Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Bob Bogard tells me don’t worry about Your World and You and the midterm test. Go through the motions. Distribute the test, watch the kids scribble what they don’t know, retrieve the tests, give the kids passing grades, it isn’t their fault Miss Mudd neglected them, the parents will be satisfied, and the chairman and principal will stay off my back.

I should be leaving the Meurot and taking the ferry to Manhattan where I’m having dinner with Alberta but the beers keep coming and it’s hard to say no to such generosity and when I leave my bar stool to call Alberta she screams at me that I’m a common Irish drunk and that’s the last time she’ll ever wait for me because she’s finished with me forever and there are plenty of men who’d like to go out with her, good-bye.

All the beer in the world won’t relieve my misery. I struggle with five classes a day, I live in a flat Alberta calls a hovel, and now I’m in danger of losing her because of my hours at the Meurot. I tell Bob I have to go, it’s nearly midnight, we’ve been on the bar stools for nine hours and I have dark clouds fluttering in my head. He says, One more and then we’ll eat. You can’t go on that ferry without eating. He says it’s important to eat the kind of food that will ward off any unpleasant feeling in the morning, and the food he orders at the St. George Diner is fish with eggs sunny-side up, hash brown potatoes, toast and coffee. He says the combination of fish and eggs after a day and night of beer is miraculous.

I’m on the ferry again where the old Italian patroling for shoeshine customers tells me my shoes look worse than ever and there’s no use telling him I can’t afford his offer of a shine, half price, if I’ll buy shoes from his brother up on Delancey Street.

No, I don’t have money for shoes. I don’t have money for a shine.

Ah, professore, professore, I give you free shine. Make you feel good, the shine. You go see my brother for the shoes.

He sits on his box, pulls my foot to his lap and looks up at me. I smella beer, professore. Teacher come home late, eh? Terrible shoes, terrible shoes, but I shine. He dabs on the polish, draws the brush around the shoe, snaps the polishing cloth across the toe, taps my knee to say it’s done, replaces his things in the box and stands. He waits for the question and I don’t ask because he knows it, What about my other shoe?

He shrugs. You go see my brother and I do your other shoe.

If I buy new shoes from your brother I won’t need a shine for this.

He shrugs again. You are the professore. You smart, eh, with the brains? You teach and think about the shine and the no shine.

And he waddles away humming and calling shine shine to sleeping passengers.

I’m a teacher with a college degree and this old Italian, with little English, toys with me and sends me ashore with one shoe shined, the other streaked with marks of rain, snow, mud. If I grabbed him and demanded a shine for the dirty shoe he might yell and bring crew members to his aid and how would I explain the offer of a free shine, the shining of one shoe and then the trick? I’m sober enough by now to know you can’t force an old Italian to shine your dirty shoe, that I was foolish to let him at my foot in the first place. If I protested to the crew members he might tell them he smelled beer and they’d laugh and walk away.

He waddles up and down the aisles. He keeps saying shine to the other passengers and I have a great urge to grab him and his box and heave him over the side. Instead, when I’m leaving the ferry, I tell him, I’ll never buy shoes from your brother on Delancey Street.

He shrugs. I don’t have a no brother on Delancey. Shine, shine.

When I told the shoeshine man I had no money I wasn’t lying. I don’t have fifteen cents for the subway fare. Whatever I had went for beer and when we went to the St. George Diner I asked Bob Bogard to pay for my fish and eggs and I’ll pay him back next week and it won’t do me any harm to walk home, up Broadway, past Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Church where Robert Emmet’s brother, Thomas, is buried, past City Hall, up to Houston Street and over to my cold-water flat on Downing Street.

It is two o’clock in the morning, few people, an occasional car. Broad Street, where I worked at the Manufacturer’s Trust Company, is over to my right and I wonder what became of Andy Peters and Brigid formerly Bridey. I walk and look back over the eight and a half years since I arrived in New York, days at the Biltmore Hotel, the army, NYU, jobs in warehouses, on the docks, in banks. I think of Emer and Tom Clifford and wonder what became of Rappaport and the men I knew in the army. I never dreamed I’d be able to get a college degree and become a teacher and now I’m wondering if I can survive a vocational high school. The office buildings I pass are dark but I know that during the day people sit at desks, study the stock market and make millions. They wear suits and ties, they carry briefcases, they go to lunch and talk about money money money. They live in Connecticut with their long-legged Episcopalian wives, who probably lolled in the lounge of the Biltmore Hotel when I cleaned up for them, and they drink martinis before dinner. They play golf at the country club and they have affairs and no one cares.

I could do that. I could spend time with Stanley Garber to get rid of my accent though he told me already I’d be an ass to lose it. He said the Irish accent is charming, opens doors, reminds people of Barry Fitzgerald. I told him I didn’t want to remind people of Barry Fitzgerald and he said, Would you prefer to have a Jewish accent and remind people of Molly Goldberg? I asked him who Molly Goldberg was and he said if you don’t know who Molly Goldberg is there’s no use talking to you.

Why can’t I have a bright carefree life like my brothers Malachy and Michael, uptown in the bar serving drinks to beautiful women and bantering with Ivy League graduates? I’d make more money than this forty-five hundred dollars a year for regular substitute teachers. There would be large tips, all the food I could eat, and nights in the beds of Episcopalian heiresses frolicking and dazzling them with bits of poetry and scraps of wit. I’d sleep late, have lunch at a romantic restaurant, walk the streets of Manhattan, there would be no forms to fill out, no papers to correct, the books I’d read would be for my own pleasure and I’d never have to worry about sullen high school teenagers.

And what would I say if I ever met Horace again? Would I be able to tell him I went to college and became a teacher for a few weeks and it was so hard I became a bartender so that I could meet a better class of people on the Upper East Side? I know he’d shake his head and probably thank God I wasn’t his son.

I think of the longshoreman in the coffee shop working for years so that his son can go to St. John’s University to become a teacher. What would I say to him?

If I told Alberta I was planning to leave teaching for the exciting world of the bars she’d surely run off and marry a lawyer or a football player.

So I won’t give up teaching, not because of Horace or the longshoreman or Alberta, but because of what I might say to myself at the end of a night of serving drinks and amusing the customers. I’d accuse myself of taking the easy way and all because I was defeated by boys and girls resisting Your World and You and Giants in the Earth.

They don’t want to read and they don’t want to write. They say, Aw, Mr. McCourt, all these English teachers want us to write about dumb things like our summer vacation or the story of our life. Boring. Every year since our first grade we write the story of our life and teachers just give us a check mark and they say, Very Nice.