I could do that. I could spend time with Stanley Garber to get rid of my accent though he told me already I’d be an ass to lose it. He said the Irish accent is charming, opens doors, reminds people of Barry Fitzgerald. I told him I didn’t want to remind people of Barry Fitzgerald and he said, Would you prefer to have a Jewish accent and remind people of Molly Goldberg? I asked him who Molly Goldberg was and he said if you don’t know who Molly Goldberg is there’s no use talking to you.
Why can’t I have a bright carefree life like my brothers Malachy and Michael, uptown in the bar serving drinks to beautiful women and bantering with Ivy League graduates? I’d make more money than this forty-five hundred dollars a year for regular substitute teachers. There would be large tips, all the food I could eat, and nights in the beds of Episcopalian heiresses frolicking and dazzling them with bits of poetry and scraps of wit. I’d sleep late, have lunch at a romantic restaurant, walk the streets of Manhattan, there would be no forms to fill out, no papers to correct, the books I’d read would be for my own pleasure and I’d never have to worry about sullen high school teenagers.
And what would I say if I ever met Horace again? Would I be able to tell him I went to college and became a teacher for a few weeks and it was so hard I became a bartender so that I could meet a better class of people on the Upper East Side? I know he’d shake his head and probably thank God I wasn’t his son.
I think of the longshoreman in the coffee shop working for years so that his son can go to St. John’s University to become a teacher. What would I say to him?
If I told Alberta I was planning to leave teaching for the exciting world of the bars she’d surely run off and marry a lawyer or a football player.
So I won’t give up teaching, not because of Horace or the longshoreman or Alberta, but because of what I might say to myself at the end of a night of serving drinks and amusing the customers. I’d accuse myself of taking the easy way and all because I was defeated by boys and girls resisting Your World and You and Giants in the Earth.
They don’t want to read and they don’t want to write. They say, Aw, Mr. McCourt, all these English teachers want us to write about dumb things like our summer vacation or the story of our life. Boring. Every year since our first grade we write the story of our life and teachers just give us a check mark and they say, Very Nice.
In the English classes they’re cowed by the midterm test with its multiple choice questions on spelling, vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension. When I hand out the tests in Economic Citizenship there is muttering. There are hard words against Miss Mudd and how her ship should hit a rock and she should become fish food. I tell them, Do your best, and I’ll be reasonable with report card grades, but there is a coldness and resentment in the room as if I had betrayed them by forcing this test on them.
Miss Mudd saves me. While my classes are taking the midterm test I explore the closets at the back of the room and find them stuffed with old grammar books, newspapers, Regents exams and hundreds of pages of uncorrected student compositions going back to 1942. I’m about to dump everything into the trash till I start reading the old compositions. The boys back then yearned to fight, to avenge the deaths of brothers, friends, neighbors. One wrote, I’m gonna kill five Japs for every one they killed from my neighborhood. Another wrote, I don’t want to go in the army if they tell me kill Italians because I’m Italian. I could be killing my own cousins and I won’t fight unless they let me kill Germans or Japs. I’d prefer to kill Germans because I don’t want to go to the Pacific where there’s all kinds of jungles with bugs and snakes and crap like that.
The girls would wait. When Joey comes home me and him gonna get married and move to Jersey and get away from his crazy mother.
I pile the crumbling papers on my desk and begin reading to my classes. They sit up. There are familiar names. Hey, that was my father. He was wounded in Africa. Hey, that was my Uncle Sal that was killed in Guam.
While I read the essays aloud there are tears. Boys run from the room to the toilets and return red-eyed. Girls weep openly and console one another.
Dozens of Staten Island and Brooklyn families are named in these papers so brittle we worry they’ll fall apart. We want to save them and the only way is to copy them by hand, the hundreds still stacked in the closets.
No one objects. We are saving the immediate past of immediate families. Everyone has a pen and all through the rest of the term, April till the end of June, they decipher and write. Tears continue and there are outbursts. This is my father when he was fifteen. This is my aunt and she died when she was having a baby.
They are suddenly interested in compositions with the title “My Life,” and I want to say, See what you can learn about your fathers and uncles and aunts? Don’t you want to write about your lives for the next generation?
But I let it pass. I don’t want to interfere with a room so quiet Mr. Sorola has to investigate. He walks around the room, looks at what the class is doing and says nothing. I think he’s grateful for the silence.
In June I give everyone a passing grade, thankful I’ve survived my first months of teaching in a vocational high school, though I wonder what I would have done without the crumbling compositions.
I might have had to teach.
40
Since I long ago lost the key the door of my flat is always open and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to steal. Strangers begin to appear, Walter Anderson, an aging public relations man, Gordon Patterson, aspiring actor, Bill Galetly, man in search of the truth. They are homeless bar patrons sent by Malachy in the largeness of his heart.
Walter begins to steal from me. Good-bye, Walter.
Gordon smokes in bed and causes a fire but worse than that his girlfriend complains to me at Malachy’s bar about Gordon’s discomfort and my hostility. He, too, goes.
School is over and I have to work again, day by day, on piers and warehouse platforms. Every morning I shape up to replace men on vacation, men out sick, or when there’s a sudden rush of business and they need more help. When there’s no work I roam the docks and the streets of Greenwich Village. I can make my way to Fourth Avenue to browse in one bookshop after another and dream of the day I’ll come here and buy all the books I like. All I can afford now is cheap paperbacks and I’m content on my way home with my package of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a weekend of reading. I’ll heat up a can of beans on my electric ring and boil water for tea and read in the light that comes from the flat below. I’ll start with Hemingway because I saw the film with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, everyone having a fine time of it in Paris and Pamplona, everyone drinking, going to bullfights, falling in love even if there was a sadness between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley over his condition. It’s the way I’d like to live, roaming the world without a care, though I wouldn’t want to be Jake.