Frank McCourt - 'Tis

He handed me back the telephone. And I’ll tell you something else, he said. It’s that goddam Harry Ball that’s responsible for all them pigeons shitting on my air conditioner. He sits in his goddam aluminum beach chair when he’s looking for a parking spot and feeds them pigeons over at Borough Hall. I told him once cut it out, that they were just rats with wings, and he got so mad he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks and that suited me fine. These old guys feed pigeons because they don’t have wives no more, anymore? I dunno. I ran away from the orphanage but I don’t feed pigeons.

He knocked on our door one night and when I opened it he was in his ragged bathrobe, holding a sheaf of papers, and drunk. It was his will and he wanted to read me part of it. No, he wouldn’t have coffee. It killed him, but he’d have a beer.

So, you helped me out and Alberta had me up for dinner and no one ever has old guys up for dinner so I’m leaving you four thousand dollars and Alberta four thousand and I’m leaving you my Thomas Aquinas and my ties. Here’s what it says in the will, To Frank McCourt I leave my collection of ties which he has admired and which are anything but somber.

When we moved to Warren Street we lost touch with Virgil for a while though I wanted him to be godfather at Maggie’s christening. Instead there was a call from a lawyer telling me of Virgil Frank’s death and the terms of his will as it pertained to us. However, said the lawyer, he changed his mind about the Summa Theologica and the ties, so all you get is the money. Do you accept this?

Sure, yes, but why did he change it?

He heard you went to Ireland for a visit and that upset him because you contributed to the gold flow.

What do you mean?

According to Mr. Frank’s will President Johnson said a few years ago that Americans traveling abroad were draining the country of gold and weakening the economy and that’s why you’re not getting the ties that are anything but somber and the three volumes of Aquinas. Okay?

Oh, sure.

Now that we had a portion of a down payment we searched the neighborhood for a house. Our landlady, Hortensia Odones, heard we’d been looking and one day she climbed the outside fire escape at the back of the house and startled me when I saw her head at the kitchen window with the great curly wig.

Frankie, Frankie, open the window. It’s cold out here. Lemme in.

I reached out to help her in but she yelled, Watch my hair, watch my hair, and I had to do the heavy work of hauling her in the kitchen window while she hung on to her wig.

Whoo, she said, whoo. Frankie, you got any rum?

No, Hortensia, only wine or Irish whiskey.

Gimme a whiskey, Frankie. My ass is frozen.

Here, Hortensia. Tell me, why don’t you come up the stairs?

Because it’s dark down there, that’s why, and I can’t afford to keep lights goin’ night an’ day an’ I can see the fire escape day an’ night.

Oh.

And what’s this I hear? You an’ Alberta lookin’ for a house? Why don’t you buy this one?

How much?

Fifty thousand.

Fifty thousand?

That’s right. Is that too much?

Oh, no. That’s fine.

The day we signed the agreement we drank rum with her while she told us how sad she was to leave this house after all the years she was there, not with her husband, Odones, but her boyfriend, Louis Weber, who was famous for running the numbers game in the neighborhood and even though he was Puerto Rican he was afraid of nobody, not even the Cosa Nostra who tried to take over till Louis walked into the Don’s house down in Carroll Gardens and said, What is this shit? excuse the language, and the Don admired Louis for his balls and told his goombahs back off, don’t bother Louis, and you know, Frankie, no one messes with the Italians in Carroll Gardens. You don’t see no coloreds or PRs down there, no sir, and if you do they’re passing through.

The Mafia might have backed away from Louis but Hortensia said you couldn’t trust them and anytime she and Louis went for a drive they rode with two guns between them, his and hers, and he told her if anyone came with trouble and put him out of commission she was to take the steering wheel and yank it toward the sidewalk so that they’d hit a pedestrian instead of traffic and the insurance company would take care of things and if they didn’t and gave Hortensia any trouble he’d leave her with a set of phone numbers of a few guys, PRs, the goddam Mafia wasn’t the only game in town, and these guys would take care of the insurance companies, the greedy bastards, excuse the language, Alberta, is there any rum left, Frankie?

Poor Louis, she said, the Kefauver Commission was bothering him but he died in his bed and I never go for a ride no more but he left me a gun downstairs, you wanna see my gun, Frankie, no? well, I have it and anyone comes into my apartment without an invitation gets it, Frankie, right between the eyes, bang, boom, he’s gone.

Neighbors smiled and nodded and told us we had bought a gold mine, that everyone knew Louis had buried money in the basement of our new house where Hortensia still lived, or over our heads in the false ceiling of the living room. All we had to do was pull down that ceiling and we’d be up to our armpits in hundred-dollar bills.

When Hortensia moved out we dug up the basement to install a new waste line. No buried money. We pulled down false ceilings, exposed bricks and beams. We tapped on walls and someone suggested we consult a psychic.

We found an old doll with tufts of hair, no eyes, no arms, one leg. We kept it for our two-year-old, Maggie, who called it The Beast and loved it over all her other dolls.

Hortensia moved to a small street-level apartment on Court Street and stayed there till she died or moved back to Puerto Rico. I often wished I had spent more time with her and a bottle of rum or that I had introduced her to Virgil Frank so that we could have rum and Irish whiskey and talk about Louis Weber and the gold flow and ways of reducing your telephone bills with an egg timer.

51

It’s 1969 and I’m substitute teaching for Joe Curran, who is out for a few weeks with the drink. His students ask if I know Greek and seem disappointed that I don’t. After all, Mr. Curran would sit at his desk and read or recite from memory long passages from The Odyssey, yeah, in Greek, and he’d remind his students daily he was a graduate of Boston Latin School and Boston College and tell them anyone who didn’t know his Greek or Latin couldn’t consider himself educated, could never lay claim to being a gentleman. Yes, yes, this might be Stuyvesant High School, says Mr. Curran, and you might be the brightest kids from here to the foothills of the Rockies, your heads stuffed with science and mathematics, but all you need in this life is your Homer, your Sophocles, your Plato, your Aristotle, your Aristophanes for the lighter moments, your Virgil for the dark places, your Horace to escape the mundane, and your Juvenal when you’re completely pissed off with the world. The grandeur, boys, the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome.

It wasn’t the Greeks or the Romans his students loved, it was the forty minutes when Joe droned or declaimed and they could daydream, catch up on homework for other classes, doodle, nibble at sandwiches from home, carve their initials on desks that might have been occupied by James Cagney, Thelonius Monk or certain Nobel Laureates. Or they could dream of the nine girls who had just been admitted for the first time in the school’s history. The nine Vestal Virgins, Joe Curran called them, and there were complaints from parents that the suggestiveness of his language was inappropriate.

Oh, inappropriate my ass, said Joe. Why can’t they speak simple En-glish? Why can’t they use a simple word like wrong?