the Irish kept fighting, kept resisting, almost always losing, but struggling on, until in 1916, they rose in rebellion on Easter Sunday and drove the English out. Or at least drove them out of twenty-six of the nation’s thirty-two counties. The way she told it, the story was thrilling.

What happened to the other counties? I asked.

They’re still occupied by the British, she said. They kept six of them: the counties where our people are from. My parents, Daddy’s parents. And there’ll be no peace until they’re free. Someday they’ll finish the job they started in 1916.

She told me that 1916 was also the year her father died. His name was Peter Devlin and he was a seaman. He fell off a ship in a dry dock in Brooklyn and was crushed. So my mother, who was a little girl in 1916, went back to Ireland with her mother and her brother, Maurice. They lived there until 1929, when her mother died and she decided it was time to come back to America.

Those two dates always make me sad, she said, 1916 and 1929.

The room seemed to fill with sorrow as she tried, so carefully, to explain herself to me. Her mother and father were dead and she had come alone across that great expanse of blue on the map to live here in Brooklyn. I was happy she was here; who else could be my mother? But I felt sorry that she had no mother or father of her own. That was unfair. She had nobody except us. Even her brother, Uncle Maurice, was in Ireland, far across the ocean.

And where did you live in Ireland?

In Belfast, she said. Right here, see that dot?

She paused and her voice grew soft.

We lived on Madrid Street, she said. It was named after a city in Spain.

She showed me Madrid on the map, and I thought it was a wonderful thing to live on a street with a name like Madrid instead of a mere number, like ours. But she was unhappy as she told me about Belfast (on that day, and many others). The city was divided between Catholics like us and Protestants, who were a different kind of Christian. And though she knew some decent Protestants, in Belfast most of them were bigots. She was a little girl in Belfast when the Troubles started and the bigots formed into the Murder Gang and came into the Catholic neighborhoods to burn down houses and kill Catholics. The British army was there too, with armored cars and machine guns, terrible men who hated the Irish and hated the Catholics. All of that was in Belfast, where the bigots ran everything.

This was at once scary and thrilling, and I made her tell me the stories many times. I couldn’t imagine myself on streets where gunmen shot rifles from the shadows, where soldiers came rolling upon you in iron trucks, where you could be beaten or killed because you were a Catholic. But my mother seemed to me to be an amazing woman, someone who had seen things when she was a little girl that were more terrible than any movie. And here she was. Smiling. Whistling when she was happy. Telling me that she loved America for its freedom.

Freedom is a lot more important than money, she said. Remember that. Here we’re free. And you must never ever be a bigot.

What is a bigot anyway?

A bigot is a hater, she said. A bigot hates Catholics. A bigot hates Jews. A bigot hates colored people. It’s no sin to be poor, she said. It is a sin to be a bigot. Don’t ever be one of them.

No, Mommy, I said. I won’t be one of them.

And imagined a bigot with yellow eyes and a tall black hat and fangs for teeth. I said I would watch for them and if a bigot came to our street I would tell her and she could use the telephone in Mr. Kelly’s kitchen and call the police.

After I learned that I was Irish, I came to understand another big thing: my father was a cripple. That’s what the kids in 1A said. He is not, I said (not knowing what they meant, thinking perhaps that it was something like being a bigot). He is too, they said. He’s a cripple.

Yes, my mother said, he is a cripple. He lost his left leg in 1927. He was a soccer player. That’s a game they play in Ireland, with a round ball that they kick. They also play it out in Bay Ridge, another part of Brooklyn, and in a lot of other countries. She took a tobacco-colored photograph from a drawer and showed it to me. My father was sitting with other members of a team, all of them wearing short pants.

See, she said. He has two legs in this picture. But he only has one leg now.

She explained how he had to wear a wooden leg. He had a stump above the knee that fit into the wooden leg and straps that went over his shoulders to hold it in place. That was why the stairs at Roulston’s were hard on him. I hadn’t known that. She told me more, about how he was playing soccer one Sunday, here in America, in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, and he was kicked very hard and his leg was broken and they left him on the sidelines while they waited for an ambulance. It was a long wait. When the ambulance finally came, it took him away to Kings County Hospital, but there were no doctors to treat him and by the next day gangrene had set in and they had to cut off his leg.