The little ones get into their winter clothes and leave and my classroom is quiet. A Stuyvesant author who suffered negative criticism says he hopes those damn kids get lost in the snow. Another tall junior, Alex Newman, says he feels okay because his book was praised but what those kids did to a few of the authors was disgraceful. He says some of those kids are assassins and there is agreement around the room.
But they’re softened up for the American Literature of the junior year, ready for the rant of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. We chant Vachel Lindsay and Robert Service and T. S. Eliot, who can be recruited for either side of the Atlantic. We tell jokes because every joke is a short story with a fuse and an explosion. We journey back into childhood for games and street rhymes, Miss Lucy and Ring-around-a-rosy, and visiting educators wonder what’s going on in this classroom.
And tell me, Mr. McCourt, how does that prepare our children for college and the demands of society?
55
On the table by the bed in my mother’s apartment there were bottles of pills, tablets, capsules, liquid medicines, take this for that and that for this three times a day when it’s not four but not when you’re driving or operating heavy machinery, take before, during and after meals avoiding alcohol and other stimulants and be sure you don’t mix your medications, which Mam did, confusing the emphysema pills with the pills for the pain of her new hip and the pills that put her to sleep or woke her up and the cortisone that bloated her and caused hair to grow on her chin so that she was terrified to leave the house without her little blue plastic razor in case she might be away awhile and in danger of sprouting all kinds of hair and she’d be ashamed of her life, so she would, ashamed of her life.
The city provided a woman to care for her, bathe her, cook, take her for walks if she was able for it. When she wasn’t able for it she watched television and the woman watched with her though she reported later that Mam spent much of her time staring at a spot on the wall or looking out the window delighting in the times her grandson, Conor, called up to her and they chatted while he hung from the iron bars that secured her windows.
The woman from the city lined up the pill bottles and warned Mam to take them in a certain order during the night but Mam would forget and become so confused no one knew what she might have done to herself and the ambulance would have to take her to Lenox Hill Hospital where she was now well known.
The last time she was in the hospital I called her from my school to ask how she was.
Ah, I dunno.
What do you mean you dunno?
I’m fed up. They’re sticking things in me and pulling things out of me.
Then she whispered, If you’re coming to see me, would you do me a favor?
I would. What is it?
You’re not to tell anyone about this.
I won’t. What is it?
Will you bring me a blue plastic razor?
A plastic razor? For what?
Never mind. Couldn’t you just bring it and stop asking questions?
Her voice broke and there was sobbing.
All right, I’ll bring it. Are you there?
She could barely talk with the sobbing. And when you come up give the razor to the nurse and don’t come in till she tells you.
I waited while the nurse took in the razor and screened Mam from the world. On her way out, the nurse whispered, She’s shaving. It’s the cortisone. She’s embarrassed.
All right, said Mam, you can come in now and don’t be asking me any questions even if you didn’t do what I asked you.
What do you mean?
I asked you for a blue plastic razor and you brought me a white one.
What’s the difference?
There’s a big difference but you wouldn’t know. I won’t say another word about it.
You look fine.
I’m not fine. I’m fed up, I told you. I just want to die.
Oh, stop. You’ll be out by Christmas. You’ll be dancing.
I will not be dancing. Look, there’s women running around this country getting abortions right and left and I can’t even die.
What in God’s name is the connection between you and women getting abortions?
Her eyes filled. Here I am in the bed, dying or not dying, and you’re tormenting me with theology.
My brother Michael came into the room, all the way from San Francisco. He prowled the area around her bed. He kissed her and massaged her shoulders and feet. That’ll relax you, he said.
I’m relaxed, she said. If I was any more relaxed I’d be dead and wouldn’t that be a relief.
Michael looked at her and at me and around the room and his eyes were watery. Mam told him he should be back in San Francisco with his wife and children.
I’ll be going back tomorrow.
Well, it was hardly worth your while, all this traveling, was it?
I had to see you.
She drifted off and we went to a bar on Lexington Avenue for a few drinks with Alphie and Malachy’s son, young Malachy. We didn’t talk about Mam. We listened to young Malachy, who was twenty and didn’t know what to do with his life. I told him since his mother was Jewish he could go to Israel and join the army. He said he wasn’t Jewish but I insisted he was, that he had the right of return. I told him if he went to the Israeli Consulate and announced he wanted to join the Israeli army it would be a publicity coup for them. Imagine, young Malachy McCourt, a name like that, joining the Israeli army. He’d be on the front page of every paper in New York.
He said no, he didn’t want his ass shot off by those crazy Arabs. Michael said he wouldn’t be up there on the front lines, he’d be back where he could be used for propaganda purposes and all those exotic Israeli girls would be throwing themselves at him.
He said no again and I told him it was a waste of time buying him drinks when he wouldn’t do a simple thing like joining the Israeli army and carving out a career for himself. I told him if I had a Jewish mother I’d be in Jerusalem in a minute.
That night I returned to Mam’s room. A man stood at the end of her bed. He was bald, he had a gray beard and a gray three-piece suit. He jingled the change in his trouser pocket and told my mother, You know, Mrs. McCourt, you have every right to be angry when you’re ill and you do have a right to express it.
He turned to me. I’m her psychiatrist.
I’m not angry, said Mam. I just want to die and ye won’t let me.
She turned to me. Will you tell him go away?
Go away, Doctor.
Excuse me, I’m her doctor.
Go away.
He left and Mam complained they were tormenting her with priests and psychiatrists and even if she was a sinner she’d done penance a hundred times over, that she was born doing penance. I’m dying for something in my mouth, she said, something tarty like lemonade.
I brought her an artificial lemon filled with concentrated juice and poured it into a glass with a little water. She tasted it. I asked you for lemonade and all you gave me was water.