Frank McCourt - 'Tis

There’s a big difference but you wouldn’t know. I won’t say another word about it.

You look fine.

I’m not fine. I’m fed up, I told you. I just want to die.

Oh, stop. You’ll be out by Christmas. You’ll be dancing.

I will not be dancing. Look, there’s women running around this country getting abortions right and left and I can’t even die.

What in God’s name is the connection between you and women getting abortions?

Her eyes filled. Here I am in the bed, dying or not dying, and you’re tormenting me with theology.

My brother Michael came into the room, all the way from San Francisco. He prowled the area around her bed. He kissed her and massaged her shoulders and feet. That’ll relax you, he said.

I’m relaxed, she said. If I was any more relaxed I’d be dead and wouldn’t that be a relief.

Michael looked at her and at me and around the room and his eyes were watery. Mam told him he should be back in San Francisco with his wife and children.

I’ll be going back tomorrow.

Well, it was hardly worth your while, all this traveling, was it?

I had to see you.

She drifted off and we went to a bar on Lexington Avenue for a few drinks with Alphie and Malachy’s son, young Malachy. We didn’t talk about Mam. We listened to young Malachy, who was twenty and didn’t know what to do with his life. I told him since his mother was Jewish he could go to Israel and join the army. He said he wasn’t Jewish but I insisted he was, that he had the right of return. I told him if he went to the Israeli Consulate and announced he wanted to join the Israeli army it would be a publicity coup for them. Imagine, young Malachy McCourt, a name like that, joining the Israeli army. He’d be on the front page of every paper in New York.

He said no, he didn’t want his ass shot off by those crazy Arabs. Michael said he wouldn’t be up there on the front lines, he’d be back where he could be used for propaganda purposes and all those exotic Israeli girls would be throwing themselves at him.

He said no again and I told him it was a waste of time buying him drinks when he wouldn’t do a simple thing like joining the Israeli army and carving out a career for himself. I told him if I had a Jewish mother I’d be in Jerusalem in a minute.

That night I returned to Mam’s room. A man stood at the end of her bed. He was bald, he had a gray beard and a gray three-piece suit. He jingled the change in his trouser pocket and told my mother, You know, Mrs. McCourt, you have every right to be angry when you’re ill and you do have a right to express it.

He turned to me. I’m her psychiatrist.

I’m not angry, said Mam. I just want to die and ye won’t let me.

She turned to me. Will you tell him go away?

Go away, Doctor.

Excuse me, I’m her doctor.

Go away.

He left and Mam complained they were tormenting her with priests and psychiatrists and even if she was a sinner she’d done penance a hundred times over, that she was born doing penance. I’m dying for something in my mouth, she said, something tarty like lemonade.

I brought her an artificial lemon filled with concentrated juice and poured it into a glass with a little water. She tasted it. I asked you for lemonade and all you gave me was water.

No, that’s lemonade.

She’s tearful again. One little thing I ask you, one little thing and you can’t do it for me. Would it be too much to ask you to shift my feet, would it? They’re in the one place all day.

I want to ask her why she doesn’t move her feet herself but that will only lead to tears so I move them.

How’s that?

How’s what?

Your feet.

What about my feet?

I moved them.

You did? Well, I didn’t feel it. You won’t give me lemonade. You won’t shift my feet. You won’t bring me a proper blue plastic razor. Oh, God, what use is it having four sons if you can’t get your feet shifted?

All right. Look. I’m moving your feet.

Look? How can I look? ’Tis hard for me to lift my head from the pillow to be looking at my feet. Are you done tormenting me?

Is there anything else?

It’s a furnace in here. Would you open the window?

But it’s freezing outside.

There are tears. Can’t get me lemonade, can’t . . .

All right, all right. I open the window to a blast of cold air from Seventy-seventh Street that freezes the sweat on her face. Her eyes are closed and when I kiss her there is no taste of salt.

Should I stay awhile or even all night? The nurses don’t seem to mind. I could push this chair back, rest my head against the wall and doze. No. I might as well go home. Maggie will be singing tomorrow with the choir at the Plymouth Church and I don’t want her to see me slouching and red-eyed.

All the way back to Brooklyn I feel I should return to the hospital but a friend is having an opening night party for his bar, the Clark Street Station. There is music and merry chatter. I stand outside. I can’t go in.

When Malachy calls at three in the morning he doesn’t have to say the words. All I can do is make a cup of tea the way Mam did at unusual times and sit up in the bed in a dark darker than darkness knowing by now they’ve moved her to a colder place, that gray fleshly body that carried seven of us into the world. I sip my hot tea for the comfort because there are feelings I didn’t expect. I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man, the fine high mourning, the elegiac sense to suit the occasion. I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.

I’m sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won’t come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.

For once, Mam, my bladder is not near my eye and why isn’t it?

Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day. Her life was Purgatory enough and surely she’s in the better place with her three children, Margaret, Oliver, Eugene.

After the service I tell Maggie her grandmother has died and she wonders why I’m dry-eyed. You know, Dad, it’s all right if you cry.

My brother Michael has returned to San Francisco and I’m meeting Malachy and Alphie for breakfast on West Seventy-second Street near the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home. When Malachy orders a hearty meal Alphie says, I don’t know how you can eat so much with your mother dead, and Malachy tells him, I have to sustain my grief, don’t I?

Afterward, at the funeral home, we meet Diana and Lynn, wives of Malachy and Alphie. We sit in a semicircle at the desk of the funeral counselor. He wears a gold ring, a gold watch, a gold tie clasp, gold spectacles. He wields a gold pen and flashes a consoling golden smile. He places a large book on the desk and tells us the first casket is a very elegant item and would be somewhat less than ten thousand dollars, very nice indeed. We don’t linger. We tell him keep turning the pages till he reaches the last item, a coffin for less than three thousand. Malachy inquires, What is the absolute rock-bottom price?

Well, sir, will this be interment or cremation?

Cremation.

Before he answers I try to lighten the moment by telling him and my family of the conversation I had with Mam a week ago.

What do you want us to do with you when you go?

Oh, I’d like to be brought back and buried with my family in Limerick.