If Mrs. Austin won’t let me have a light I can still sit up in the bed or lie down or I can decide to stay in or go out. I won’t go out tonight because of my bald head and I don’t mind because I can stay here and turn my mind into a film about Limerick. This is the greatest discovery I’ve made from lying in the room, that if I can’t read because of my eyes or Mrs. Austin complaining about the light I can start any kind of a film in my head. If it’s midnight here it’s five in the morning in Limerick and I can picture my mother and brothers asleep with the dog, Lucky, growling at the world and my uncle, Ab Sheehan, snorting away in his bed from all the pints he had the night before and farting from his great feed of fish and chips.
I can float through Limerick and see people shuffling through the streets for the first Sunday Mass. I can go in and out of churches, shops, pubs, graveyards and see people asleep or groaning with pain in the hospital at the City Home. It’s magic to go back to Limerick in my mind even when it brings the tears. It’s hard to pass through the lanes of the poor and look into their houses and hear babies crying and women trying to start fires to boil water in kettles for the breakfast of tea and bread. It’s hard to see children shivering when they have to leave their beds for school or Mass and there’s no heat in the house like the heat we have here in New York with radiators singing away at six in the morning. I’d like to empty out the lanes of Limerick and bring all the poor people to America and put them in houses with heat and give them warm clothes and shoes and let them stuff themselves with porridge and sausages. Some day I’ll make millions and I’ll bring the poor people to America and send them back to Limerick fat-arsed and waddling up and down O’Connell Street in light colors.
I can do anything I like in this bed, anything. I can dream about Limerick or I can interfere with myself even if it’s a sin, and Mrs. Austin will never know. No one will ever know unless I go to confession and I’m too doomed for that.
Other nights when I have hair on my head and no money I can walk around Manhattan. I don’t mind that one bit because the streets are as lively as any film at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse. There’s always a fire engine screaming around a corner or an ambulance or a police car and sometimes they come screaming together and you know there’s a fire. People always watch for the fire engine to slow down and that tells you what block to go to and where to look for smoke and flames. If someone is at a window ready to jump that makes it more exciting. The ambulance will wait with flashing lights and cops will tell everyone move back. That’s the main job of cops in New York, telling everyone move back. They’re powerful with their guns and sticks but the real hero is the fireman especially if he climbs a ladder and plucks a child from a window. He could save an old man with crutches and nothing on but a nightshirt but it’s different when it’s a child sucking her thumb and resting her curly head on the fireman’s broad shoulder. That’s when we all cheer and look at each other and know we’re all happy about the same thing.
And that’s what makes us look in the Daily News the next day to see if there’s any chance we might be in the picture with the brave fireman and the curly-haired child.
9
Mrs. Austin tells me her sister, Hannah, that’s married to the Irishman, is coming for a little visit on Christmas before they go out to her house in Brooklyn and she’d like to meet me. We’ll have a sandwich and a Christmas drink and that will get Hannah’s mind off her troubles with that crazy Irishman. Mrs. Austin doesn’t understand herself why Hannah would want to spend Christmas Eve with the likes of me, another Irishman, but she was always a bit strange and maybe she likes the Irish after all. Their mother warned them a long time ago back in Sweden, over twenty years, would you believe it, to stay away from Irishmen and Jews, to marry their own kind and Mrs. Austin doesn’t mind telling me her husband, Eugene, was half-Swedish, half-Hungarian, that never drank a drop in his life though he loved to eat and that’s what killed him in the end. She doesn’t mind telling me he was big as a house when he died, that when she wasn’t cooking he was raiding the refrigerator and when they got a TV set that was really the end of him. He’d sit there eating and drinking and worrying about the state of the world so much his heart just stopped, just like that. She misses him and it’s hard after twenty-three years especially when they had no kids. Her sister, Hannah, has five kids and that’s because the Irishman won’t ever leave her alone, a couple of drinks and he’s jumping on her, just like a typical Irish Catholic. Eugene wasn’t like that, he had respect. In any case she’ll expect to see me after work on Christmas Eve.
On the day itself Mr. Carey invites the housemen of the hotel and four chambermaid supervisors to his office for a little Christmas drink. There’s a bottle of Paddy’s Irish whiskey and a bottle of Four Roses which Digger Moon won’t touch. He wants to know why anyone would drink piss like Four Roses when they can have the best thing that ever came out of Ireland, the whiskey. Mr. Carey strokes his belly along the double-breasted suit and says it’s all the same to him, he can’t drink anything. It would kill him. But drink anyway, here’s to a Merry Christmas and who knows what the next year will bring.
Joe Gilligan is already smiling from whatever he’s been swigging all day from the flask in his back pocket and between that and the arthritis there’s the odd stumble. Mr. Carey tells him, Here, Joe, sit in my chair, and when Joe tries to sit he lets out a great groan and there are tears on his cheeks. Mrs. Hynes, the head of all the chambermaids, goes over to him and holds his head against her chest and pats him and rocks him. She says, Ah, poor Joe, poor Joe, I don’t know how the good Lord could twist your bones after what you did for America in the war. Digger Moon says that’s where Joe got the arthritis, in the goddam Pacific, where they have every goddam disease known to man. Remember this, Joe, it was the goddam Japs gave you that arthritis the way they gave me malaria. We haven’t been the same since, Joe, you an’ me.
Mr. Carey tells him take it easy, take it easy with the language, there are ladies present, and Digger says, Okay, Mr. Carey, I respect you for that and it’s Christmas so what the hell. Mrs. Hynes says, That’s right, it’s Christmas and we must love each other and forgive our enemies. Digger says, Forgive my ass. I don’t forgive the white man and I don’t forgive the Japs. But I forgive you, Joe. You suffered more than ten Indian tribes with that goddam arthritis. When he grabs Joe’s hand to shake it Joe howls with pain and Mr. Carey says, Digger, Digger. Mrs. Hynes says, Will you, for the love o’ Jesus, have respect for Joe’s arthritis. Digger says, Sorry, ma’am, I have the greatest respect for Joe’s arthritis, and to prove it he holds a large glass of Paddy’s to Joe’s lips.
Eddie Gilligan stands over in a corner with his glass and I wonder why he looks and says nothing when the world is worried about his brother. I know he has his own troubles with his wife’s blood infection but I can’t understand why he won’t at least stand closer to his brother.