Alberta talks about marriage. She’d like to settle down, have a husband, go to antique shops on weekends, make dinner, get a decent apartment some day, be a mother.
But I’m not ready yet. I see Malachy and Michael having their grand times uptown. I see the Clancy Brothers singing in the back room of the White Horse Tavern, acting in plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre, recording their songs, being discovered and moving on to glamorous clubs where beautiful women invite them to parties. I see the Beats in cafés all over the Village reading their work with jazz musicians in the background. They’re all free and I’m not.
They drink. They smoke pot. The women are easy.
Alberta follows her grandmother’s Rhode Island routines. Every Saturday you make coffee, smoke a cigarette, put your hair up in pink curlers, go to the supermarket, get a big order, stock the refrigerator, take soiled things to the Laundromat and wait till they’re cleaned and ready to be folded, go to the dry cleaner with garments which look clean to me and when I object she simply says, What would you know about dry cleaning? clean the house whether it needs it or not, have a drink, make a big dinner, go to a movie.
Sunday morning you sleep late, have a big lunch, read the paper, look at antiques on Atlantic Avenue, come home, prepare lessons for the week, correct papers, make a big dinner, have a drink, correct more papers, have tea, smoke a cigarette, go to bed.
She works harder at teaching than I do, prepares her lessons carefully, corrects papers conscientiously. Her students are more academic than mine and she can encourage them to talk about literature. If I mention books, poetry, plays my students groan and whine for the lavatory pass.
The supermarket depresses me because I don’t want a big dinner every night. It exhausts me. I want to roam the city, drink coffee in cafés and beer in bars. I don’t want to face the Zoe routine every weekend the rest of my life.
Alberta tells me things have to be taken care of, that I have to grow up and settle down or I’ll be like my father, a mad wanderer drinking myself to death.
This leads to an argument where I tell her I know my father drank too much and abandoned us but he’s my father, not hers, and she’ll never understand how it was when he didn’t drink, mornings I had with him by the fire, listening to his talk about Ireland’s noble past and Ireland’s great sufferings. She never had mornings like that with her father who left her with Zoe when she was seven and I wonder how she could ever get over that. How could she ever forgive her mother and father for dumping her on the grandmother?
The argument is so bad I walk out and live in my Village flat, ready for the wild bohemian life. Then I hear she has found someone else and suddenly I want her, I’m desperate, I’m mad for her. I can think only of her virtues, her beauty and energy and the sweetness of her weekend routines. If she takes me back I’ll be the perfect husband. I’ll take coupons to the supermarket, wash the dishes, vacuum the whole apartment every day of the week, chop vegetables for the big dinners every night. I’ll wear a tie, polish my shoes, turn Protestant.
Anything.
I don’t care anymore about the wild life of Malachy and Michael uptown, the scruffy Beats in the Village with their useless lives. I want Alberta, crisp and bright and womanly, all warm and secure. We’ll be married, oh we will, and we’ll grow old together.
She agrees to meet me in Louis’ Bar near Sheridan Square and when she walks in the door she’s more beautiful than ever. The bartenders stop pouring to look at her. Necks are craned. She’s wearing the rich blue coat with a light gray fur collar her father bought her as a peace offering after he punched her in the mouth years ago. There’s a silken lavender scarf over the collar and I know I’ll never look at that color again without thinking of this moment, that scarf. I know she’s going to sit on the stool beside me and tell me it was all a mistake, that we were made for each other and I should come with her now to her apartment, she’ll make dinner and we’ll live happily ever after.
Yes, she’ll have a martini and no she won’t go with me to my apartment and no I won’t go with her to her apartment because it’s over. She’s had enough of me and my brothers, the uptown scene and the Village scene, and she wants to get on with her life. It’s hard enough teaching every day without the strain of putting up with me and my whining about how I want to do this that and the other thing, how I want to be everything but responsible. Too much complaining, she says. Time to grow up. She tells me I’m twenty-eight years old but I act like a kid and if I want to waste my life in bars like my brothers it’s my business but she’ll have no part of it.
The more she talks the angrier she grows. She won’t let me hold her hand or even kiss her on the cheek and, no, she won’t have another martini.
How can she talk to me like this with my heart breaking there on the bar stool? She doesn’t care that I was the first man in her life, the first ever in the bed, the one a woman never forgets. All that doesn’t matter because she’s found someone who is mature, who loves her, who will do anything for her.
I’ll do anything for you.
She says it’s too late. You had your chance.
My heart is banging away, and there’s a great pain in my chest and all the dark clouds in the world are gathered in my head. I want to cry into my beer there in Louis’ Bar but there would be talk, oh, yeah, another lovers’ quarrel and we’d be asked to leave or at least I would. I’m sure they’d like Alberta to stay to adorn the place. I don’t want to be out on the street with all those happy couples strolling to dinners and movies and a little snack later before they climb into the bed all naked and, Jesus, is this her plan for tonight when I’m alone in my cold-water flat and no one in the world to talk to but Bill Galetly?
I appeal to her. I invoke my miserable childhood, brutal schoolmasters, the tyranny of the Church, my father who chose the bottle over the babies, my defeated mother moaning by the fire, my eyes blazing red, my teeth crumbling in my head, the squalor of my flat, Bill Galetly tormenting me with people in Platonic caves and the Gospel According to St. John, my hard days at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, older teachers telling me whip the little bastards into shape, the younger ones declaring our students are real people and it’s up to us to motivate them.
I plead with her to have another martini. It might soften her so much she’ll come to my apartment where I’ll tell Bill, Take a walk, Bill, we need privacy. We want to sit in the candlelight and plan a future of Saturday shopping, vacuuming, cleaning, Sunday antique hunting, lesson planning and hours romping in the bed.
No, no, she won’t have another martini. She’s meeting her new man and she has to go.
Oh, God, no. It’s a knife in my heart.
Stop the whining. I’ve heard enough about you and your miserable childhood. You’re not the only one. I was dumped on my grandmother when I was seven. Do I complain? I just get on with it.
But you had hot and cold running water, thick towels, soap, sheets on the bed, two clear blue eyes and fine teeth and your grandmother packed your little lunch box to capacity every day.
She climbs from the bar stool, lets me help her with her coat, drapes the lavender scarf around her neck. She has to go.
Oh, Christ. I could easily whimper like a kicked dog. My belly is cold and there’s nothing in the world but dark clouds with Alberta in the middle all blonde, blue-eyed, lavender-scarved, ready to leave me forever for her new man and it’s worse than having doors shut in my face, worse than dying itself.
Then she kisses my cheek. Good night, she says. She doesn’t say good-bye. Does that mean she’s leaving a door open? Surely if she’s finished with me forever she should be saying good-bye.
It doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Out the door. Up the steps with every man in the bar looking at her. It’s the end of the world. I might as well be dead. I might as well jump into the Hudson River and let it carry my corpse past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty across the Atlantic and up the River Shannon where at least I’d be among my own people and not rejected by Rhode Island Protestants.
The bartender is about fifty and I’d like to ask him if he’s ever suffered the way I’m suffering now and what did he do about it? Is there a cure? He might even be able to tell me what it means when a woman who’s leaving you forever says good night instead of good-bye.
But this man has a great bald head and massive black eyebrows and I have a feeling he has his own troubles and there’s nothing for it but to get off the bar stool and leave. I could go uptown and join Malachy and Michael in their exciting lives but I walk home to Downing Street instead hoping happy passing couples won’t hear the escaping whimpers of a man whose life is over.
Bill Galetly is there with his candles, his Plato, his Gospel According to St. John and I wish I could have my own place to myself for a night of whimpering into my pillow but he’s sitting on the floor staring at himself in the mirror and pinching whatever flesh he can find on his belly. He looks up and tells me I look heavy-laden.
What do you mean?
The burden of the ego. You’re sagging. Remember, the Kingdom of God is within you.
I don’t want God or His Kingdom. I want Alberta. She gave me up. I’m going to bed.
Bad time to go to bed. To lie down is to lie down.
It irritates me to have to listen to the obvious and I tell him, Of course it is. What are you talking about?
To lie down is to succumb to gravity at a time when you could spiral to the perfect form.
I don’t care. I’m lying down.
Okay. Okay.
I’m in the bed a few minutes when he sits on the edge and tells me of the madness and emptiness of the advertising business. Plenty of money and everyone wretched with stomach ulcers. All ego. No purity. He tells me I’m a teacher and I could save many lives if I studied Plato and St. John but first I have to save my own life.
I’m not in the mood.
Not in the mood to save your own life?
No, I don’t care.
Yeah, yeah, that’s what happens when you’re rejected. You take it personally.
Of course I take it personally. How else would I take it?
Look at her side of the story. She’s not rejecting you, she’s accepting herself.
He’s going around in circles and the Alberta pain is so great I have to get away. I tell him I’m going out.
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.
Down in Greenwich Village I buy shirts and socks in shops called haberdasheries and I don’t know what material they’re made of even though there are people telling me you have to be careful what you put on your body nowadays, you might have allergies and break out in a rash. I never worried about such things in Limerick but here danger lurks even in the buying of socks and shirts.
Things in shop windows have names I don’t know and I don’t know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It’s strange to stand at a florist’s shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don’t even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people’s gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I’m sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I’d have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it’s not likely you’d be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.
All along the avenue there are shops with gourmet foods and if I ever enter such a place I’ll have to bring someone who grew up respectable and knows the difference between pâté de foie gras and mashed potatoes. All these shops are obsessed with French and I don’t know what they’re thinking of. Why can’t they say spuds instead of pommes or is it that you pay more for something printed in French?
There’s no sense at all looking in the windows of antique furniture shops. They’ll never let you know the price of something till you ask and they’ll never plant a sign on a chair to tell you what it is or where it came from. Most of the chairs you wouldn’t want to sit in anyway. They’re so upright and stiff they’d give you such a pain in your back you’d wind up in the hospital. Then there are little tables with curved legs so delicate they’d collapse under the weight of a pint and destroy a priceless carpet from Persia or wherever people sweat for the pleasure of rich Americans. There are delicate mirrors, too, and you wonder what it’s like in the morning to see your face in a frame agog with little Cupids and maidens frolicking and where would you look in such confusion? Would I look at the stuff oozing from my eyes or would I be enchanted with a maiden succumbing to a Cupid arrow?
With the dawn glimmering far down in Greenwich Village Fifth Avenue is nearly deserted except for people making their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to save their souls, mostly old women who seem to have greater fear than the old men mumbling along beside them or it may be that old women live longer and there are more of them. When the priest dispenses Communion the pews empty and I envy the people coming back down the aisles with the wafers in their mouths and the holy look that tells you they’re in a state of grace. They can go home now and have the big breakfast and if they fall dead while eating sausages and eggs they go straight to heaven. I’d like to make my peace with God but my sins are so terrible any priest would drive me from the confessional and I know once again my only hope for salvation is that I’ll have an accident where I’ll linger for a few minutes so that I can make an Act of Perfect Contrition that will open the gates of heaven.
Still, it’s comforting to sit in the cathedral in the hush of a dawn Mass especially when I can look around and put names on what I see, the pews, the Stations of the Cross, the pulpit, the tabernacle with the monstrance holding the Eucharist inside, the chalice, the ciborium, the cruets for wine and water at the altar’s right side, the paten. I know nothing about jewelry and the flowers in the shop but I can recite the priestly vestments, the amice, the alb, the girdle, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble, and I know the priest up there wearing the purple chasuble of Lent will change to white on Easter Sunday when Christ is risen and Americans give their children chocolate rabbits and yellow eggs.
After all the Sunday mornings in Limerick I can skip as easily as an altar boy from the Introit of the Mass to the Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed, the signal for the thirsty men of Ireland to rise from their knees and flock to the pubs for the Sunday pint, cure for the woes of the night before.
I can name the parts of the Mass and the priestly vestments and the parts of a rifle like Henry Reed in his poem but what use is all this if I rise in the world and sit in a stiff chair at a table where they’re serving fancy food and I can’t tell the difference between mutton and duck?
It’s full daylight on Fifth Avenue and there’s no one but myself sitting on the steps between the two great lions of the Forty-second Street public library where Tim Costello told me to go nearly ten years ago to read The Lives of the English Poets. There are little birds of different sizes and colors flitting from tree to tree telling me spring will soon be here and I don’t know their names either. I can tell the difference between a pigeon and a sparrow and there it ends except for the seagull.
If my students at McKee High School could look into my head they’d wonder how I ever became a teacher at all. They know already I never went to high school and they’d say, That’s it. Here’s a teacher who stands up there giving us vocabulary lessons and he doesn’t even know the names of the birds in the trees.
The library will be open in a few hours and I could sit in the Main Reading Room with big picture books that tell me the names of things but it’s still early morning and it’s a long way to Downing Street, Bill Galetly cross-legged and squinting at himself in the mirror, Plato and the Gospel According to St. John.
He’s flat on his back on the floor, naked and snoring, a candle guttering by his head, banana peels everywhere. It’s cold in the flat but when I place a blanket over him he sits up and pushes it away. Sorry about the bananas, Frank, but I had a little celebration this morning. Big breakthrough. Here it is.
He points to a passage in St. John. Read it, he says. Go ahead, read it.
And I read, It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing, the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life.
Bill stares at me. So?
What?
You get it? You dig?
I don’t know. I’d have to read it a few times and it’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been up all night.
I fasted for three days to get inside that. You have to get inside things. Like sex. But I’m not finished. I’m looking for the parallel world in Plato. Guess I’ll have to go to Mexico.
Why Mexico?
Great shit there.
Shit?
You know. Variety of chemicals to help the seeker.
Oh, yes. I’m going to bed for a while.
Wish I could offer you a banana but I had the celebration.
I sleep a few hours this Sunday morning and when I awake he’s gone leaving behind nothing but banana skins.