“Going into a restaurant, opening a menu, perusing it, and ordering whatever the body could digest was always a wonder to my brother and me.”
Well, wouldn’t you know it, my brother Frank visited me last night. He just wriggles his way into my dreams sometimes, after I partake of certain spicy foods late at night, or doze off, reading something just too bloody boring. Last night I was guilty on both counts, which was practically an invitation for Frank to come and visit. Still, just how he creeps in, I’ll never know.
May I tell you about the dream? In it, it was lunchtime and present were Terry Moran, Pat Mulligan, Sean Carberry, and myself, Malachy McCourt. Someone suggested we ought to do this lunch on a regular basis. Then came the whens and the when nots. One can’t do it on Monday, other can’t do it on Wednesday, and so on. I said let’s do it every first Friday because though we were all collapsed Catholics, we knew that the church said if you went to Mass and received communion for nine first Fridays you were assured of a priest when your death was nigh. I proposed that if you did nine of our Fridays, you would not die without a bartender in attendance. The motion was carried, and thus the First Friday Club came into existence in March 1973.
There is still a vestige of it in existence.
With me the only founder still attending.
Until he retired from teaching at Stuyvesant High School, my brother Frank could not attend, but he did start after retirement. And a very great addition he was, too. Over the years, our venue was Eamonn Doran’s Saloon on Second Avenue, and we were often graced with some saintly celebrated folk like Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Dennis Smith, James T. Farrell, William Kennedy, the various Irish ambassadors and consuls. It was a largely Irish male gang until Mary Higgins Clark, Mary Karr, Mary Tierney, Marcia Rock, and Mary Breasted Smyth founded a rival group calling themselves the Legion of Mary. Catholics will know this one.
They assembled on the opposite side of Eamonn’s and would have nothing to do with our crowd. One time the writer Peggy Noonan outraged the women by insisting on sitting with the men. She, of course, is a Republican.
There was an element of the Algonquin Round Table in our gatherings as the wit flowed as freely as the Guinness and savage sarcasm was not unknown.
It was at a First Friday that the following exchange took place between my brother Frank and my friend Mary Breasted Smyth.
Mary: What are you doing now that you are retired, Frank?
Frank: I am getting the miserable childhood down on paper. Finding the voice was elusive, but now it’s coming along.
Mary: May I have a look, as I know an agent or two?
Frank: Certainly! I have about a hundred pages!
Mary: Let’s go.
Now, I can’t vouch for the veracity of this story, but I heard Mary took Frank’s pages to an agent, who glanced at it and tossed it back to her with the comment that he did not think anyone would be interested in a book written by an unknown teacher about a miserable childhood in an obscure town in Ireland.
Mary took it to another agent, Molly Friedrich, who leapt on it and hand-carried it to Nan Graham at Scribner, and not for the first time, the First Friday lunch club gave birth to a book.
As I said, I don’t know for certain that was the sequence, but true or not, it does illustrate the triumph of great writing over stupidity and cupidity.
And I became Frank McCourt’s brother, and he was never again Malachy McCourt’s brother. Even in my dream, he had a rapscallion’s twinkle in his eye, and in conversation there was, as usual, the quips, rejoinders, and comebacks that Frank was noted for, particularly as people could never get past his deadpan delivery. In the dream, he was so vivid, so real, so close to me, he could easily have kicked my grizzled, doddery, superannuated arse.
There were many times over the years that we broke bread, commiserated, laughed, remembered.
It was as a result of imitating our Limerick teachers, neighbors, and clergy at various mealtimes. Frank said we should write it all up as a play; we did, and thus the play A Couple of Blaguards was born and is still being performed.
We no longer said grace before meals anymore, which was mandatory in the old days.
Bless us, O Lord,
In these thy gifts
Which of thy bounty
We are bound to receive
Through Christ our Lord
Amen
We did joke about having on the table that which was missing when we were children, namely food. Frank said we had had a balanced diet, a liquid and a solid, namely tea and bread. Sometimes in childhood we got to share an egg. You have no idea how carefully the mother was watched as she sliced a hard-boiled egg into four equal pieces for us. Likewise, bread was also sliced with surgeon-like precision, and crumbs were quickly grabbed and scooped up into the gob.
Going into a restaurant, opening a menu, perusing it, and ordering whatever the body could digest was always a wonder to my brother and me. When the two of us lunched, it was at a diner near Stuyvesant High School, while Frank was still teaching there. Between riotous chuckles and mostly salty anecdotes and reminiscences, we would happily stuff burgers into our gobs (Frank’s was always bunless; he had that gluten nonsense), and plates heaped high with lumpy, leaden mashed potatoes. My drink of choice was tea, while Frank was known to toss back a beer or two.
I never tired of his company. My brother was one of the most eloquent human beings ever to have been born. He could hold forth on a huge variety of subjects with humor, satire, and exaltation of language and clever speech. He was not interested in proper English, nor was he always grammatically correct, though he taught English and felt that colorful speech was important.
It’s possible that he was the only high school teacher in New York City who never went to high school and did not have a high school diploma.
Generally speaking, we had no agenda when we met. When he was living with his first wife—the War Department, as I dubbed her—his life was more miserable than our childhood. There were no cell phones in those days but she always managed to track Frank down, and the waiters would have to take long, abusive messages before they came and got him to the phone. She disliked me, so he could never admit he was meeting me, but she always knew and berated him for wasting his time with me, or else she couldn’t find the dust pan, or something else like did he mail the ConEd bill, or where’s the toothpaste and other nasty, pointless forms of lunchus interruptus.
We did chat about the doings of the two younger McCourts, Mike and Alphie, what they were not doing right, getting involved in ill-advised ventures, with some solemn older-brother headshaking. Then there was our mother, Angela, still here on holiday, after twenty years, having weight problems and smoking, which she eventually stopped, but not early enough to avoid that dastardly emphysema.
Then the subjects were our children and their doings and undoings.
Frank’s only child, his daughter, Maggie, absconded and joined a loony group of aimless young people meandering around the United States following a band, and they called themselves Dead Heads. A more appropriate appellation was never invented. It was a terrible insult to actual dead people, however, as there is more life in those dead folk.
But there they go yelping, screaming, gyrating, and boasting about the number of times they have seen the Grateful Dead onstage, still not knowing the amount of money they have been conned out of.
I had five offspring to discuss, two from a previous legal entanglement; two with Diana, my always present beloved; and one stepchild who is severely autistic. There were enough of them to cause various concerns, but none of them were off in cuckoo pursuit, flinging money at a disguised capitalistic enterprise known as rock.
To my relief, Frank took a permanent leave of absence from his awful alliance with the War Department but leaped into another alliance with a woman who put the powder into her nose rather than on it. That did not last too long. Then he met the light of his life, Ellen, married again, and lived happily ever after. She encouraged him to write, unlike the War Department, who disparaged him at every turn. Finally, with Ellen, Angela’s Ashes emerged.
My last breaking of bread with brother Frank was at his bedside in the hospice, the marvelous visiting nurse service in New York City.
He had that Irish skin that welcomes melanoma, which hit him on the knee and rampaged through his body, finally landing in the brain and depriving him of hearing, so we had to write down every word to him. And this is the part that creeps into every dream that Frank sneaks into. One day he was having soup and I was into a tuna sandwich when Alphie’s wife, Lynn, arrived, clumping noisily on the two canes she had to use. Frank saw her and said loudly: It was very quiet in here until you arrived, the usual Frank sort of welcome, though he couldn’t even hear the clumping of her canes. We laughed, of course.
Then he asked Lynn: When would you like to die?
Lynn wrote: January seems like a good month.
Frank: Why January?
Lynn wrote: I would have gotten all my Christmas gifts.
I wrote: When would you like to die?
Frank: February!
I wrote: The ground is frozen, making it hard to dig graves.
Frank: Let the Israelis do it.
We all laughed. I don’t even know what he meant—I suppose that they were rugged, strapping, and unflagging—but it sounded funny. That was indeed the last laugh and the last lunch. We were sitting in the little living room adjacent to the bedroom when Frank slipped into a coma, chatting quietly, when we heard a very loud sigh and that was Frank letting go of his last breath. It was July 19, 2009, at 3:03 p.m. That was the end of my dear brother Frank McCourt but the beginning of his frequent nightly forays into my deepest, darkest sleep. A place where he is always most welcome.
Malachy McCourt is or has been an actor, a saloon keeper, a gubernatorial candidate, and an author/writer husband to his wife, Diana, for fifty-four years, father to five, grandfather to eight. His most recent book is Death Need Not Be Fatal.