Frank McCourt - 'Tis

She tells me how excited she was the day she graduated from elementary school, how her father was to travel all the way up from New York for the party but called at the last minute to say he had to go to a picnic for tugboat men and the memory of that brings the tears again. That day on the phone her grandmother blasted her father, told him he was a no-good skirt-chasing bastard and not to set foot in Tiverton again. At least her grandmother was there. She was there for everything, always. She wasn’t much for the kissing and hugging and tucking in but she kept the house clean, the clothes laundered, the lunch box well stuffed every day for school.

Mike wipes her tears and says you can’t have everything and even if I say nothing I wonder why you can’t have everything or at least give everything. Why can’t you clean the house, launder the clothes, stuff the lunch box and still kiss, hug and tuck in? I can’t say this to Mike because she admires her grandmother for being tough and I’d prefer to hear that Grandma might have hugged, kissed and tucked in.

With Bob away at ROTC camp Mike invites me to visit her family. She lives on Riverside Drive near Columbia University with her father, Allen, and her new stepmother, Stella. Her father is a tugboat captain for the Dalzell Towing Company in New York Harbor. Her stepmother is pregnant. Her grandmother, Zoe, is here from Rhode Island for a while till Mike settles in and gets used to New York.

Mike tells me her father likes to be called Captain and when I say, Hello, Captain, he growls till the phlegm rattles in his throat and squeezes my hand till the knuckles crack so that I’ll know how manly he is. Stella says, Hi, honey, and kisses my cheek. She tells me she’s Irish, too, and it’s nice to see Alberta going out with Irish boys. Even she says boys and she’s Irish. Grandmother lies on the living room couch with her hands joined under her head and when Mike introduces me Zoe’s hairline twitches forward and she says, Howya doin’?

It slips out of my mouth, Nice easy life you have there on the couch.

She glares at me and I know I’ve said the wrong thing and it’s awkward when Mike and Stella go to another room to look at a dress and I’m left standing in the middle of the living room with the Captain smoking a cigarette and reading the Daily News. No one speaks to me and I’m wondering how Mike Small can go off and leave me standing here with the father and the grandmother ignoring me. I never know what to say to people at times like this. Should I say, How’s the tugboat business? or should I tell the grandmother she did a wonderful job raising Mike.

My mother in Limerick would never leave anyone standing in the middle of the room like this. She’d say, Sit down there and we’ll have a nice cup of tea, because in the lanes of Limerick it’s a bad thing to ignore anyone and even worse to forget the cup of tea.

It’s strange that a man with a good job like the Captain and his mother on the couch wouldn’t bother to ask me if I had a mouth in my head or if I’d like to sit down. I don’t know how Mike can leave me standing like this though I know if this ever happened to her she’d simply sit down and make everyone feel cheerful the way my brother Malachy does.

What would happen if I sat down? Would they say, Oh, you’re feeling pretty relaxed sitting down without being asked? Or would they say nothing and wait till I leave to talk behind my back?

They’ll talk behind my back anyway and tell each other Bob is a much nicer boy and looks handsome in his ROTC uniform though they might have said as much if they’d seen me in my summer khakis with my corporal’s stripes. I doubt it. They probably prefer him with his high school diploma and his clear healthy eyes and his bright future and his cheerful nature all done up in his officer’s uniform.

And I know from the history books the Irish were never liked up there in New England, that there were signs everywhere saying, No Irish Need Apply.

Well, I don’t want to beg anyone for anything and I’m ready to turn on my heel and walk out when Mike bounces down the hall all blonde and smiling and ready for a walk and dinner in the Village. I’d like to tell her I don’t want to have anything to do with people who leave you standing in the middle of the floor and hang out signs rejecting the Irish but she’s so bright and blue-eyed and cheerful, so clean and American, I think if she told me stand there forever I’d be like a dog and wag my tail and do it.

Then on the way down in the elevator she tells me I said the wrong thing to Grandma, that Grandma is sixty-five and works very hard cooking and keeping the house clean and doesn’t like people’s smartass remarks about taking a few minutes on the couch.

What I want to say is this, Oh, fuck your grandma and her cooking and cleaning. She has plenty of food and drink and clothes and furniture and hot and cold running water and no shortage of money and what the bloody hell is she complaining about? There are women all over the world raising large families and not whining and there’s your grandmother lying on her arse complaining she has to take care of an apartment and a few people. Fuck your grandma again.

That is what I want to say except that I have to swallow my words in case Mike Small might be offended and never see me again and it’s very hard going through life not saying what comes to your tongue. It’s hard being with a beautiful girl like her because she’d never have any trouble getting someone else and I’d probably have to find a girl not as good-looking who didn’t mind my bad eyes and my lack of a high school diploma though a girl not as good-looking might offer me a chair and a cup of tea and I wouldn’t have to swallow my words all the time. Andy Peters is always telling me life is easier with plain-looking girls, especially ones with small tits or no tits, because they’re always grateful for the least bit of attention and one might even love me for myself, as they say in the movies. I can’t even think of Mike Small having tits the way she’s reserving the whole body for the wedding night and the honeymoon and it gives me a pain to picture Bob the football player having the excitement with her on the wedding night.

The platform boss from the Baker and Williams Warehouse sees me on the subway train and tells me I can get work during the summer with men going on vacation. He lets me work eight to noon and when I’m finished on the second day I walk over to Port Warehouses to see if I can have a sandwich with Horace. I often think he’s the father I’d like to have even if he’s black and I’m white. If ever I said that to anyone at the warehouse I’d be laughed off the platform. He must know himself the way they talk about black people and he surely hears the word nigger floating through the air. When I worked on the platform with him I wondered how he could keep his fists to himself. Instead he’d put his head down and have a little smile and I thought he might be a bit deaf or simple in his mind but because I knew he wasn’t deaf and the way he talked about his son getting an education in Canada showed that if he’d had a chance he would have been in a university himself.

He’s coming out of a diner on Laight Street and when he sees me he smiles, Oh, mon. I must have known you were coming. I got a hero sandwich a mile long and beer. We eat on the pier, okay?

I’m ready to walk back down Laight Street to the pier but he steers me away. He doesn’t want the men at the warehouse to see us. They’d ride him all day. They’d laugh and ask Horace when he knew my mother. That makes me want to defy them and walk Laight Street even more. No, mon, he says. Save your emotions for bigger things.

This is a big thing, Horace.

It’s nothing, mon. It’s ignorance.