On a slow day at Merchants Refrigerating we’re told we can go home. Instead of taking the train back to Queens I walk up Hudson Street and stop at a bar called the White Horse Tavern. I’m nearly twenty-three but I have to prove I’m eighteen before they’ll give me a beer and a knockwurst sandwich. It’s quiet in the bar even though I’ve read in the paper it’s a favorite place of poets, especially the wild man, Dylan Thomas. People sitting at tables by the windows look like poets and artists and they’re probably wondering why I’m sitting at the bar with trousers caked with beef blood. I wish I could sit there by the windows with a long-haired girl and tell her how I’ve read Dostoyevsky and how Herman Melville got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.
There’s nothing to do but sit at the bar tormenting myself with questions. What am I doing here with this knockwurst and beer? What am I doing in the world at all? Will I spend the rest of my life hauling sides of beef from truck to freezer and vice versa? Will I end my days in a small apartment in Queens while Emer is happy raising a family in a suburb completely protected by insurance? Will I ride the subways all my life envying people carrying books from universities?
I shouldn’t be eating knockwurst at a time like this. I shouldn’t be drinking beer when I don’t have an answer in my head. I shouldn’t be in this bar with poets and artists all sitting there with their serious whispered conversations. I’m weary of knockwurst and liverwurst and the feel of frozen meat on my shoulders every day.
I push the knockwurst away and leave a half stein of beer and walk out the door, across Hudson Street, along Bleecker Street, not knowing where I’m going but knowing I have to keep walking till I know where I’m going, and here I am in Washington Square and there’s New York University and I know that’s where I have to go with my GI Bill, high school or no high school. A student points to the admissions office and the woman gives me an application. She says I didn’t fill it in properly, that they need to know my high school graduation, where and when.
I never went.
You never went to high school?
No, but I have the GI Bill and I’ve been reading books all my life.
Oh, my, but we require high school graduation or the equivalency.
But I read books. I’ve read Dostoyevsky and I’ve read Pierre, or the Ambiguities. It’s not as good as Moby Dick but I read it in a hospital in Munich.
You actually read Moby Dick?
I did and Pierre, or the Ambiguities got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.
I can see she doesn’t understand. She goes into another office with my application and brings out the Dean of Admissions, a woman with a kind face. The dean tells me I’m an unusual case and wants to know about my schooling in Ireland. It’s her experience that European students are better prepared for college work and she will allow me to enroll at NYU if I can maintain a B average for a year. She wants to know what kind of work I do and when I tell her about the meat she says, My, my, I learn something every day.
Since I’m not a high school graduate and work full time I’m allowed to take only two courses, Introduction to Literature and the History of Education in America. I don’t know why I have to be introduced to literature but the woman in the admissions office says it’s a requirement even though I’ve read Dostoyevsky and Melville and that’s admirable for someone without a high school education. She says the History of Education in America course will provide me with the broad cultural background I need after my inadequate European education.
I’m in heaven and the first thing to do is buy the required textbooks, cover them with the purple and white NYU book jackets so that people in the subway will look at me admiringly.
All I know of university classes is what I saw a long time ago in the movies in Limerick and here I am sitting in one, the History of Education in America, with Professor Maxine Green up there on the platform telling us how the Pilgrims educated their children. All around me are students scribbling away in their notebooks and I wish I knew what to scribble myself. How am I supposed to know what’s important out of all the things she’s saying up there? Am I supposed to remember everything? Some students raise their hands to ask questions but I could never do that. The whole class would stare at me and wonder who’s the one with the accent. I could try an American accent but that never works. When I try it people always smile and say, Do I detect an Irish brogue?
The professor is saying the Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and that puzzles me because the Pilgrims were English themselves and the English were always the ones who persecuted everyone else, especially the Irish. I’d like to raise my hand and tell the professor how the Irish suffered for centuries under English rule but I’m sure everyone in this class has a high school diploma and if I open my mouth they’ll know I’m not one of them.
Other students are easy about raising their hands and they always say, Well, I think.
Some day I’ll raise my hand and say, Well, I think, but I don’t know what to think about Pilgrims and their education. Then the professor tells us ideas don’t drop fully formed from the skies, that the Pilgrims were, in the long run, children of the Reformation with an accompanying worldview and their attitudes to children were so informed.
There is more notebook scribbling around the room, the women busier than the men. The women scribble as if every word out of Professor Green’s mouth were important.
Then I wonder why I have this fat textbook on American education which I carry in the subways so that people can admire me for being a college student. I know there will be examinations, a midterm and a final, but where will the questions come from? If the professor talks and talks and the textbook is seven hundred pages I’ll surely be lost.
There are good-looking girls in the class and I’d like to ask one if she knows what I should know before the midterm exam in seven weeks. I’d like to go to the university cafeteria or a Greenwich Village coffee shop and chat with the girl about the Pilgrims and their Puritan ways and how they frightened the life out of their children. I could tell the girl how I read Dostoyevsky and Melville and she’d be impressed and fall in love with me and we’d study the history of education in America together. She’d make spaghetti and we’d go to bed for the excitement and then we’d sit up in the bed reading the fat textbook and wondering why people in old New England made themselves so miserable.
Men in the class look at the scribbling women and you know they’re not paying the professor a scrap of attention. You know they’re deciding which girls they’ll talk to afterward and when this first class ends they move toward the good-looking ones. They smile easily with their fine white teeth and they’re used to chatting because that’s what they did in high school where boys and girls sit together. A good-looking girl will always have someone waiting for her in the hall outside and the man in the class who started chatting with her will lose his smile.
The lecturer in the Saturday morning class is Mr. Herbert. The girls in the class seem to like him and they must know him from other classes because they ask him about his honeymoon. He smiles and jingles the change in his trouser pocket and tells us about his honeymoon and I wonder what this has to do with Introduction to Literature. Then he asks us to write two hundred words on an author we’d like to meet and why. My author is Jonathan Swift and I write that I’d like to meet him because of Gulliver’s Travels. A man with an imagination like that would be a great one to have a cup of tea or a pint with.
Mr. Herbert stands on his platform, looks through the essays, and says, Hmmm, Frank McCourt. Where is Frank McCourt?
I raise my hand and feel my face turning red. Ah, says Mr. Herbert, you like Jonathan Swift?
I do.
For his imagination, eh?
Yes.
His smile is gone and his voice doesn’t sound friendly and I feel uncomfortable with the way everyone in the class is looking at me. He says, You do know that Swift was a satirist, don’t you?
I have no notion of what he’s talking about. I have to lie and say, I do.
He says, You do know he was perhaps the greatest satirist in English literature.
I thought he was Irish.
Mr. Herbert looks at the class and smiles. Does that mean, Mr. McCourt, that if I’m from the Virgin Islands I’m a virgin?
There is laughter around the room and I feel my face on fire. I know they’re laughing at me because of the way Mr. Herbert toyed with me and put me in my place. Now he tells the class that my essay is a perfect example of a simplistic approach to literature, that while Gulliver’s Travels may be enjoyed as a children’s story it is important in English literature, not Irish, ladies and gentlemen, for its satiric brilliance. He says, When we read great works of literature in college we endeavor to rise above the mundane and the childish, and when he says that he looks at me.
The class ends and the girls gather around Mr. Herbert to smile and tell him how they enjoyed his honeymoon story and I feel so ashamed I walk down six flights of stairs so that I don’t have to be in the elevator with students who might despise me for enjoying Gulliver’s Travels for the wrong reasons or even students who might feel sorry for me. I put my books in a bag because I don’t care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can’t hold on to a girl, I can’t keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. If I’d stayed there and taken the exam I’d be a postman now strolling from street to street, handing out letters, chatting with the women, going home for my tea without a worry in the world. I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart’s content not giving a fiddler’s fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.