Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Mrs. Austin’s house is gone. There’s a large new building, the New York Foundling Hospital, and it brings me to tears the way they’re tearing down my early days in the city. At least the cinema is here and it must be the night of beer because I have to press my whole body against the cinema wall with arms stretched out till a head calls from a police car, Hey, buddy, what’s going on?

What if I told him about Hamlet and the pie and Mrs. Austin and the night of glug and how her house is gone and my furnished room with it and how the woman in my life is with another man and is it against the law, Officer, to kiss a cinema of sad and happy memories when it’s the only comfort you have left, is it, Officer?

Of course I’m not going to say this to a New York cop or anyone else. I just tell him, It’s all right, Officer, and he tells me move on, the favorite words of the police department.

I move on and all along Third Avenue music pours through the doors of Irish pubs with the smells of beer and whiskey and snatches of talk and laughter.

Good man yourself, Sean.

Arrah, Jasus, we might as well be drunk as the way we are.

God above, I can’t wait to get back to Cavan for the decent pint that’s in it.

Do you think you’ll ever go back, Kevin?

I will when they build a bridge.

They laugh and Mickey Carton on the jukebox pumps his accordion with Ruthie Morrissey’s voice sailing over all the noise of the night, It’s my old Irish home, far across the foam, and I’m tempted to turn in, sit up on a stool and tell the bartender, Give us an oul’ drop of the craythur there, Brian, or make it two because bird never flew on one wing, good lad yourself. And wouldn’t that be better than sitting on Mrs. Austin’s steps or kissing the walls of the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse and wouldn’t I be among my own, wouldn’t I?

My own. The Irish.

I could drink Irish, eat Irish, dance Irish, read Irish. My mother often warned us, Marry your own, and now old-timers tell me, Stick with your own. If I listened to them I wouldn’t be rejected by a Rhode Island Episcopalian who once said, What would you do with yourself if you weren’t Irish? And when she said that I would have walked out except that we were halfway through the dinner she’d cooked, stuffed chicken with a bowl of pink new potatoes tossed in salt butter and parsley and a bottle of Bordeaux that gave me such shivers of pleasure I could have tolerated any number of barbs at myself and the Irish in general.

I’d like to be Irish when it’s time for a song or a poem. I’d like to be American when I teach. I’d like to be Irish-American or American-Irish though I know I can’t be two things even if Scott Fitzgerald said the sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

I don’t know what I’d like to be and what does it matter with Alberta over in Brooklyn with her new man?

Then in a shop window I catch a glimpse of my sad face and I laugh when I remember what my mother would have called it, the gloomy puss.

At Fifty-seventh Street I walk west toward Fifth Avenue for a taste of America and the richness that’s in it, the world of the people who sit in the Palm Court of the Biltmore Hotel, people who don’t have to go through life carrying ethnic hyphens. You could wake them in the middle of the night, ask them what they are and they’d say, Tired.

I turn the gloomy puss south on Fifth Avenue and there’s the dream I had all those years in Ireland, the avenue nearly deserted at this hour of the morning except for double-decker buses, one going north, the other south, jewelry shops, bookshops, women’s shops with mannequins all dressed up for Easter, rabbits and eggs everywhere in windows and not a sign of the risen Jesus, and far down the avenue the Empire State Building, and I have my health, don’t I? a little weak in the eye and teeth department, a college degree and a teaching job and isn’t this the country where all things are possible, where you can do anything you like as long as you stop complaining and get off your ass because life, pal, is not a free lunch.

If only Alberta came to her senses and back to me.

Fifth Avenue tells me how ignorant I am. There are the window mannequins in their Easter garb and if one of them came to life and asked me what kind of fabric she was wearing I wouldn’t have a notion. If they wore canvas I’d spot it straightway because of the coal bags I delivered in Limerick and used for cover when they were empty and the weather was desperate. I might be able to recognize tweed because of the coats people wore winter and summer though I’d have to admit to the mannequin I don’t know the difference between silk and cotton. I could never point to a dress and say that’s satin or wool and I’d be lost entirely if challenged to identify damask or crinoline. I know novelists like to hint at the wealth of their characters by dwelling on damask drapes though I don’t know if anyone wears such material unless the characters fall on hard times and take the scissors to the damask. I know you can hardly pick up a novel set in the South where there isn’t a white plantation family lolling on the verandah sipping bourbon or lemonade listening to the darkies singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the verandah women fanning themselves against the crinoline heat.

Down in Greenwich Village I buy shirts and socks in shops called haberdasheries and I don’t know what material they’re made of even though there are people telling me you have to be careful what you put on your body nowadays, you might have allergies and break out in a rash. I never worried about such things in Limerick but here danger lurks even in the buying of socks and shirts.

Things in shop windows have names I don’t know and I don’t know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It’s strange to stand at a florist’s shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don’t even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people’s gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I’m sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I’d have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it’s not likely you’d be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.

All along the avenue there are shops with gourmet foods and if I ever enter such a place I’ll have to bring someone who grew up respectable and knows the difference between pâté de foie gras and mashed potatoes. All these shops are obsessed with French and I don’t know what they’re thinking of. Why can’t they say spuds instead of pommes or is it that you pay more for something printed in French?

There’s no sense at all looking in the windows of antique furniture shops. They’ll never let you know the price of something till you ask and they’ll never plant a sign on a chair to tell you what it is or where it came from. Most of the chairs you wouldn’t want to sit in anyway. They’re so upright and stiff they’d give you such a pain in your back you’d wind up in the hospital. Then there are little tables with curved legs so delicate they’d collapse under the weight of a pint and destroy a priceless carpet from Persia or wherever people sweat for the pleasure of rich Americans. There are delicate mirrors, too, and you wonder what it’s like in the morning to see your face in a frame agog with little Cupids and maidens frolicking and where would you look in such confusion? Would I look at the stuff oozing from my eyes or would I be enchanted with a maiden succumbing to a Cupid arrow?