Frank McCourt - 'Tis

There are only eight boarders left. Ned Guinan went home to Kildare to look at horses and die and two others married waitresses from Schrafft’s who are famous for saving up to go home and buy the old family farm. The towel marked Top and Bottom is still there but no one uses it after Peter McNamee caused a sensation by going out and buying a towel of his own. He says he was weary of looking at grown men dripping after their showers walking around and shaking themselves dry like old dogs, men who would squander half their wages on whiskey but couldn’t see their way to buying a towel. He says it was the last straw one Saturday when five boarders sat around on their beds drinking duty-free Irish whiskey from Shannon Airport, talking and singing along with an Irish radio program, putting themselves in the mood for a dance in Manhattan that night. After they took showers the towel was useless and instead of walking around to shake themselves dry they began to dance jigs and reels to the music on the radio and they were having a grand time except that Nora from Kilkenny came to replace toilet paper and walked in without knocking and when she saw what she saw she screamed like a banshee and ran up the stairs hysterical to Mr. Logan who came down to find the dancers rolling around naked and laughing and not giving a fiddler’s fart about Mr. Logan and his yelling that they were a disgrace to the Irish nation and Mother Church and he had a good mind to throw the lot of them into the street in their pelts and what kind of mothers did they have at all. He went back upstairs mumbling because he’d never evict five boarders paying eighteen dollars each a week.

When Peter brought his own towel home everyone was astonished and tried to borrow it but he told them bugger off and hid it in various places though hiding it was a problem because a towel, to dry, needs to be hung up and will only grow damp and musty if folded and hidden under the mattress or the bathtub itself. It made Peter bitter that he couldn’t hang his towel to dry till Nora from Kilkenny told him she’d take it upstairs and watch over it while it dried, she and Mr. Logan were that grateful for the meat he never failed to deliver every Friday night. That was a nice solution till Mr. Logan became agitated every time Peter went up for his dry towel and chatted a few minutes with Nora from Kilkenny. Mr. Logan would stare at his baby boy, Luke, then at Peter and back again at the baby and his frown would grow so severe his eyebrows met. He could stand it no longer and called up the stairs, Does it take all day, Peter, to get your dry towel? Nora has work to do in this house. Peter would come down the stairs. Ah, sorry, Mr. Logan, very sorry, but that doesn’t satisfy Mr. Logan who is staring at little Luke again and back at Peter. I have something to tell you, Peter. We won’t be needing your meat anymore and you’ll have to find a way to keep your towel dry yourself. Nora has enough to do without standing guard over your towel while it dries.

That night there is screaming and yelling in the Logan room and next morning Mr. Logan pins a note to Peter’s towel telling him he’ll have to leave, that he’s caused too much damage to the Logan family the way he took advantage of their good nature in the matter of drying the towel.

Peter doesn’t mind. He’s moving out to Long Island to his cousin’s house. We’ll all miss him, the way he opened up the world of towels to us, and now we all have them, they’re hanging everywhere and everyone is honorable about not using other men’s towels because they never dry anyway in the dampness of the basement bedroom.

22

It’s easier traveling on the train every morning in my suit and tie and the New York Times held up so that the world will see I’m not the kind of yob that reads comics in the Daily News or the Mirror. People will see that this is a man in a suit that can handle big words on his way to an important job in an insurance office.

I might be wearing a suit and reading the Times and getting admiring looks but I still can’t help committing my daily deadly sin, Envy. I see the college students with the covers on their books, Columbia, Fordham, NYU, CCNY, and I feel empty thinking I’ll never be one of them. I’d like to go to one of the bookshops and buy college book covers I could flaunt on the train except I know I’d be found out and laughed at.

Mr. Puglio teaches us the different health insurance policies offered by Blue Cross, family, individual, company, widows, orphans, veterans, cripples. When he teaches he becomes excited and tells us it’s a wonderful thing to sleep at night knowing people have nothing to worry about if they get sick as long as they have Blue Cross. We sit in a small room where the air is thick with cigarette smoke for lack of a window and it’s hard to stay awake on a summer’s afternoon with Mr. Puglio getting worked up over premiums. Every Friday he gives us a test and it’s a misery on Monday when he praises the higher scorers and frowns at the low scorers like me. My scores are low because I don’t care about insurance and I wonder if Emer is in her right mind getting engaged to an insurance man when she could be with a man who went from training German shepherds to typing the fastest morning reports in the European Command. I feel like calling her up and telling her now that I’m inside the insurance business it’s driving me mad and is she happy she did this to me. I could still be working at Port Warehouses enjoying my liverwurst and beer if she hadn’t broken my heart entirely. I’d like to call her but I’m afraid she’ll be cold and that will drive me to the Breffni Bar for relief.

Tom is at the Breffni and he says the best thing is to let the wound heal, have a drink and where did you get that awful suit. It’s bad enough to be suffering over the Blue Cross and Emer without having your suit sneered at and when I tell Tom fuck off he laughs and tells me I’ll live. He’s moving out of the boarding house himself to a small apartment in Woodside, Queens, and if I’d like to share the cost is ten dollars a week, cook our own food.

Once again I feel like calling Emer and telling her about my big job at Blue Cross and the apartment I’m getting in Queens but her face is fading in my memory and there’s another place in my mind that tells me I’m glad to be single in New York.

If Emer doesn’t want me what’s the use of being in the insurance business where I’m suffocated every day in an airless room with Mr. Puglio becoming hostile whenever I doze off? It’s hard to sit there when he tells us that the first duty of a married man is to train his wife to be a widow and I daydream about Mrs. Puglio getting the widow lecture. Does Mr. Puglio give her the lecture at the dinner table or sitting up in the bed?

On top of everything my appetite is gone from sitting all day in my suit and if I buy a liverwurst sandwich I throw most of it to the pigeons in Madison Park.

I sit in that park and listen to men in white shirts and ties talking about their jobs, the stock market, the insurance business, and I wonder if they’re content knowing this is what they’ll be doing till their hair turns gray. They tell each other how they told off the boss, how he didn’t have a word to say, his mouth going like this, you know, him stuck to his chair. They’ll be bosses themselves some day with people telling them off and how will they like that. There are days I’d give anything to be strolling along the banks of the Shannon or out the Mulcaire River or even climbing the mountains behind Lenggries.

One of the Blue Cross trainees passes me on his way back to the office.

Yo, McCourt, it’s two o’clock. You coming?

He says yo because he drove a tank in a cavalry outfit in Korea and that’s how they talked when the cavalry had horses. He says yo because that tells the world he wasn’t an ordinary infantry soldier.