Teacher Man. Frank McCourt

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СКАЧАТЬ mother who tried to get him to say good things about himself. He couldn’t, so he drank and died. Do you drink?

      Not much.

      Be careful. You’re Irish.

      Your father wasn’t Irish.

      No, but he could have been. Everyone in Liverpool is Irish. Let’s cook that monkfish.

      She handed me a kimono. It’s OK. Change in the bedroom. If it’s good enough for a samurai it’s good enough for a tough little mick who ain’t so tough.

      She changed into a silver dressing gown that seemed to have a life of its own. One moment it clung to her, then hung in a way that let her move freely inside. I preferred the clinging part and it kept me alive inside my kimono.

      She asked if I liked white wine and I said yes because I was learning that yes was the best answer to every question, at least with June. I said yes to the monkfish and the asparagus and the two flickering candles on the table. I said yes to the way she raised her wineglass and touched it against mine till they went ping. I told her this was the most delicious dinner I’d ever had in my life. I wanted to go on and say I was in heaven but that might sound forced and she might give me the kind of strange look that would ruin the whole night and my life beyond.

      Norm was never mentioned in the six nights that followed the night of the monkfish except that there were twelve fresh roses in a vase in her bedroom with a card that said love from Norm. I drank extra wine to boost my courage enough to ask, How the hell can you lie in this bed with me in the presence of Norm’s fresh roses? but I never did. I couldn’t afford roses so I brought her carnations, which she put in a large glass jar beside the roses. There was no competition. Beside Norm’s roses my carnations looked so sad I bought her a dozen roses with my last few dollars. She sniffed them and said, Oh, they’re beautiful. I didn’t know what to say to that as I hadn’t grown them, just bought them. Norm’s roses in the glass jar looked dry and it made me happy to think my roses would replace them, but what she did then gave me the greatest pain I ever had in my heart.

      From my chair in the kitchen I could see what she was doing in the bedroom, taking my roses one by one and placing them delicately among, between and around Norm’s roses, standing back, looking at them, using my fresh roses to prop up the roses of Norm that were going limp, stroking the roses, his and mine, and smiling as if one set of roses was as good as the other.

      She must have known I was watching. She turned and smiled at me, suffering, nearly blubbering, in the kitchen. They’re beautiful, she said again. I knew she was talking about twenty-four roses, not just my dozen, and I wanted to yell something at her and storm out like a real man.

      I didn’t. I stayed. She made stuffed pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes and it tasted like cardboard. We went to bed and all I could think of was my roses mingled with his, that son-of-a-bitch in Vermont. She said I seemed low in energy and I wanted to tell her I wished I was dead. It’s OK, she said. People just get used to each other. You have to keep it fresh.

      Was this her way of keeping it fresh? Juggling two of us at one time, stuffing her vase with flowers from different men?

      Near the end of that spring term I met Seymour on Washington Square. How’s it going? he said, and laughed as if he knew something. How’s the gorgeous June?

      I stammered and shifted from one foot to the other. He said, Don’t worry. She did it to me, too, but she had me only two weeks. I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell.

      Up to?

      It’s all for old Norm. She has me up, she has you up and Christ knows who else she has up, and she tells Norm all about it.

      But he goes to Vermont.

      Vermont, my ass. The minute you leave her place he’s in there lapping up the details.

      How do you know?

      He told me. He likes me. He tells her about me, she tells him about you, and they know I’m telling you about them, and they have a hell of a time. They talk about you and how you don’t know your ass from your elbow about anything.

      I walked away and he called after me, Anytime, man, anytime.

      I scraped through the teacher’s license examination. I scraped through everything. Passing score on the teacher examination was sixty-five; mine was sixty-nine. The passing points came, I think, through the kindness of an English chairman at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn who judged my demonstration lesson and my good luck in having a skimpy knowledge of the poetry of the Great War. An alcoholic professor at NYU told me in a friendly way that I was a half-assed student. I was offended till I thought about it and realized he was right. I was half-assed all around, but promised that someday I’d pull myself together, focus, concentrate, make something of myself, snap out of it, get my act together, all in the good old American way.

      We sat on chairs in the corridors of Brooklyn Technical High School waiting for interviews, filling out forms, signing statements declaring our loyalty to America, assuring the world we were not now, nor had we ever been, members of the Communist Party.

      I saw her long before she sat beside me. She wore a green scarf and dark glasses and when she pulled off the scarf there was a dazzle of red hair. I had the yearning ache for her but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of turning to look.

      Hi, Frank.

      If I were a character in a novel or movie I would have stood and walked away, proud. She said hi again. She said, You look tired.

      I snapped at her to show her I was not going to be polite after what she did to me. No, I am not tired, I said. But then she touched my face with her fingers.

      That fictional character would have pulled his head back to show he hadn’t forgotten, was not going to soften because of two greetings and a few fingertips. She smiled and touched my cheek again.

      Everyone in the hallway was looking at her and I thought they were wondering what she was doing with me: she was that gorgeous and I was hardly a prize. They saw her hand on mine.

      How are you anyway?

      Fine, I croaked. I looked at that hand and thought of it roaming across Norm’s body.

      She said, Are you nervous about the interview?

      I snapped again. No, I’m not.

      You’ll be a fine teacher.

      I don’t care.

      You don’t care? So why are you going through this?

      There’s nothing else to do.

      Oh. She said she was getting a teacher’s license to teach for a year and write a book about it. This was Norm’s suggestion. Norm the big expert. He said education in America was a mess and a muckraking book from inside the school system would be a best-seller. Teach a year or two, complain about the terrible state of the schools, and you have a big seller.

      My name was called for the interview. She said, How about coffee afterwards?

      If I’d had any pride or self-esteem I would have told her no and walked away but I said, OK, and went to my interview with my heart pounding.

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