Teacher Man
Frank McCourt
A third memoir from the author of the huge international bestsellers ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and ‘‘Tis’. In ‘Teacher Man’, Frank McCourt details his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City.Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy – but who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work he would sit up reading the great novels.Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last thirty years, working in New York’s public high schools. Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in ‘Teacher Man’, the third in his series of memoirs.The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout ‘Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were…’ Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people’s attention came ‘Angela’s Ashes’.Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant high school – long before he became the figure he is now, he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them – and now in ‘Teacher Man’ he shares his reminiscences of those thirty years as well as revealing how they led to his own success with ‘Angela's Ashes’ and ‘’Tis’.
Frank McCourt
TEACHER MAN
A Memoir
Dedication (#ulink_f47ca14e-c24d-5dbc-a6db-a3fb1db3a2ee)
To the next generations of the Tribe McCourt:
Siobhan (daughter of Malachy) and her children, Fiona and Mark Malachy of Bali (son of Malachy) Nina (stepdaughter of Malachy) Mary Elizabeth (daughter of Michael) and her daughter, Sophia Angela (daughter of Michael) Conor (son of Malachy) and his daughter, Gillian Cormac (son of Malachy) and his daughter, Adrianna Maggie (daughter of Frank) and her children, Chiara, Frankie, and Jack Allison (daughter of Alphie) Mikey (son of Michael) Katie (daughter of Michael)
Sing your song, dance your dance, tell your tale.
Contents
Title Page (#u63e24dd5-6145-5379-9bff-966dd6cec3be)
Dedication (#u7a3ecd9e-efc5-5975-97e2-e6643f0d8ad5)
Prologue (#uf460873c-73e8-5f34-942c-366061eaa7c1)
Part I: It’s A Long Road To Pedagogy (#u16eb2ff1-ce1d-5307-8524-d1158ceb0b84)
Chapter One (#u98aca226-cbc5-5952-afc3-a37ef5f1c947)
Chapter Two (#ua30834e1-98fa-5e77-9317-52bbb9681876)
Chapter Three (#u98bd918e-8846-587a-a930-3efe108f18c4)
Chapter Four (#ucf9e2615-a21b-541c-9eb1-b524add3c279)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Part II: Donkey On A Thistle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Coming Alive In Room 205 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also By Frank McCourt (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_cc671ce5-8a75-5aab-98ca-3f848ba1696d)
If I knew anything about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis I’d be able to trace all my troubles to my miserable childhood in Ireland. That miserable childhood deprived me of self-esteem, triggered spasms of self pity, paralyzed my emotions, made me cranky, envious and disrespectful of authority, retarded my development, crippled my doings with the opposite sex, kept me from rising in the world and made me unfit, almost, for human society. How I became a teacher at all and remained one is a miracle and I have to give myself full marks for surviving all those years in the classrooms of New York. There should be a medal for people who survive miserable childhoods and become teachers, and I should be first in line for the medal and whatever bars might be appended for ensuing miseries.
I could lay blame. The miserable childhood doesn’t simply happen. It is brought about. There are dark forces. If I am to lay blame it is in a spirit of forgiveness. Therefore, I forgive the following: Pope Pius XII; the English in general and King George VI in particular; Cardinal MacRory, who ruled Ireland when I was a child; the bishop of Limerick, who seemed to think everything was sinful; Eamonn De Valera, former prime minister (Taoiseach) and president of Ireland. Mr. De Valera was a half-Spanish Gaelic fanatic (Spanish onion in an Irish stew) who directed teachers all over Ireland to beat the native tongue into us and natural curiosity out of us. He caused us hours of misery. He was aloof and indifferent to the black and blue welts raised by schoolmaster sticks on various parts of our young bodies. I forgive, also, the priest who drove me from the confessional when I admitted to sins of self-abuse and self-pollution and penny thieveries from my mother’s purse. He said I did not show a proper spirit of repentance, especially in the matter of the flesh. And even though he had hit that nail right on the head, his refusal to grant me absolution put my soul in such peril that if I had been flattened by a truck outside the church he would have been responsible for my eternal damnation. I forgive various bullying schoolmasters for pulling me out of my seat by the sideburns, for walloping me regularly with stick, strap and cane when I stumbled over answers in the catechism or when in my head I couldn’t divide 937 by 739. I was told by my parents and other adults it was all for my own good. I forgive them for those whopping hypocrisies and wonder where they are at this moment. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory (if it still exists)?
I can even forgive myself, though when I look back at various stages of my life, I groan. What an ass. What timidities. What stupidities. What indecisions and flounderings.
But then I take another look. I had spent childhood and adolescence examining my conscience and finding myself in a perpetual state of sin. That was the training, the brainwashing, the conditioning and it discouraged smugness, especially among the sinning class.
Now I think it time to give myself credit for at least one virtue: doggedness. Not as glamorous as ambition or talent or intellect or charm, but still the one thing that got me through the days and nights.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that in American lives there are no second acts. He simply did not live long enough. In my case he was wrong.
When I taught in New York City high schools for thirty years no one but my students paid me a scrap of attention. In the world outside the school I was invisible. Then I wrote a book about my childhood and became mick of the moment. I hoped the book would explain family history to McCourt children and grandchildren. I hoped it might sell a few hundred copies and I might be invited to have discussions with book clubs. Instead it jumped onto the best-seller list and was translated into thirty languages and I was dazzled. The book was my second act.
In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second,’ Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it’s a wonder I was able to lift the pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. (I have read novels about the lives of university professors where they seemed to be so busy with adultery and academic in-fighting you wonder where they found time to squeeze in a little teaching.) When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.
I never expected Angela’s Ashes to attract any attention, but when it hit the best-seller lists I became a media darling. I had my picture taken hundreds of times. I was a geriatric novelty with an Irish accent. I was interviewed for dozens of publications. I met governors, mayors, actors. I met the first President Bush and his son the governor of Texas. I met President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. I met Gregory Peck. I met the Pope and kissed his ring. Sarah, Duchess of York, interviewed me. She said I was her first Pulitzer Prize winner. I said she was my first duchess. She said, Ooh, and asked the cameraman, Did you get that? Did you get that? I was nominated for a Grammy for the spoken word and nearly met Elton John. People looked at me in a different way. They said, Oh, you wrote that book, This way, please, Mr. McCourt, or Is there anything you’d like, anything? A woman in a coffee shop squinted and said, I seen you on TV. You must be important. Who are you? Could I have your autograph? I was listened to. I was asked for my opinion on Ireland, conjunctivitis, drinking, teeth, education, religion, adolescent angst, William Butler Yeats, literature in general. What books are you reading this summer? What books have you read this year? Catholicism, writing, hunger. I spoke to gatherings of dentists, lawyers, ophthalmologists and, of course, teachers. I traveled the world being Irish, being a teacher, an authority on misery of all kinds, a beacon of hope to senior citizens everywhere who always wanted to tell their stories.
They made a movie of Angela’s Ashes. No matter what you write in America there is always talk of The Movie. You could write the Manhattan telephone directory, and they’d say, So, when is the movie?
If I hadn’t written Angela’sAshes I would have died begging, Just one more year, God, just one more year because this book is the one thing I want to do in my life, what’s left of it. I never dreamed it would be a best-seller. I hoped it would sit on booksellers’ shelves while I lurked in the bookshop and watched beautiful women turn pages and shed the occasional tear. They’d buy the book, of course, take it home, loll on divans and read my story while sipping herbal tea or a fine sherry. They’d order copies for all their friends.
In ’Tis I wrote about my life in America and how I became a teacher. After it was published I had the nagging feeling I’d given teaching short shrift. In America, doctors, lawyers, generals, actors, television people and politicians are admired and rewarded. Not teachers. Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go around the back. They are congratulated on having ATTO (All That Time Off). They are spoken of patronizingly and patted, retroactively, on their silvery locks. Oh, yes, I had an English teacher, Miss Smith, who really inspired me. I’ll never forget dear old Miss Smith. She used to say that if she reached one child in her forty years of teaching it would make it all worthwhile. She’d die happy. The inspiring English teacher then fades into gray shadows to eke out her days on a penny-pinching pension, dreaming of the one child she might have reached. Dream on, teacher. You will not be celebrated.
You think you’ll walk into the classroom, stand a moment, wait for silence, watch while they open notebooks and click pens, tell them your name, write it on the board, proceed to teach.
On your desk you have the English course of study provided by the school. You’ll teach spelling, vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, composition, literature.
You can’t wait to get to the literature. You’ll have lively discussions about poems, plays, essays, novels, short stories. The hands of one hundred and seventy students will quiver in the air and they’ll call out, Mr. McCourt, me, me, I wanna say something.
You hope they’ll want to say something. You don’t want them to sit gawking while you struggle to keep a lesson alive.
You’ll feast on the bodies of English and American literature. What a time you’ll have with Carlyle and Arnold, Emerson and Thoreau. You can’t wait to get to Shelley, Keats and Byron and good old Walt Whitman. Your classes will love all that romanticism and rebellion, all that defiance. You’ll love it yourself, because, deep down and in your dreams, you’re a wild romantic. You see yourself on the barricades.
Principals and other figures of authority passing in the hallways will hear sounds of excitement from your room. They’ll peer through the door window in wonder at all the raised hands, the eagerness and excitement on the faces of these boys and girls, these plumbers, electricians, beauticians, carpenters, mechanics, typists, machinists.
You’ll be nominated for awards: Teacher of the Year, Teacher of the Century. You’ll be invited to Washington. Eisenhower will shake your hand. Newspapers will ask you, a mere teacher, for your opinion on education. This will be big news: A teacher asked for his opinion on education. Wow. You’ll be on television.
Television.
Imagine: A teacher on television.
They’ll fly you to Hollywood, where you’ll star in movies about your own life. Humble beginnings, miserable childhood, problems with the church (which you bravely defied), images of you solitary in a corner, reading by candlelight: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens. You there in the corner blinking with your poor diseased eyes, bravely reading till your mother pulls the candle away from you, tells you if you don’t stop the two eyes will fall out of your head entirely. You plead for the candle back, you have only a hundred pages left in Dombey and Son, and she says, No, I don’t want to be leading you around Limerick with people asking how you went blind when a year ago you were kicking a ball with the best of them.
You say yes to your mother because you know the song:
A mother’s love is a blessingNo matter where you go Keep her while you have her You’ll miss her when she’s gone.
Besides, you could never talk back to a movie mother played by one of those old Irish actresses, Sarah Allgood or Una O’Connor, with their sharp tongues and their suffering faces. Your own mother had a powerful hurt look, too, but there’s nothing like seeing it on the big screen in black and white or living color.
Your father could be played by Clark Gable except that a) he might not be able to handle your father’s North of Ireland accent and b) it would be a terrible comedown from Gone With the Wind, which, you remember, was banned in Ireland because, it is said, Rhett Butler carried his own wife, Scarlett, up the stairs and into bed, which upset the film censors in Dublin and caused them to ban the film entirely. No, you’d need someone else as your father because the Irish censors would be watching closely and you’d be badly disappointed if the people in Limerick, your city, and the rest of Ireland were denied the opportunity of seeing the story of your miserable childhood and subsequent triumph as teacher and movie star.
But that would not be the end of the story. The real story would be how you eventually resisted the siren call of Hollywood, how after nights of being dined, wined, feted and lured to the beds of female stars, established and aspiring, you discovered the hollowness of their lives, how they poured out their hearts to you on various satin pillows, how you listened, with twinges of guilt, while they expressed their admiration for you, that you, because of your devotion to your students, had become an idol and an icon in Hollywood, how they, the ravishing female stars, established and aspiring, regretted how they had gone astray, embracing the emptiness of their Hollywood lives when, if they gave it all up, they could rejoice daily in the integrity of teaching the future craftsmen, tradesmen and clerk- typists of America. How it must feel, they would say, to wake up in the morning, to leap gladly from the bed, knowing that before you stretched a day in which you’d do God’s work with the youth of America, content with your meager remuneration, your real reward the glow of gratitude in the eager eyes of your students as they bear gifts from their grateful and admiring parents: cookies, bread, homemade pasta and the occasional bottle of wine from the backyard vines of Italian families, the mothers and fathers of your one hundred and seventy students at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Borough of Staten Island, in the City of New York.
PART I (#ulink_df211831-3be2-585a-b39e-0b86d3a586f6)
It’s a Long Road to Pedagogy (#u6766b5f4-6e28-58ce-a6af-749ef45db6f5)
1 (#ulink_3dff58cf-64bc-5e9b-a79c-880cf10fb500)
Here they come.
And I’m not ready.
How could I be?
I’m a new teacher and learning on the job.
On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long.
It is March 1958. I sit at my desk in an empty classroom in McKee Vocational and Technical High School in the Borough of Staten Island, New York City. I toy with the implements of my new calling: five manila folders, one for each class; a clump of crumbling rubber bands; a block of brown wartime composition paper flecked with whatever went into the making of it; a worn blackboard eraser; a stack of white cards that I will insert row by row into slots in this tattered red Delaney book to help me remember the names of one hundred and sixty-odd boys and girls who will sit in rows every day in five different classes. On the cards I’ll record their attendance and tardiness and make little marks when boys and girls do bad things. I’m told I should keep a red pen to record the bad things, but the school hasn’t supplied one, and now I have to request it on a form or buy one in a shop because the red pen for the bad things is the teacher’s most powerful weapon. There are many things I will have to buy in a shop. In Eisenhower’s America there is prosperity but it does not trickle down to schools, especially to new teachers who need supplies for their classes. There is a note from an assistant principal in charge of administration reminding all teachers of the city’s financial plight and to please use these supplies sparingly. This morning I have to make decisions. In a minute the bell will ring. They’ll swarm in and what will they say if they see me at the desk? Hey, look. He’s hiding out. They are experts on teachers. Sitting at the desk means you’re scared or lazy. You’re using the desk as a barrier. Best thing is to get out there and stand. Face the music. Be a man. Make one mistake your first day and it takes months to recover.
The kids arriving are juniors, sixteen years old, eleven years in school from kindergarten to today. So, teachers come, teachers go, all kinds, old, young, tough, kind. Kids watch, scrutinize, judge. They know body language, tone of voice, demeanor in general. It’s not as if they sit around in toilets or cafeterias discussing these things. They just absorb it over eleven years, pass it on to coming generations. Watch out for Miss Boyd, they’ll say. Homework, man, homework, and she corrects it. Corrects it. She ain’t married so she’s got nothing else to do. Always try to get married teachers with kids. They don’t have time for sitting around with papers and books. If Miss Boyd got laid regular she wouldn’t give so much homework. She sits there at home with her cat listening to classical music, correcting our homework, bothering us. Not like some teachers. They give you a pile of homework, check it off, never even look at it. You could copy a page of the Bible and they’d write at the top, “Very nice.” Not Miss Boyd. She’s on to you right off. Excuse me, Charlie. Did you write this yourself? And you have to admit, no, you didn’t and now you’re up shit creek, man.
It’s a mistake to arrive early, gives you too much time to think of what you’re facing. Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That’s where I got the nerve. It is the Eisenhower era and newspapers report the great unhappiness of American adolescents. These are the “Lost Children of the Lost Children of the Lost Generation.” Movies, musicals, books tell us of their unhappiness: Rebel Without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, West SideStory, The Catcher in the Rye. They make despairing speeches. Life is meaningless. All adults are phonies. What’s the use of living at all? They have nothing to look forward to, not even a war of their own where they can kill natives in distant places and march up ticker-tape Broadway with medals and limps for the girls to admire. No use complaining to their fathers, who just fought a war, or their mothers, who waited while the fathers fought. Fathers say, Oh, shaddup. Don’t bodder me. I got a pounda shrapnel up my ass an’ I don’t have time for you bitchin’ an’ moanin’ wid your belly full an’ your closet stuffed with clothes. F’Christ’s sakes, when I was your age I was out woikin’ in a junkyard before I went on the docks so I could send your sorry ass to school. Go squeeze your goddam pimples an’ lemme read my paper.
There’s so much teen unhappiness they form gangs and fight other gangs, not rumbles like the ones you see in movies with star- crossed romances and dramatic music in the background, but mean fights where they grunt and curse one another, where Italians, Blacks, Irish, Puerto Ricans attack with knives, chains, baseball bats in Central Park and Prospect Park and stain the grass with their blood, which is always red no matter where it came from. Then if there’s a killing there’s public outrage and accusations that if the schools and teachers were doing their jobs these terrible things wouldn’t happen. There are patriots who say, If these kids have the time and energy to be fighting one another why can’t we just ship them overseas to fight the goddam Communists and settle that problem for once and for all?
Vocational schools were seen by many as dumping grounds for students ill-equipped for academic high schools. That was snobbery. It didn’t matter to the public that thousands of young people wanted to be auto mechanics, beauticians, machinists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters. They didn’t want to be bothered with the Reformation, the War of 1812, Walt Whitman, art appreciation, the sex life of the fruit fly.
But, man, if we have to do it we’ll do it. We’ll sit in those classes that have nothing to do with our lives. We’ll work in our shops where we learn about the real world and we’ll try to be nice to the teachers and get outa here in four years. Whew!
Here they are. The door slams against the shelf that runs along the base of the blackboard, stirs a cloud of chalk dust. Entering a room is a big deal. Why couldn’t they simply walk into the room, say, Good morning, and sit? Oh, no. They have to push and jostle. One says, Hey, in a mock threatening way and another one says, Hey, right back. They insult one another, ignore the late bell, take their time sitting. That’s cool, baby. Look, there’s a new teacher up there and new teachers don’t know shit. So? Bell? Teacher? New guy. Who is he? Who cares? They talk to friends across the room, lounge in desks too small for them, stick out their legs, laugh if someone trips. They stare out the window, over my head at the American flag or the pictures taped to the walls by Miss Mudd, now retired, pictures of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Emily Dickinson and—how did he get here?— Ernest Hemingway. It’s the Life magazine cover and that picture is everywhere. They gouge their initials on desk tops with penknives, declarations of love with hearts and arrows alongside the long-ago gougings of their fathers and brothers. Some old desks are gouged so deep you can see your knees through holes where hearts and names used to be. Couples sit together, hold hands, whisper and gaze into each other’s eyes while three boys against the back closets sing doowop, bass, baritone and high notes, man, snap fingers, tell the world they’re just teenagers in love.
Five times a day they push into the room. Five classes, thirty to thirty-five in each class. Teenagers? In Ireland we saw them in American movies, moody, surly, driving around in cars, and we wondered why they were moody and surly. They had food and clothes and money and still they were mean to their parents. There were no teenagers in Ireland, not in my world. You were a child. You went to school till you were fourteen. If you were mean to your parents they’d give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room. You grew up, got a laboring job, got married, drank your pint on a Friday night, jumped on the wife that same night and kept her pregnant forever. In a few years you emigrated to England to work on the building sites or to enlist in His Majesty’s forces and fight for the Empire.
The problem of the sandwich started when a boy named Petey called out, Anyone wan’ a baloney sandwich?
You kiddin’? Your mom must hate you, givin’ you sandwiches like that.
Petey threw his brown-paper sandwich bag at the critic, Andy, and the class cheered. Fight, fight, they said. Fight, fight. The bag landed on the floor between the blackboard and Andy’s front-row desk.
I came from behind my desk and made the first sound of my teaching career: Hey. Four years of higher education at New York University and all I could think of was Hey.
I said it again. Hey.
They ignored me. They were busy promoting the fight that would kill time and divert me from any lesson I might be planning. I moved toward Petey and made my first teacher statement, Stop throwing sandwiches. Petey and the class looked startled. This teacher, new teacher, just stopped a good fight. New teachers are supposed to mind their own business or send for the principal or a dean and everyone knows it’s years before they come. Which means you can have a good fight while waiting. Besides, what are you gonna do with a teacher who tells you stop throwing sandwiches when you already threw the sandwich?
Benny called out from the back of the room. Hey, teach, he awredy threw the sangwidge. No use tellin’ him now don’t throw the sangwidge. They’s the sangwidge there on the floor.
The class laughed. There’s nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don’t do it after you already did it. One boy covered his mouth and said, Stoopid, and I knew he was referring to me. I wanted to knock him out of his seat, but that would have been the end of my teaching career. Besides, the hand that covered his mouth was huge, and his desk was too small for his body.
Someone said, Yo, Benny, you a lawyer, man? and the class laughed again. Yeah, yeah, they said, and waited for my move. What will this new teacher do?
Professors of education at New York University never lectured on how to handle flying-sandwich situations. They talked about theories and philosophies of education, about moral and ethical imperatives, about the necessity of dealing with the whole child, the gestalt, if you don’t mind, the child’s felt needs, but never about critical moments in the classroom.
Should I say, Hey, Petey, get up here and pick up that sandwich, or else? Should I pick it up myself and throw it into the wastepaper basket to show my contempt for people who throw sandwiches while millions starve all over the world?
They had to recognize I was boss, that I was tough, that I’d take none of their shit.
The sandwich, in wax paper, lay halfway out of the bag and the aroma told me there was more to this than baloney. I picked it up and slid it from its wrapping. It was not any ordinary sandwich where meat is slapped between slices of tasteless white American bread. This bread was dark and thick, baked by an Italian mother in Brooklyn, bread firm enough to hold slices of a rich baloney, layered with slices of tomato, onions and peppers, drizzled with olive oil and charged with a tongue-dazzling relish.
I ate the sandwich.
It was my first act of classroom management. My mouth, clogged with sandwich, attracted the attention of the class. They gawked up at me, thirty-four boys and girls, average age sixteen. I could see the admiration in their eyes, first teacher in their lives to pick up a sandwich from the floor and eat it in full view. Sandwich man. In my boyhood in Ireland we admired one schoolmaster who peeled and ate an apple every day and rewarded good boys with the long peel. These kids watched the oil dribble down my chin to my two-dollar tie from Klein-on-the-Square.
Petey said, Yo, teacher, that’s my sandwich you et.
Class told him, Shaddap. Can’t you see the teacher is eating?
I licked my fingers. I said, Yum, made a ball of paper bag and wax paper and flipped it into the trash basket. The class cheered. Wow, they said, and Yo, baby, and M-a-a-a-n. Look at dat. He eats the sandwich. He hits the basket. Wow.
So this is teaching? Yeah, wow. I felt like a champion. I ate the sandwich. I hit the basket. I felt I could do anything with this class. I thought I had them in the palm of my hand. Fine, except I didn’t know what to do next. I was there to teach, and wondered how I should move from a sandwich situation to spelling or grammar or the structure of a paragraph or anything related to the subject I was supposed to teach, English.
My students smiled till they saw the principal’s face framed in the door window. Bushy black eyebrows halfway up his forehead shaped a question. He opened the door and beckoned me out. A word, Mr. McCourt?
Petey whispered, Hey, mister. Don’t worry about the sandwich. I didn’t want it anyway.
The class said, Yeah, yeah, in a way that showed they were on my side if I had trouble with the principal, my first experience of teacher-student solidarity. In the classroom your students might stall and complain but when a principal or any other outsider appeared there was immediate unity, a solid front.
Out in the hallway, he said, I’m sure you understand, Mr. McCourt, it isn’t seemly to have teachers eating their lunch at nine a.m. in their classrooms in the presence of these boys and girls. Your first teacher experience and you choose to begin it by eating a sandwich? Is that proper procedure, young man? It’s not our practice here, gives children the wrong idea. You can see the reasoning, eh? Think of the problems we’d have if teachers just dropped everything and began to eat their lunches in class, especially in the morning when it’s still breakfast time. We have enough trouble with kids sneaking little nibbles during morning classes and attracting cockroaches and various rodents. Squirrels have been chased from these rooms, and I won’t even mention rats. If we’re not vigilant these kids, and some teachers, your colleagues, young man, will turn the school into one big cafeteria.
I wanted to tell him the truth about the sandwich and how well I handled the situation, but if I did it might be the end of my teaching job. I wanted to say, Sir, it was not my lunch. That was the sandwich of a boy who threw it at another boy and I picked it up because I’m new here and this thing happened in my class and there was nothing in the courses at college on sandwiches, the throwing and retrieving of. I know I ate the sandwich but I did it out of desperation or I did it to teach the class a lesson about waste and to show them who was in charge or, Jesus, I ate it because I was hungry and I promise never to do it again for fear I might lose my good job though you must admit the class was quiet. If that’s the way to capture the attention of kids in a vocational high school you ought to send out for a pile of baloney sandwiches for the four classes I still have to meet today.
I said nothing.
The principal said he was there to help me because, Ha, ha, I looked like I might need a lot of help. I’ll admit, he said, you had their full attention. OK, but see if you can do it in a less dramatic way. Try teaching. That’s what you’re here for, young man. Teaching. Now you have ground to recover. That’s all. No eating in class for teacher or student.
I said, Yes, sir, and he waved me back to the classroom.
The class said, What’d he say?
He said I shouldn’t eat my lunch in the classroom at nine a.m.
You wasn’t eatin’ no lunch.
I know, but he saw me with the sandwich and told me not to do it again.
Man, that’s unfair.
Petey said, I’ll tell my mom you liked her sandwich. I’ll tell her you got in a lot of trouble over her sandwich.
All right, Petey, but don’t tell her you threw it away.
Naw, naw. She’d kill me. She’s from Sicily. They get excited over there in Sicily.
Tell her it was the most delicious sandwich I ever had in my life, Petey.
OK.
Mea culpa.
Instead of teaching, I told stories.
Anything to keep them quiet and in their seats.
They thought I was teaching.
I thought I was teaching.
I was learning.
And you called yourself a teacher?
I didn’t call myself anything. I was more than a teacher. And less. In the high school classroom you are a drill sergeant, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.
In the teachers’ cafeteria veterans warned me, Son, tell ’em nothing about yourself. They’re kids, goddam it. You’re the teacher. You have a right to privacy. You know the game, don’t you? The little buggers are diabolical. They are not, repeat not, your natural friends. They can smell it when you’re going to teach a real lesson on grammar or something, and they’ll head you off at the pass, baby. Watch ’em. Those kids have been at this for years, eleven or twelve, and they have teachers all figured out. They’ll know if you’re even thinking about grammar or spelling, and they’ll raise their little hands and put on that interested expression and ask you what games you played as a kid or who do you like for the goddam World Series. Oh, yeah. And you’ll fall for it. Next thing is you’re spilling your guts and they go home not knowing one end of a sentence from the other, but telling the moms and dads about your life. Not that they care. They’ll get by, but where does that leave you? You can never get back the bits and pieces of your life that stick in their little heads. Your life, man. It’s all you have. Tell ’em nothing.
The advice was wasted. I learned through trial and error and paid a price for it. I had to find my own way of being a man and a teacher and that is what I struggled with for thirty years in and out of the classrooms of New York. My students didn’t know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere.
My life saved my life. On my second day at McKee a boy asks a question that sends me into the past and colors the way I teach for the next thirty years. I am nudged into the past, the materials of my life.
Joey Santos calls out, Yo, teach….
You are not to call out. You are to raise your hand.
Yeah, yeah, said Joey, but…
They have a way of saying yeah yeah that tells you they’re barely tolerating you. In the yeah yeah they’re saying, We’re trying to be patient, man, giving you a break because you’re just a new teacher.
Joey raises his hand. Yo, teacher man….
Call me Mr. McCourt.
Yeah. OK. So, you Scotch or somethin’?
Joey is the mouth. There’s one in every class along with the complainer, the clown, the goody-goody, the beauty queen, the volunteer for everything, the jock, the intellectual, the momma’s boy, the mystic, the sissy, the lover, the critic, the jerk, the religious fanatic who sees sin everywhere, the brooding one who sits in the back staring at the desk, the happy one, the saint who finds good in all creatures. It’s the job of the mouth to ask questions, anything to keep the teacher from the boring lesson. I may be a new teacher but I’m on to Joey’s delaying game. It’s universal. I played the same game in Ireland. I was the mouth in my class in Leamy’s National School. The master would write an algebra question or an Irish conjugation on the board and the boys would hiss, Ask him a question, McCourt. Get him away from the bloody lesson. Go on, go on.
I’d say, Sir, did they have algebra in olden times in Ireland?
Mr. O’Halloran liked me, good boy, neat handwriting, always polite and obedient. He would put the chalk down, and from the way he sat at his desk and took his time before speaking you could see how happy he was to escape from algebra and Irish syntax. He’d say, Boys, you have every right to be proud of your ancestors. Long before the Greeks, even the Egyptians, your forefathers in this lovely land could capture the rays of the sun in the heart of winter and direct them to dark inner chambers for a few golden moments. They knew the ways of the heavenly bodies and that took them beyond algebra, beyond calculus, beyond, boys, oh, beyond beyond.
Sometimes, in the warm days of spring, he dozed off in his chair and we sat quietly, forty of us, waiting for him to wake, not even daring to leave the room if he slept past going-home time.
No. I’m not Scotch. I’m Irish.
Joey looks sincere. Oh, yeah? What’s Irish?
Irish is whatever comes out of Ireland.
Like St. Patrick, right?
Well, no, not exactly. This leads to the telling of the story of St. Patrick, which keeps us away from the b-o-r-i-n-g English lesson, which leads to other questions.
Hey, mister. Everyone talk English over there in Ireland?
What kinda sports didja play?
You all Catlics in Ireland?
Don’t let them take over the classroom. Stand up to them. Show them who’s in charge. Be firm or be dead. Take no shit. Tell them, Open your notebooks. Time for the spelling list.
Aw, teacher, aw, Gawd, aw man. Spelling. Spelling. Spelling. Do we haveta? They moan, B-o-r-i-n-g spelling list. They pretend to bang their foreheads on desks, bury their faces in their folded arms. They beg for the pass. Gotta go. Gotta go. Man, we thought you were a nice guy, young and all. Why do all these English teachers have to do the same old thing? Same old spelling lessons, same old vocabulary lessons, same old shit, excuse the language? Can’t you tell us more about Ireland?
Yo, teacher man…. Joey again. Mouth to the rescue.
Joey, I told you my name is Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt.
Yeah, yeah. So, mister, did you go out with girls in Ireland?
No, dammit. Sheep. We went out with sheep. What do you think we went out with?
The class explodes. They laugh, clutch their chests, nudge, elbow one another, pretend to fall out of their desks. This teacher. Crazy, man. Talks funny. Goes out with sheep. Lock up your sheep.
Excuse me. Open your notebooks, please. We have a spelling list to cover.
Hysterics. Will sheep be on the list? Oh, man.
That smart-ass response was a mistake. There will be trouble. The goody-goody, the saint and the critic will surely report me: Oh, Mom, oh, Dad, oh, Mr. Principal, guess what teacher said in class today. Bad things about sheep.
I’m not prepared, trained or ready for this. It’s not teaching. It has nothing to do with English literature, grammar, writing. When will I be strong enough to walk into the room, get their immediate attention and teach? Around this school there are quiet industrious classes where teachers are in command. In the cafeteria older teachers tell me, Yeah, it takes at least five years.
Next day the principal sends for me. He sits behind his desk, talking into the telephone, smoking a cigarette. He keeps saying, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll speak to the person involved. New teacher, I’m afraid.
He puts the phone down. Sheep. What is this about sheep?
Sheep?
I dunno what I’m gonna do with you. There’s a complaint you said “dammit” in class. I know you’re just off the boat from an agricultural country and don’t know the ropes, but you should have some common sense.
No, sir. Not off the boat. I’ve been here eight and a half years, including my two years in the army, not counting years of infancy in Brooklyn.
Well, look. First the sandwich, now the sheep. Damn phone ringing off the hook. Parents up in arms. I have to cover my ass. You’re two days in the building and two days you’re in the soup. How do you do it? If you’ll excuse the expression you’re inclined to screw up a bit. Why the hell did you have to tell these kids about the sheep?
I’m sorry. They kept asking me questions, and I was exasperated. They were only trying to keep me away from the spelling list.
That’s it?
I thought the sheep thing was a bit funny at the time.
Oh, yeah, indeed. You standing there advocating bestiality. Thirteen parents are demanding you be fired. There are righteous people on Staten Island.
I was only joking.
No, young man. No jokes here. There’s a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You’re the teacher. You say you went out with sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.
I’m sorry.
This time I’ll let it go. I’ll tell the parents you’re just an Irish immigrant off the boat.
But I was born here.
Could you be quiet for one minute and listen while I save your life, huh? This time I’ll let it go. I won’t put a letter in your file. You don’t realize how serious it is to get a letter in your file. If you’ve got any ambition to rise in this system, principal, assistant principal, guidance counselor, the letter in the file will hold you back. It’s the start of the long downward slide.
Sir, I don’t want to be principal. I just want to teach.
Yeah, yeah. That’s what they all say. You’ll get over it. These kids will give you gray hair before you’re thirty.
It was clear I was not cut out to be the purposeful kind of teacher who brushed aside all questions, requests, complaints, to get on with the well-planned lesson. That would have reminded me of that school in Limerick where the lesson was king and we were nothing. I was already dreaming of a school where teachers were guides and mentors, not taskmasters. I didn’t have any particular philosophy of education except that I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study.
If a principal had ever said, The class is yours, teacher. Do with it what you like, I would have said to my students, Push the chairs aside. Sit on the floor. Go to sleep.
What?
I said, Go to sleep.
Why?
Figure it out for yourself while you’re lying there on the floor.
They’d lie on the floor and some would drift off. There would be giggling as boy wriggled closer to girl. Sleepers would snore sweetly. I’d stretch out with them on the floor and ask if anyone knew a lullaby. I know a girl would start and others would join. A boy might say, Man, what if the principal walked in. Yeah. The lullaby continues, a murmur around the room. Mr. McCourt, when are we getting up? He’s told, Shush, man, and he shushes. The bell rings and they’re slow off the floor. They leave the room, relaxed and puzzled. Please don’t ask me why I’d have such a session. It must be the spirit that moves.
2 (#ulink_9b4727d6-af20-5e22-8011-011beb105448)
If you were in my classes in the early McKee days you would have seen a scrawny young man in his late twenties with unruly black hair, eyes that flared with a chronic infection, bad teeth and the hangdog look you see on immigrants in Ellis Island photographs or on pickpockets being arrested.
There were reasons for the hangdog look:
I was born in New York and taken to Ireland before I was four. I had three brothers. My father, an alcoholic, wild man, great patriot, ready always to die for Ireland, abandoned us when I was ten going on eleven. A baby sister died, twin boys died, two boys were born. My mother begged for food, clothing, and coal to boil water for the tea. Neighbors told her to place us in an orphanage, me and my brothers. No, no, never. The shame of it. She hung on. We grew. My brothers and I left school at fourteen, worked, dreamed of America and, one by one, sailed away. My mother followed with the youngest, expecting to live happily ever after. That’s what you’re supposed to do in America, but she never had a moment of happy-ever-after.
In New York I worked at menial and laboring jobs till I was drafted into the United States Army. After two years in Germany I went to college on the GI Bill to become a teacher. In college there were courses on literature and composition. There were courses on how to teach by professors who did not know how to teach.
So, Mr. McCourt, what was it like growing up in, you know, Ireland?
I’m twenty-seven years old, a new teacher, dipping into my past to satisfy these American teenagers, to keep them quiet and in their seats. I never thought my past would be so useful. Why would anyone want to know about my miserable life? Then I realize this is what my father did when he told us stories by the fire. He told us about men called seanachies who traveled the country telling the hundreds of stories they carried in their heads. People would let them warm themselves by the fire, offer them a drop, feed them whatever they were having themselves, listen to hours of story and song that seemed endless, give them a blanket or a sack to cover themselves on the bed of straw in the corner. If the seanachie needed love there might be an aging daughter available.
I argue with myself, You’re telling stories and you’re supposed to be teaching.
I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.
Storytelling is a waste of time.
I can’t help it. I’m not good at lecturing.
You’re a fraud. You’re cheating our children.
They don’t seem to think so.
The poor kids don’t know.
I’m a teacher in an American school telling stories of my school days in Ireland. It’s a routine that softens them up in the unlikely event I might teach something solid from the curriculum.
One day, my schoolmaster joked that I looked like something the cat brought in. The class laughed. The master smiled with his great yellow horsey teeth and gobs of phlegm stirred and rattled in his gullet. My classmates took that as a laugh, and when they laughed with him I hated them. I hated the master, too, because I knew that for days to come I’d be known in the school yard as the one the cat brought in. If the master had made that remark about another boy I would have laughed, too, because I was as great a coward as the next one, terrified of the stick.
There was one boy in the class who did not laugh with everyone else: Billy Campbell. When the class laughed, Billy would stare straight ahead and the master would stare at him, waiting for him to be like everyone else. We waited for him to drag Billy from his seat, but he never did. I think the master admired him for his independence. I admired him, too, and wished I had his courage. It never came to me.
Boys in that Irish school mocked the American accent I had from New York. You can’t go away and leave your accent behind, and when they mock your accent you don’t know what to do or think or feel till the pushing starts and you know they’re trying to get a rise out of you. It’s you against forty boys from the lanes of Limerick and you can’t run, for if you do, you’ll be known as a sissy or a nancy boy the rest of your life. They call you gangster or redskin and then you fight and fight till someone hits you on the nose and you’re pumping blood all over your one shirt, which will get you into terrible trouble with your mother, who will leave her chair by the fire and give you a good clitther on the head for fighting at all. There’s no use trying to explain to your mother that you got all this blood from defending your American accent, which you have because of her in the first place. No, she’ll say, now she has to boil water and wash your bloody shirt and see if she can dry it before the fire so that you can have it for school tomorrow. She says nothing about the American accent that got you into trouble in the first place. But it’s all right because in a few months that accent will disappear to be replaced, thank God, with a Limerick accent anyone but my father would be proud of.
Because of my father, my troubles were not over. You’d think with my perfect Limerick accent at the age of four the boys would stop tormenting me but, no, they start mimicking my father’s North of Ireland accent and saying he’s some class of a Protestant and now I have to defend him and once more it’s home to my mother with the bloody shirt and my mother yells if she has to wash this shirt one more time it will surely fall apart in her hands. The worst part was the time when she couldn’t get the shirt dry by morning and I had to wear it damp to school. When I came home my nose was stuffed and my whole body shivered with the damp again, this time from sweat. My mother was distracted and cried all over me for being mean to me and sending me to school with that damp shirt that was getting redder and redder from all the fights. She put me to bed and buried me under old overcoats and the blanket from her own bed till the shivering stopped and I drifted off to sleep listening to her downstairs talking to my father and saying it was a sad day they left Brooklyn to have the children tormented in the school yards of Limerick.
After two days in bed I returned to school in the shirt that was now a pale shade of pink. The boys said pink was a color for sissies and was I a girl?
Billy Campbell stood up to the biggest of them. Leave the Yank alone, he said.
Oh, said the big boy. Who’s goin’ to make me?
I am, said Billy, and the big boy went to the other side of the yard to play. Billy understood my problem because his father was from Dublin and sometimes the boys sneered even at that.
I told stories about Billy because he had the kind of courage I admired. Then one of my McKee students raised his hand and said it was all right to admire Billy but didn’t I stand up to a whole group over my American accent and shouldn’t I admire myself? I said no, I did only what I had to do with everyone in that Irish school pushing and taunting me, but this fifteen-year-old McKee boy insisted you have to give yourself credit, not too much because that would be bragging. I said, OK, I’d give myself credit for fighting back except that I wasn’t as brave as Billy, who would fight not for himself but for others. He owed me nothing but he still defended me and that was a kind of courage I hoped to have some day.
My students ask about my family and bits of my past drift into my head. I realize I’m making discoveries about myself and I tell this story the way my mother told a neighbor:
I was pushing the pram with Malachy in it and him a little fella barely two. Frank was walking along beside me. Outside Todd’s store on O’Connell Street a long black motorcar pulled up to the pavement and out got this rich woman all dressed up in furs and jewelry. Well, didn’t she look into the pram and didn’t she offer to buy Malachy on the spot. You can imagine what a shock that was to me, a woman wanting to buy Malachy with his golden blond hair, his pink cheeks, his lovely little pearly white teeth. He was so lovely there in the pram, and I knew parting with him would break my heart. Besides, what would my husband say if I came home and told him I sold the child? So I told the woman no and she looked so sad my heart went out to her.
When I grew older and heard her tell that story for the hundredth time, I said she should have sold Malachy and there would have been more food for the rest of us. She said, Well, I offered you but the woman wasn’t a bit interested.
Girls in the class said, Aw, gee, Mr. McCourt, your mother shouldn’t have done that to you. People shouldn’t offer to sell their children. You ain’t so ugly.
Boys in the class said, Well, he ain’t no Clark Gable. Just kiddin’, Mr. McCourt.
Mea culpa.
When I was six, the schoolmaster in Ireland told me I was a bad boy. You’re a very bad boy. He said all the boys in the class were very bad boys. He reminded us that he was using the word very, a word he would use only on special occasions like this. If we ever used that word answering a question or writing a composition he’d have our scalps. On this occasion, it was allowed. That’s how bad we were. He had never seen such a collection and wondered what was the use of teaching urchins and amadauns. Our heads were filled with American trash from the Lyric Cinema. We were to bow those heads, pound our chests and say, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought it meant, I am sorry, till he wrote on the board, “Mea culpa. I am guilty.” He said we were born in Original Sin, which was supposed to be washed away with the waters of baptism. He said it was clear that rivers of baptismal water had been wasted on the likes of us. One look at our darting little eyes was proof of our wickedness.
He was there to prepare us for First Confession and First Communion, to save our worthless souls. He taught us Examination of Conscience. We were to look inward, to search the landscape of our souls. We were born with Original Sin, which was a nasty oozing thing marring the dazzling whiteness of our souls. Baptism restored their white perfection. But now we were older and there were the sins: sores, gashes, abscesses. We were to drag them wriggling, squirming, putrid, into God’s glorious light. Examination of Conscience, boys, followed by the mea culpa. Powerful laxative, boys. Cleans you out better than a dose of salts.
Every day we practiced Examination of Conscience and confessed our sins to him and the class. The master said nothing, sat at his desk, nodded, fondled the slim stick he used to keep us in a state of grace. We confessed to all the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. He would point the stick and say, Madigan, confess to us how you committed the Deadly Sin, Envy. Our favorite Deadly Sin for confessing was Gluttony, and when he pointed the stick at Paddy Clohessy and told him, Clohessy, the Gluttony, Paddy described a meal you could only dream about: pig’s head with potatoes and cabbage and mustard, no end of lemonade to wash it down, followed by ice cream and biscuits and tea with loads of milk and sugar and, if you liked, you could rest awhile and have more of the same, your mother not a bit put out by your appetite, because there was enough for everyone and more where that came from.
The master said, Clohessy, you are a poet of the palate. No one knew what palate meant till three of us went around the corner to see if the Andrew Carnegie librarian might let us look at the big dictionary near her desk. She said, What do ye want to know palate for? and when we told her that’s what Paddy Clohessy was a poet of she looked up the word and said our teacher must be losing his wits. Paddy was stubborn. He asked her what palate was and when she said it was the center of taste sensation he looked delighted with himself and made clucking noises with his tongue. He even did it going through the streets till Billy Campbell asked him to stop as it was making him hungry.
We confessed to breaking all the Ten Commandments. If you said you committed adultery or coveted your neighbor’s wife the master knew you didn’t know what you were talking about, Don’t get above yourself, boy, and moved on to the next penitent.
After First Communion we continued Examination of Conscience for the next sacrament: Confirmation. The priest said Examination of Conscience and confession would save us from hell. His name was Father White and we were interested in him because one of the boys said he never wanted to be a priest at all. His mother forced him into the priesthood. We doubted that boy, but he said he knew one of the maids at the priests’ house and she said Father White got drunk at dinner and told the other priests his only dream was to grow up and drive the bus that went from Limerick to Galway and back but his mother wouldn’t let him. It was strange to be examined by someone who became a priest because his mother made him. I wondered if the dream of the bus was in his head while he stood at the altar saying Mass. It was strange, also, to think of a priest getting drunk, because everyone knows they’re not supposed to. I used to look at buses passing by and picture him up there, smiling away and no priestly collar choking the life out of him.
When you get into the habit of examining your conscience it’s hard to stop, especially when you’re an Irish Catholic boy. If you do bad things you look into your soul, and there are the sins, festering. Everything is either a sin or not a sin and that’s an idea you might carry in your head the rest of your life. Then when you grow up and drift away from the church, Mea culpa is a faint whisper in your past. It’s still there, but now you’re older and not so easily frightened.
When you’re in a state of grace the soul is a pure dazzling white surface, but your sins create abscesses that ooze and stink. You try to save yourself with Mea culpa, the only Latin words that mean anything to you or God.
If I could travel to my twenty-seventh year, my first teaching year, I’d take me out for a steak, a baked potato, a pint of stout. I’d give myself a good talking to. For Christ’s sake, kid, straighten up. Throw back those miserable bony shoulders. Stop mumbling. Speak up. Stop putting yourself down. In that department the world will be happy to oblige. You’re starting your teaching career, and it isn’t an easy life. I know. I did it. You’d be better off as a cop. At least you’d have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth. If you don’t learn to love it, you’ll wriggle in a corner of hell.
Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands—thousands—of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P. G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You’ll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they’d find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain. Every June they graduate, grow up, work and move on. They’ll have kids, Mac, who will come to you someday for English, and you’re left facing another term of Joeys and Sandras, Tonys and Michelles, and you’ll want to know: Is this what it’s all about? Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember, if this is your world, you’re one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You’re with them, day in, day out, and you’ll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it’s bye-bye, teacher, nice knowin’ you, my sister’s gonna be in your class in September. But there’s something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You’ll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That’s a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forget how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at you like you just arrived from another planet and they’re right. Day after day in the classroom means you’re in another world, Mac.
So, teacher, how did you come to America and all that?
I tell them about my arrival in America at nineteen years of age, that there was nothing about me, on me, in my head or suitcase, to suggest that in a few years I’d be facing five classes a day of New York teenagers.
Teacher? I never dreamed I could rise so high in the world.
Except for the book in the suitcase, everything I wore or carried off the ship was secondhand. Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland’s sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.
The brown suit I wore came from Nosey Parker’s pawnshop, Parnell Street, Limerick. My mother bargained for it. The Nose said that suit would be four pounds, and she said, Is it coddin’ me you are, Mr. Parker?
No, I’m not coddin’ you, he said. That suit was wore wanst be a cousin of the Earl of Dunraven himself and anything worn be the aristocracy has higher value.
My mother said she wouldn’t care if it was worn by the earl himself for all the good he and his ilk ever did for Ireland with their castles and servants and never a thought for the sufferings of the people. She’d offer three pounds and not a penny more.
The Nose snapped that a pawnshop was no place for patriotism and she snapped back that if patriotism was something you could show on the shelf there he’d be polishing it and overcharging the poor. He said, Mother o’ God, missus. You were never like this before. What came over you?
What came over her was that this was like Custer’s last stand, her last chance. This was her son, Frank, going to America and she couldn’t send him off looking like this, wearing the relics of oul’ decency, this one’s shirt, that one’s trousers. Then she showed how clever she could be. She had very little money left, but if Mr. Parker could see his way to throwing in a pair of shoes, two shirts, two pairs of socks and that lovely green tie with the golden harps she wouldn’t forget the favor. It wouldn’t be long before Frank would be sending home dollars from America and when she needed pots, pans and an alarm clock she’d think immediately of The Nose. Indeed, she could see half a dozen items there on the shelves she couldn’t live without once the dollars came pouring in.
The Nose was no daw. From years behind the counter he knew the tricks of his customers. He knew, also, my mother was so honest she hated owing anybody anything. He said he valued her future custom, and he himself wouldn’t want to see that lad there landing shabby in America. What would the Yanks say? So for another pound, oh, take off another shilling, she could have the extra items.
My mother said he was a decent man, that he’d get a bed in heaven and she wouldn’t forget him, and it was strange seeing the respect passing between them. The lane people of Limerick had no use for pawnbrokers, but where would they be without them?
The Nose had no suitcases. His customers were not known for traveling the world, and he had a good laugh over that with my mother. He said, World travelers, how are you. She looked at me as if to say, Take a good look at The Nose for it isn’t every day you’ll see him laugh.
Feathery Burke, in Irishtown, had suitcases for sale. He sold anything old, secondhand, stuffed, useless or ready for the fire. Ah, yes, he had the very thing for the young fella going to America, God bless him, that would be sending money home to his poor old mother.
I’m hardly old, said my mother, so none of your plamas. How much for the suitcase?
Yerra, missus, I’ll give it away to you for two pounds because I don’t want to be standing between the boy and his fortune in America.
My mother said that before she’d pay two pounds for that wornout piece of cardboard held together by a spit and a prayer she’d wrap my things in brown paper and twine and send me off to New York like that.
Feathery looked shocked. Women from the back lanes of Limerick were not supposed to carry on like that. They were supposed to be respectful of their betters and not rise above their station, and I was surprised myself to see my mother in that pick-quarrel mood.
She won, told Feathery what he was charging was pure robbery, we were better off under the English, and if he didn’t come down in his price she’d go to that decent man Nosey Parker. Feathery gave in.
God above, missus. A good thing I didn’t have children for if I did and I had to deal with the likes of you every day they’d be standing in the corner whimpering with the hunger.
She said, Pity about you and the children you never had.
She folded the clothes into the suitcase and said she’d take the whole lot home so that I could go and buy the book. She walked away from me, up Parnell Street, puffing on a cigarette. She walked with energy that day, as if the clothes and the suitcase and my going away would open doors.
I went to O’Mahony’s Bookshop to buy the first book in my life, the one I brought to America in the suitcase.
It was The Works of William Shakespeare: Gathered into One Volume, published by the Shakespeare Head Press, Oldhams Press Ltd. and Basil Blackwood, MCMXLVII. Here it is, cover crumbling, separating from the book, hanging on through the kindness of tape. A well-thumbed book, well marked. There are passages underlined that once meant something to me though I look at them now and hardly know why. Along the margins notes, remarks, appreciative comments, congratulations to Shakespeare on his genius, exclamation marks indicating my appreciation and befuddlement. Inside the cover I wrote, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh, etc.” It proves I was a gloomy youth.
When I was thirteen/fourteen I listened to Shakespeare plays on the radio of Mrs. Purcell, the blind woman next door. She told me Shakespeare was an Irishman ashamed of what he came from. A fuse blew the night we listened to Julius Caesar and I was so eager to find out what happened to Brutus and Mark Antony I went to O’Mahony’s Bookshop to get the rest of the story. A sales clerk in the shop asked me in a superior way if it was my intention to buy that book and I told him I was thinking about it but first I’d have to find out what happened to everyone in the end, especially the one I liked, Brutus. The man said never mind Brutus, pulled the book away from me and said this was not a library and would I kindly leave. I backed into the street embarrassed and blushing and wondering at the same time why people won’t stop bothering people. Even when I was small, eight or nine, I wondered why people won’t stop bothering people and I’ve been wondering ever since.
The book was nineteen shillings, half a week’s wages. I wish I could say I bought it because of my profound interest in Shakespeare. It wasn’t that way at all. I had to have it because of a film I saw where an American soldier in England went around spouting Shakespeare and all the girls fell madly in love with him. Also, if you even hint that you read Shakespeare, people give you that look of respect. I thought if I learned long passages I’d impress the girls of New York. I already knew “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” but when I said it to a girl in Limerick she gave me a curious look as if I were coming down with something.
Going up O’Connell Street I wanted to unwrap my package and let the world see me with Shakespeare in my oxter but I didn’t have the nerve. I passed the small theater where I once saw a traveling company perform Hamlet and remembered how I felt sorry for myself for the way I’d suffered like him. At the end of the play that night Hamlet himself returned to the stage to tell the audience how grateful he and the cast were for our attendance and how weary he was, he and the cast, and how much they’d appreciate our help in the form of small change, which we could deposit in the lard tin by the door. I was so moved by the play because so much of it was about me and my gloomy life that I dropped sixpence into the lard tin and wished I could have attached a note to let Hamlet know who I was and how my suffering was real and not just in a play.
Next day I delivered a telegram to Hanratty’s Hotel and there was the cast from Hamlet, drinking and singing in the bar while a porter ran back and forth loading a van with their luggage. Hamlet himself sat alone at the end of the bar, sipping his glass of whiskey, and I don’t know where the courage came from but I said hello to him. After all, we both had been betrayed by our mothers and our suffering was great. The world would never know about mine and I envied him for the way he was able to express his anguish every night. Hello, I said, and he stared at me with two black eyes under black eyebrows in a white face. He had all those words from Shakespeare in his head but now he kept them there and I blushed like a fool and tripped over my feet.
I rode my bicycle up O’Connell Street in a state of shame. Then I remembered the sixpence dropped into the lard tin, sixpence that paid for their whiskey and singing at Hanratty’s Bar, and I wanted to go back and confront the whole cast and Hamlet himself and tell them what I thought of them with their false stories of weariness and the way they drank the money of poor people.
Let the sixpence go. If I went back they’d surely throw Shakespeare words at me and Hamlet would stare at me again with his cold black eyes. I’d have no words for that and I’d look foolish if I tried staring back at him with my red eyes.
My students said spending all that money on a Shakespeare book was dumb, no disrespect intended, and if I wanted to make an impression on people why didn’t I go to the library and copy down all the quotes? Also, you’d have to be pretty dumb to be impressed with a guy just because he quoted this old writer that no one could read anyway. Sometimes they have these Shakespeare plays on TV and you can’t understand a word, so what’s the use? The money I paid for the book could have been spent on something cool like shoes or a nice jacket or, you know, taking a girl to the movies.
Some girls said that was real cool the way I used Shakespeare to make an impression on people though they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Why did Shakespeare have to write in that old language nobody could understand? Why?
I couldn’t answer. They said again, Why? I felt trapped but all I could do was to tell them I didn’t know. If they waited I’d try to find out. They looked at one another. The teacher doesn’t know? How could that be? Is he for real? Wow. How did he get to be a teacher?
Hey, teacher man, you got any more stories?
No, no, no.
You keep saying no, no, no.
That’s it. No more stories. This is an English class. Parents are complaining.
Aw, man. Mr. McCourt, you ever in the army? You fight in Korea?
I never thought much of my life but I went on doling out bits and pieces of it, my father’s drinking, days in Limerick slums when I dreamed of America, Catholicism, drab days in New York, and I was surprised that New York teenagers asked for more.
3 (#ulink_b15ad8f4-8afd-5b47-8fbe-8d7d16febd74)
I told them that after my two years in the army the GI Bill helped me doze through four years at New York University. I worked nights to supplement my allowance from the government. I could have attended part time, but I was eager to graduate and impress the world and women with my degree and my college knowledge. I was expert at making excuses for late papers and missed exams. I shuffled and mumbled the mishaps of my life to patient professors, hinted at great sadnesses. The Irish accent helped. I lived on the edge of faith and begorrah.
University librarians poked me when I snored behind a stack of books. One librarian told me snoozing was strictly forbidden. She was kind enough to suggest that out in Washington Square Park there was no end of benches where I could stretch till the cops came. I thanked her and told her how I’d always admired librarians, not only for their mastery of the Dewey Decimal System, but for their helpfulness in other areas of daily living.
The professor of education at New York University warned us about our teaching days ahead. He said first impressions are crucial. He said, The way you meet and greet your first class might determine the course of your whole career. Your whole career. They’re watching you. You’re watching them. You’re dealing with American teenagers, a dangerous species, and they’ll show you no mercy. They’ll take your measure and they’ll decide what to do with you. You think you’re in control? Think again. They’re like heat-seeking
missiles. When they go after you they’re following a primal instinct. It is the function of the young to get rid of their elders, to make room on the planet. You know that, don’t you? The Greeks knew it. Read the Greeks.
The professor said that before your students enter the room you must have decided where you’ll be—“posture and placement”—and who you’ll be—“identity and image.” I never knew teaching could be that complicated. He said, You simply cannot teach unless you know where to position yourself physically. That classroom can be your battleground or your playground. And you have to know who you are. Remember Pope: “Know thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.” First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom. Never let them invade your territory. Never. And remember: teachers who sit or even stand behind their desks are essentially insecure and should try another line of work.
I liked the way he said assuredly, the first time I ever heard it used outside of a Victorian novel. I promised myself that when I became a teacher I’d use the word, too. It had an important sound to it that would make people sit up and pay attention.
I thought it was terrific the way you could stand up there on that little platform with your podium and your desk and talk for an hour with everyone before you making notes and if you had any kind of good looks or personality the girls would be tripping over themselves to see you afterward in your office or anywhere else. That’s what I thought at the time.
The professor said he had made an informal study of teenage behavior in high school and if we were sensitive observant teachers we’d notice certain phenomena moments before class bells rang. We’d notice how adolescent temperatures rose, blood raced and there was enough adrenaline to power a battleship. He smiled and you could see how pleased he was with his ideas. We smiled back because professors have the power. He said teachers must observe how students present themselves. He said, So much—so much, I say—depends on how they enter a room. Observe their entrances. They amble, they strut, they shuffle, they collide, they joke, they show off. You, yourself, might think nothing of entering a room, but for a teenager it can be everything. To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.
I could barely understand what the professor was talking about but I was very impressed. I never thought there was so much involved in stepping into a room. I thought teaching was a simple matter of telling the class what you knew and then testing them and giving them grades. Now I was learning how complicated the life of a teacher could be, and I admired this professor for knowing all about it.
The student next to me in the professor’s class whispered, This guy is so full of crap. He never taught a high school class in his life. The student’s name was Seymour. He wore a yarmulke, so it was no wonder he said wise things from time to time, or he could have been showing off for the red-haired girl sitting in front of him. When she looked over her shoulder to smile at Seymour’s remarks you could see she was beautiful. I wished I could have shown off myself, but I rarely knew what to say, whereas Seymour had an opinion on everything. The red-haired girl told Seymour if he felt that strongly he should speak up.
Hell, no, said Seymour. I’d be out on my ass.
She smiled at him and when she smiled at me I thought I’d float out of my seat. She said her name was June and then raised her hand for the professor’s attention.
Yes?
Professor, how many high school classes have you taught?
Oh, I’ve observed dozens of classes over the years.
But have you ever actually taught in a high school?
What’s your name, young lady?
June Somers.
Haven’t I just told you I’ve observed and supervised dozens of student teachers?
My father is a high school teacher, professor, and he says you know nothing about high school teaching till you’ve done it.
He said he didn’t know what she was getting at. She was wasting the time of this class and if she wanted to continue the discussion she could make an appointment with his secretary to meet in his office.
She stood and slung her bag strap on her shoulder. No, she would not make an appointment to see him and saw no reason why he couldn’t simply answer her question about his teaching experience.
That’s enough, Miss Somers.
She turned and looked at Seymour, glanced at me and walked toward the door. The professor stared and dropped the piece of chalk in his hand. By the time he retrieved it she was gone.
What would he do now about Miss June Somers?
Nothing. He said the hour was nearly over, he’d see us next week, picked up his bag and walked out. Seymour said June Somers had screwed herself royally. Royally. He said, One thing I’ll tell you. Don’t mess around with professors. You can’t win. Ever.
The following week he said, Did you see that? Jesus.
I didn’t think someone wearing a yarmulke should say Jesus like that. How would he like it if Yahweh or G dash D were a curse and I blasted him with it? But I said nothing for fear he might laugh at me.
He said, They’re going out. I saw them in a Macdougal Street café all lovey-dovey drinking coffee, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Goddam. I guess she had a little chat in his office and moved on.
My mouth was dry. I thought some day I’d run into June and find
my tongue and we’d go to a movie together. I’d choose something foreign with subtitles to show how sophisticated I was and she’d admire me and let me kiss her in the dark, missing a dozen subtitles and the thread of the story. That wouldn’t matter because we’d have plenty to talk about in a cozy Italian restaurant where candles flickered and her red hair twinkled back and who knows what that would lead to because that was as far as my dreams would go. Who did I think I was anyway? What made me think she’d look at me for one second?
I prowled the coffee shops of Macdougal Street hoping she might see me and smile and I’d smile back and sip my coffee so casually she’d be impressed, take a second look. I’d make sure she could see the cover of my book, something by Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, and she’d wonder why she was wasting her time with the professor when she could be with that sensitive Irishman sunk in German philosophy. She’d excuse herself and on her way to the ladies’ toilet drop a scrap of paper on my table with her phone number.
Which is what she did the day I saw her at the Café Figaro. When she left the table the professor looked after her with such an air of ownership and pride I could have knocked him from his chair. Then he glanced at me and I knew he didn’t even recognize me as a student from his class.
He called for his bill, and while the waitress stood at his table obscuring his view, June was able to drop that scrap of paper on my table. I waited till they left. “Frank, call me tomorrow.” The telephone number was scrawled in lipstick.
God. She noticed me, a dockside laborer fumbling my way toward a teaching career, and the professor was, Jesus, a professor. But she knew my name. I was weak in the head from happiness. There was my name on a paper napkin with lipstick that had touched her lips and I knew I’d keep that piece of paper forever. I’d be buried with it.
I called her and she asked if I knew where we could have a quiet drink.
Chumley’s.
OK.
What would I do? How would I sit? What would I say? I was having a drink with the most beautiful girl in Manhattan, who probably slept every night with that professor. That was my Calvary, thinking of her with him. Men in Chumley’s looked at me and envied me and I knew what they were thinking. Who is that miserable specimen with that beautiful girl, that knockout, that stunner? Yeah, maybe I was her brother or cousin. No, even that was unlikely. I wasn’t good- looking enough even to be her third or fourth cousin.
She ordered a drink. Norm’s away, she said. He teaches a course in Vermont two days a week. I suppose bigmouth Seymour told you everything.
No.
So, why are you here?
You… you invited me.
What do you think of yourself?
What?
Simple question. What do you think of yourself?
I don’t know. I…
She looked disapproving. You call when you’re told to call. You appear when you’re told to appear and you don’t know what you think of yourself. For Christ’s sakes, say one good thing about yourself. Go ahead.
I felt blood rushing to my face. I had to say something or she might get up and walk away.
A platform boss on the piers once said I was a tough little mick.
Oh, well. Take that remark and a dime and you can ride the subway two stops. You’re a lost soul. That’s easy to see. Norm likes lost souls.
Words jumped from my mouth: I don’t care what Norm likes.
Oh, God. She’ll get up and walk away. No. She laughed so hard she nearly choked on her wine. Then everything was different. She smiled at me and smiled and smiled. I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin.
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine and my heart was a mad animal in my chest. Let’s go, she said.
We walked to her apartment on Barrow Street. Inside, she turned and kissed me. She moved her head in a circular way so that her tongue traveled clockwise in my mouth and I thought, Lord, I am not worthy. Why didn’t God tell me about this before my twenty- sixth year?
She said I was a healthy peasant and obviously starved for affection. I didn’t like being called a peasant—Jesus, hadn’t I read books, every word of E. Laurie Long, P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, E. Philips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace and good old Dickens—and I thought what we were doing here was more than showing affection. I said nothing because I had no experience of activities like this. She asked me if I liked monkfish and I said I didn’t know because I’d never heard of it before. She said everything depended on how you cooked it. Her secret was shallots. Not everyone agrees with that, she said, but it worked for her. It’s a delicate whitefish best cooked with a good white wine. Not an ordinary cooking wine, but a good one. Norm cooked fish once but he made a mess of it, used some piss from California that turned the fish into an old shoe. The poor dear knew his literature and his lecturing, but nothing about wine or fish.
It’s strange to be with a woman who takes your face in her hands and tells you to have faith in yourself. She said, My father came from Liverpool and he drank himself to death because he was afraid of the world. He said he wished he was a Catholic so he could join a monastery and never have to see a human being again, and it was my mother who tried to get him to say good things about himself. He couldn’t, so he drank and died. Do you drink?
Not much.
Be careful. You’re Irish.
Your father wasn’t Irish.
No, but he could have been. Everyone in Liverpool is Irish. Let’s cook that monkfish.
She handed me a kimono. It’s OK. Change in the bedroom. If it’s good enough for a samurai it’s good enough for a tough little mick who ain’t so tough.
She changed into a silver dressing gown that seemed to have a life of its own. One moment it clung to her, then hung in a way that let her move freely inside. I preferred the clinging part and it kept me alive inside my kimono.
She asked if I liked white wine and I said yes because I was learning that yes was the best answer to every question, at least with June. I said yes to the monkfish and the asparagus and the two flickering candles on the table. I said yes to the way she raised her wineglass and touched it against mine till they went ping. I told her this was the most delicious dinner I’d ever had in my life. I wanted to go on and say I was in heaven but that might sound forced and she might give me the kind of strange look that would ruin the whole night and my life beyond.
Norm was never mentioned in the six nights that followed the night of the monkfish except that there were twelve fresh roses in a vase in her bedroom with a card that said love from Norm. I drank extra wine to boost my courage enough to ask, How the hell can you lie in this bed with me in the presence of Norm’s fresh roses? but I never did. I couldn’t afford roses so I brought her carnations, which she put in a large glass jar beside the roses. There was no competition. Beside Norm’s roses my carnations looked so sad I bought her a dozen roses with my last few dollars. She sniffed them and said, Oh, they’re beautiful. I didn’t know what to say to that as I hadn’t grown them, just bought them. Norm’s roses in the glass jar looked dry and it made me happy to think my roses would replace them, but what she did then gave me the greatest pain I ever had in my heart.
From my chair in the kitchen I could see what she was doing in the bedroom, taking my roses one by one and placing them delicately among, between and around Norm’s roses, standing back, looking at them, using my fresh roses to prop up the roses of Norm that were going limp, stroking the roses, his and mine, and smiling as if one set of roses was as good as the other.
She must have known I was watching. She turned and smiled at me, suffering, nearly blubbering, in the kitchen. They’re beautiful, she said again. I knew she was talking about twenty-four roses, not just my dozen, and I wanted to yell something at her and storm out like a real man.
I didn’t. I stayed. She made stuffed pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes and it tasted like cardboard. We went to bed and all I could think of was my roses mingled with his, that son-of-a-bitch in Vermont. She said I seemed low in energy and I wanted to tell her I wished I was dead. It’s OK, she said. People just get used to each other. You have to keep it fresh.
Was this her way of keeping it fresh? Juggling two of us at one time, stuffing her vase with flowers from different men?
Near the end of that spring term I met Seymour on Washington Square. How’s it going? he said, and laughed as if he knew something. How’s the gorgeous June?
I stammered and shifted from one foot to the other. He said, Don’t worry. She did it to me, too, but she had me only two weeks. I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell.
Up to?
It’s all for old Norm. She has me up, she has you up and Christ knows who else she has up, and she tells Norm all about it.
But he goes to Vermont.
Vermont, my ass. The minute you leave her place he’s in there lapping up the details.
How do you know?
He told me. He likes me. He tells her about me, she tells him about you, and they know I’m telling you about them, and they have a hell of a time. They talk about you and how you don’t know your ass from your elbow about anything.
I walked away and he called after me, Anytime, man, anytime.
I scraped through the teacher’s license examination. I scraped through everything. Passing score on the teacher examination was sixty-five; mine was sixty-nine. The passing points came, I think, through the kindness of an English chairman at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn who judged my demonstration lesson and my good luck in having a skimpy knowledge of the poetry of the Great War. An alcoholic professor at NYU told me in a friendly way that I was a half-assed student. I was offended till I thought about it and realized he was right. I was half-assed all around, but promised that someday I’d pull myself together, focus, concentrate, make something of myself, snap out of it, get my act together, all in the good old American way.
We sat on chairs in the corridors of Brooklyn Technical High School waiting for interviews, filling out forms, signing statements declaring our loyalty to America, assuring the world we were not now, nor had we ever been, members of the Communist Party.
I saw her long before she sat beside me. She wore a green scarf and dark glasses and when she pulled off the scarf there was a dazzle of red hair. I had the yearning ache for her but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of turning to look.
Hi, Frank.
If I were a character in a novel or movie I would have stood and walked away, proud. She said hi again. She said, You look tired.
I snapped at her to show her I was not going to be polite after what she did to me. No, I am not tired, I said. But then she touched my face with her fingers.
That fictional character would have pulled his head back to show he hadn’t forgotten, was not going to soften because of two greetings and a few fingertips. She smiled and touched my cheek again.
Everyone in the hallway was looking at her and I thought they were wondering what she was doing with me: she was that gorgeous and I was hardly a prize. They saw her hand on mine.
How are you anyway?
Fine, I croaked. I looked at that hand and thought of it roaming across Norm’s body.
She said, Are you nervous about the interview?
I snapped again. No, I’m not.
You’ll be a fine teacher.
I don’t care.
You don’t care? So why are you going through this?
There’s nothing else to do.
Oh. She said she was getting a teacher’s license to teach for a year and write a book about it. This was Norm’s suggestion. Norm the big expert. He said education in America was a mess and a muckraking book from inside the school system would be a best-seller. Teach a year or two, complain about the terrible state of the schools, and you have a big seller.
My name was called for the interview. She said, How about coffee afterwards?
If I’d had any pride or self-esteem I would have told her no and walked away but I said, OK, and went to my interview with my heart pounding.
I said good morning to the three examiners, but they’re trained not to look at teacher candidates. Man in the middle said, You have a couple of minutes to read the poem on the desk before you. After you’ve read it we’ll ask you to analyze it and tell us how you’d teach it to a high school class.
The title of the poem described how I felt at that interview: “I Would I Might Forget That I Am I.”
Bald man on the right asked if I knew the form of the poem.
Yes, oh, yes. It’s a sonata.
A what?
Oh, I’m sorry. A sonnet. Fourteen lines.
And the rhyme?
Ah… ah… abbaabbacdcdc.
They looked at one another and I didn’t know if I was right or wrong.
And the poet?
Ah, I think it’s Shakespeare. No, no, Wordsworth.
Neither, young man. It’s Santayana.
The bald man glared at me as if I had offended him. Santayana, he said, Santayana, and I almost felt ashamed of my ignorance.
They looked grim and I wanted to declare that asking questions about Santayana was unfair and unjust due to the fact he was in no textbook or anthology I ever looked at in my four dozing years at New York University. They did not ask but I volunteered the only knowledge I had of Santayana, that if we don’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat our mistakes. They looked unimpressed, even when I told them I knew Santayana’s first name, George.
So, said the man in the middle. How would you teach this poem?
I babbled. Well… I think… I think… it’s partly about suicide and how Santayana is fed up, and I’d talk about James Dean because teenagers admire him and how he probably killed himself subconsciously on a motorbike, and I’d bring in Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” and let them talk about their own feelings about suicide if they ever had any.
Man on the right said, What would you do for reinforcement?
I don’t know, sir. What is reinforcement?
He raised his eyebrows and looked at the others as if trying to be patient. He said, Reinforcement is an activity, enrichment, followup, some kind of assignment where you clinch the learning so that it’s embedded in the student’s memory. You can’t teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don’t you?
Oh. I felt desperate. I blurted, I’d tell them to write a hundred-and- fifty-word suicide note. That would be a good way of encouraging them to think about life itself, because Samuel Johnson said the prospect of hanging in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully.
Man in the middle exploded. What?
Man on the right shook his head. We’re not here to talk about Samuel Johnson.
Man on the left hissed. Suicide note? You would do no such thing. Do you hear me? You are dealing with tender minds. Jesus Christ! You are excused.
I said, Thank you, but what was the use? I was sure that was the end of me. Easy to see they didn’t like me, my ignorance of Santayana and reinforcement, and I was sure the suicide-note idea was the last straw. They were high school department heads or had other important jobs and I disliked them the way I disliked anyone with power over me, bosses, bishops, college professors, tax examiners, foremen in general. Even so, I wondered why people like these examiners are so impolite they make you feel unworthy. I thought if I were sitting in their place I’d try to help candidates overcome their nervousness. If young people want to become teachers they should be encouraged and not intimidated by examiners who seemed to think Santayana was the center of the universe.
That is what I felt at the time but I didn’t know the ways of the world. I didn’t know that people up there have to protect themselves against people down here. I didn’t know that older people have to protect themselves against younger people who want to push them off the face of the earth.
After my interview she was already in the hallway, knotting her scarf under her chin, telling me, That was a breeze.
It was no such thing. They asked me about Santayana.
Really? Norm adores Santayana.
Did this woman have any sense at all, ruining my day with Norm and that damn Santayana?
I don’t give a shit about Norm. Santayana, too.
My, my. Such eloquence. Is the Irishman having a little tantrum?
I wanted to hold my chest to calm my rage. Instead, I walked away and kept walking even when she called, Frank, Frank, we could be serious.
I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, repeating, We could be serious, all the way to McSorley’s on East Seventh Street. What did she mean?
I drank beer after beer, ate liverwurst and onion on crackers, pissed mightily in McSorley’s massive urinals, called her from the public phone, hung up when Norm answered, felt sorry for myself, wanted to call Norm again, invite him to a showdown on the sidewalk, picked up the phone, put it down, went home, whimpered into my pillow, despised myself, called myself an ass till I fell into a boozy sleep.
Next day, hungover and suffering, I traveled to Eastern District High School in Brooklyn for my teaching test, the last hurdle for the license. I was supposed to arrive an hour before the lesson, but took the wrong subway train and arrived half an hour late. The English department chairman said I could come back another time, but I wanted to get it over with, especially since I knew I was on the road to failure anyway.
The chairman handed me sheets of paper with the subject of my lesson: War Poems. I knew the poems by heart, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Does it Matter?” and Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”
When you teach in New York you’re required to follow a lesson plan. First, you are to state your aim. Then you are to motivate the class because, as everyone knows, those kids don’t want to learn anything.
I motivate this class by telling them about my aunt’s husband, who was gassed in World War I and when he came home the only job he could find was shoveling coal, coke and slack at the Limerick Gas Works. The class laughs and the chairman smiles slightly, a good sign.
It isn’t enough to teach the poem. You are to “elicit and evoke,” involve your students in the material. Excite them. That is the word from the Board of Education. You are to ask pivotal questions to encourage participation. A good teacher should launch enough pivotal questions to keep the class hopping for forty-five minutes.
A few kids talk about war and their family members who survived World War II and Korea. They say it wasn’t fair the way some came home with no faces and no legs. Losing an arm wasn’t that bad because you always had another. Losing two arms was a real pain because someone had to feed you. Losing a face was something else. You only had one and when that was gone, that was it, baby. One girl with a lovely figure and wearing a lacy pink blouse said her sister was married to a guy who was wounded at Pyongyang and he had no arms at all, not even stubs where you could stick on the false arms. So her sister had to feed him and shave him and do everything and all he ever wanted was sex. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all he ever wanted, and her sister was getting all worn out.
The chairman in the back of the room says, Helen, in a warning voice, and she says to the whole class, Well, it’s true. How would you like to have someone you have to give a bath to and feed and then go to bed with three times a day. Some of the boys snicker but stop when Helen says, I’m sorry. I get so sad over my sister and Roger because she said she can’t go on. She’d leave him but he’d have to go to the veterans’ hospital. He said if that ever happened he’d kill himself. She turns around to speak to the chairman in the back of the room. I’m sorry over what I said about sex but that’s what happened and I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.
I admired Helen so much for her maturity and courage and her lovely breasts I could hardly go on with the lesson. I thought I wouldn’t mind being an amputee myself if I had her near me all day, swabbing me, drying me, giving me the daily massage. Of course, teachers were not supposed to think like that but what are you to do when you’re twenty-seven and someone like Helen is sitting there in front of you bringing up topics like sex and looking the way she did?
One boy will not let go. He says Helen’s sister shouldn’t worry about her brother-in-law committing suicide because that would be impossible when you didn’t have arms. If you didn’t have arms you didn’t have a way of dying.
Two boys say you shouldn’t have to face life without a face or legs when you’re only twenty-two. Oh, sure, you could always get false legs, but you could never get a false face and who would ever go out with you? That’d be the end and you’d never have children or anything. Your own mother wouldn’t want to look at you and all your food would have to come through a straw. It was very sad knowing you’d never want to look in the bathroom mirror anymore for fear of what you might see or what you might not see, a face gone. Imagine how hard it was for the poor mom when she had to decide to throw out her son’s razor and shaving cream knowing he’d never use them again. Never ever again. She could never actually go into his room and say, Son, you’re never gonna use these shaving things anymore and a lotta stuff is piling up here so I’m gonna throw them out. Can you imagine how he’d feel, sitting there with no face, and his own mother telling him, in a way, it was all over? You’d only do that to someone you didn’t like and it was hard to think a mother wouldn’t like her son even if he had no face. No matter what condition you’re in your mother is supposed to like you and stand behind you. If she doesn’t, where are you and what’s the use of living at all?
Some boys in the class wish they had their own war so they could go over there and get even. One boy says, Oh, bullshit, you can never get even, and they boo him and shout him down. His name is Richard and they say it’s well known around the school what a Communist he is. The chairman makes notes, probably on how I’ve lost control of the class by allowing more than one voice in the room. I feel desperate. I raise my voice, Anyone here ever see a movie about German soldiers called All Quiet on the Western Front? No, they never saw it and why should they pay money to see movies about Germans after what they did to us? Goddam krauts.
How many of you are Italian? Half the class.
Does this mean you’d never see an Italian movie after they fought against America in the war?
No, it has nothing to do with war. They just don’t want to watch those movies with all those dumb subtitles that move so fast you can never catch up with the story and when there is snow in the movie and the subtitles are white how the hell are you supposed to read anything? A lot of these Italian movies come with snow and dogs taking a leak against a wall, and they’re depressing anyhow with people standing in streets waiting for something to happen.
The Board of Education ruled that a lesson must have a summary that pulls everything together and leads to a homework assignment or reinforcement or some kind of outcome, but I forget, and when the bell rings there’s an argument going on between two boys, one defending John Wayne, the other saying he was a big phony who never went to war. I try to pull everything together in one grand summary but the discussion dribbles away. I tell them, Thank you, but no one is listening and the chairman scratches his forehead and makes notes.
I walked toward the subway, berating myself. What was the use? Teacher, my arse. I should have stayed in the army with the dogs. I’d be better off on the docks and the warehouses, lifting, hauling, cursing, eating hero sandwiches, drinking beer, chasing waterfront floozies. At least I’d be with my own kind, my own class of people, not getting above meself, acushla. I should have listened to the priests and the respectable people in Ireland who told us beware of vanity, accept our lot, there’s a bed in heaven for the meek of heart, the humble of soul.
Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, wait up.
That was the chairman calling from a half block away. Wait up. I walked back toward him. He had a kind face. I thought he was there to console me with a Too bad, young man.
He was out of breath. Look, I’m not supposed to even talk to you but I just want to say you’ll be getting your exam results in a few weeks. You have the makings of a fine teacher. I mean, for Christ’s sakes, you actually knew Sassoon and Owen. I mean, half the people walking in here can’t tell the difference between Emerson and Mickey Spillane. So, when you get your results and you’re looking for a job, just call me. OK?
Oh, yes, sure, yes, I will. Thanks.
I danced along the street, walked on air. Birds chirped on the elevated subway platform. People looked at me with smiles and respect. They could see I was a man with a teaching job. I wasn’t such an idiot after all. Oh, Lord. Oh, God. What would my family say? A teacher. The word will go around Limerick. Did you hear about Frankie McCourt? Jaysus, he’s a teacher over there in America. What was he when he left? Nothing. That’s what he was. Poor miserable bugger that looked like something the cat brought in. I’d call June. Tell her I was offered a teaching job already. In a high school. Not as high up as Norman the professor, but still… I stuck a dime into the phone box. It dropped. I put the phone down again. Calling her meant I needed to call her, and I didn’t need to need. I could live without her in the tub and the monkfish and the white wine. The train rumbled in. I wanted to tell people, sitting and standing, I was offered a teaching job. They’d smile up from their newspapers. No, no call to June. Let her stay with Norm, who destroyed monkfish and knew nothing about wine, depraved Norm who couldn’t take June as she was. No, I’d make my way downtown to Port Warehouses, ready to work till my teacher’s license arrived. My teacher’s license. I’d like to wave it from the top of the Empire State Building.
When I called about the teaching job the school said sorry, the kindly chairman had passed away and, sorry, no positions were available and good luck in my search. Everyone said as long as I had the license I’d have no trouble finding a job. Who the hell would want a lousy job like that? Long hours, low pay and what gratitude do you get for dealing with the brats of America? Which is why the country was crying out for teachers.
School after school told me, Sorry, your accent’s gonna be a problem. Kids, you know, like to mimic, and we’d have Irish brogues all over the school. What would parents say when their kids come home sounding like, you know, like Barry Fitzgerald? You unnerstand our position? Assistant principals wondered how I managed to get a license with that brogue. Didn’t the Board of Education have any standards anymore?
I was disheartened. No room for me in the great American Dream. I returned to the waterfront, where I felt more comfortable.
4 (#ulink_12f70a4d-ab14-5ff5-8186-8f1c88316abb)
Hey, Mr. McCourt, did you ever do real work, not teaching, but, you know, real work?
Are you joking? What do you call teaching? Look around this room and ask yourself if you’d like to get up here and face you every day. You. Teaching is harder than working on docks and warehouses. How many of you have relatives working along the waterfront?
Half the class, mostly Italian, a few Irish.
Before I came to this school I worked on Manhattan, Hoboken and Brooklyn piers, I said. One boy said his father knew me from Hoboken.
I told them, After college I passed the exams for the teacher’s license but I didn’t think I was cut out for the life of a teacher. I knew nothing about American teenagers. Wouldn’t know what to say to you. Dockside work was easier. Trucks backed in. We swung our hooks. Haul, hoist, pull, push. Stack on pallets. Forklift slides in, lifts the load, reverses, stacks the load in the warehouse, and back to the platform. You worked with your body and your brain had a day off. You worked eight to noon, had a foot-long sandwich and a quart of beer for lunch, sweated it off from one to five, headed home, hungry for dinner, ready for a movie and a few beers in a Third Avenue bar.
Once you got the hang of it you moved like a robot. You kept up with the strongest man on the platform and size didn’t matter. You used your knees to save your back. If you forgot, platform men would bark, Chrissakes, you got a rubber spine or sumpin’? You learned to use the hook different ways with different loads: boxes, sacks, crates, furniture, great chunks of greasy machinery. A sack of beans or peppers has a mind of its own. It can change shape one way or another and you have to go with it. You looked at the size, shape and weight of an item and you knew in a second how to lift and swing it. You learned the ways of truckers and their helpers. Independent truckers were easy. They worked for themselves, set their own pace. Corporation truckers prodded you to hurry up, man, lift the damn load, let’s go, I wanna get outa heah. Truckers’ helpers were surly no matter who they worked for. They played little games to test you and throw you off, especially if they thought you were just off the boat. If you worked close to the edge of pier or platform they’d suddenly drop their side of the sack or crate hard enough to pull an arm from its socket and you learned to stay away from the edge of anything. Then they’d laugh and say, Faith an’ begorrah, Paddy, or Top o’ the mornin’ with a fake Irish accent. You’d never complain to a boss about any of this. He’d say, Whassa matter, kid? Can’t you take a little joke? Complaining only made matters worse. The word might get to a trucker or a helper and he might accidentally bump you off the platform or even the pier. A big new man from Mayo took offense when someone put a rat’s tail in his sandwich and when he threatened to kill whoever did it he was accidentally toppled into the Hudson and everyone laughed before they threw him a line and hauled him out dripping with river scum. He learned to laugh and they stopped bothering him. You can’t work the piers with a long face. After a while they stop picking on you and the word goes around that you know how to take your lumps. Eddie Lynch, the platform boss, told me I was a tough little mick and that meant more to me than the day I was promoted to corporal in the United States Army because I knew I wasn’t that tough, just desperate.
I told my classes I was so uncertain about teaching I thought of simply spending my life at Port Warehouses, big fish, small pond. My bosses would be so impressed with my college degree they’d hire me as checker and promote me to an office job where I’d surely rise in the world. I might become boss of all checkers. I knew how it was with warehouse office workers or office workers anywhere. They pushed papers around, yawned, looked out the window at us slaving away on the platform.
I did not tell my classes about Helena, the telephone woman who offered more than doughnuts in the back of the warehouse. I was tempted till Eddie said if you even brushed against her you’d wind up in St. Vincent’s Hospital with a dripping dick.
What I missed about the piers was the way people spoke their minds and didn’t give a shit. Not like the college professors who would tell you, On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no, and you didn’t know what to think. It was important to know what professors thought so you could give it back to them at exam time. In the warehouses everyone insulted everyone else in a joking way till someone stepped over the line and the hooks came out. It was remarkable when that happened. You could see from the way the laughs faded and the smiles got tighter that some bigmouth was getting too close to the bone and you knew the next thing was the hook or the fist.
Work stopped when fights broke out on piers and loading docks. Eddie told me men got tired of lifting and hauling and stacking, same damn thing year in year out, and that’s why they insulted and pushed one another to the edge of a real fight. They had to do something to break the routine and the long silent hours. I told him I didn’t mind working all day and not saying a word and he said, Yeah, but you’re peculiar. You’re only here a year an’ a half. If you did this fifteen years your mouth would be goin’ too. Some of these guys fought in Normandy and the Pacific and what are they now? Donkeys. Donkeys with purple hearts already. Pathetic donkeys in a dead end. They get drunk over on Hudson Street and brag about their medals as if the world gives a shit. They’ll tell you they’re working for the kids, the kids, the kids. A better life for the kids. Jesus! I’m glad I never got married.
If Eddie hadn’t been there the fights would have been worse. He was the man with eye and ear on everything and he could sniff trouble in the wind. If two men started to go at it Eddie would stick his great belly between them and tell them get the hell off his platform and finish their fight in the street. Which they never did because they were really grateful for the excuse to avoid the fist and especially the hook. You can handle a fist but you never know where a hook is coming from. Still, they’d keep on muttering and giving each other the finger, but it was all gas now because the moment had passed, the challenge was over, the rest of us were back at work and what’s the use of a fight if there’s no one to see what a killer you are?
Helena came from the office to watch the fights and when they were over she’d whisper to the winners and invite them to a dark place in the warehouse for a nice time.
Eddie said some of those rotten bastards pretended to fight so Helena would be nice to them, and if he ever saw me in the back with her after a fight he’d throw my ass in the river. He said that because of the time I had a fight or nearly had a fight with the driver Fat Dominic, who was dangerous because of rumors he was connected to the mob. Eddie said that was bullshit. If you were really connected you weren’t driving and breaking your ass unloading rigs. The rest of us believed Dominic probably knew people who were connected, or even made, so it was a good idea to cooperate with him. But how could you cooperate when he sneered, Whassa madda, Paddy? Can’t talk? Maybe a dummy humped your momma, huh?
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