Frank McCourt - 'Tis

She lives in a house with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a pink bird on the little front lawn. We stand at the small iron gate and I’m wondering if I should kiss her and get her into such a state we might go behind a tree for the excitement but there’s a roar from inside, Goddammit, Dolores, get your ass in here, hell of a nerve you have coming home at this goddam hour and tell that goddam shithead run for his life, and she says, Oh, and runs inside.

By the time I get back to Mary O’Brien’s everyone is up and having bacon and eggs followed by rum and slices of pineapple in heavy syrup. Mary puffs on her cigarette and gives me the knowing smile.

You look like you had a good time last night.

32

When the day workers at the bank leave their offices Bridey Stokes comes in with her mop and bucket to clean three floors. She pulls a large canvas bag behind her, fills it with trash from the wastepaper baskets and drags it to the freight elevator to empty it somewhere in the basement. Andy Peters tells her she should have extra canvas bags so that she won’t have to travel up and down so much and she says the bank won’t supply even one more canvas bag they’re that cheap. She could buy them herself but she’s working nights to keep her son, Patrick, at Fordham University and not to be supplying the Manufacturer’s Trust Company with canvas bags. Every night on each floor she fills the bag twice and that means six trips to the basement. Andy tries to explain to her that if she had six canvas bags she could fill the elevator once and that would save so much time and energy she could finish earlier and go home to Patrick and her husband.

Husband? He drank himself to death ten years ago.

I’m sorry to hear that, says Andy.

I’m not a bit sorry. He was too handy with his fists and I bear the marks to this day. Patrick, too. He’d think nothing of knocking little Patrick around the house till the little fella couldn’t even cry anymore and it was so bad one night I took him from the house and begged the man in the subway booth to let us in and I asked a cop where was Catholic Charities and they took care of us and got me this job and I’m grateful even if there’s only one canvas bag.

Andy tells her she doesn’t have to be a slave.

I’m not a slave. I’m up in the world since I got away from that lunatic. God forgive me but I didn’t even go to his funeral.

She lets out a sigh and leans on the handle of the mop which comes up to her chin she’s that small. She has large brown eyes and no lips and when she tries to smile there’s nothing to smile with. She’s so thin that when Andy and I go out to the coffee shop we bring her a cheeseburger with french fries and a milk shake to see if we could put some fat on her bones till we realize she’s not touching the food but taking it home to Patrick who’s studying accounting at Fordham.

Then one night we find her crying and stuffing the freight elevator with six bulging canvas bags. There’s room for us with the bags and we ride down with her wondering if the bank suddenly turned generous and lavished canvas bags on her.

No. ’Tis my Patrick. One more year and he’d be graduated from Fordham but he left me a note to say he’s in love with a girl from Pittsburgh and they’re gone off to start a new life in California and I said to myself if that’s the way I’m going to be treated I’m not going to kill myself with the one canvas bag anymore and I went up and down the streets of Manhattan till I found a place on Canal Street that sells them, a Chinese place. You’d think in a city like this you wouldn’t have trouble finding canvas bags and I don’t know what I’d do without the Chinese.

She cries harder and pulls the sleeve of her sweater across her eyes. Andy says, All right, Mrs. Stokes.

Bridey, she says. I’m Bridey now.

All right, Bridey. We’ll go across the street and you can eat something for your strength.

Ah, no. I have no appetite.

Take off the apron, Bridey. We’re going across the street.

She tells us in the coffee shop she doesn’t even want to be Bridey anymore. She’s Brigid. Bridey is a name for skivvies and Brigid has the bit of dignity. No, she could never manage a cheeseburger but she eats it and all the french fries slathered with ketchup and tells us her heart is broken while she sucks her milk shake through a straw. Andy wants her to explain why she suddenly decided to get the canvas bags. She doesn’t know. There was something about Patrick leaving like that and the memories of the way her husband beat her that opened a little door in her head and that’s all she can say about it. The days of the one bag are over. Andy says there’s no rhyme nor reason to it. She agrees but she doesn’t care anymore. She got off the Queen Mary over twenty years ago, a healthy girl excited over America, and look at her now, a scarecrow. Well, her scarecrow days are over, too, and she’d love a piece of apple pie if they have it. Andy says he studies rhetoric, logic, philosophy but this is beyond him and she says they’re very slow with the apple pie.

* * *

There are books to be read, term papers written, but I’m so obsessed with Mike Small I sit at the library window and watch her movements along Washington Square between the main university building and the Newman Club where she goes between classes even though she’s not a Catholic. When she’s with Bob the football player my heart sinks and that song runs through my head, “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” though I know very well who’s kissing her now, Mr. Football Player himself, two hundred pounds of him bending to plant his lips on her and even though I know I’d like him if there were no Mike Small in the world, he’s that decent and good-humored, I still want to find the back of a comic book where Charles Atlas promises to help me build muscles that will let me kick sand in Bob’s face the first time I meet him at a beach.

When summer comes he puts on his ROTC uniform and travels to North Carolina for training and Mike Small and I are free to meet and roam Greenwich Village, eating at Monte’s on MacDougal Street, drinking beer at the White Horse or the San Remo. We ride the Staten Island Ferry and it’s lovely to stand on deck, hand in hand, to watch the Manhattan skyline recede and loom even though I can’t stop thinking again of the ones who were sent back with the bad eyes and the bad lungs and wondering what it was like for them in towns and villages all over Europe once they had a glimpse of New York, the tall towers over the water and the way the lights twinkle at dusk with tugboats hooting and ships blaring in the Narrows. Did they see and hear all this through the windows at Ellis Island? Did the memory bring pain and did they ever again try to slip into this country through a place where there weren’t men in uniform rolling back their eyelids and tapping at their chests?

When Mike Small says, What are you thinking about? I don’t know what to say for fear she might think I’m peculiar the way I wonder about the ones who were sent back. If my mother or father had been sent back I wouldn’t be on this deck with the lights of Manhattan a sparkling dream before me.

Besides, it’s only Americans who ask questions like that, What are you thinking about? or What do you do? In all my years in Ireland no one ever asked me such questions and if I weren’t madly in love with Mike Small I’d tell her mind her own business about what I’m thinking or what I do for a living.

I don’t want to tell Mike Small too much about my life because of the shame and I don’t think she’d understand especially when she grew up in a small American town where everyone had everything. But when she starts talking about her days in Rhode Island with her grandmother there are clouds. She talks about swimming in the summer, ice skating in the winter, hay rides, trips to Boston, dates, proms, editing her high school yearbook, and her life sounds like a Hollywood movie till she goes back to the time her father and mother separated and left her with his mother in Tiverton. She talks about how much she missed her mother and how she cried herself to sleep for months and now she cries again. This makes me wonder if ever I had been sent to live in comfort with a relation would I have missed my family? It’s hard to think I would have missed the same tea and bread every day, the collapsed bed swarming with fleas, a lavatory shared by all the families in the lane. No, I wouldn’t have missed that but I would have missed the way it was with my mother and brothers, the talk around the table and the nights around the fire when we saw worlds in the flames, little caves and volcanoes and all kinds of shapes and images. I would have missed that even if I lived with a rich grandmother and I felt sorry for Mike Small who had no brothers and sisters and no fire to sit at.