Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Yes.

Well, go easy with the Coke. It kills my stomach.

We sit in a living room dark from layers of blinds, curtains, drapes. There are no books, magazines, newspapers and the only pictures are of the Captain in his army lieutenant’s uniform and one of Mike, a blonde angel of a child.

We sip our drinks and there’s a silence because Mike is in the hallway answering the phone and Zoe and I have nothing to say to each other. I wish I could say, This is a nice house, but I can’t because I don’t like the darkness of this room when the sun is beaming outside. Then Zoe calls out, Alberta, you gonna stay on that goddam phone all night? You have a guest. She says to me, That’s Charlie Moran she’s talking to. They was great friends all through school but goddam he likes to talk.

Charlie Moran, is it? Mike leaves me here in this gloomy room with Grandma while she chatters away with her old boyfriend. All these weeks in Rhode Island she’s been having a grand time of it with Charlie while I’m slaving away in banks and warehouses.

Zoe says, Make yourself another drink, Frank. That means she wants one, too, and when she tells me go easy on the Coke, it kills her stomach, I double her rum dosage hoping it will knock her out so that I can have my way with her granddaughter.

But no, the drink makes her livelier and after a few swallows she says, Let’s eat, goddammit. Irishmen like to eat, and while we’re eating, she says, Do you like that, Frank?

I do.

Well, then, eat it. You know what I always say. A meal ain’t a meal without a potato and I’m not even Irish. No, goddammit, not a drop of Irish though there’s a bit of Scotch. MacDonald was my mother’s name. That’s Scotch, isn’t it?

’Tis.

Not Irish?

No.

After dinner we watch television and she falls asleep in her armchair after telling me that Louis Armstrong there on the screen is ugly as sin and can’t sing worth a damn. Mike shakes her and tells her go to bed.

Don’t tell me go to bed, goddammit. You might be a college student but I’m still your grandmother, isn’t that right, Bob?

I’m not Bob.

You’re not? Well, who are you?

I’m Frank.

Oh, the Irishman. Well, Bob’s a nice fellow. He’s gonna be an officer. What are you gonna be?

A teacher.

A teacher? Oh, well, you won’t be drivin’ no Cadillac, and she pulls herself up the stairs to bed.

Now, surely, with Zoe snoring away in her room Mike will visit my bed but, no, she’s too nervous. What if Zoe woke suddenly and discovered us? I’d be out on the road hailing the bus to Providence. It’s a torment when Mike comes to kiss good night and even in the dark I know she’s in her pink baby doll pajamas. She won’t stay, oh, no, Grandma might hear and I tell her I wouldn’t care if God Himself were in the next room. No, no, she says, and leaves, and I wonder what kind of world is this where people will walk away from a chance of a wild fling in the bed.

At dawn Zoe runs the vacuum cleaner upstairs and downstairs and complains, This goddam house looks like Hogan’s Alley. The house is spotless because she has nothing else to do but clean it and she barks about Hogan’s Alley to put me in my place because she knows I know it was a dangerous Irish slum in New York. She complains the vacuum cleaner doesn’t pick up the way it used to though it’s easy to see there’s nothing to pick up. She complains that Alberta sleeps too late and is she supposed to make three separate breakfasts, her own, mine, Alberta’s?

Her neighbor, Abbie, drops in and they drink coffee and complain about kids, dirt, television, that goddam ugly Louis Armstrong who can’t sing, dirt, the price of food and clothes, kids, the goddam Portuguese taking over everything in Fall River and surrounding towns, bad enough when the Irish ran everything, at least they could speak English long as they were sober. They complain about hairdressers who charge a fortune and can’t tell a decent hairdo from a donkey’s ass.

Oh, Zoe, says Abbie, your language.

Well, I mean it, goddammit.

If my mother were here she’d be puzzled. She’d wonder why these women complain. Lord above, she’d say, they have everything. They’re warm and clean and well fed and they complain about everything. My mother and the women in the slums of Limerick had nothing and rarely complained. They said it was the will of God.

Zoe has everything but complains with the music of the vacuum cleaner and that may be her way of prayer, goddammit.

In Tiverton Mike is Alberta. Zoe complains she doesn’t know why a girl would want to use a goddam name like Mike when she has her own name, Agnes Alberta.

We walk around Tiverton and I imagine again what it would be like to be a teacher here, married to Alberta. We’d have a sparkling kitchen where every morning I’d have my coffee and an egg and read the Providence Journal. We’d have a big bathroom with plenty of hot water and thick towels with powerful naps and I might loll there in the tub and gaze on the Narragansett River through little curtains billowing gently in the morning sun. We’d have a car for trips to Horseneck Beach and Block Island, and we’d visit Alberta’s mother’s relations in Nantucket. As the years passed my hair would recede, my belly protrude. Friday nights we’d attend local high school basketball games and I’d meet someone who might sponsor me for the country club. If they admitted me I’d have to take up golf and that would surely be the end of me, the first step toward the grave.

A visit to Tiverton is enough to drive me back to New York.

35

In the summer of 1957 I complete my degree courses at NYU and in the autumn pass the Board of Education exams for teaching high school English.

An afternoon newspaper, the World-Telegram and Sun, has a School Page where teachers can find jobs. Most of the vacancies are for vocational high schools and friends have already warned me, Don’t go near those vocational high schools. The kids are killers. They’ll chew you up and spit you out. Look at that movie The Blackboard Jungle, where a teacher says vocational schools are the garbage cans of the school system and the teachers are there to sit on the lids. See that movie and you’ll run in the other direction.

There is a vacancy for an English teacher at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the Bronx but the chairman of the Academic Department tells me I look too young and the kids would give me a hard time. He says his father was from Donegal, his mother from Kilkenny, and he’d like to help me. We should take care of our own but his hands are tied and the way he shrugs and extends his open palms contradicts what he said entirely. Still, he heaves himself from his chair and walks me to the front door with his arm across my shoulders, tells me I should try Samuel Gompers again, maybe in a year or two I’d fill out and lose that innocent look, and he’d keep me in mind though I needn’t bother to come back if I grew a beard. He can’t stand beards and he wants no goddam beatniks in his department. Meanwhile, he says, I might try the Catholic high schools where the pay wasn’t that good but I’d be with my own kind of people and a nice Irish kid should stick with his own.

The Academic Chairman at Grady Vocational High School in Brooklyn says, yeah, he’d like to help me out but, You know, with that brogue you’d have trouble with the kids, they might think you talk funny and teaching is hard enough when you speak properly and doubly hard with a brogue. He wants to know how I passed the speech part of the teachers’ license examination and when I tell him I was issued a substitute license on condition I take remedial speech he says, Yeah, maybe you could come back when you don’t sound like Paddy-off-the-boat, ha ha ha. He tells me in the meantime I should stick with my own people, he’s Irish himself, well, three-quarters Irish and you never know with other people.