Oh, you don’t have to go out. Sit on the floor with the candle behind. Look at the wall. Shadows. Are you hungry?
No.
Wait, and he brings a banana from the kitchen. Have this. The banana is good for you.
I don’t want a banana.
It makes you peaceful. All that potassium.
I don’t want a banana.
You only think you don’t want a banana. Listen to your body.
He follows me into the hallway preaching bananas. He’s naked but he follows me down the stairs, three flights, along the hallway that leads to the front door. He keeps talking about bananas, the ego and Socrates happy under a tree in Athens and when we reach the front door he stands on the top step waving the banana while children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk whoop and scream and point and women with bosoms and elbows resting on windowsill pillows scream at him in Italian.
Malachy isn’t at his bar. He’s at home and happy with his wife, Linda, planning the life of the baby to come. Michael is off for the night. There are women at the bar and the tables but they’re with men. The bartender says, Oh, you’re Malachy’s brother, and won’t let me pay for my drinks. He introduces me to couples at the bar, This is Malachy’s brother.
Really? We didn’t know he had another brother. Oh, yeah, we know your brother Michael. And your name is?
Frank.
And what do you do?
I’m a teacher.
Really? You’re not in the bar business?
They laugh. And when do you think you’ll go into the bar business?
When my brothers become teachers.
That’s what I say but what flows through my head is different. I want to tell them they’re condescending twits, that I knew their likes in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, that they probably flicked their cigarette ash on the floor for me to clean up and looked through me the way you look through people who clean up. I’d like to tell them to kiss my arse and if I had a few more drinks I would but I know that inside I’m still plucking at my forelock and shuffling my feet in the presence of superior people, that they’d laugh at anything I said to them because they know what I am inside and if they don’t know they don’t care. If I fell dead off the bar stool they’d move to a table to avoid the unpleasantness and tell the world later how they ran into a drunken Irish schoolteacher.
None of this matters anyway. Alberta is surely in a romantic little Italian restaurant with her new man, the two of them smiling at each other across the glow of the light from the candle stuck in a Chianti bottle. He’s telling her what’s good on the menu and after they order their dinner they talk about what they’ll do tomorrow, maybe tonight, and if I think about that my bladder will move near my eye.
Malachy’s bar is at Sixty-third Street and Third Avenue, five blocks from my first furnished room at Sixty-eighth Street. Instead of going home straightway I can sit on Mrs. Austin’s steps and look back over the contents of my ten years in New York, the trouble I had trying to see Hamlet at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse with my lemon meringue pie and my bottle of ginger ale.
Mrs. Austin’s house is gone. There’s a large new building, the New York Foundling Hospital, and it brings me to tears the way they’re tearing down my early days in the city. At least the cinema is here and it must be the night of beer because I have to press my whole body against the cinema wall with arms stretched out till a head calls from a police car, Hey, buddy, what’s going on?
What if I told him about Hamlet and the pie and Mrs. Austin and the night of glug and how her house is gone and my furnished room with it and how the woman in my life is with another man and is it against the law, Officer, to kiss a cinema of sad and happy memories when it’s the only comfort you have left, is it, Officer?
Of course I’m not going to say this to a New York cop or anyone else. I just tell him, It’s all right, Officer, and he tells me move on, the favorite words of the police department.
I move on and all along Third Avenue music pours through the doors of Irish pubs with the smells of beer and whiskey and snatches of talk and laughter.
Good man yourself, Sean.
Arrah, Jasus, we might as well be drunk as the way we are.
God above, I can’t wait to get back to Cavan for the decent pint that’s in it.
Do you think you’ll ever go back, Kevin?
I will when they build a bridge.
They laugh and Mickey Carton on the jukebox pumps his accordion with Ruthie Morrissey’s voice sailing over all the noise of the night, It’s my old Irish home, far across the foam, and I’m tempted to turn in, sit up on a stool and tell the bartender, Give us an oul’ drop of the craythur there, Brian, or make it two because bird never flew on one wing, good lad yourself. And wouldn’t that be better than sitting on Mrs. Austin’s steps or kissing the walls of the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse and wouldn’t I be among my own, wouldn’t I?
My own. The Irish.
I could drink Irish, eat Irish, dance Irish, read Irish. My mother often warned us, Marry your own, and now old-timers tell me, Stick with your own. If I listened to them I wouldn’t be rejected by a Rhode Island Episcopalian who once said, What would you do with yourself if you weren’t Irish? And when she said that I would have walked out except that we were halfway through the dinner she’d cooked, stuffed chicken with a bowl of pink new potatoes tossed in salt butter and parsley and a bottle of Bordeaux that gave me such shivers of pleasure I could have tolerated any number of barbs at myself and the Irish in general.
I’d like to be Irish when it’s time for a song or a poem. I’d like to be American when I teach. I’d like to be Irish-American or American-Irish though I know I can’t be two things even if Scott Fitzgerald said the sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.
I don’t know what I’d like to be and what does it matter with Alberta over in Brooklyn with her new man?
Then in a shop window I catch a glimpse of my sad face and I laugh when I remember what my mother would have called it, the gloomy puss.
At Fifty-seventh Street I walk west toward Fifth Avenue for a taste of America and the richness that’s in it, the world of the people who sit in the Palm Court of the Biltmore Hotel, people who don’t have to go through life carrying ethnic hyphens. You could wake them in the middle of the night, ask them what they are and they’d say, Tired.
I turn the gloomy puss south on Fifth Avenue and there’s the dream I had all those years in Ireland, the avenue nearly deserted at this hour of the morning except for double-decker buses, one going north, the other south, jewelry shops, bookshops, women’s shops with mannequins all dressed up for Easter, rabbits and eggs everywhere in windows and not a sign of the risen Jesus, and far down the avenue the Empire State Building, and I have my health, don’t I? a little weak in the eye and teeth department, a college degree and a teaching job and isn’t this the country where all things are possible, where you can do anything you like as long as you stop complaining and get off your ass because life, pal, is not a free lunch.
If only Alberta came to her senses and back to me.
Fifth Avenue tells me how ignorant I am. There are the window mannequins in their Easter garb and if one of them came to life and asked me what kind of fabric she was wearing I wouldn’t have a notion. If they wore canvas I’d spot it straightway because of the coal bags I delivered in Limerick and used for cover when they were empty and the weather was desperate. I might be able to recognize tweed because of the coats people wore winter and summer though I’d have to admit to the mannequin I don’t know the difference between silk and cotton. I could never point to a dress and say that’s satin or wool and I’d be lost entirely if challenged to identify damask or crinoline. I know novelists like to hint at the wealth of their characters by dwelling on damask drapes though I don’t know if anyone wears such material unless the characters fall on hard times and take the scissors to the damask. I know you can hardly pick up a novel set in the South where there isn’t a white plantation family lolling on the verandah sipping bourbon or lemonade listening to the darkies singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the verandah women fanning themselves against the crinoline heat.