I said it again, Shakespeare. There was fear in the room and I felt myself drawn to the edge of a cliff with something in my head demanding, How can you move from Salinger to Shakespeare?
I told the class, It’s Shakespeare or The Scarlet Letter, kings and lovers or a woman having a baby in Boston. If we read Shakespeare we’ll act out the plays. If we read The Scarlet Letter we’ll sit here and discuss the deeper meaning and I’ll give you the big exam they keep in the department office.
Oh, no, not the deeper meaning. English teachers always be going on about the deeper meaning.
All right. It’s Shakespeare, no deeper meaning and no exams except what you decide. So, write your name on this paper and the amount you’re paying and we’ll get the book.
They passed up their nickels and dimes. They groaned when they thumbed the book, Five Great Plays of Shakespeare. Man, I can’t read this old English.
I wished I could have dominated my classes like other teachers, imposed on them classic English and American literature. I failed. I caved in and took the easy way with Catcher in the Rye and when that was taken dodged and danced my way to Shakespeare. We’d read the plays and enjoy ourselves and why not? Wasn’t he the best?
Still my students complained till someone called out, Shit, man, excuse the language, Mr. McCourt, but here’s this guy saying Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
Where? Where? The class wanted to know the page number and all around the room boys declaimed Mark Antony’s speech, flung out their arms and laughed.
Another discovered Hamlet’s To be or not to be soliloquy and soon the room was filled with ranting Hamlets.
The girls raised their hands. Mr. McCourt, the boys have all these great speeches and there’s nothing for us.
Oh, girls, girls, there’s Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Gertrude.
We spent two days plucking morsels from the five plays, Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Hamlet; Henry IV, Part One.
My students led and I followed because there was nothing else to do. Remarks had been passed in the hallways, in the students’ cafeteria.
Hey, wass dat?
It’s a book, man.
Oh, yeah? What book?
Shakespeare. We’re reading Shakespeare.
Shakespeare? Shit, man, you not reading Shakespeare.
When the girls wanted to act out Romeo and Juliet the boys yawned and obliged. This would be sissy romantic stuff till the fight scene where Mercutio dies in style, telling the world about his wound.
’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door/But ’tis enough, ’twill serve.
To be or not to be was the passage everyone memorized but when they recited it they had to be reminded this was a meditation on suicide and not an incitement to arms.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
The girls wanted to know why everyone picked on Ophelia especially Laertes, Polonious, Hamlet. Why didn’t she fight back? They had sisters like that who were married to bastard sons o’ bitches, excuse the language, and you wouldn’t believe what they put up with.
A hand went up. Why didn’t Ophelia run away to America?
Another hand. Because there was no America in the old days. It had to be discovered.
Whadda you talkin’ about? There was always an America. Where do you think the Indians lived?
I told them they’d have to look it up and the opposing hands agreed to go to the library and report next day.
One hand, There was an America in Shakespeare’s time and she coulda went.
The other hand, There was an America in Shakespeare’s time but no America in Ophelia’s time and she cuddena went. If she went in Shakespeare’s time there was nothing but Indians and Ophelia woulda been uncomfortable in a tepee which is what they called their houses.
We moved on to Henry IV, Part One, and all the boys wanted to be Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff. The girls complained again there was nothing for them except for Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude and look what happened to them. Didn’t Shakespeare like women? Did he have to kill everyone who wore a skirt?
The boys said that’s the way it is and the girls snapped back they were sorry we didn’t read The Scarlet Letter because one of them had read it and told the rest how Hester Prynne had her beautiful baby, Pearl, and the father was a jerk who died miserable and Hester got her revenge on the whole town of Boston and wasn’t that much better than poor Ophelia floating down a stream, out of her mind, talking to herself and throwin’ flowers around, wasn’t it?
Mr. Sorola came to observe me with the new head of the Academic Department, Mrs. Popp. They smiled and didn’t complain about this Shakespeare book not being on the syllabus though the next term Mrs. Popp took this class away from me. I lodged a grievance and had a hearing before the superintendent. I said that was my class, I had started them reading Shakespeare and I wanted to continue in the next term. The superintendent ruled against me on the grounds that my attendance record was spotty and erratic.
My Shakespeare students were probably lucky in having the head of the department as their teacher. She was surely more organized than I and more likely to discover deeper meanings.
48
Paddy Clancy lived around the corner from me in Brooklyn Heights. He called to see if I’d like to go to the opening of a new bar in the Village, the Lion’s Head.
Of course I’d like to go and I stayed till the bar closed at 4 A.M. and missed work the next day. The bartender, Al Koblin, thought for a while I was one of the singing Clancy Brothers and charged me nothing for the drinks till he discovered I was only Frank McCourt, a teacher. Now even though I had to pay for my drinks I didn’t mind because the Lion’s Head became my home away from home, a place where I could feel comfortable the way I never did in uptown bars.
Reporters from the offices of the Village Voice drifted in from next door and they attracted journalists from everywhere. The wall opposite the bar was soon adorned with the framed book jackets of writers who were regular customers.
That was the wall I coveted, the wall that haunted me and had me dreaming that some day I’d look up at a framed book jacket of my own. Up and down the bar writers, poets, journalists, playwrights talked about their work, their lives, their assignments, their travels. Men and women would have a drink while waiting for cars to planes that would take them to Vietnam, Belfast, Nicaragua. New books came out, Pete Hamill, Joe Flaherty, Joel Oppenheimer, Dennis Smith, and went up on the wall, while I hung on the periphery of the accomplished, the ones who knew the magic of print. At the Lion’s Head you had to prove yourself in ink or be quiet. There was no place here for teachers and I went on looking at the wall, envious.
Mam moved into a small apartment across the street from Malachy on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Now she could see Malachy, his new wife, Diana, their sons, Conor and Cormac, my brother Alphie, his wife, Lynn, and their daughter, Allison.
She could have visited all of us as often as she liked and when I asked her why she didn’t she barked at me, I don’t want to be beholden to anyone. It irritated me always when I called and asked her what she was doing and she said, Nothing. If I suggested that she get out of the house and visit a community center or a senior citizens’ center she’d say, Arrah, for the love o’ Jesus, will you leave me alone. Whenever Alberta invited her to dinner she always made a point of being late, complaining of the long journey from her Manhattan apartment to our house in Brooklyn. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to come at all if it was such a bother to her and the last thing she needed anyway was a dinner she was getting that fat, but I curbed my tongue so that there wouldn’t be tension at the table. Unlike the first time she came to dinner and pushed the noodles aside she now devoured everything before her though if you offered her a second helping she’d look prim and say no thanks as if she had the appetite of a butterfly and then pick at the crumbs on the table. If I told her she didn’t have to pick at crumbs, there was more food in the kitchen, she’d tell me leave her alone, that I was getting to be a right bloody torment. If I told her she’d be better off if she’d stayed in Ireland she’d bristle, What do you mean I’d be better off?