Even if there weren’t another soul in the carriage I’d have to control myself because the slightest hint of a tear and the salt in it makes my eyes redder than they are and I don’t want to get off the train and walk the streets of Limerick with eyes like two piss holes in the snow.
My mother opens the door and clutches at her chest. Mother o’ God, I thought you were an apparition. What are you doing back so soon? Sure, didn’t you leave only yesterday morning. Gone one day, back the next?
I can’t tell her how I’m home because of the bad things they were saying in the North about her and her terrible sin. I can’t tell her how they had my father nearly canonized for his suffering over that same sin. I can’t tell her because I don’t want to be tormented by the past and I don’t want to be trapped between the North and the South, Toome and Limerick.
I have to lie and tell her my father is drinking and that makes her face go white again and her nose pointed. I ask her why she acts so surprised. Isn’t this the way he always was?
She says she hoped he might have given up the drink so that we’d have a father we could talk to, even in the North. She’d like Michael and Alphie to see this father they barely knew and she wouldn’t want them to see him in his wildness. When he was sober he was the best husband in the world, the best father. He’d always have a song or a story or a comment about the state of the world that made her laugh. Then everything was destroyed with the drink. The demons came, God help us, and children were better off without him. She’s better off now by herself with the few pounds coming in and the peace, ease and comfort that’s in it and the best thing now would be a nice cup of tea for I must be famished after my travels to the North.
All I can do with the days left in Limerick is walk around again knowing I’ll have to make my way in America and I won’t return for a long time. I kneel in St. Joseph’s Church by the box where I made my First Confession. I move to the altar rail to look at the place where the bishop patted my cheek at Confirmation and made me a soldier of the True Church. I wander up to Roden Lane where we lived for years and wonder how families can still live there all sharing the one lavatory. The Downes house is a shell and that’s a sign there are other places to go besides the slums. Mr. Downes brought his whole family over to England and that’s what comes of working and not drinking the wages that should go to wife and children. I could wish I had a father like Mr. Downes but I didn’t and there’s no use complaining.
19
With the months left in Lenggries there is nothing to do most of the day but run the supply room and read books from the base library.
There are no more laundry trips to Dachau. Rappaport told someone about our visit to the refugee camp and when the story reached the captain we were hauled in and reprimanded for unsoldierly conduct and confined to barracks for two weeks. Rappaport says he’s sorry. He didn’t mean for some asshole to spill the beans but he felt terrible over the women in the camp. He tells me I shouldn’t go around with the likes of Weber. Buck is okay but Weber fell out of a tree. Rappaport says I should concentrate on getting an education, that if I were Jewish that’s all I’d be thinking about. How would he know about the times I looked at college students in New York and dreamed I’d be like them. He tells me when I’m discharged I’ll have the Korean GI Bill and I can go to college but what use is that when I don’t even have the high school diploma? Rappaport says I shouldn’t think about why I can’t do something. I should think about why I can do it.
That’s the way Rappaport talks and I suppose that’s the way it is when you’re Jewish.
I tell him I can’t go back to New York and go to high school if I have to earn a living.
Nights, says Rappaport.
And how long will it take me to get a high school diploma that way?
A few years.
I can’t do that. I can’t spend years working by day, going to school by night. I’d be dead in a month.
So what else are you going to do?
I don’t know.
So? says Rappaport.
* * *
My eyes are red and oozing and Sergeant Burdick sends me on sick call. The army doctor wants to know about my last treatment and when I tell him about the doctor in New York who said I had a disease from New Guinea he says that’s it, that’s what you got, soldier, go get your head shaved and report back in two weeks. It’s not so bad getting your head shaved in the army with the way you have to wear a cap or helmet except that if you go to a bierstube the Lenggries girls might call out, Oh, Irishman’s got the clap, and if you try to explain it’s not the clap they only pat your cheek and tell you come to them any time clap or no clap. In two weeks there’s no improvement in my eyes and the doctor says I have to go back to the military hospital in Munich for observation. He doesn’t say he’s sorry for making a great mistake, for making me get my head shaved, that it probably wasn’t the dandruff at all or anything from New Guinea. He says these are desperate times, Russians massing on the border, our troops have to be healthy, and he’s not going to take a chance on this eye disease from New Guinea spreading all over the European Command.
They send me in a jeep again but the driver now is a Cuban corporal, Vinnie Gandia, who is asthmatic and plays drums in civilian life. It was hard for him being in the army but the music business was slow and he needed some way to send money to the family in Cuba. They were going to kick him out of the army in basic training because his shoulders were so bony he couldn’t carry a rifle or a fifty-millimeter machine gun barrel till he saw a picture of a Kotex on a box and a light went on in his head. Jesus. That was it. Slip the Kotex pads under his shirt as a pad on his shoulders and he was ready for anything the army could throw at him. After remembering Rappaport did the same thing I wonder if Kotex knew how they were helping the fighting men of America. All the way to Munich Vinnie guides the steering wheel with his elbows so that he can tap with his drumsticks on every hard surface. He gasps bits of songs, Mister Whatyoucallit whatcha doin’ tonight, and bap bap da do bap do do de do bap to go along with the beat and then he’s so excited the asthma hits him and he’s gasping so hard he has to stop the jeep and pump his inhaler. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel and when he looks up there are tears on his cheeks from the strain of trying to breathe. He tells me I should be grateful all I have is sore eyes. He wishes he had sore eyes instead of asthma. He could still play the drums without stopping for his goddam inhaler. Sore eyes never stopped a drummer. He wouldn’t care if he went blind long as he could play the drums. What’s the use of living if you can’t play your goddam drums? People don’t appreciate not having asthma. They sit around moaning and bitching about life and all the time breathing breathing nice and normal and taking it for granted. Give ’em one day of asthma and they’ll spend the rest of their lives thanking God with every breath they take, just one day. He’s gonna have to invent some kind of gadget you hang on your head so you can breathe when you play, some kind of helmet maybe, and you’re in there breathing like a baby in fresh air and you’re rapping away on them drums, shit, man, that would be heaven. Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, they don’t have asthma, lucky bastards. He says if I can still see when I get out of the army he’ll take me to joints on Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. If I can’t see he’ll still take me. Shit, you don’t have to see to hear the sounds, man, and wouldn’t that be something, him gasping and me with a white cane or a seeing-eye dog up and down Fifty-second Street. I could sit with this blind guy, Ray Charles, and we could compare notes. That makes Vinnie laugh and brings on the attack again and when he gets his breath back he says asthma is a bitch because if you think of something funny you laugh and that takes your breath away. That pisses him off, too, the way people go around laughing and taking it for granted and never think what it would be like to play drums with asthma, never think what it’s like when you can’t laugh. People just don’t think about things like that.