Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Girls along the wall are laughing. My face is on fire and I wish to God Bud Clancy would play “Three O’Clock in the Morning” so that I could lead Madeline back to her seat and give up dancing forever but, no, Bud starts a slow one, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” and Madeline presses herself up against me with her nose in my chest and pushes me around the floor, clumping and limping, till she steps back from me and tells me if this is the way Yanks dance then she’ll dance from this day out with the men of Limerick who know how, thank you very much, indeed.

The girls along the wall laugh even harder. Even the men who can’t get anyone to dance with them and spend their time drinking pints are laughing and I know I might as well leave because no one will dance with me after the spectacle I made of myself. I have such a desperate feeling and I’m so ashamed of myself that I want them to feel ashamed and the only way to do that is to put on the limp and hope they’ll think it’s a war wound but when I hobble toward the door the girls shriek and turn so hysterical with laughter I run down the stairs and into the street so ashamed I want to throw myself into the River Shannon.

The next day Mam tells me she heard I went to a dance last night, that I danced with Madeline Burke from Mungret Street and everyone is saying, Wasn’t that very good of Frankie McCourt to dance with Madeline the way she is, God help us, an’ him in his uniform an’ all.

It doesn’t matter. I won’t go out in my uniform anymore. I’ll wear civilian clothes and no one will be looking to see if I have a fat arse. If I go to a dance I’ll stand by the bar and drink pints with the men who pretend they don’t care when the girls say no.

I have ten days left on my furlough and I wish it was ten minutes so that I could go back to Lenggries and get whatever I want for a pound of coffee and a carton of cigarettes. Mam says I’m acting very dour but I can’t explain the strange feelings I have for Limerick after all the bad times of my childhood and now the way I disgraced myself at the dance. I don’t care if I was good to Madeline Burke and her limp. That’s not what I came back to Limerick for. I’ll never try to dance with anyone again without looking to see if they have legs the same length. It should be easy if I watch them going to the lavatory. In the long run it’s easier to be with Buck and Rappaport, even Weber, taking the laundry to Dachau.

But I can’t tell my mother any of this. It’s hard to tell anyone anything especially if it’s about coming and going. You have to get used to a big powerful place like New York where you could be dead in your bed for days with a strange odor coming from your room before anyone would notice. Then you’re put into the army and you have to get used to men from all over America, all colors and shapes. When you go to Germany you look at people on the streets and in the beer places. You have to get used to them, too. They seem ordinary though you’d like to lean across to the group at the next table and say, Did anyone here kill Jews? Of course we were told in army orientation sessions to keep our mouths shut and treat Germans as allies in the war against godless communism but you’d still like to ask out of pure curiosity or to see the looks on their faces.

The hardest part of all the coming and going is Limerick. I’d like to walk around and be admired for my uniform and corporal’s stripes and I suppose I would if I hadn’t grown up here but I’m known to too many people because of the time I spent delivering telegrams and working for Easons and now all I get is, Ah, Jaysus, Frankie McCourt, is that yourself? Aren’t you lookin’ grand entirely. How’re your poor eyes and how’s your poor mother? You never looked better, Frankie.

I could be wearing the uniform of a general but all I am to them is Frankie McCourt the scabby-eyed telegram boy with the poor suffering mother.

The best part of being in Limerick is walking around with Alphie and Michael though Michael is usually busy with a girl who’s mad about him. All the girls are mad about him with his black hair and blue eyes and shy smile.

Oh, Mikey John, they say, isn’t he gorgeous.

If they say it to his face he blushes and that makes them love him even more. My mother says he’s a grand dancer, that’s what she heard, and no one is better singing “When April showers, they come your way.” He was having his dinner one day and the news came on the radio that Al Jolson had died and he got up, crying, and walked away from his dinner. It’s a very serious thing when a boy walks away from his dinner and it proved how much Michael loved Al Jolson.

With all his talent I know Michael should be in America and he will because I’ll make sure of it.

There are days I walk the streets in civilian clothes by myself. I have a notion that when I visit all the places we lived in I’m in a tunnel through the past where I know I’ll be happy to come out at the other end. I stand outside Leamy’s School where I got whatever education I have, good or bad. Next door is the St. Vincent de Paul Society where my mother went to keep us from starving. I wander the streets from church to church, memories everywhere. There are voices, choirs, hymns, priests preaching or murmuring during confession. I can look at the doors on every street in Limerick and know I delivered telegrams at every one.

I meet schoolmasters from Leamy’s National School and they tell me I was a fine boy even if they forget how they whacked me with stick and cane when I couldn’t remember the proper answers for the catechism or the dates and names in Ireland’s long sad history. Mr. Scanlon tells me there’s no use in being in America unless I make a fortune for myself and Mr. O’Halloran, the headmaster, stops his car to ask me about my life in America and to remind me of what the Greeks said, that there is no royal road to knowledge. He’ll be very surprised, he says, if I turn my back on books to join the shopkeepers of the world, to fumble in the greasy till. He smiles with his President Roosevelt smile and drives away.

I meet priests from our own church, St. Joseph’s, and other churches where I might have gone to confession or delivered telegrams but they pass me. You have to be rich to get a nod from a priest, unless he’s a Franciscan.

Still I sit in silent churches to look at altars, pulpits, confessionals. I’d like to know how many Masses I attended, how many sermons frightened the life out of me, how many priests were shocked by my sins before I gave up going to confession altogether. I know I’m doomed the way I am though I’d confess to a kindly priest if I could find one. Sometimes I wish I could be a Protestant or a Jew because they don’t know any better. When you belong to the True Faith there are no excuses and you’re trapped.

There’s a letter from my father’s sister, Aunt Emily, to say my grandmother is hoping I’ll be able to travel to the North to see them before I leave for Germany. My father is living with them, working as a farm laborer all around Toome, and he’d like to see me too after all these years.

I don’t mind traveling to the North to see my grandmother but I don’t know what I’ll say to my father. Now that I’m twenty-two I know from walking around Munich and Limerick and looking at children in the streets I could never be the father that walked away from them. He left us when I was ten to work in England and send us money but, as my mother said, he chose the bottle over the babies. Mam says I should go to the North because my grandmother is frail and might not last till the next time I come home. She says there are some things you can do only once and you might as well do them that once.

It’s surprising she should talk about my grandmother like this after the cold reception she got when she landed from America with my father and four small children but there are two things she hates in the world, holding grudges and owing money.