Well, that’s how it starts. One beer and the next thing ye’re roaring and singing and waking the child.
There’s no child here.
There is in Malachy’s house and the roaring and singing, too.
Alberta calls us into dinner, tuna casserole with green salad. Mam takes her time coming to the table. She has to finish her cigarette and what’s the hurry anyway.
Alberta says it’s nice to eat casserole when it’s good and hot.
Mam says she hates hot food that burns the roof of your mouth.
I tell her, For Christ’s sake, finish your cigarette and come to the table.
She comes with her offended look. She pulls her chair in and pushes the salad away. She doesn’t like the lettuce in this country. I try to control myself. I ask her what the hell is the difference between the lettuce in this country and the lettuce in Ireland. She says there’s a big difference, that the lettuce in this country is tasteless.
Alberta says, Oh, never mind. Not everyone likes lettuce anyway.
Mam stares at her casserole and forks noodles and tuna aside while she hunts for peas. She says she loves peas though these are not as good as the ones in Limerick. Alberta asks if she’d like more peas.
No, thank you.
After which she probes the noodles for bits of tuna.
I ask her, Don’t you like the noodles?
What?
The noodles. Don’t you like them?
I don’t know what they are but I’m not fond of ’em.
I want to lean into her face and tell her she’s acting like a savage, that Alberta went to great lengths thinking of something that might please her and all she can do now is to sit with her nose in the air as if someone had done something to her and if she doesn’t like it she can put on her damn coat and go back to Manhattan to the party she’s missing and I’ll never bother her again with an invitation to dinner.
I want to say all this but Alberta makes peace. Oh, that’s all right. Maybe Mam is tired with the excitement of coming to New York and if we have a nice cup of tea and a piece of cake we’ll all relax.
Mam says, No, thank you to the cake, she couldn’t eat another morsel but she would like a cup of tea till, again, she sees the tea bag in her cup and tells us this isn’t a proper cup of tea at all.
I tell her that’s what we have and that’s what she’s getting though what I don’t tell her is that I’d like to throw the tea bag between her eyes.
She said no to the cake but here she is pushing it into her mouth and swallowing with hardly a chew and then picking up and eating the crumbs from around her plate, the woman who didn’t want the cake.
She glances at the teacup. Well, if that’s the only tea ye have I suppose I’ll have to drink it. She lifts the tea bag on her spoon and squeezes it till the water turns brown and wants to know why there’s a lemon on her saucer.
Alberta says some people like lemon with their tea.
Mam says she never heard the likes of that, it’s disgusting.
Alberta removes the lemon and Mam says she’d like milk and sugar, if you don’t mind. She asks for a match for her cigarette and smokes while she drinks only half the tea to show she doesn’t care for it.
Alberta asks if she and Alphie would like to see a movie in the neighborhood but Mam says, no, they have to be getting back to Manhattan and it’s too late.
Alberta says it isn’t that late and Mam says it’s late enough.
I walk with my mother and Alphie up Henry Street and over to the subway at Borough Hall. It’s a bright January night and all along the street there are still Christmas lights glowing and flickering in the windows. Alphie talks about the elegance of the houses and says thanks for the dinner. Mam says she doesn’t know why people can’t put the dinner in a bowl and give it to you without a plate under it. She thinks that kind of thing is putting on airs.
When the train comes in I shake hands with Alphie. I bend over to kiss my mother and hand her a twenty-dollar bill but she pulls her face away and sits in the train with her back to me and I walk away with the money back in my pocket.
44
For eight years I traveled on the Staten Island Ferry. I would take the RR train from Brooklyn to Whitehall Street in Manhattan, walk to the terminal, slip a nickel into a turnstile slot, buy coffee and a doughnut, plain no sugar, and wait on a bench with a newspaper filled with yesterday’s disasters.
Mr. Jones taught music at McKee High School though when you saw him on the ferry you might have thought he was a university professor or head of a law firm. You might have thought that even though he was a Negro who would become a black and, in later years, an African-American. Every day he wore a different three-piece suit and a hat to match. He wore shirts with collars or held in place with gold stick pins. His watch and rings were gold, too, and delicate. The old Italian shoeshine men loved him for the daily trade and generous tips and they left his shoes dazzling. Every morning he read the Times and held it with fingers protruding from little leather gloves that covered the area below the wrist to beyond the knuckles. He smiled when he told me of concerts and operas he’d attended the night before or of summer trips to Europe especially to Milan and Salzburg. He put his hand on my arm and told me I must not die before I sit in La Scala. Another teacher joked one morning that the kids at McKee must be impressed with his clothes, all that elegance, you know, and Mr. Jones said, I dress for what I am. The teacher shook his head and Mr. Jones went back to his Times. On the ferry back that day the other teacher told me Mr. Jones didn’t see himself as a Negro at all, that he’d call to the black kids to stop bopping down the hall. The black kids didn’t know what to make of Mr. Jones with all that elegance. They knew that whatever music they liked Mr. Jones would be up there talking about Mozart, playing his music on the phonograph or illustrating passages on the piano, and when it was time for the Christmas assembly he’d have his boys and girls up on the stage caroling like angels.
Every morning on the ferry I passed the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and thought of my mother and father coming to this country. When they sailed in were they excited as I was that first sunny October morning? Teachers going to McKee and other schools on Staten Island sat on the ferry and looked toward the statue and the island. They must have thought of their parents and grandparents coming into this place and they might have thought of all the hundreds who were sent back. It must have saddened them the way it saddened me to see Ellis Island neglected and crumbling and that ferry docked by the side low in the water, the ferry that took the immigrants from Ellis Island to the island of Manhattan and if they looked hard enough they saw ghosts hungry for the landing.
Mam had moved with Alphie to an apartment on the West Side. Then Alphie left to be his own man in the Bronx and Mam moved to Flatbush Avenue near Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Her building was shabby but she felt comfortable having a place of her own where she’d be under obligation to nobody. She could walk to any number of bingo games and she was content, thank you.
In my early years at McKee High School I enrolled at Brooklyn College for classes leading to a master’s degree in English. I started with summer courses and continued with afternoon and evening classes into the aca-demic year. I would take the ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan and walk to a subway train at Bowling Green that took me to the end of the Flatbush line near Brooklyn College. On ferry and train I could read for my classes or correct the work of my students at McKee.
I told my students I wanted neat, clean, legible work but they handed in whatever they had scribbled quickly on buses and trains, in shop classes when the teacher wasn’t looking, or in the cafeteria. The papers were dotted with the stains of coffee, Coke, ice cream, ketchup, sneezes, and a lusciousness where girls had blotted their lips. A set of such papers would so irritate me I’d fling them over the side of the ferry and watch with satisfaction while they sank below the water to create a Sargasso of illiteracy.