It was a Friday night, his night off from the bank, and I knew he couldn’t escape by going to work. I imagined him downstairs with the cord in his hand trying to decide what to do with the spoon at his window. He could have gone out but where would he go? Who would want to have a beer with him in a bar and listen to how his mother died screaming? On top of that he’d probably tell the world someone upstairs was tormenting him with a spoon and anyone in a bar with a beer would move away from him.
I tapped on and off for a few hours and and suddenly there was light and music from the radio. Symphonie fantastique was long over and that irritated me but I turned the dial up on the electric blanket, put on cap and gloves and got back into bed with Anna Karenina which I couldn’t read because of the darkness in my head over Bradford and his poor mother in Colorado. If my mother were dying of bone cancer in Limerick and someone upstairs tormented me with a spoon at my window I’d go up and kill him. I felt so guilty now I thought of knocking on Bradford’s door and telling him, I’m sorry over the spoon and your poor mother and you can pull the plug, but I was so warm and cozy in the bed I fell asleep.
The following week I met him loading his things into a van. I asked if I could help and all he said was, Prick. He moved out but he left me plugged in and I had weeks of electricity till I blew the cord with an electric heater and had to go to Beneficial Finance Company for a loan to pay my electricity bills so that I wouldn’t freeze to death.
39
The old-timers in the teachers’ cafeteria say the classroom is a battleground, that teachers are warriors bringing the light to these damn kids who don’t want to learn, who just want to sit on their asses and talk about movies and cars and sex and what they’re gonna do Saturday night. That’s the way it is in this country. We’ve got free education and no one wants it. Not like Europe where there’s respect for teachers. Parents of kids in this school don’t care because they never went to high school themselves. They were too busy struggling with the Depression and fighting wars, World War II and Korea. Then you have all these bureaucrats who never liked teaching in the first place, all these goddam principals and assistant principals and chairmen who got out of the classroom as fast as their little legs could carry them and now spend their lives harassing the classroom teacher.
Bob Bogard is at the time clock. Ah, Mr. McCourt, would you like to go for some soup?
Soup?
He has a little smile and I know he means something else. Yes, Mr. McCourt. Soup.
We walk down the street and turn into the Meurot Bar.
Soup, Mr. McCourt. Would you like a beer?
We settle on our bar stools and drink beer after beer. It’s Friday and other teachers drift in and the talk is kids, kids, kids and the school, and I learn that in every school there are two worlds, the world of the classroom teacher and the world of the administrator and supervisor, that these worlds are forever at sword’s point, that when anything goes wrong the teacher is the scapegoat.
Bob Bogard tells me don’t worry about Your World and You and the midterm test. Go through the motions. Distribute the test, watch the kids scribble what they don’t know, retrieve the tests, give the kids passing grades, it isn’t their fault Miss Mudd neglected them, the parents will be satisfied, and the chairman and principal will stay off my back.
I should be leaving the Meurot and taking the ferry to Manhattan where I’m having dinner with Alberta but the beers keep coming and it’s hard to say no to such generosity and when I leave my bar stool to call Alberta she screams at me that I’m a common Irish drunk and that’s the last time she’ll ever wait for me because she’s finished with me forever and there are plenty of men who’d like to go out with her, good-bye.
All the beer in the world won’t relieve my misery. I struggle with five classes a day, I live in a flat Alberta calls a hovel, and now I’m in danger of losing her because of my hours at the Meurot. I tell Bob I have to go, it’s nearly midnight, we’ve been on the bar stools for nine hours and I have dark clouds fluttering in my head. He says, One more and then we’ll eat. You can’t go on that ferry without eating. He says it’s important to eat the kind of food that will ward off any unpleasant feeling in the morning, and the food he orders at the St. George Diner is fish with eggs sunny-side up, hash brown potatoes, toast and coffee. He says the combination of fish and eggs after a day and night of beer is miraculous.
I’m on the ferry again where the old Italian patroling for shoeshine customers tells me my shoes look worse than ever and there’s no use telling him I can’t afford his offer of a shine, half price, if I’ll buy shoes from his brother up on Delancey Street.
No, I don’t have money for shoes. I don’t have money for a shine.
Ah, professore, professore, I give you free shine. Make you feel good, the shine. You go see my brother for the shoes.
He sits on his box, pulls my foot to his lap and looks up at me. I smella beer, professore. Teacher come home late, eh? Terrible shoes, terrible shoes, but I shine. He dabs on the polish, draws the brush around the shoe, snaps the polishing cloth across the toe, taps my knee to say it’s done, replaces his things in the box and stands. He waits for the question and I don’t ask because he knows it, What about my other shoe?
He shrugs. You go see my brother and I do your other shoe.
If I buy new shoes from your brother I won’t need a shine for this.
He shrugs again. You are the professore. You smart, eh, with the brains? You teach and think about the shine and the no shine.
And he waddles away humming and calling shine shine to sleeping passengers.
I’m a teacher with a college degree and this old Italian, with little English, toys with me and sends me ashore with one shoe shined, the other streaked with marks of rain, snow, mud. If I grabbed him and demanded a shine for the dirty shoe he might yell and bring crew members to his aid and how would I explain the offer of a free shine, the shining of one shoe and then the trick? I’m sober enough by now to know you can’t force an old Italian to shine your dirty shoe, that I was foolish to let him at my foot in the first place. If I protested to the crew members he might tell them he smelled beer and they’d laugh and walk away.
He waddles up and down the aisles. He keeps saying shine to the other passengers and I have a great urge to grab him and his box and heave him over the side. Instead, when I’m leaving the ferry, I tell him, I’ll never buy shoes from your brother on Delancey Street.
He shrugs. I don’t have a no brother on Delancey. Shine, shine.
When I told the shoeshine man I had no money I wasn’t lying. I don’t have fifteen cents for the subway fare. Whatever I had went for beer and when we went to the St. George Diner I asked Bob Bogard to pay for my fish and eggs and I’ll pay him back next week and it won’t do me any harm to walk home, up Broadway, past Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Church where Robert Emmet’s brother, Thomas, is buried, past City Hall, up to Houston Street and over to my cold-water flat on Downing Street.
It is two o’clock in the morning, few people, an occasional car. Broad Street, where I worked at the Manufacturer’s Trust Company, is over to my right and I wonder what became of Andy Peters and Brigid formerly Bridey. I walk and look back over the eight and a half years since I arrived in New York, days at the Biltmore Hotel, the army, NYU, jobs in warehouses, on the docks, in banks. I think of Emer and Tom Clifford and wonder what became of Rappaport and the men I knew in the army. I never dreamed I’d be able to get a college degree and become a teacher and now I’m wondering if I can survive a vocational high school. The office buildings I pass are dark but I know that during the day people sit at desks, study the stock market and make millions. They wear suits and ties, they carry briefcases, they go to lunch and talk about money money money. They live in Connecticut with their long-legged Episcopalian wives, who probably lolled in the lounge of the Biltmore Hotel when I cleaned up for them, and they drink martinis before dinner. They play golf at the country club and they have affairs and no one cares.