Teacher Man: A Memoir (20 page)

I kept a separate pile of index cards for the story of the Irish in America, a pile that grew higher than the one on literary relations. It was all enough to keep me away from the pubs at lunchtime, enough to keep me from the work I should have been doing on Irish-American literary relations.

Could I change my dissertation topic? Would Trinity allow me to present some aspect of the Irish in America, politics, music, the military, entertainment?

Professor Walton said that would not be possible in the English Department. I seemed to be straying into history and that would require approval of the History Department, which he doubted would be possible since I had no background in history. I had already spent a year at Trinity and would have only one more year to finish my dissertation on Irish-American literary relations. The professor said one must keep one’s hand firmly on the helm.

How could I tell my wife in New York I’d squandered a year exploring the ditches and railbeds of Irish-American history when I should have been improving my knowledge of literature?

I hung on in Dublin making feeble attempts at shaping some kind of dissertation. If I went to a pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else.

I sat on a bench in St. Stephen’s Green coveting the office girls of Dublin. Would they run away with me to Coney Island, Far Rockaway, the Hamptons?

I watched the ducks in the pond and envied them. All they had to do in the world was quack, paddle and open their mouths for morsels. They didn’t have to worry about the dissertation that was killing me. How and why did I ever get into this? Jesus! I could be in New York, grateful for my lot, teaching my five classes a day, going home, having a beer, going to a movie, reading a book, cooing to the wife and so to bed.

Oh, but no. Little snotty-nosed Frankie from the lanes of Limerick tried to rise above his station, climb the social ladder, mingle with a better class of people, the quality of Trinity College.

This is what you get, Frankie, for your paltry ambition. Why don’t you run down the street and buy yourself a Trinity scarf? See if that will lift your spirits, help you write that grand original study of Irish-American literary relations,
1889
to
1911
.

There is an activity called “pulling yourself together.” I tried, but what was there to pull together?

The second year in Dublin dribbled away. I couldn’t find my niche there. I didn’t have the personality or the self-confidence to shoulder my way into a group, be one of the lads, buy my round and make the witty comments you’re supposed to hear in Irish pubs.

I sat in the library and added to my mountain of index cards. Drinking added to my addleheadedness. I went for long walks around the city, up one street and down the other. I met a woman, a Protestant, and we went to bed. She fell in love with me, and I didn’t know why.

I wandered the streets of Dublin looking for the door. I had a notion that in any city there was a way in for the outsider and the traveler. In New York, for me, it was schools and bars and friendship. There was no door for me in Dublin and I had to admit, finally, what ailed me: I missed New York. At first, I resisted the feeling. Go away. Leave me alone. I love Dublin. Look at the history. Every street is brimming with the past. I dreamt of Dublin when I was a child in Limerick. Yes, but, yes, but yes, as my Uncle Pa Keating would say, You’re going on forty, so it’s time to shit or get off the pot.

Before I left Trinity, Professor Walton glanced over the index cards and said, My, my.

In January of
1971
, I returned to New York, a failing doctoral candidate. Alberta was pregnant. We had conceived the summer before, during our fortnight stay in Nantucket. I told her I could continue research at the Forty-second Street Library in New York. She was impressed with my bag of index cards, but wanted to know what purpose they served.

Every Saturday I sat in the South Reading Room of the Forty-second Street Library. I should have sat in the North Reading Room in the literature section but I found the
Lives of the Saints
in the South and they were too gripping to be ignored. Then I happened on accounts of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, how the Irish and the Chinese, coming from opposite directions, competed, how the Irish drank and undermined their health while the Chinese smoked opium and rested, how the Irish didn’t care what they ate while the Chinese nourished themselves on the food they knew and loved, how the Chinese never sang while they worked and how the Irish never stopped, for all the good it did them, the poor crazy Irish.

Alberta went on maternity leave and I took her place back at Seward. But a month after I started at Seward Park High School the principal died of a heart attack. Then I met the new principal in the elevator, the department chairman who had fired me from Fashion Industries High School. I said, Are you following me? and when his mouth tightened I knew, once again, my days were numbered.

A few weeks later I sealed my doom. In the presence of other teachers, the principal asked, So, Mr. McCourt, are you a father yet?

No, not yet.

Well, what do you want, a boy or a girl?

Oh, it’s all the same to me.

Well, he said, as long as it’s not a neuter.

Well, if it is, I’ll train it to grow up and be a principal.

The letter that I was being “excessed” soon followed, signed by Assistant Principal (Acting) Mitchel B. Schulich.

A failed everything, I looked for my place in the world. I became an itinerant substitute teacher, drifting from school to school. High schools called me for day-to-day work to replace sick teachers. Some schools needed me when teachers were called for long spells of jury duty. I was assigned classes in English or wherever a teacher was needed: biology, art, physics, history, mathematics. Substitute teachers like me floated somewhere on the fringes of reality. I was asked daily, And who are you today?

Mrs. Katz.

Oh.

And that’s what you were: Mrs. Katz or Mr. Gordon or Ms. Newman. You were never yourself. You were always Oh.

In the classroom I had no authority. Assistant principals sometimes told me what to teach, but students paid no attention and there was nothing I could do. The ones who came to class ignored me and chatted, asked for the pass, rested their heads on desks and dozed, floated paper airplanes, studied for other subjects.

I learned how to discourage them from coming to class at all: If you want an empty classroom all you have to do is stand at the classroom door and scowl. They’ll decide you’re mean and run. Only Chinese came to class. They must have been warned by their parents. They sat in the back and studied, resisting my subtle hints that they disappear, too. Principals and their assistants looked displeased when they saw me sitting at the teacher’s desk reading the paper or a book in a near-empty room. They said I should be teaching. That’s what I was hired for. I would gladly teach, I said, but this is a physics class and my license is in English. They knew it was a silly question, but they were supervisors and had to ask, Where are the kids? Everyone in every school knew the rule: When you see a substitute teacher, run, baby, run.

A
year after I returned from Dublin, our old friend R’lene Dahlberg introduced me to Roger Goodman, head of the English Department at Stuyvesant High School. He asked if I would be interested in covering the classes of Mr. Joe Curran for a month or so while he convalesced from something. Stuyvesant was said to be the top high school in the city, the Harvard of high schools, alma mater of various Nobel Prize winners, of James Cagney himself, a school where, as soon as a boy or girl was admitted, doors opened to the best universities in the country. Thirteen thousand candidates sat every year for the Stuyvesant admissions test and the school skimmed off the top seven hundred.

Now I taught where I could never have been one of the seven hundred.

When Joe Curran returned after a few months Roger Goodman offered me a permanent position. He said the kids liked me, that I was a vital, engaging teacher, that I’d be a valuable addition to the English Department. I was embarrassed by this praise but I said yes and thank you. I promised myself I’d stay only two years. Teachers all over the city vied for jobs at Stuyvesant High School, but I wanted to be out in the world. At the end of a school day you leave with a head filled with adolescent noises, their worries, their dreams. They follow you to dinner, to the movies, to the bathroom, to the bed.

You try to put them out of your mind. Go away. Go away. I’m reading a book, the paper, the writing on the wall. Go away.

I wanted to be doing something adult and significant, going to meetings, dictating to my secretary, sitting with glamorous people at long mahogany boardroom tables, flying to conventions, unwinding in trendy bars, sliding into bed with luscious women, entertaining them before and after with witty pillow talk, commuting to Connecticut.

When my daughter was born in
1971
my fantasies faded before her sweet reality and I began to feel at home in the world. Every morning I gave Maggie her bottle, changed her diaper, dipped her bottom in warm soapy water in the kitchen sink, resisted the morning newspaper because of the time it would consume, stood with the rush-hour crowd on the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, walked along Fifteenth Street to Stuyvesant, made my way through a crowd of waiting students to the front door, pushed in, said good morning to the guard, punched in at the time clock, took a pile of papers from my mailbox, said good morning to teachers punching in, opened the door to my empty classroom, room
205
, opened windows with the long pole, sat and looked over the empty desks, relaxed for the few minutes before my first class, thought of my daughter gurgling that morning in the kitchen sink, watched dust dancing in the shaft of sunlight piercing the room, took the attendance book from a drawer and spread it on the desk, erased from the blackboard grammar notes from last night’s French lesson in the adult evening school, opened the classroom door, said hi to the surge of students in the first class.

Roger Goodman said it was important to teach diagramming. He loved the structure and Euclidian beauty of it. I said, Oh, because I knew nothing about diagramming. He told me these things at lunch in the Gas House Bar and Restaurant around the corner from the school.

Roger was short and bald, his baldness offset by rich bushy black-and-gray eyebrows and a short beard, which lent him a twinkling impishness.

He lunched with teachers. That made him unusual among assistant principals, who reminded me of the Cabots and Lodges.

Some afternoons Roger came to the Gas House to drink with us. He had no affectations, always cheerful, always encouraging, a supervisor you could feel comfortable with. He put on no airs, no intellectual pretensions, and mocked bureaucratic gobbledygook. I don’t think he could have uttered “pedagogical strategizing” without chuckling.

He trusted me. He seemed to think I could teach on any of the four levels of high school: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. He even asked what I’d like to teach and took me to the room where books were organized by grade. It was dazzling to see them ranged on shelves reaching to the twenty-foot ceilings and stacked on carts for delivery to classrooms. There were anthologies of English, American and world literature, piles of
The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, The Painted Bird, Moby-Dick, Arrowsmith, Intruder in the Dust, Lie Down in Darkness, Introduction to Poetry
by X. F. Kennedy. There were dictionaries, collections of poetry, short stories, plays, textbooks on journalism and grammar.

Take whatever you want, said Roger, and if there’s anything else you’d like we can order it. Take your time. Think about it tonight. Let’s go to the Gas House for lunch.

School, books, lunch. It was all one to Roger. He did not change hats. At day’s end when teachers lined up to punch out and rush home he’d waggle his eyebrows and invite you around the corner for a stirrup cup, one for the road. For the long journey to his apartment at the far end of Brooklyn a man needed sustenance. He would sometimes drive me home, on three-martini days a drive slow and deliberate. Perched on the cushion that elevated his short body he would hold the steering wheel as if guiding a tugboat. Next day he’d confess he didn’t remember much about the drive.

In my years of teaching this was the first time I felt free in the classroom. I could teach whatever I liked. If outsiders stuck their heads in the door it didn’t matter. When Roger came for a rare observation he wrote enthusiastic positive reports. He broke down my resistance to anyone in the world a step or two above me. I told him what I was doing in my classes and all I got was encouragement. Sometimes he’d slip in a word or two about the necessity of teaching diagramming and I’d promise to try it. After a while it was a joke.

I tried but failed. I made lines vertical, horizontal, slanting, and then I stood, adrift at the blackboard, till a Chinese student volunteered to take over and teach the teacher what the teacher should have known.

My students were patient, but I could tell from the looks they exchanged, and the traffic in notes passing back and forth, that I was in a grammar wilderness. At Stuyvesant they had to know grammar for their classes in Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin.

Roger understood. He said, Maybe diagramming is not your strong point. He said some people just don’t have it. R’lene Dahlberg had it. Joe Curran certainly had it. After all, he was a graduate of Boston Latin, a school two and a half centuries older than Stuyvesant and, he claimed, more prestigious. Teaching at Stuyvesant for him was a step down in the world. He could diagram in Greek and Latin and probably French and German. That’s the kind of training you get at Boston Latin. Jesse Lowenthal had it, too, but of course he would. He was the oldest teacher in the department with his elegant three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his old-world manners, his scholarship, Jesse who did not want to retire but, when he did, planned to spend his days studying Greek and drifting into the next life with Homer on his lips. It pleased Roger to know he had in his department a solid core of teachers who could be relied on to diagram at a moment’s notice.

Roger said it was sad Joe Curran had such a drinking problem. Otherwise he could have entertained Jesse with miles of Homer from memory and, if Jesse was up to it, Virgil and Horace, and the one Joe favored out of his own great anger, Juvenal himself.

In the teachers’ cafeteria Joe told me, Read your Juvenal so you’ll understand what’s going on in this miserable fookin’ country.

Roger said it was sad about Jesse. Here he is in his twilight years with Christ only knows how many years of teaching under his belt. He doesn’t have the same energy for five classes a day. He asked to have his load reduced to four but no, oh no, the principal says no, the superintendent says no, all the way up the bureaucracy they say no, and Jesse says good-bye. Hello Homer. Hello Ithaca. Hello Troy. That’s Jesse. We’re going to lose a great teacher and, boy, could he diagram. What he did with a sentence and a piece of chalk would stun you. Beautiful.

If you asked the boys and girls of Stuyvesant High School to write three hundred and fifty words on any subject they might respond with five hundred. They had words to spare.

If you asked all the students in your five classes to write three hundred and fifty words each then you had
175
multiplied by
350
and that was
43
,
750
words you had to read, correct, evaluate and grade on evenings and weekends. That’s if you were wise enough to give them only one assignment per week. You had to correct misspellings, faulty grammar, poor structure, transitions, sloppiness in general. You had to make suggestions on content and write a general comment explaining your grade. You reminded them there was no extra credit for papers adorned with ketchup, mayonnaise, coffee, Coke, tears, grease, dandruff. You suggested strongly they write their papers at desk or table and not on train, bus, escalator or in the hubbub of Joe’s Original Pizza joint around the corner.

If you gave each paper a bare five minutes you’d spend, on this one set of papers, fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes. That would amount to more than two teaching days, and the end of the weekend.

You hesitate to assign book reports. They are longer and rich in plagiarism.

Every day I carried home books and papers in a fake brown leather bag. My intention was to settle into a comfortable chair and read the papers, but after a day of five classes and
175
teenagers I was not inclined to prolong that day with their work. It could wait, damn it. I deserved a glass of wine or a cup of tea. I’d get to the papers later. Yes, a nice cup of tea and a read of the paper or a walk around the neighborhood or a few minutes with my little daughter when she told me about her school and the things she did with her friend Claire. Also, I ought to scan a newspaper in order to keep up with the world. An English teacher should know what’s going on. You never knew when one of your students might bring up something about foreign policy or a new Off-Broadway play. You wouldn’t want to be caught up there in front of the room with your mouth going and nothing coming out.

That’s the life of the high school English teacher.

The bag sat on the floor in a corner by the kitchen, never far from sight or mind, an animal, a dog waiting for attention. Its eyes followed me. I didn’t want to hide it in a closet for fear I might forget completely there were papers to read and correct.

There was no point in trying to read them before dinner. I’d wait till later, help with the dishes, put my daughter to bed, get down to work. Get that bag, man. Sit on the couch where you can spread things out, put some music on the phonograph or turn on the radio. Nothing distracting. Some acoustic syrup. Music to grade papers by. Settle yourself on the couch.

Rest your head a minute before you tackle the first paper on your lap, “My Stepfather the Jerk.” More teen angst. Close your eyes a moment. Ah…drift, teacher, drift…You’re floating. A slight snore wakes you. Papers on the floor. Back to work. Scan the paper. Well-written. Focused. Organized. Bitter. Oh, the things this girl says about her stepfather, that he’s a bit too familiar with her. Invites her to movies and dinner when her mother works overtime. And there’s the way he looks at her. Mother says, Oh, that’s nice, but there’s something about her eyes, and then the silence. Writer wonders what she should do. Is she asking me, the teacher? And should I do something? Am I to respond, help her out of her dilemma? If there is a dilemma. Stick my nose into family matters where it doesn’t belong? She could be making it up. What if I say something and it gets back to stepfather or mother? I could read and evaluate this paper objectively, congratulate the writer on the clarity and development of her theme. That’s what I’m there for, isn’t it? I’m not supposed to get involved in every little family squabble, especially in Stuyvesant High School, where they like to “let it all hang out.” Teachers tell me half these kids are in therapy and the other half should join them. I’m not a social worker or a therapist. Is this a cry for help or another teenage fantasy? No, no, too many problems in these classes. Kids in other schools were never like this. They didn’t turn the class into group therapy. Stuyvesant is different. I could give this paper to a guidance counselor. Here, Sam, you take care of this. If I didn’t, and it came out later that the stepfather abused the girl and the world knew I’d let it slip by, important people in the school system would summon me to their offices: assistant principals, principals, superintendents. They would want explanations. How could you, experienced teacher, let this happen? My name might even blaze across page three of the tabloids.

Make a few marks with the red pen. Give her a
98
. The writing is terrific, but there are spelling errors. Congratulate her on writing that is honest and mature, and tell her, Janice, you have great promise and I hope to see more of your work in the coming weeks.

They have ideas I want to dissipate, about the private lives of teachers. I tell them, In your head choose one of your teachers. Don’t tell anyone the name. Don’t write it down. Now speculate. When that teacher leaves the school every day what does he — or she — do? Where does he go?

You know. After school, teacher goes directly home. Carries a bag filled with papers to be read and marked. Might have a cup of tea with spouse. Oh, no. Teacher would never have a glass of wine. That’s not how teachers live. They don’t go out. Maybe a movie on the weekend. They have dinner. They put their kids to bed. They watch the news before they settle in for the night to read those papers. At eleven it’s time for another cup of tea or a glass of warm milk to help them sleep. Then they put on pajamas, kiss the spouse and drift off.