The Greek says, Good night, gen’men, and would we like to take some day-old doughnuts. Take ’em, he says, or I trow out. Jerry says he’ll have one to keep him going to Ireland’s Thirty-Two where he’ll have a feed of corned beef and cabbage and floury white potatoes. The Greek fills a bag with doughnuts and confectionery and tells me I look like I could use a decent meal, so take the bag.
Jerry says good night at Sixty-eighth Street and I wish I could go with him. The whole day has me dizzy and it’s still not over with the Swedes there waiting, stirring the glug, slicing the raw fish. The thought of it makes me puke all over again there on the street and people passing by, frantic with Christmas, make sounds of disgust and step away from me, telling their little children, Don’t look at that disgusting man. He’s drunk. I want to tell them, please don’t turn the little children against me. I want to tell them this is not a habit I have. There are clouds at the back of my head, my mother has a goose, at least, but she needs shoes.
But there’s no use trying to talk to people with parcels and children by the hand and their heads ringing with Christmas carols because they’re going home to bright apartments and they know God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world, as the poet said.
Mrs. Austin opens the door. Oh, look, Hannah, Mr. McCourt brought us a whole bag of doughnuts and pastries. Hannah gives a little wave from the couch and says, That’s nice, you never know when you might need a bag of doughnuts. I always thought the Irish brought a bottle but you’re different. Give the boy a drink, Stephanie.
Hannah is drinking red wine but Mrs. Austin goes to a bowl on the table and ladles out the black stuff into a glass, the glug. My stomach turns again and I have to control it.
Siddown, says Hannah. Lemme tell you something, Irish boy. I don’t give a shit about your people. You may be nice, my sister says you’re nice, you bring nice doughnuts, but right under your skin you’re nothing but shit.
Please, Hannah, says Mrs. Austin.
Please, Hannah, my ass. What did you people ever do for the world besides drink? Stephanie, give him some fish, decent Swedish food. Moon-faced mick. You make me sick, you little mick. Ah, ha, didja hear the poetry in that?
She cackles away over her poetry and I don’t know what to do with my glug in one hand and Mrs. Austin pushing fish at me with the other. Mrs. Austin is drinking the glug, too, and she staggers from me to the bowl to the couch where Hannah is holding out her glass for more wine. She slurps her wine and glares at me. She says, A kid I was when I married that mick. Nineteen. How many years ago? Jesus, twenty-one. Whadda you, Stephanie? Forty-something? Wasted my life on that mick. And what are you doin’ here? Who sent you?
Mrs. Austin.
Mrs. Austin. Mrs. Austin. Speak up, you little spud-shitter. Drink your glug and speak up.
Mrs. Austin sways before me with her glug glass. Come on, Eugene, less go to bed.
Oh, I’m not Eugene, Mrs. Austin.
Oh.
She turns and wobbles away into another room and Hannah cackles again, See that. She still doesn’t know she’s a widow. Wish I was a goddam widow.
The glug I drank is making my stomach turn and I try to rush to the street but the door has three locks and I’m throwing up in the basement vestibule before I can get out. Hannah lurches from the couch and tells me get into the kitchen, get a mop and soap and clean up this goddam mess, don’t you know it’s Christmas Eve for Chrissakes and is this how you treat your gracious host.
From kitchen to door I go with dripping mop, swabbing, squeezing, rinsing in the kitchen sink and back again. Hannah pats my shoulder and kisses my ear and tells me I’m not such a bad mick after all, that I must have been well brought up the way I clean my mess. She tells me help myself to anything, glug, fish, even one of my own doughnuts, but I place the mop back where I found it and walk past Hannah, with the idea in my head that once I cleaned up I don’t have to listen to her anymore or anyone like her. She calls to me, Where you going? Where the hell do you think you’re going? but I’m up the stairs to my room, my bed, so that I can lie there listening to Christmas carols on the radio with the world spinning around me and a great wonder in my head about the rest of my life in America. If I wrote to anyone in Limerick and told them about my Christmas Eve in New York they’d say I was making it up. They’d say New York must be a lunatic asylum.
In the morning there’s a knock at my door and it’s Mrs. Austin in dark glasses. Hannah is farther down the stairs and she’s in dark glasses, too. Mrs. Austin says she heard I had an accident in her apartment but no one can blame her or her sister since they were prepared to offer the finest of Swedish hospitality and if I chose to arrive at their little party in a certain state they couldn’t be blamed and it’s too bad because they wanted nothing but a truly Christian Christmas Eve and I just wanted to tell you, Mr. McCourt, we don’t appreciate your behavior one bit, isn’t that right, Hannah?
There’s a croak from Hannah as she coughs and puffs on a cigarette.
They go back down the stairs and I want to call after Mrs. Austin to see if there’s any chance she could spare me a doughnut from the Greek’s bag since I’m so empty from all the throwing up last night but they’re out the door and from my window I can see them loading Christmas parcels into a car and driving off.
I can stand at the window all day looking at the happy people with children by the hand going off to church, as they say in America, or I can sit up in the bed with Crime and Punishment and see what Raskolnikov is up to but that will stir up all kinds of guilt and I don’t have the strength for it and it’s not the right kind of reading for a Christmas Day anyway. I’d like to go up the street for Communion at St. Vincent Ferrer’s but it’s years since I went to confession and my soul is as black as Mrs. Austin’s glug. The happy Catholic people with children by the hand are surely going to St. Vincent’s and if I follow them I’m bound to have a Christmas feeling.
It’s lovely to go into a church like St. Vincent’s where you know the Mass will be just like the Mass in Limerick or anywhere in the world. You could go to Samoa or Kabul and they’d have the same Mass and even if they wouldn’t let me be an altar boy in Limerick I still have the Latin my father taught me and no matter where I go I can respond to the priest. No one can scoop out the contents of my head, all the saints’ feast days I know by heart, the Mass Latin, the chief towns and products of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, songs galore of Ireland’s sufferings and Oliver Goldsmith’s lovely poem “The Deserted Village.” They could put me in jail and throw away the key but they could never stop me from dreaming my way around Limerick and out along the banks of the Shannon or thinking about Raskolnikov and his troubles.
The people who go to St. Vincent’s are like the ones who go to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse for Hamlet and they know the Latin responses the way they know the play. They share prayer books and sing hymns together and smile at each other because they know Brigid the maid is back there in the Park Avenue kitchen keeping an eye on the turkey. Their sons and daughters have the look of coming home from school and college and they smile at other people in the pews also home from school and college. They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in snow they’d be lost forever.
The church is so crowded there are people standing in the back but I’m so weak with the hunger and the long Christmas Eve of whiskey, glug and throwing up I want to find a seat. There’s an empty spot at the end of a pew far up the center aisle but as soon as I slip into it a man comes running at me. He’s all dressed up in striped trousers, a coat with tails, and a frown over his face and he whispers to me, You must leave this pew at once. This is for regular pew holders, come on, come on. I feel my face turning red and that means my eyes are worse and when I go down the aisle I know the whole world is looking at me, the one who sneaked into the pew of a happy family with children home from school and college.