Still I sit in silent churches to look at altars, pulpits, confessionals. I’d like to know how many Masses I attended, how many sermons frightened the life out of me, how many priests were shocked by my sins before I gave up going to confession altogether. I know I’m doomed the way I am though I’d confess to a kindly priest if I could find one. Sometimes I wish I could be a Protestant or a Jew because they don’t know any better. When you belong to the True Faith there are no excuses and you’re trapped.
There’s a letter from my father’s sister, Aunt Emily, to say my grandmother is hoping I’ll be able to travel to the North to see them before I leave for Germany. My father is living with them, working as a farm laborer all around Toome, and he’d like to see me too after all these years.
I don’t mind traveling to the North to see my grandmother but I don’t know what I’ll say to my father. Now that I’m twenty-two I know from walking around Munich and Limerick and looking at children in the streets I could never be the father that walked away from them. He left us when I was ten to work in England and send us money but, as my mother said, he chose the bottle over the babies. Mam says I should go to the North because my grandmother is frail and might not last till the next time I come home. She says there are some things you can do only once and you might as well do them that once.
It’s surprising she should talk about my grandmother like this after the cold reception she got when she landed from America with my father and four small children but there are two things she hates in the world, holding grudges and owing money.
If I go to the North in a train I should wear my uniform for the admiration I’m sure to get though I know if I open my gob with my Limerick accent people will turn away or stick their heads in books and newspapers. I could put on an American accent but I already tried that with my mother and she went into hysterics, laughing. She said I sounded like Edward G. Robinson under water.
If anyone talks to me the only thing I can do is nod my head or shake it or put on the look of a secret sadness caused by a severe war wound.
It’s all for nothing. The Irish are so used to American soldiers coming and going since the end of the war I might as well be invisible in my corner of the carriage on the train to Dublin and then Belfast. There’s no curiosity, no one saying, Are you back from Korea? Aren’t those Chinamen terrible? and I don’t even want to put on the limp anymore. A limp is like a lie, you have to remember to keep it going.
My grandmother says, Och, don’t you look grand in your uniform, and Aunt Emily says, Och, you’re a man now.
My father says, Och, you’re here. How’s your mother?
She’s grand.
And your brother Malachy and your brother Michael and your wee brother what’s his name?
Alphie.
Och, aye, Alphie. How’s your wee brother Alphie?
They’re all grand.
He lets out a small Och and sighs, That’s grand.
Then he wants to know if I take a drink and my grandmother says, Now, Malachy, enough of that talk.
Och, I only wanted to warn him of the bad company to be found in pubs.
This is my father who left us when I was ten to spend every penny he earned in the pubs of Coventry with German bombs dropping all around him, his family next to starvation in Limerick and here he is putting on the air of one in the grip of sanctifying grace and all I can think of is there must be some truth to the story he was dropped on his head or the other story that he had a disease like meningitis.
That might be an excuse for the drinking, the dropping on the head or the meningitis. German bombs couldn’t be an excuse because there were other Limerickmen sending money home from Coventry, bombs or no bombs. There were even men who fell in with Englishwomen and still sent money home though that money would slow down to nothing because Englishwomen are notorious for not wanting their Irishmen to support their families at home when they have three or four snotty-nosed English brats of their own running around demanding bangers and mash. Many an Irishman at the end of the war was so desperate trapped between his Irish and English families there was nothing for him to do but jump on a ship to Canada or Australia never to be heard from again.
That wouldn’t be my father. If he had seven children with my mother it was only because she was there in the bed doing her wifely duty. Englishwomen are never that easy. They’d never suffer an Irishman who would leap on them in the bravery of a few pints and that means there are no little McCourt bastards running the streets of Coventry.
I don’t know what to say to him with his little smile and his Och aye because I don’t know if I’m talking to a man in his right mind or the man dropped on his head or the one with meningitis. How can I talk to him when he gets up, sticks his hands deep into his trouser pockets and marches around the house whistling “Lily Marlene”? Aunt Emily whispers he hasn’t had a drink in ages and it’s a great struggle for him. I want to tell her it was a greater struggle for my mother to keep us all alive but I know he has the sympathy of his whole family and anyway what use is there going over the past. Then she tells me how he suffered over my mother’s disgraceful doings with her cousin, how the story drifted back to the North that they were living as man and wife, that when my father heard about it in Coventry, with the bombs dropping all around him, it drove him so mad he was in the pubs day, night and in between. Men home from Coventry would tell how my father would run into the streets during the air raids lifting his arms to the Luftwaffe and begging them to drop one on his poor tormented head.
My grandmother nods her head, agreeing with Aunt Emily, Och, aye. I want to remind them my father drank long before the bad days in Limerick, that we had to hunt him in pubs all over Brooklyn. I want to tell them that if he’d only sent money we could have stayed in our own house instead of being evicted and having to move in with Mam’s cousin.
But my grandmother is frail and I have to control myself. My face feels tight and there are dark clouds in my head and all I can do is stand and tell them my father drank all through the years, drank when babies were born and babies died and drank because he drank.
She says, Och, Francis, and shakes her head as if to disagree with me, as if to defend my father, and that causes such a rage in me I hardly know what to do till I’m pulling my duffel bag down the stairs and out on the road to Toome, Aunt Emily at the hedge calling, Francis, oh, Francis, come back, your grandmother wants to talk to you, but I keep walking though I’m aching to go back, that bad as my father is I’d at least like to know him, that my grandmother was doing only what any mother would do, defending her son who was dropped on his head or had meningitis, and I might go back except that a car stops and a man offers me a lift to the bus station in Toome and once I’m in the car there’s no going back.
I’m not in the mood for talk but I have to be polite to the man even when he says the McCourts of Moneyglass are a fine family even if they’re Catholics.
Even if they’re Catholics.
I’d like to tell the man stop the car and let me out with my duffel bag but if I do I’ll be only halfway to Toome and I’d be tempted to walk back to my grandmother’s house.
I can’t go back. The past won’t go away in this family and there would surely be talk again of my mother and her great sin and then we’d have an explosion and I’d be dragging my duffel bag along the Toome road again.
The man lets me out and when I say thanks I wonder to myself if he marches around on the twelfth of July beating a drum with the other Protestants but he has a kind face and I can’t imagine him beating a drum for anything.
All the way on the bus to Belfast and the train from Belfast to Dublin I have the ache to go back to the grandmother I might never see again and to see if I could get past my father’s little smiles and the Och ayes but once I’m on the train to Limerick there’s no going back. My head is cluttered with images of my father, my Aunt Emily, my grandmother, and the sadness of their lives in the farmhouse with seven useless acres. Then there’s my mother in Limerick, forty-four years of age with seven children, three dead, and all she wants, as she says, is a little peace, ease and comfort. There’s the sadness of Corporal Dunphy’s life in Fort Dix and Buck in Lenggries, the two of them who found a home in the army because they wouldn’t know what to do with the outside world, and I’m afraid if I don’t stop thinking this way the tears will come and I’ll disgrace myself in this carriage with five people gawking at me in my uniform saying, Jaysus, who’s the Yank weeping in the corner? My mother would say, Your bladder is near your eye, but the people in the carriage might say, Is this a specimen of what’s fighting the Chinese hand to hand over there in Korea?