Frank McCourt - 'Tis

If I do that she’ll pray for me. Above all, she’ll pray that I leave NYU which everyone knows is a hotbed of communism where I’m in great danger of losing my immortal soul and what doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his immortal soul? God knows there must be a place for me at Fordham or St. John’s which are not hotbeds of atheistic communism like NYU. I’d be better off out of NYU before Senator McCarthy goes after it, God bless him and keep him. Isn’t that right, Sister Beatrice?

The other nun nods yes because she’s always so busy she rarely speaks. While Sister Mary Thomas tries to save my soul from atheistic communism Sister Beatrice is giving Mrs. Klein a bath or cleaning Michael what’s left of him. Sometimes when Sister Beatrice opens Michael’s door the smell that drifts up the hall is enough to make you sick but that doesn’t stop her from going in. She still washes him and changes his bedclothes and you can hear her humming hymns. If Mrs. Klein has drunk too much and gets cranky over having to take a bath Sister Beatrice holds her, hums her hymns and strokes the little brown tufts on her skull till Mrs. Klein is a child in her arms. That makes Sister Mary Thomas impatient and she tells Mrs. Klein, You have no right to waste our time like this. We have other poor souls to visit, Catholics, Mrs. Klein, Catholics.

Mrs. Klein whimpers, I’m a Catholic. I’m a Catholic.

That’s debatable, Mrs. Klein.

And if Mrs. Klein sobs Sister Beatrice holds her harder, presses her whole open hand on her head and hums away with a little smile toward heaven. Sister Mary Thomas waggles her finger at me and tells me, Beware of marrying outside the True Faith. This is what happens.

27

There’s a letter telling me report to my faculty adviser in the English Department, Mr. Max Bogart. He says my grades are unsatisfactory, B minus in the History of Education in America and C in Introduction to Literature. I’m supposed to maintain a B average on my year’s probation if I want to stay in college. After all, he says, the dean did you a favor letting you in without a high school diploma and now you let her down.

I have to work.

What do you mean you have to work? Everyone has to work.

I have to work nights, sometimes days, on piers, in warehouses.

He says I have to make a decision, work or college. He’ll give me a break this time and put me on probation on top of the probation I already have. Next June he wants to see me with a straight B average or better.

I never thought college would be all numbers and letters and grades and averages and people putting me on probation. I thought this would be a place where kindly learned men and women would teach in a warm way and if I didn’t understand they’d pause and explain. I didn’t know I’d go from course to course with dozens of students, sometimes over a hundred, with professors lecturing and not even looking at you. Some professors look out the window or up at the ceiling and some stick their noses in notebooks and read from paper that is yellow and crumbling with age. If students ask questions they’re waved away. In English novels students at Oxford and Cambridge were always meeting in professors’ rooms and sipping sherry while discussing Sophocles. I’d like to discuss Sophocles, too, but I’d have to read him first and there’s no time after my nights at Merchants Refrigerating.

And if I’m to discuss Sophocles and get gloomy over existentialism and the Camus suicide problem I’ll have to give up Merchants Refrigerating. If I didn’t have the night job I might be able to sit in the cafeteria and talk about Pierre, or the Ambiguities or Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare in general. There are girls in the cafeteria with names like Rachel and Naomi and they’re the ones Mrs. Klein told me about, Jewish girls who are very sensual. I wish I had the courage to talk to them because they’re probably like Protestant girls, all in a state of despair over the emptiness of it all, no sense of sin and ready for all kinds of sensuality.

In the spring of 1954 I’m a full-time student at NYU working only part-time on the docks and the warehouses or when the Manpower agency sends me on a temporary job. The first one is at a hat factory on Seventh Avenue where the owner, Mr. Meyer, tells me it’s easy work. All I have to do is take these women’s hats, neutral colors all of them, dip these feathers into different dye pots, let the feather dry, match the color against the hat, attach feather to hat. Easy, right? Yeah, that’s what you’d think, says Mr. Meyer, but when I let some of my Puerto Rican help try this job they came up with color combinations that would blind you. These PRs think life is an Easter Parade and it ain’t. You gotta have taste when you match a feather with a hat, taste, my friend. Little Jewish ladies in Brooklyn don’t want to be wearing the Easter Parade on their heads on Passover, know’t I mean?

He tells me I look intelligent enough, college boy, right? Easy job like this shouldn’t be a problem. If it is I shouldn’t even be in college. He’s going away for a few days so I’ll be on my own except for the Puerto Rican ladies working on the sewing machines and the cutting tables. Yeah, he says, the PR ladies will take care of you, ha ha.

I want to ask him if there are colors that match and colors that don’t but he’s gone. I dip feathers into pots and when I attach them to the hats the Puerto Rican women and girls start to giggle and laugh. I finish a batch of hats and they take them to shelves along the walls and bring me another batch. All the time they try not to laugh but they can’t help themselves and I can’t stop blushing. I try to vary the color schemes by dipping the feathers into different pots for a rainbow effect. I use a feather as a paintbrush and on the other feathers I try to make dots, stripes, sunsets, moons waxing and waning, wavy rivers with fish waggling along and birds roosting, and the women laugh so hard they can’t operate the sewing machines. I wish I could talk to them and ask them what I’m doing wrong. I wish I could tell them I wasn’t put into this world to stick feathers on hats, that I’m a college student who trained dogs in Germany and worked on the piers.

In three days Mr. Meyer returns and when he sees the hats he stops inside the door like a man paralyzed. He looks at the women and they shake their heads as if to say there’s madness in the world. He says, What did you do? and I don’t know what to say back. He says, Jesus. I mean are you Puerto Rican or what?

No, sir.

Irish, right? Yeah, that’s it. Maybe you’re color blind. I didn’t ask you about that. Did I ask you about your color blindness?

No, sir.

If you’re not color blind then I don’t know how you can explain these combinations. You make the Puerto Ricans look dull, y’know that? Dull. I guess it’s the Irish thing, no sense of color, no art, f’ Chrissakes. I mean where are the Irish painters? Name one.

I can’t.

You heard of Van Gogh, right? Rembrandt? Picasso?

I did.

That’s what I mean. You’re nice people, the Irish, great singers, John McCormack. Great cops, politicians, priests. Lotta Irish priests but no artists. When didja ever see an Irish painting on the wall? A Murphy, a Reilly, a Rooney? Nah, kid. I think it’s because your people know one color, green. Right? So my advice to you is stay away from anything to do with color. Join the cops, run for office, pick up your paycheck and have a nice life, no hard feelings.

They shake their heads in the Manpower office. They thought this would be the perfect job for me, college boy, right? What’s so hard about sticking feathers on hats? Mr. Meyer called them and said, Don’t send me no more Irish college boys. They’re color blind. Send me someone stoopid that knows colors and won’t mess with my hats.