Frank McCourt - 'Tis

The night before I go stateside there’s a party in a Bad Tolz restaurant. Officers and noncoms bring their wives and that means ordinary soldiers cannot bring their German girlfriends. Officers’ wives would disapprove knowing that certain ordinary soldiers have wives waiting back home and it’s not proper to sit with German girls who might be destroying good American families.

The captain makes a speech and says I was one of the finest soldiers he ever had under his command. Sergeant Burdick makes a speech and presents me with a scroll honoring me for my tight control of sheets, blankets and protective devices.

When he says protective devices there is snickering along the table till the officers give the warning glares that tell the men, Cut it out, our wives are here.

One officer has a wife, Belinda, who is my age. If she didn’t have a husband I might have a few beers to give me the courage to talk to her but I don’t have to because she leans over and whispers that all the wives think I’m handsome. That makes me blush so hard I have to go out to the lavatory and when I return Belinda is saying something to the other wives that makes them laugh and when they look at me they laugh even harder and I’m sure they’re laughing over what Belinda said to me. That makes me blush again and I wonder if there’s anyone you can trust in this world.

Somehow Buck seems to know what happened. He whispers, The hell with these women, Mac. They shouldn’t mock you like that.

I know he’s right but I’m sad that the last memory of Lenggries I’ll carry away with me is Belinda and the mocking officers’ wives.

20

The day of my discharge from the army at Camp Kilmer I met Tom Clifford at the Breffni Bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan. We had corned beef and cabbage slathered with mustard and beer galore to cool our mouths. Tom had found an Irish bed-and-breakfast place in the South Bronx, Logan’s Boarding House, and once I dropped off my duffel bag there we could come back down and see Emer after work in her apartment at East Fifty-fourth Street.

Mr. Logan seemed to be an old man with a bald head and a meaty red face. He might have been old but he had a young wife, Nora from Kilkenny, and a baby a few months old. He told me he was high up in the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus and I should make no mistake about where he stood on religion and morality in general, that none of his twelve boarders could expect a Sunday morning breakfast unless they could show they had attended Mass and, if at all possible, Holy Communion. For those who attended Communion and had at least two witnesses to prove it there would be sausages with the breakfast. Of course every boarder had two other boarders to testify he went to Communion. There was testifying right and left and Mr. Logan was so upset over what he had to pay out in sausages he disguised himself in Nora’s hat and coat and shuffled up to the middle of the church to discover not only that the boarders hadn’t gone to Communion but that Ned Guinan and Kevin Hayes were the only ones to go to Mass at all. The rest were over on Willis Avenue slipping in the back door of a bar for an illegal drink before noon opening time and when they came streeling back for the breakfast, reeking, Mr. Logan wanted to smell their breath. They told him feck off, this was a free country, and if they had to get their breaths smelled for the sake of a sausage they’d stay content with the watery eggs and milk, the stale bread and watery tea.

Also, there was to be no swearing or any kind of blaguarding in Mr. Logan’s house or we’d be asked to desist and depart. He would not allow his wife and child, Luke, to be exposed to any kind of disgraceful behavior from the twelve young Irish boarders. Our beds might be in the basement but he would always know about disgraceful behavior. No, indeed, it takes years to build up a boarding house business and he was not going to let twelve laborers from the Old Country tear it down. Bad enough that Negroes were moving in right and left and destroying a neighborhood, people with no morality, no jobs and no fathers for their children running the streets like savages.

The weekly rate was eighteen dollars for bed and breakfast and if I wanted dinner that would be an extra dollar a day. There were eight beds for twelve boarders and that was because everyone worked different shifts on the docks and various warehouses and what was the use of having extra beds cluttering up the two rooms in the basement, the only time all the beds were filled was Saturday night and then you had to bunk in with someone else. It didn’t matter because Saturday night was the night to get drunk up on St. Nicholas Avenue and you wouldn’t care if you slept with man, woman or sheep.

There was one bathroom for all of us, bring your own soap, and two long narrow towels that used to be white. Each towel had a black line to separate the top from the bottom and that was how you were supposed to use them. There was a handwritten sign on the wall telling you the top was for anything above your navel, the bottom for anything below, signed J. Logan, prop. The towels were changed every two weeks though there were always fights between the boarders who were careful about the rules and the ones who might have had a drink.

Chris Wayne from Lisdoonvarna was the oldest boarder, forty-two, working in construction and saving to bring over his girlfriend, twenty-three, so that they could get married and have children while he still had a tittle of power in himself. The boarders called him Duke because of his last name and because of the silliness in it. He didn’t drink or smoke, went to Mass and Communion every Sunday, and avoided the rest of us. He had tufts of gray in his curly black hair and he was gaunt from piety and frugality. He had his own towel, soap and two sheets he carried around in a bag for fear we might use them. Every night he knelt by his bed and said the entire rosary. He was the only one who had secured a bed of his own since no one, drunk or sober, would climb in with him or use the bed in his absence because of the odor of sanctity around it. He worked from eight to five every workday and ate dinner with the Logans every night. They loved him for that because it brought in an extra seven dollars a week and they loved him even more for the small amounts he put into his scrawny frame. They didn’t love him later when he started coughing and spitting and there were specks of blood on his handkerchief. They told him they had a child to think of and he’d better find another place. He told Mr. Logan he was a son-of-a-bitch and a pathetic bastard that he felt sorry for. If he thought he was really the father of that child Mr. Logan should look around at his boarders and if he wasn’t completely blind he’d detect a marked resemblance to the child on the face of one of the boarders. Mr. Logan struggled out of his armchair gasping that if he didn’t have the bad heart he’d kill Chris Wayne on the spot. He tried to rush at the Duke but his heart wouldn’t let him and he had to listen to Nora from Kilkenny screeching at him, begging him to stop or she’d be a widow with an orphan child.

The Duke laughed till he gasped at Nora, Don’t worry, that child will always have a father. Sure, isn’t he in this room.

He coughed his way out of the room and down the stairs to the basement and no one ever saw him again.

It was hard to live there after that. Mr. Logan was suspicious of everyone and you could hear him roaring at Nora from Kilkenny at all hours. He took away one of the towels and saved money by buying old bread at the bakery and serving powdered milk and eggs for breakfast. He wanted to make us all go to confession so that he could watch our faces and know if what the Duke said was true. We refused. There were only four boarders long enough in the house to be suspects and Peter McNamee, the longest one there, told Mr. Logan to his face that fooling around with Nora from Kilkenny was the last thing he’d ever think of. She was such a bag of bones from running the house you could hear her rattle and clank coming up the stairs.