Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Alberta wanted a natural Lamaze childbirth but the doctors and nurses at Unity Hospital had no patience with middle-class women and their peculiarities. They had no time for this woman and her breathing exercises and jabbed her with an anesthetic to hasten the birth. Instead, that slowed the rhythm so much the impatient doctor clamped forceps on Maggie’s head and yanked her from her mother’s womb and I wanted to punch him for the flatness he left on her temples.

The nurse took the child to a corner to clean and wash her and when she finished beckoned that I might now see my daughter with her red astonished face and her black feet.

The soles of her feet were black.

God, what kind of a birthmark have you inflicted on my child? I couldn’t say anything to the nurse because she was black and might be offended that I didn’t find my daughter’s black feet attractive. I had a vision of my child as a young woman lolling on a beach, lovely in a bathing suit, but forced to wear socks to conceal her disfigurement.

The nurse asked if the baby was to be breast-fed. No. Alberta had said she wouldn’t have the time when she went back to work and the doctor did something to dry up her milk. They wanted to know the child’s name and even though Alberta had toyed with Michaela she was still under anesthetic and powerless and I told the nurse, Margaret Ann, for my two grandmothers and my sister who had died at twenty-one days in this very borough of Brooklyn.

Alberta was wheeled back to her room and I called Malachy to tell him the good news, that a child had been born but that she was afflicted with black feet. He laughed in my ear and told me I was an ass, that the nurse probably took footprints instead of fingerprints. He said he’d meet me at the Lion’s Head where everyone bought me a drink and I got stocious drunk, so drunk Malachy had to hoist me home in a taxi which made me so sick I threw up the length of Broadway with the driver yelling that would cost me twenty-five dollars for the cleaning of the cab, an unreasonable demand that deprived him of a tip and had him threatening to call the cops and, What are you going to tell them? said Malachy, are you going to tell them that you’re a zigzag driver going from one side of Broadway to the other and making everyone sick, is that what you’re going to tell them? and the driver was so angry he wanted to step out and confront Malachy but changed his mind when my brother, holding me up, stood large and red-bearded on the sidewalk and asked the driver politely if he had any more comments before he went to meet his Maker. The driver uttered obscenities about us and the Irish in general and drove through a red light, his left arm at the window, his middle finger rigid in the air.

Malachy brought me aspirins and vitamins and told me I’d be as right as rain in the morning and I wondered what that meant, right as rain, though that question was pushed from my head by the image of Maggie and the forcep flatness of her temples and I was ready to jump from the bed to hunt down that damn doctor who wouldn’t let my daughter be born in her own good time but my legs wouldn’t oblige me and I fell asleep.

Malachy was right. There was no hangover, only delight that a little child in Brooklyn had my name and I’d have a lifetime watching her grow and when I called Alberta I could hardly talk with the tears in my throat and she laughed and quoted my mother, Your bladder is near your eye.

That same year Alberta and I bought the brownstone house where we’d been tenants on the parlor floor. We were able to buy it only because our friends Bobby and Mary Ann Baron lent us money and because Virgil Frank died and left us eight thousand dollars.

When we lived at 30 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights Virgil was two floors below us. He was over seventy, had a full head of combed-back white hair, a strong nose, his own teeth and hardly a scrap of flesh on his bones. I visited him regularly because an hour with him was better than movies, television and most books.

His apartment was one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. His bed was a cot against the wall and beyond that a desk and a window with an air conditioner. Opposite the bed was a bookcase filled with volumes on flowers, trees and birds which, he said, he’d get around to some day as soon as he bought a pair of binoculars. You have to be careful about buying binoculars because you go into a store and how are you gonna test them? Salesmen in the store say, Oh, they’re okay, they’re strong, and how can you tell? They won’t let you take them outside to look up and down Fulton Street in case you make a run for it with the binoculars and that’s dumb. How the hell you gonna make a run for it when you’re seventy? In the meantime he’d like to be able to see birds out his window but all you can see from this apartment is pigeons fornicating on top of his air conditioner and that pisses him off.

He watches them, oh yeah, he watches them, bangs on the window with a fly swatter, tells them, Get outa here, goddam pigeons. Go fornicate on someone else’s air conditioner. He tells me they’re just rats with wings, all they do is eat and fornicate and when they’re finished with fornicating they drop a load on the air conditioner, one load after another, like that crap the boids, I mean the birds, damn, I’m talkin’ Brooklyn again and that ain’t good when you’re selling watercoolers, like that bird crap in South America where the mountains are covered with it, what is it? guano, yeah, which is good for growing things but not for air conditioners.

Besides the books on outdoor life he had a three-volume set of The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and when I opened a volume he said, I didn’t know you liked that stuff. Wouldn’t you prefer the birds? I told him you can always get bird books but his Summa was rare and he said I could have it except I’d have to wait till he died. But don’t worry, Frank, I’ll put it in my will.

He also promised to leave me his collection of ties which dazzled me whenever he opened his closet door, the loudest, most colorful ties I had ever seen.

You like ’em, eh? Some of these ties go all the way back to the twenties and on down to the thirties and forties. Men knew how to dress then. They didn’t go around tippy-toe like the man in the gray flannel suit afraid of a little color. I always said never stint on the tie and the hat because you have to look good when you’re selling watercoolers which I did for forty-five years. I’d go into an office and I’d say, What? What? You telling me you still drinking tap water from these old cups and glasses. Do you know the danger to your health?

And Virgil would stand between bed and bookcase rocking like a preacher and delivering his sales spiel on watercoolers.

Yes, sir, I sell watercoolers and I wanna tell you there’s five things you can do with water. You can clean it, you can pollute it, you can heat it, you can cool it and, ha ha, you can sell it. You know and I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Office Manager, you can drink it and you can swim in it though there isn’t much call for swimming water in the average American office. I wanna tell you my company has made a study of offices that drink our water and offices that don’t drink our water and, you’re right, you’re right, Mr. Office Manager, the people who drink our water are healthier and more productive. Our water drives away the flu and improves digestion. We’re not saying, no we’re not saying, Mr. Office Manager, that our water is solely responsible for great productivity and the prosperity of America but we are saying that our studies show offices without our water are barely hanging on, desperate and wondering why. A copy of our study is available when you sign our yearly contract. At no extra charge we’ll survey your staff and give you an estimate of water consumption. I am happy to observe you don’t have air-conditioning because that means you’ll need extra water for your fine staff. And we know, Mr. Office Manager, that our watercoolers bring people together. Problems are settled over a paper cup of water. Eyes meet. Romances flourish. Everybody happy, everybody eager to come to work every day. Increased productivity. We get no complaints. Sign right here. A copy for you, a copy for me and we’re in business.