Dad shook his head.
Why are you shaking your head? You are an alcoholic and you have to admit it.
Och, no. I’m not an alcoholic like those poor people at the meeting. I don’t drink kerosene.
Malachy threw up his hands and returned to his tea at the table. We didn’t know what to say to each other in the presence of this man on the couch, husband, father. I had my memories of him, mornings by the fire in Limerick, his stories and songs, his cleanliness, neatness and sense of order, the way he helped us with our schoolwork, his insistence on obedience and attention to our religious duties, all destroyed by his payday madness when he threw his money around the pubs buying pints for every hanger-on while my mother despaired by the fire knowing the next day she’d have to stick her hand out for charity.
I knew in the days that followed that if blood called to blood I’d drift to my father’s side of the family. My mother’s people had often said in Limerick I had the odd manner of my father and a strong streak of the North in my character. They may have been right because whenever I went to Belfast I felt at home.
The night before he left he asked if we’d like to go for a walk. Mam and Malachy said no, they were tired. They had spent more time with him than I and must have been weary of his shenanigans. I said yes because this was my father and I was a nine-year-old thirty-three-year-old.
He put on his cap and we walked down Flatbush Avenue. Och, he said, it’s a very warm kind of a night.
’Tis.
Very warm, he said. You’d be in danger of drying up on a night like this.
Ahead of us was the Long Island Railroad Station ringed with bars for the thirsty commuters. I asked if he remembered the bars.
Och, he said, why should I remember such places?
Because you drank in them and we searched for you.
Och, well, I might have worked in one or two when times were hard for the bread and meat they gave me to take home to you childer.
He remarked again on the heat of the night and surely it wouldn’t do us any harm to cool ourselves in one of these places.
I thought you didn’t drink.
That’s right. Gave it up.
Well, what about the ship? You had to be carried off.
Och, that was the seasickness. We’ll have something here for the coolness.
While we drank our beer he told me my mother was a fine woman and I should be good to her, that Malachy was a fine big lad though you’d hardly know him with that red beard and where did it come from, that he was sorry to hear I had married a Protestant though it wasn’t too late for her to convert nice girl that she was and he was happy to hear I was a teacher like all his sisters in the North and would there be any harm in having another beer?
No, there wouldn’t be any harm and there wasn’t any harm in the beers we had up and down Flatbush Avenue and when we arrived back at my mother’s apartment I left him at the door because I didn’t want to see the looks on the faces of Mam and Malachy that would accuse me of leading my father astray or vice versa. He wanted to continue the drinking up toward Grand Army Plaza but my guilt told me to say no. He was supposed to leave next day on the Queen Mary though he hoped my mother would say, Ah, stay. Sure we’ll find some way of getting along.
I said that would be lovely and he said we’d all be together again and things would be better because he was a new man. We shook hands and I left.
Next morning Mam called and said, He went pure mad, so he did.
What did he do?
You brought him home drunk as a lord.
He wasn’t drunk. He had a few beers.
He had more than that and I was here by myself with Malachy gone into Manhattan. A bottle of whiskey he had, your father, that he brought from the ship and I had to call the cops and he’s gone now, bag and baggage, and sailed away today on the Queen Mary because I called Cunard and they told me, oh, yes, they had him on board and they’d be watching closely for any signs of the lunacy he came with.
What did he do?
She wouldn’t tell me and she didn’t have to because it was easy to guess. He probably tried to get into bed with her and that was not part of her dream. She hinted and suggested that if I hadn’t spent hours with him in saloons he would have behaved himself and wouldn’t be on the Queen Mary now heading out into the Atlantic. I told her his drinking wasn’t my fault but she was sharp with me. Last night was the last straw, she said, and you were part of it.
47
For teachers Fridays are bright. You leave the school with a bag filled with papers to read and correct, books to read. This weekend you will surely catch up with all those uncorrected, unmarked papers. You don’t want to let them pile up in the closets like Miss Mudd so that decades hence a young teacher will pounce on them to keep his classes busy. You will take the papers home, pour a glass of wine, stack Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins and Hector Berlioz on the phonograph and try to read a hundred and fifty student compositions. You know that some don’t care what you do with their work as long as you give them a decent grade so that they can pass and get on with real life in their shops. Others fancy themselves as writers and want their papers back corrected and graded high. The class Romeos would like you to comment on their papers and read them aloud so that they can bask in the admiring glances of the girls. The ones who don’t care are sometimes interested in the same girls and verbal threats are passed from desk to desk because the ones who don’t care are weak in written expression. If a boy is a good writer you have to be careful about praising him too much because of the danger of accidents on the stairs. The ones who don’t care hate goody-goodies.
You intend to go straight home with your bag but you then discover Friday afternoon is the time for beer and teacher enlightenment. An occasional teacher might say he has to go home to his wife till he finds Bob Bogard standing by the time clock to remind us of first things first, that the Meurot Bar is a few steps away, next door in fact, and what harm would there be in one beer, one? Bob is not married and may not understand the dangers for a man who might go beyond the one beer, a man who might have to face the wrath of a wife who has cooked a fine Friday fish and now sits in the kitchen watching the grease congeal.
We stand at the Meurot Bar and order our beers. There is teacher small talk. When there’s a mention of good-looking women on our staff or even nubile students we roll our eyes. What we wouldn’t do if we were high school kids nowadays. We talk tough at the mention of troublesome boys. One more word out of that goddam kid and he’s gonna beg for a transfer. We unite in our hostility to authority, all the people who emerge from their offices to supervise and observe us and tell us what to do and how to do it, people who spent as little time as possible in the classroom themselves and don’t know their ass from their elbow about teaching.
A young teacher might drop in, just graduated from college, newly licensed. The drone of university professors and the chatter from college cafeterias is still in his ears and if he wants to discuss Camus and Sartre and how existence precedes essence or vice versa he’ll be talking to himself in the mirror of the Meurot Bar.
None of us had followed the Great American Path, elementary school, high school, college, and into teaching at twenty-two. Bob Bogard fought in the war in Germany and was probably wounded. He won’t tell you. Claude Campbell served in the navy, graduated from college in Tennessee, published a novel when he was twenty-seven, teaches English, has six children with his second wife, took a master’s degree at Brooklyn College with a thesis, Ideational Trends in the American Novel, fixes everything in his house, wiring, plumbing, carpentry. I look at him and think of Goldsmith’s lines on the village schoolmaster, “And all around the wonder grew/That one small head could carry all he knew.” And Claude hasn’t even reached the age of Christ at his crucifixion, thirty-three.