I know they’re lying because in each class there are two or three with books and I know they got the books in the normal way. Teacher distributes them. Teacher gets book receipts. I don’t want to embarrass the students who have the books by asking them how they came by them. I can’t ask them to make liars of their classmates.
The chairman stops me in the hallway. Well, how about those books? and when I tell him how I can’t embarrass the students who have the books he says, Bullshit, and storms into my class next period. All right, the ones who have books, raise your hands.
There is one hand.
All right, where did you get that book?
Ah, I got it, ah, from Miss Mudd.
And you signed a receipt?
Ah, yeah.
What’s your name?
Julio.
And when you got that book didn’t the rest of the class get books, too?
I feel my heart beating hard and I’m angry that even if I’m a new teacher this is my class and no one should barge in here and embarrass one of my students and, Christ, I have to say something. I have to come between this boy and this chairman. I tell the chairman, I already asked Julio about that. He was absent and got the book from Miss Mudd at the end of the day.
Oh, yeah. Is that right, Julio?
Yeah.
And the rest of you. When did you get your books?
There is silence. They know I lied and Julio knows I lied and the chairman surely suspects me of lying but he doesn’t know what to do. He says, We’ll get to the bottom of this, and leaves.
The word goes from class to class and next day there is a book on every desk, Your World and You and Silas Marner, and when the chairman returns with Mr. Sorola he doesn’t know what to say. Mr. Sorola gives his little smile. So, Mr. McCourt, we’re back in business, eh?
There may be books on every desk this one day when students and teacher present a united front to the outsiders, the chairman, the principal, but once they leave the honeymoon ends and there is a chorus of complaints about these books, how boring they are, how heavy, and why do they have to bring them to school every day? The English students say, Oh, Silas Marner’s a small book, but if they have to carry Giants in the Earth you need a big breakfast, it’s such a big book and it’s so boring. Will they have to carry it every day? Why can’t they leave it in the classroom closet?
If you leave it in the closet how are you going to read it?
Why can’t we read it in class? All the other teachers tell their classes, Okay, Henry, you read page nineteen, okay, Nancy, you read page twenty, an’ that’s how they finish the book and when they’re reading we can put our heads down an’ take a nap ha ha ha, just kidding, Mr. McCourt.
38
In Manhattan my brother Malachy is running a bar called Malachy’s with two partners. He acts with the Irish Players, appears on radio and television and gets his name into the newspapers. That brings me fame at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. Now my students know my name and I’m not Mr. McCoy anymore.
Hey, Mr. McCourt, I seen your brother on TV. He’s a crazy guy.
Mr. McCourt, my mother seen your brother on TV.
Mr. McCourt, how come you’re not on TV? How come you’re just a teacher?
Mr. McCourt, you got an Irish accent. Why can’t you be funny like your brother?
Mr. McCourt, you could be on TV. You could be in a love story with Miss Mudd, holding her hands on a ship and kissing her old wrinkly face.
Teachers who venture into the City, Manhattan, tell me they see Malachy in plays.
Oh, he’s funny, your brother. We said hello to him after the play and told him we teach with you and he was very nice but, boy, does he like to drink.
My brother Michael is out of the air force and working behind the bar with Malachy. If people want to buy my brothers a drink who are they to say no. It’s cheers, bottoms up, slainte and skoal. When the bar closes they don’t have to go home. There are after-hours joints where they can drink and trade stories with police inspectors and gracious madams from the finest brothels on the Upper East Side. They can breakfast at Rubin’s on Central Park South where there are always celebrities to keep your neck swiveling.
Malachy was famous for his, Come in, girls, and to hell with the old farts up and down Third Avenue. The old bar owners looked with suspicion on a woman alone. She was up to no good and there was no place at the bar for her. Put her over there in a dark corner and give her no more than two drinks and if there’s a hint of a man going near her out she goes on the sidewalk and that’s that.
When Malachy’s bar opened the word spread that girls from the Barbizon Women’s Residence were actually sitting up on his bar stools and soon the men flocked in from P. J. Clarke’s, Toots Shor’s, El Morocco, to be trailed by a snoop of gossip columnists eager to report celebrity sightings and Malachy’s latest wild doings. There were playboys and their ladies, pioneers of the jet set. There were heirs to fortunes so old and deep their tendrils curled in the dark depths of South African diamond mines. Malachy and Michael were invited to parties in Manhattan apartments so vast that guests emerged days later from forgotten rooms. There were skinny-dipping parties in the Hamptons and parties in Connecticut where rich men rode the rich women who rode the Thoroughbred horses.
President Eisenhower takes time out from his golf to sign an occasional bill and to warn us of the industrial-military complex and Richard Nixon watches and waits while Malachy and Michael pour the drinks and keep everyone laughing and demanding more, more drinks, Malachy, more stories, Michael, you two are a riot.
Meanwhile my mother, Angela McCourt, drinks tea in her comfortable kitchen in Limerick, hears stories from visitors about the great times in New York, sees newspaper clippings about Malachy on The Jack Paar Show, and she has nothing else to do but drink that tea, keep the house and herself nice and warm, look after Alphie now that he’s out of school and ready for a job whatever that may be, and wouldn’t it be lovely if she and Alphie could take a little trip to New York because she hasn’t been there in ages and her sons, Frank, Michael, Malachy, are there and doing so well.
My cold-water flat on Downing Street is uncomfortable and there’s nothing I can do about it because of my small teacher’s salary and the few dollars I send my mother till my brother Alphie gets a job. When I moved in I bought kerosene for my cast-iron stove from the little Italian hunchback on Bleecker Street. He said, You ony need a leetle in the stove, but I must have put in too much because the stove turned into a great red living thing in my kitchen and since I didn’t know how to turn it down or off I fled the flat and went to the White Horse Tavern where I sat all afternoon in a terrible state of nerves waiting for the boom of the explosion and the wailing and honking of fire engines. I would have to decide then if I should go back to the smoking remains of 46 Downing Street with charred bodies being brought out and face fire inspectors and police or if I should call Alberta in Brooklyn, tell her my building was in ashes, my belongings all gone, and could she see her way to putting me up for a few days till I could find another cold-water flat.
There was no explosion, no fire, and I felt so relieved I thought I deserved a bath, time in the tub, a little peace, ease and comfort, as my mother would say.