Frank McCourt - 'Tis

I appeal to her. I invoke my miserable childhood, brutal schoolmasters, the tyranny of the Church, my father who chose the bottle over the babies, my defeated mother moaning by the fire, my eyes blazing red, my teeth crumbling in my head, the squalor of my flat, Bill Galetly tormenting me with people in Platonic caves and the Gospel According to St. John, my hard days at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, older teachers telling me whip the little bastards into shape, the younger ones declaring our students are real people and it’s up to us to motivate them.

I plead with her to have another martini. It might soften her so much she’ll come to my apartment where I’ll tell Bill, Take a walk, Bill, we need privacy. We want to sit in the candlelight and plan a future of Saturday shopping, vacuuming, cleaning, Sunday antique hunting, lesson planning and hours romping in the bed.

No, no, she won’t have another martini. She’s meeting her new man and she has to go.

Oh, God, no. It’s a knife in my heart.

Stop the whining. I’ve heard enough about you and your miserable childhood. You’re not the only one. I was dumped on my grandmother when I was seven. Do I complain? I just get on with it.

But you had hot and cold running water, thick towels, soap, sheets on the bed, two clear blue eyes and fine teeth and your grandmother packed your little lunch box to capacity every day.

She climbs from the bar stool, lets me help her with her coat, drapes the lavender scarf around her neck. She has to go.

Oh, Christ. I could easily whimper like a kicked dog. My belly is cold and there’s nothing in the world but dark clouds with Alberta in the middle all blonde, blue-eyed, lavender-scarved, ready to leave me forever for her new man and it’s worse than having doors shut in my face, worse than dying itself.

Then she kisses my cheek. Good night, she says. She doesn’t say good-bye. Does that mean she’s leaving a door open? Surely if she’s finished with me forever she should be saying good-bye.

It doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Out the door. Up the steps with every man in the bar looking at her. It’s the end of the world. I might as well be dead. I might as well jump into the Hudson River and let it carry my corpse past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty across the Atlantic and up the River Shannon where at least I’d be among my own people and not rejected by Rhode Island Protestants.

The bartender is about fifty and I’d like to ask him if he’s ever suffered the way I’m suffering now and what did he do about it? Is there a cure? He might even be able to tell me what it means when a woman who’s leaving you forever says good night instead of good-bye.

But this man has a great bald head and massive black eyebrows and I have a feeling he has his own troubles and there’s nothing for it but to get off the bar stool and leave. I could go uptown and join Malachy and Michael in their exciting lives but I walk home to Downing Street instead hoping happy passing couples won’t hear the escaping whimpers of a man whose life is over.

Bill Galetly is there with his candles, his Plato, his Gospel According to St. John and I wish I could have my own place to myself for a night of whimpering into my pillow but he’s sitting on the floor staring at himself in the mirror and pinching whatever flesh he can find on his belly. He looks up and tells me I look heavy-laden.

What do you mean?

The burden of the ego. You’re sagging. Remember, the Kingdom of God is within you.

I don’t want God or His Kingdom. I want Alberta. She gave me up. I’m going to bed.

Bad time to go to bed. To lie down is to lie down.

It irritates me to have to listen to the obvious and I tell him, Of course it is. What are you talking about?

To lie down is to succumb to gravity at a time when you could spiral to the perfect form.

I don’t care. I’m lying down.

Okay. Okay.

I’m in the bed a few minutes when he sits on the edge and tells me of the madness and emptiness of the advertising business. Plenty of money and everyone wretched with stomach ulcers. All ego. No purity. He tells me I’m a teacher and I could save many lives if I studied Plato and St. John but first I have to save my own life.

I’m not in the mood.

Not in the mood to save your own life?

No, I don’t care.

Yeah, yeah, that’s what happens when you’re rejected. You take it personally.

Of course I take it personally. How else would I take it?

Look at her side of the story. She’s not rejecting you, she’s accepting herself.

He’s going around in circles and the Alberta pain is so great I have to get away. I tell him I’m going out.

Oh, you don’t have to go out. Sit on the floor with the candle behind. Look at the wall. Shadows. Are you hungry?

No.

Wait, and he brings a banana from the kitchen. Have this. The banana is good for you.

I don’t want a banana.

It makes you peaceful. All that potassium.

I don’t want a banana.

You only think you don’t want a banana. Listen to your body.

He follows me into the hallway preaching bananas. He’s naked but he follows me down the stairs, three flights, along the hallway that leads to the front door. He keeps talking about bananas, the ego and Socrates happy under a tree in Athens and when we reach the front door he stands on the top step waving the banana while children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk whoop and scream and point and women with bosoms and elbows resting on windowsill pillows scream at him in Italian.

Malachy isn’t at his bar. He’s at home and happy with his wife, Linda, planning the life of the baby to come. Michael is off for the night. There are women at the bar and the tables but they’re with men. The bartender says, Oh, you’re Malachy’s brother, and won’t let me pay for my drinks. He introduces me to couples at the bar, This is Malachy’s brother.

Really? We didn’t know he had another brother. Oh, yeah, we know your brother Michael. And your name is?

Frank.

And what do you do?

I’m a teacher.

Really? You’re not in the bar business?

They laugh. And when do you think you’ll go into the bar business?

When my brothers become teachers.

That’s what I say but what flows through my head is different. I want to tell them they’re condescending twits, that I knew their likes in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, that they probably flicked their cigarette ash on the floor for me to clean up and looked through me the way you look through people who clean up. I’d like to tell them to kiss my arse and if I had a few more drinks I would but I know that inside I’m still plucking at my forelock and shuffling my feet in the presence of superior people, that they’d laugh at anything I said to them because they know what I am inside and if they don’t know they don’t care. If I fell dead off the bar stool they’d move to a table to avoid the unpleasantness and tell the world later how they ran into a drunken Irish schoolteacher.

None of this matters anyway. Alberta is surely in a romantic little Italian restaurant with her new man, the two of them smiling at each other across the glow of the light from the candle stuck in a Chianti bottle. He’s telling her what’s good on the menu and after they order their dinner they talk about what they’ll do tomorrow, maybe tonight, and if I think about that my bladder will move near my eye.

Malachy’s bar is at Sixty-third Street and Third Avenue, five blocks from my first furnished room at Sixty-eighth Street. Instead of going home straightway I can sit on Mrs. Austin’s steps and look back over the contents of my ten years in New York, the trouble I had trying to see Hamlet at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse with my lemon meringue pie and my bottle of ginger ale.