The youngest woman in the class, Nicole, turned the tables on me. She sat in the back in a corner and never spoke till I asked the class if they’d like to write about their mothers. Then she raised her hand. How about your mother, Mr. McCourt?
Questions came like bullets. Is she alive? How many children did she have? Where’s your father? Did she have all those children with one man? Where is she living? Who’s she living with? She’s living alone? Your mother’s living alone and she has four sons? How come?
They frowned. They disapproved. Poor lady with four sons shouldn’t be living alone. People should take care of their mothers but what do men know? You can never tell a man what it’s like to be a mother and if it wasn’t for the mothers America would fall apart.
In April Martin Luther King was killed and classes were suspended for a week. When we met again I wanted to beg forgiveness for my race. Instead I asked for the essays I had already assigned. Mrs. Williams was indignant. Look, Mr. McCourt, when they tryin’ to burn your house down you ain’t sittin’ around writin’ no cawm-po-zishuns.
In June Bobby Kennedy was killed. My thirty-six ladies wondered what was happening to the world but they agreed you have to carry on, that education was the only road to sanity. When they talked about their children their faces brightened and I became irrelevant to their talk. I sat on my desk while they told each other that now they were in college themselves they stood over their kids to make sure the homework was done.
On the last night of classes in June there was a final examination. I watched those dark heads bent over papers, the mothers of two hundred and twelve children, and I knew, that no matter what they wrote or didn’t write on those papers, no one would fail.
They finished. The last paper had been handed in but no one was leaving. I asked if they had another class here. Mrs. Williams stood and coughed. Ah, Mr. McCourt, I must say, I mean we must say, it was a wonderful thing to come to college and learn so much about English and everything and we got you this little something hopin’ you’ll like it an’ all.
She sat down, sobbing, and I thought, This class begins and ends in tears.
The gift was passed up, a bottle of shaving lotion in a fancy red and black box. When I sniffed it I was nearly knocked over but I sniffed again with gusto and told the ladies I’d keep the bottle forever in memory of them, this class, their yoots.
Instead of going home after that class I took the subway to West Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan and called my mother from a street telephone.
Would you like to have a snack?
I don’t know. Where are you?
I’m a few blocks away.
Why?
I just happened to be in the neighborhood.
Visiting Malachy?
No. Visiting you.
Me? Why should you be visiting me?
For Christ’s sake, you’re my mother and all I wanted to do was invite you out for a snack. What would you like to eat?
She sounded doubtful. Well, I love them jumbo shrimps they have in the Chinese restaurants.
All right. We’ll have jumbo shrimps.
But I don’t know if I’m able for them this minute. I think I’d prefer to go to the Greeks for a salad.
All right. I’ll see you there.
She came into the restaurant gasping for breath and when I kissed her cheek I could taste the salt of her sweat. She said she’d have to sit a minute before she could even think of food, that if she hadn’t given up the cigarettes she’d be dead now.
She ordered the feta salad and when I asked her if she liked it she said she loved it, she could live on it.
Do you like that cheese?
What cheese?
The goat cheese.
What goat cheese?
The white stuff. The feta. That’s goat cheese.
’Tis not.
’Tis.
Well, if I knew that was goat cheese I’d never touch it because I was attacked by a goat once out the country in Limerick and I’d never eat a thing that attacked me.
It’s a good thing, I told her, you were never attacked by a jumbo shrimp.
50
In 1971 my daughter Maggie was born at Unity Hospital in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. There would be no problem taking home the right infant since she seemed to be the only white one in the nursery.
Alberta wanted a natural Lamaze childbirth but the doctors and nurses at Unity Hospital had no patience with middle-class women and their peculiarities. They had no time for this woman and her breathing exercises and jabbed her with an anesthetic to hasten the birth. Instead, that slowed the rhythm so much the impatient doctor clamped forceps on Maggie’s head and yanked her from her mother’s womb and I wanted to punch him for the flatness he left on her temples.
The nurse took the child to a corner to clean and wash her and when she finished beckoned that I might now see my daughter with her red astonished face and her black feet.
The soles of her feet were black.
God, what kind of a birthmark have you inflicted on my child? I couldn’t say anything to the nurse because she was black and might be offended that I didn’t find my daughter’s black feet attractive. I had a vision of my child as a young woman lolling on a beach, lovely in a bathing suit, but forced to wear socks to conceal her disfigurement.
The nurse asked if the baby was to be breast-fed. No. Alberta had said she wouldn’t have the time when she went back to work and the doctor did something to dry up her milk. They wanted to know the child’s name and even though Alberta had toyed with Michaela she was still under anesthetic and powerless and I told the nurse, Margaret Ann, for my two grandmothers and my sister who had died at twenty-one days in this very borough of Brooklyn.
Alberta was wheeled back to her room and I called Malachy to tell him the good news, that a child had been born but that she was afflicted with black feet. He laughed in my ear and told me I was an ass, that the nurse probably took footprints instead of fingerprints. He said he’d meet me at the Lion’s Head where everyone bought me a drink and I got stocious drunk, so drunk Malachy had to hoist me home in a taxi which made me so sick I threw up the length of Broadway with the driver yelling that would cost me twenty-five dollars for the cleaning of the cab, an unreasonable demand that deprived him of a tip and had him threatening to call the cops and, What are you going to tell them? said Malachy, are you going to tell them that you’re a zigzag driver going from one side of Broadway to the other and making everyone sick, is that what you’re going to tell them? and the driver was so angry he wanted to step out and confront Malachy but changed his mind when my brother, holding me up, stood large and red-bearded on the sidewalk and asked the driver politely if he had any more comments before he went to meet his Maker. The driver uttered obscenities about us and the Irish in general and drove through a red light, his left arm at the window, his middle finger rigid in the air.
Malachy brought me aspirins and vitamins and told me I’d be as right as rain in the morning and I wondered what that meant, right as rain, though that question was pushed from my head by the image of Maggie and the forcep flatness of her temples and I was ready to jump from the bed to hunt down that damn doctor who wouldn’t let my daughter be born in her own good time but my legs wouldn’t oblige me and I fell asleep.
Malachy was right. There was no hangover, only delight that a little child in Brooklyn had my name and I’d have a lifetime watching her grow and when I called Alberta I could hardly talk with the tears in my throat and she laughed and quoted my mother, Your bladder is near your eye.
That same year Alberta and I bought the brownstone house where we’d been tenants on the parlor floor. We were able to buy it only because our friends Bobby and Mary Ann Baron lent us money and because Virgil Frank died and left us eight thousand dollars.