Teacher Man: A Memoir (18 page)

Mary pulled at my arm. ’Tis getting dark. Are you going to stand here all night? Come on, I’m dying for a sherry. Then we’ll go to my little bedsit and who knows what will happen, who knows. She giggled and pulled me against her great soft jiggling body and I wanted to tell Dublin, No, no, she’s not mine.

We walked up Nassau Street, where she stopped to admire jewelry at the Yates shop at the corner. Lovely, she said. Lovely. Oh, the day will come I’ll have one of them rings on my finger.

She dropped my arm to point at a ring in the window and I ran. Away up Nassau Street I ran, barely hearing her scream that I was a dirty Limerick jackeen of a Yank.

I returned to Bewley’s next day to tell her how sorry I was over my behavior. She said, Ah, that’s all right. Sure you never know what’s goin’ to come out of you after a few sherries or pints. She said she’d be finished at six and if I liked we could go out for fish and chips and have tea later in her room. After the tea she said it was surely too late for me to walk back to my hotel off Grafton Street and it wouldn’t bother her one bit if I stayed and took the bus with her in the morning. She went to the hallway lavatory and I undressed down to my underwear. She returned in a gray billowing nightdress. She dropped to her knees by the bed, blessed herself, and asked God to come between her and all harm. She told God she knew she was putting herself in the way of temptation but sure wasn’t he an innocent, the boy in the bed.

She rolled in and squashed me against the wall and when I reached to pull up her nightdress she slapped my hand away. She said she didn’t want to be responsible for the loss of my soul but, if I said a perfect Act of Contrition before I fell asleep, she’d feel easier in her mind. While I was saying the prayer she wriggled out of the nightdress and pulled me against her body. She whispered I must finish the prayer later and I said I would, indeed I would, as I pushed into her vast blubbery body and finished my Act of Contrition.

I was twenty-two then and now, at thirty-eight, I was applying to Trinity College. Yes, they would consider my application if I sat for the American Graduate Record Examination. I did, and astonished myself and those around me with a score in the ninety-ninth percentile in English. That meant I was up there with smart people all around the country and it gave me such a lift I went to Gage and Tollner’s restaurant in Brooklyn, ate a sea bass with a baked potato and drank so much wine I had no memory of going home. Alberta was patient with me, did not upbraid me in the morning because, after all, I was going to Dublin to a superior university, and she wouldn’t be seeing much of me in the next two years, the time Trinity gave you to write and defend a dissertation.

In the mathematics section of the GRE I had, I think, the lowest score in the world.

Alberta booked me a berth on the
Queen Elizabeth,
the ship’s second-last eastward voyage on the Atlantic. We had a party on the ship because that’s what you were supposed to do. We drank champagne and when it was time for visitors to go ashore I kissed her and she kissed me back. I said I’d miss her and she said she’d miss me, but I’m not sure either of us was telling the truth. I was light-headed from the champagne and when the ship pulled away from the pier I waved without knowing what I was waving at. That was my life, I thought. Waving without knowing what I was waving at. That seemed like the kind of deep observation that could be explored, but it gave me a headache and I moved on.

The ship pulled into the Hudson and headed for the Narrows. I made sure I was on deck to wave to Ellis Island. Everyone waved at the Statue, but I had a special wave for Ellis Island, the place of hope and heartbreak.

I thought of myself, little fellow nearly four years old, thirty-four years ago, waving, waving, sailing to Ireland, and here I was again, waving, and what was I doing, where was I going and what was it all about?

When you’re alone and still unsteady from champagne you wander the ship, exploring. I’m on the
Queen Elizabeth
sailing to Dublin, to Trinity College, if you don’t mind. Did you ever think, with your comings and goings, with all that waving, you’d be joining the enemy? Trinity College, the Protestant college, loyal always to this majesty and that majesty and what did Trinity ever contribute to the cause of freedom? But down there in your sniffling little soul you always saw them as superior, didn’t you, horse Protestants with their law-dee-daw accents, their noses in the air.

Oliver St. John Gogarty was a Trinity man and even though I wrote about him, and read every word of his I could find, thinking some of his talent and style would rub off on me, it was all for nothing. I once showed my thesis to Stanley Garber, a teacher at McKee, and told him of my hopes. He shook his head and said, Look, McCourt, forget Gogarty. In the back of your brain you’ll always be that little pissy-assed kid from the lanes of Limerick. Find out who the hell you are. Climb the cross and do your own suffering. No substitutions, pal.

How can you talk like that, Stanley? That stuff about the cross. You’re Jewish.

That’s right. Look at us. We tried to fit in with the goyim. We tried to assimilate, but they wouldn’t let us. What happens then? Friction, man, and friction throws up people like Marx and Freud and Einstein and Stanley Garber. Thank God you’re not assimilated, McCourt, and drop Gogarty. You are not Gogarty. You are on your own. Do you understand that? If you keeled over and died this minute the stars in their courses would still be stars in their courses and you’d be a blip. Go your own way or you’ll wind up in a little house on Staten Island saying Hail Marys with a Maureen.

I couldn’t think about that because here, descending that grand central staircase of the
Queen Elizabeth,
was a woman I knew. She saw me and said we should have a drink. I remembered she was a private nurse to the rich of New York and I wondered what else she was. She said she was disappointed over her friend who had changed her travel plans and here she was, the nurse, with a first-class cabin with two beds and five days of lonely travel before her. The drink loosened my tongue and I told her of my lonesomeness and how we could be company for each other on the voyage though it might be difficult with her being first class and me down below the waterline.

Oh, that would be grand, she said. She was half Irish and sometimes talked like that.

If I had been sober I might have been wiser, but I fell to temptation and forgot my own berth in the bowels of the ship.

On the third day of the crossing I slipped away for breakfast in the dining room, my first visit. The waiter said, Yes, sir? and I felt foolish telling him I didn’t know where to sit.

Sir, haven’t you been here before?

No.

Because he was a waiter he did not ask the obvious question. Nor did the purser, who said I’d been declared officially not aboard. The ship assumed I’d gone ashore with my friends in a fit of enthusiasm. You could see he was waiting for an explanation, but I could never tell him of my first-class-cabin experiences with the private nurse. He said, yes, there was a seat for me, and welcome to breakfast.

There were two bunks in that cabin below the waterline. My cabin mate was on his knees, praying. He looked shocked when he saw me. He was a Methodist from Idaho, sailing to Heidelberg to study theology, so I could not brag to him that I’d spent the last three nights in a first-class cabin with a private nurse from New York. I apologized for interrupting his prayer, but he said you could never interrupt his prayer as his whole life was a prayer. I thought that was a wonderful thing to say and wished my life could be a prayer. What he said gave me a pang of conscience and made me feel worthless and sinful. His name was Ted. He looked clean-cut and cheerful. He had fine-looking teeth and a Marine crew cut. His white shirt was crisp, starched, pressed. He was at ease with himself, at peace with the world. God was in his heaven, a Methodist heaven, and all was right. I felt intimidated. If his life was a prayer, what was mine? One long sin? If this ship hit an iceberg Ted would be out on the deck singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and I’d be searching the ship for a priest to hear my last confession.

Ted asked if I was religious, if I attended church. He said I was welcome to join him in an hour at a Methodist service, but I mumbled, I go to Mass occasionally. He said he understood. How could he? What does a Methodist know about the sufferings of a Catholic, especially an Irish Catholic? (I didn’t say that, of course. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He was so sincere.) He asked if I’d like to pray with him and I mumbled again I didn’t know any Protestant prayers and, besides, I had to take a shower and change my clothes. He gave me what writers call a penetrating look and I felt he knew everything. He was only twenty-four but, already, he had faith, vision, direction. He might have heard of sin but you could see he was free of it, clean in every way.

I told Ted that after my shower I would find the Catholic chapel and attend Mass. He said, You don’t need Mass. You don’t need a priest. You have your faith, your Bible, two knees and a floor to pray on.

That made me feel cranky. Why can’t people leave people alone? Why do people feel they have to convert the likes of me?

No, I did not want to drop to my knees and pray with the Methodist. Even worse, I didn’t want to go to Mass or confession or anything else when I could go up there, walk the deck, sit in a chair and watch the horizon rise and fall.

Oh, to hell with it, I said, and took my shower, thinking of horizons. I thought horizons were better than people. They didn’t bother other horizons. When I came out Ted was gone, his belongings neatly laid out on his bunk.

Up on deck the private nurse came sailing along on the arm of a short plump gray-haired man in a navy blue double-breasted blazer with a pink Ascot ballooning from his Adam’s apple. She pretended she didn’t see me but I stared so hard she had to give me a little nod. She passed on and I wondered if she waggled her arse deliberately to torment me.

Waggle on. I don’t care.

But I cared. I felt destroyed, cast aside. After her three days with me how could that nurse go off with that old man who was at least sixty? What about the times sitting up in bed drinking bottles of white wine? What about the time I scrubbed her back in the tub? What was I to do with myself in the two days before the ship docked in Ireland? I’d have to lie on the top bunk with the Methodist praying and sighing below me. The nurse didn’t care. She deliberately crossed my path on different decks to make me miserable, and when I thought about her and that old man it made me disgusted to think of his ancient wrinkled body next to hers.

The next two days it was darkness on the high seas as I stood at the rail and thought of jumping into the Atlantic Ocean, down to the bottom with all the ships that were sunk during the war, battleships, submarines, destroyers, freighters, and I wondered if an aircraft carrier was ever sunk. That got me off my misery for a while, wondering about the aircraft carriers and bodies below floating and bumping against the bulkheads, but the misery came back. When you’re wandering around a ship with nothing to do but run into a nurse you spent three days with and she with the old man with the double-breasted blazer you’re inclined to think little or nothing of yourself. If I jumped into the Atlantic it might give her something to think about, but it wouldn’t do me any good because I’d never know.

I stood at that rail, with the ship whooshing along, thinking about my life and what a poltroon I was. (That was one of my favorite words at the time and it was apt.) Poltroon. All I did from the day I arrived in New York to this day on the
Queen Elizabeth
was meander from one thing to another: emigrate, work at dead-end jobs, drink in Germany and New York, chase women, sleep through four years at New York University, drift from one teaching job to another, marry and wish I was single, have another drink, hit a cul-de-sac in teaching, sail for Ireland with the hope that life would behave itself.

I wished I could be part of those jolly traveling groups, on land or sea, who play Ping-Pong and shuffleboard and then go off for a drink and who knows what else, but I didn’t have the talent. In my head I practiced and rehearsed. Oh, hi, I’d say. How’s it going? and they’d say, Fine, and by the way, won’t you join us for a drink? and I’d say, Why not? with an air of insouciance. (That was another of my favorite words at the time because it was what I was aiming at, and because I liked the sound of it.) If I had a few drinks the insouciance might come. In my charming Irish way I’d be the life of the party, but I didn’t want to leave the rail and the comfort of ending it all.

Thirty-eight was on my mind. Aging teacher sailing to Dublin, still a student. Is that any way for a man to live?

I forced myself onto a deck chair for a mid-Atlantic crisis meeting with myself, closed my eyes to shut out the ocean and the sight of the nurse. I couldn’t block out the
click-clack
of her high heels and the American guffaw of Mr. Ancient Ascot.

If I had any kind of intelligence, beyond the mere sniffing survival skills, I would have attempted an agonizing reappraisal of my life. But I had no talent for introspection. After all those years of confession in Limerick I could examine my conscience with the best of them. This was different. Mother Church was no help here. On that deck chair I could barely venture beyond the catechism. I was beginning to understand that I did not understand, and digging into myself and my miseries made my head hurt. A thirty-eight-year-old in a mess and didn’t know what to do about it. That’s how ignorant I was. Now I know you’re encouraged to blame everyone but yourself for everything: parents; the miserable childhood; the church; the English.

People in New York, Alberta especially, told me, You need help. I knew they were saying, You’re obviously disturbed. You should see a shrink.

She insisted. She said I was impossible to live with and made an appointment for me with a psychoanalyst on East Ninety-sixth Street, shrink row. The man’s name was Henry, and I got off on the wrong foot when I told him he looked like Jeeves. He said, Who’s Jeeves? and he wasn’t pleased when I told him about that P. G. Wodehouse character. He raised his eyebrows in a Jeevesian way and I felt like a fool. Besides, I did not know what this was all about, what I was doing in that office. I knew from psychology classes at NYU that the mind had various parts, the conscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the ego, the id, the libido and maybe other little nooks and crannies where demons lurked. That was the extent of my knowledge, if it was knowledge at all. Then I wondered why I was paying money I could barely afford to sit opposite this man who scribbled in a notebook at chin level, stopping occasionally to stare at me as if I were a specimen.