Frank McCourt - 'Tis

With the dawn glimmering far down in Greenwich Village Fifth Avenue is nearly deserted except for people making their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to save their souls, mostly old women who seem to have greater fear than the old men mumbling along beside them or it may be that old women live longer and there are more of them. When the priest dispenses Communion the pews empty and I envy the people coming back down the aisles with the wafers in their mouths and the holy look that tells you they’re in a state of grace. They can go home now and have the big breakfast and if they fall dead while eating sausages and eggs they go straight to heaven. I’d like to make my peace with God but my sins are so terrible any priest would drive me from the confessional and I know once again my only hope for salvation is that I’ll have an accident where I’ll linger for a few minutes so that I can make an Act of Perfect Contrition that will open the gates of heaven.

Still, it’s comforting to sit in the cathedral in the hush of a dawn Mass especially when I can look around and put names on what I see, the pews, the Stations of the Cross, the pulpit, the tabernacle with the monstrance holding the Eucharist inside, the chalice, the ciborium, the cruets for wine and water at the altar’s right side, the paten. I know nothing about jewelry and the flowers in the shop but I can recite the priestly vestments, the amice, the alb, the girdle, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble, and I know the priest up there wearing the purple chasuble of Lent will change to white on Easter Sunday when Christ is risen and Americans give their children chocolate rabbits and yellow eggs.

After all the Sunday mornings in Limerick I can skip as easily as an altar boy from the Introit of the Mass to the Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed, the signal for the thirsty men of Ireland to rise from their knees and flock to the pubs for the Sunday pint, cure for the woes of the night before.

I can name the parts of the Mass and the priestly vestments and the parts of a rifle like Henry Reed in his poem but what use is all this if I rise in the world and sit in a stiff chair at a table where they’re serving fancy food and I can’t tell the difference between mutton and duck?

It’s full daylight on Fifth Avenue and there’s no one but myself sitting on the steps between the two great lions of the Forty-second Street public library where Tim Costello told me to go nearly ten years ago to read The Lives of the English Poets. There are little birds of different sizes and colors flitting from tree to tree telling me spring will soon be here and I don’t know their names either. I can tell the difference between a pigeon and a sparrow and there it ends except for the seagull.

If my students at McKee High School could look into my head they’d wonder how I ever became a teacher at all. They know already I never went to high school and they’d say, That’s it. Here’s a teacher who stands up there giving us vocabulary lessons and he doesn’t even know the names of the birds in the trees.

The library will be open in a few hours and I could sit in the Main Reading Room with big picture books that tell me the names of things but it’s still early morning and it’s a long way to Downing Street, Bill Galetly cross-legged and squinting at himself in the mirror, Plato and the Gospel According to St. John.

He’s flat on his back on the floor, naked and snoring, a candle guttering by his head, banana peels everywhere. It’s cold in the flat but when I place a blanket over him he sits up and pushes it away. Sorry about the bananas, Frank, but I had a little celebration this morning. Big breakthrough. Here it is.

He points to a passage in St. John. Read it, he says. Go ahead, read it.

And I read, It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing, the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life.

Bill stares at me. So?

What?

You get it? You dig?

I don’t know. I’d have to read it a few times and it’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been up all night.

I fasted for three days to get inside that. You have to get inside things. Like sex. But I’m not finished. I’m looking for the parallel world in Plato. Guess I’ll have to go to Mexico.

Why Mexico?

Great shit there.

Shit?

You know. Variety of chemicals to help the seeker.

Oh, yes. I’m going to bed for a while.

Wish I could offer you a banana but I had the celebration.

I sleep a few hours this Sunday morning and when I awake he’s gone leaving behind nothing but banana skins.

42

Alberta is back. She calls me and asks me to meet her over at Rocky’s for the sake of old times. She’s wearing a light spring coat with the lavender scarf she wore when she said good night instead of good-bye and this meeting must have been what she had in mind all the time.

All the men in Rocky’s stare at her and their women glare at them to stop looking at someone else and look back at them.

She slips off her coat and sits with the lavender scarf on her shoulders and my heart is beating so hard I can hardly talk. She’ll have a martini straight up with a twist and I’ll have a beer. She tells me it was all a mistake going off with someone else but he was mature and ready to settle down and I acted all the time like a single man with the hovel in the Village. She realized in no time it was me she loved and even though we have our differences we can work them out especially if we settle down and get married.

When she mentions marriage there’s a different sharp pain in my chest from the fear I’ll never have that free life I see everywhere in New York, the kind of life they had in Paris where everyone sat in cafés drinking wine, writing novels, sleeping with other men’s wives and beautiful rich American women eager for the passion.

If I say anything like this to Alberta she’ll say, Oh, grow up. You’re twenty-eight going on twenty-nine not a goddam Beatnik.

Of course neither one of us is going to talk like this in the middle of our reconciliation especially since I have a nagging feeling she’s right and I might be just a drifter like my father. Even though I’ve been a teacher for a year I still envy people who can sit in coffee shops and pubs and go to parties where there are artists and models and a jazz combo in the corner blowing cool and lowdown.

No use telling her anything of my freedom dreams. She’d say, You’re a teacher. You never dreamed when you got off the boat you’d come this far. Get on with it.

Once in Rhode Island we argued over something and Zoe the grandmother said, You’re nice people, but not together.

She won’t come to my cold water flat, the hovel, and she won’t let me come to hers with her father there for a short time because of a rift with his wife, Stella. She puts her hand on mine and we look at each other so hard she has tears and I’m ashamed of the redness she must be seeing and the oozing.

On the way to the subway she tells me that when the school term ends in a few weeks she’s going to Rhode Island to be with her grandmother for a while and sort out her life. She knows there’s a question in the air, Will I be invited? and the answer is no, I’m not in favor with the grandmother at this moment. She kisses me good night, tells me she’ll talk to me on the phone soon, and after she disappears into the subway I walk across Washington Square Park torn between my yearning for her and my dreams of the free life. If I don’t fit in with the way she wants to live, clean, organized, respectable, I’ll lose her and I’ll never find anyone like her. I never had women throwing themselves at me in Ireland, Germany or the U.S.A. I could never tell the world about the weekends in Munich where I consorted with the lowest whores in Germany or the time when I was fourteen and a half frolicking with a dying girl on a green sofa in Limerick. All I have is dark secrets and shame and it’s a wonder Alberta has anything to do with me at all. If I had any belief left in anything I could go to confession but where is the priest who could hear my sins without throwing his hands up in disgust and sending me to the bishop or some part of the Vatican reserved for the doomed?