Frank McCourt - 'Tis

After three weeks at the warehouse and all the liverwurst and beer I’m scrawnier than ever. Eddie Lynch says in his Brooklyn brogue, Faith an’ begorrah, I could slip you and Clifford through the awrse of a sparrow, two o’ youse.

With the nights of drinking and working on the piers my eyes are flaring up again. They’re worse when I have to handle sacks of hot Cuban peppers from United Fruit ships. Sometimes the only thing that will give me relief is beer and Eddie Lynch says, Jesus Christ, the kid is so desperate for the beer he’s pouring it through his eyes.

The warehouse money is good and I should be content except that there’s nothing in my head but confusion and darkness. The Third Avenue El is packed every morning with people in suits and dresses, fresh and clean and happy in themselves. If they’re not reading newspapers they’re talking and I hear them describing their vacation plans or bragging about how well their children are doing in school or college. I know they’ll work every day till they’re old and silver-haired and they’ll be content with their children and grandchildren and I wonder if I’ll ever live like that.

In June the papers are filled with stories about university commencement exercises and pictures of happy graduates and their families. I try to look at the pictures but the train rocks and jolts and I’m thrown against passengers who give me superior looks because of my work clothes. I want to announce that this is only temporary, that one day I’ll be going to school and wearing a suit like them.

21

I wish I could be stronger at the warehouse and say no when someone laughs about going for a beer, one beer, just one. I should say no especially when I’m supposed to meet Emer to go to a movie or eat a piece of chicken. Sometimes after hours of drinking I call her and tell her I had to work overtime but she knows better and the more I lie the colder her voice and there’s no use calling and lying anymore.

Then, deep into the summer, Tom tells me Emer is going with someone else, she’s engaged, she’s wearing a big ring from her fiancé, an insurance man from the Bronx.

She won’t talk to me on the phone and when I knock on her door she won’t let me in. I beg her for a minute so that I can tell her how I’m a changed man, how I’m going to mend my ways and lead a decent life, no more stuffing myself with liverwurst sandwiches, no more guzzling beer till I can hardly stand.

She won’t let me in. She’s engaged and there’s a glint of diamond on her hand that sends me into such a wildness I want to pound the wall, tear out my hair, throw myself on the floor at her feet. I don’t want to stumble away from her to Logan’s Boarding House and the one towel and the warehouses and the docks and the drinking till all hours while the rest of the world, Emer and her insurance man included, lead clean lives with towels galore, all happy on graduation day and smiling with their perfect American teeth brushed after every meal. I want her to take me in so that we can talk about the days before us when I’ll have a suit and an office job and we’ll have our own apartment and I’ll be safe from the world and all temptation.

She won’t let me in. She has to go now. She has to see someone and I know it’s the insurance man.

Is he inside?

She says no but I know he is and I yell that I want to see him, trot the bugger out and I’ll deal with him, I’ll lay him out.

Then she shuts the door in my face and I’m so shocked my eyes dry up and all the heat leaves my body. I’m so shocked I wonder if my life is a series of doors closed in my face, so shocked I don’t even want to go to the Breffni Bar for a beer. People are passing me on the streets and cars are honking but I feel so cold and alone I could be in a prison cell. I sit on the Third Avenue El to the Bronx and think of Emer and her insurance man, how they’re having a cup of tea and laughing at the way I disgraced myself, how clean and wholesome they are, the two of them, not drinking, not smoking, waving away the chicken.

I know that’s the way it is around the country, people sitting in their living rooms, smiling, secure, resisting temptation, growing old together because they’re able to say, No, thank you, I don’t want a beer, not one.

I know Emer is acting like this because of my behavior and I know I’m the one she wants, not this man who’s probably sipping tea boring her to distraction with insurance stories. Still, she might like me again and take me back if I give up the warehouse, the docks, the liverwurst, the beer, and get a decent job. There’s still a chance for me since Tom told me they won’t be getting married till next year and if I improve myself starting tomorrow she’ll surely take me back although I don’t like thinking of him sitting for months on the couch kissing her and running his paws all over her shoulder blades.

Of course he’s an Irish-American Catholic, that’s what Tom told me, and of course he’ll respect her purity till the wedding night, this insurance man, but I know Irish-American Catholics have filthy minds. They have all the dirty dreams I have myself, especially insurance men. I know Emer’s man is thinking of the things they’ll be doing on their wedding night though he’ll have to confess his dirty thoughts to the priest before he gets married. It’s a good thing I’m not getting married myself because I’d have to confess to the things I did with women all over Bavaria and across the border to Austria itself and sometimes even Switzerland.

There’s an employment agency advertisement in the paper offering office jobs, steady, secure, well-paid, six-week paid training session, suit and tie required, preference given veterans.

The application form wants to know where I graduated from high school and when and that forces me to lie, Christian Brothers Secondary School, Limerick, Ireland, June 1947.

The agency man tells me the name of the company offering employment, Blue Cross.

Sir, what kind of company is that?

Insurance.

But.

But what?

Oh, it’s all right, sir.

It’s all right because I realize if I’m hired by this insurance company I might move up in the world and Emer will take me back. All she has to do is choose between two insurance men even if the other one has already given her a diamond ring.

Before I can even talk to her again I have to finish my six-week training course at the Blue Cross. The offices are on Fourth Avenue in a building with an entrance like the door of a cathedral. There are seven men in the training session, all high school graduates, one so badly wounded from the Korean War his mouth has moved around to the side of his head and he dribbles on his shoulder. It takes days to understand what he’s trying to say, that he wants to work for Blue Cross so that he can help veterans like himself who were wounded and have no one. Then a few days into the course he discovers he’s in the wrong place, that it was the Red Cross he wanted all along and he curses the instructor for not telling him before. We’re glad to see him go even after the way he suffered for America but it’s hard to be sitting all day with a man whose mouth is on the side of his head.

The instructor is Mr. Puglio and the first thing he tells us is that he’s studying for his master’s degree in business at NYU and, second, all the information we wrote on our application will be carefully checked, so if anyone claims he went to college, and didn’t, correct it now or else. The one thing Blue Cross won’t tolerate is a lie.

The boarders at Logan’s laugh every morning when I put on my suit, shirt, tie. They laugh even harder when they hear what my pay is, forty-seven dollars a week rising to fifty when I finish the training session.