Frank McCourt - 'Tis

In a way I’m glad her father punched her because she came to me instead of Bob and that surely means she prefers me. Of course Bob is unhappy and in a few days there he is at the door calling me a sneaky little bogtrotter and telling me he’s going to break my head but I move my head to one side and his fist crashes into the wall and he has to go to the hospital for a cast. On the way out he threatens he’ll see me again and I’d better make my peace with my Maker though when I run into him a few days later at NYU he offers his good hand in friendship and I never see him again. He may be calling Mike Small behind my back but it’s too late and she shouldn’t even be talking to him since she already allowed me into her room and into her bed forgetting how she was reserving the body for the wedding night and the honeymoon. The night of our first excitement she tells me I’ve taken her virginity and if I should feel guilty or sad I can’t especially when I know I’m the first, the one that stays forever in any girl’s memory, as they used to say in the army.

We can’t stay at Mary O’Brien’s because we can’t resist the temptation to be in the same bed and there are knowing looks. Paddy Arthur stops talking to me altogether and I’m not sure if he’s being pious or patriotic, angry that I’m with someone neither Catholic nor Irish.

The Captain sends word he’s ready to give Mike a certain amount of money every month and that means she can rent a small apartment in Brooklyn. I’d like to live with her but the Captain and the grandmother would think that disgraceful, so I rent my own cold-water flat at 46 Downing Street in Greenwich Village. They call it a cold-water flat and I don’t know why. It has hot water but no heat except for a large kerosene heater which turns so red I’m afraid it might blow up. The only thing I can do to keep warm is to buy an electric blanket at Macy’s and plug it into a long cord that lets me wander around. There’s a bathtub in the kitchen, and a lavatory in the hallway I must share with an old Italian couple across the hall. The old Italian man knocks on my door to tell me I’m to put my own toilet paper on the holder in the lavatory and I’m to keep my hands off his. He and his wife mark their toilet paper and they’ll know if I try to use it so watch out. His English is poor and when he starts to tell me of the troubles he had with the previous tenants in my flat he becomes so frustrated he shakes his fist in my face and warns me I could be in big trouble if I touch his toilet paper, big trouble, yet gives me a roll to start me off, to make sure I don’t touch his. He says his wife is a nice woman and giving me the roll is her idea, that she’s a sick woman who wants a quiet life and no trouble. Capice?

Mike finds a small apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. She has her own bathroom and no one torments her over toilet paper. She says my apartment is a disgrace and she doesn’t know how I can live like that, no heat, no place to cook, Italians yelling over toilet paper. She feels sorry for me and lets me stay over. She makes delicious dinners even though she didn’t even know how to make coffee when her father punched her out of the house.

When classes end she goes back to Rhode Island to have her dentist examine the abscess caused by her father’s fist. I’m taking summer session courses at NYU, reading, studying, writing term papers. I’m working at the bank, the midnight to eight shift, and operating the forklift at the Baker and Williams Warehouse two days a week, dreaming of Mike Small nice and cozy with her grandmother in Rhode Island.

She calls to tell me her grandmother isn’t that angry with me anymore over what I said about her easy life. Grandma even said something nice about me.

What was that?

She said you have a nice head of black curly hair and she feels so sorry about the thing with my father she doesn’t mind if you come here for a day or two.

After what happened to me in the bank I could go to Rhode Island for a week. A man sat next to me in a coffee shop on Broad Street near where I worked, told me he had heard me talk the night before and figured I was Irish, right?

I am.

Yeah, well, I’m Irish, too, Irish as Paddy’s pig, father from Carlow, mom from Sligo. I hope you don’t mind but I got your name from someone and found you’re a member of the Teamsters and the ILA.

My ILA card expired.

That’s okay. I’m an organizer and we’re trying to break into these fucking banks, excuse the language. Are you on for that?

Oh, sure.

I mean you’re the only one we could get on your shift with any kind of union history and what we’d like you to do is just drop little hints. You know and they know the banks pay shit wages. So, just a little hint here and there, not too many, not too soon, and I’ll see you in a few weeks. Here, I’ll take care of the bill.

Next night is Thursday, pay night, and when we receive our checks the supervisor says, You’ve got the rest of the night off, McCourt.

He makes sure everyone on the shift hears him. You’re off tonight, McCourt, and all the other nights and you can tell that to your union friends. This is a bank and we don’t need any goddam unions.

They say nothing, the typists, the clerks. They nod. Andy Peters would say something but he’s still on the four to twelve shift.

I take my check and as I wait for the elevator an executive comes out of his office. McCourt, right?

I nod.

So, you’re finishing college, right?

I am.

Ever think of joining us here? You could come aboard and we’d have you up to a nice five-figure salary in three years. I mean you’re one of our own, right? Irish?

I am.

Me, too. Father from Wicklow, mom from Dublin, and when you work at a bank like this doors open, you know, AOH, Knights of Columbus, all that there. We take care of our own. If we don’t, who will?

I was just fired.

Fired? What the hell you talking about? Fired for what?

For letting a union organizer talk to me in a coffee shop.

You did that? Let a union organizer talk to you?

I did.

That was a stupid damn thing to do. Look, pal, we’re outa the coal mines, we’re outa the kitchens and the ditches. We don’t need unions. Will the Irish ever get sense? Asking you a question. Talkin’ a yeh.

I say nothing here and on the elevator going down. I say nothing because I’ve been fired from this bank and there’s nothing to say anyway. I don’t want to talk about the Irish getting sense and I don’t know why everyone I meet has to tell me where his father and mother came from in Ireland.

The man wants to argue with me but I won’t give him the satisfaction. It’s better to walk away and leave him to the height he grew, as my mother used to say. He calls after me to tell me I’m an asshole, that I’ll wind up digging ditches, delivering beer barrels, pouring whiskey for boozy micks in a Blarney Stone bar. He says, Jesus, is there anything wrong with looking after your own kind? and the strange thing is there’s something in his voice that’s sad as if I were a son that disappointed him.

Mike Small meets my train in Providence, Rhode Island, and takes me by bus to Tiverton. On the way we stop at a liquor store for a bottle of Pilgrim’s rum, Grandma’s favorite. Zoe, the grandmother, says hi but doesn’t offer hand or cheek. It’s dinnertime and there’s corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes because that’s what the Irish like to eat, according to Zoe. She says I must be tired from the trip and surely I’d like a drink. Mike looks at me and smiles and we know it’s Zoe who wants a drink, rum and Coke.

How about you, Grandma? Would you like a drink?

Well, I dunno, but all right. Are you making the drinks, Alberta?