Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

INTRODUCTION

BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

It is a peculiar quirk of the human condition that tragedy and comedy make such natural bedfellows. Occasionally, in moments of great despair, our misery can tip into absurdity, and all of a sudden we’re laughing. Sure, sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy. But it’s often possible, and strangely comforting, to laugh about it later. If you come from Irish stock, you likely have a vivid sense of what I’m talking about. The Irish cannot claim a monopoly on the comedy of su˝ering, but to revel in loss and heartbreak and deprivation and squalor, to season it with a dash of impish self-awareness and maybe even a pinch of hyperbole and make a meal of it—a feast of it—is its own proud and distinctly Irish subgenre. Few books push this principle to such gorgeous extremes as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes.

I first read the book in the fall of 1996, about a month after it was first published.

I had just started my sophomore year at Columbia University, and a friend of mine was doing an internship at Scribner, McCourt’s publisher. It was probably on account of my name, which does not leave much to the imagination when it comes to my cultural origins, that she gave me a copy, saying that she thought it might appeal to me. It did.

By then, the book was already a phenomenon, a memoir about a rotten childhood in a foreign land by a first-time author who was sixty-six years old. It sold millions of copies in hardcover and turned McCourt into a minor celebrity, inaugurating a pleasant final chapter of his life, in which he would live in greater comfort than he’d ever known and publish subsequent books and become the sort of figure who gives hope to other people who think they might have a great book inside them but worry they could be seventy before they get around to writing it. As McCourt told a group of high school students on Long Island in 1997, I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to a long-suffering mother (the Angela of the title) and an alcoholic father, Malachy. When Frank was four, the family returned to their native Ireland, settling in the slums of Limerick in the hopes of making a better life. Instead, things got worse in a hurry: the family was beset by destitution, illness, the death of three of McCourt’s younger siblings; his father could rarely hold a job and when he did, he drank his wages; Angela was reduced to begging.

Yet somehow, Frank McCourt survived this childhood and eventually wrote a book about it. A book that, as it turned out, was uproariously funny. He might have described it as an epic of woe, but for all the gloom, this is not a gloomy book. Instead, in his retelling, the whole parade of depredations, from doing battle with fleas to the body horror of conjunctivitis to boiling a pig’s head for Christmas dinner because that is all the family can afford, becomes the stuff of riotous laughter. McCourt makes it look easy, but this is a high-wire act: a millimeter too far in one direction and you keel over into poverty porn, a millimeter too far in the other and you’re airbrushing the truth. It helps a great deal that McCourt elects to write in the voice of a child. It took him decades to find that voice. He had first attempted writing about his childhood as a young man, after finally leaving Limerick at nineteen and moving back to New York. But it hadn’t quite worked. It was only in his sixties, after he retired from his job as a beloved teacher in New York City Public Schools, that McCourt was able to summon the voice of his own childhood, more than half a century earlier and an ocean away. To a child, everything seems a little absurd: the folly of adult pride, the unpredictability of drink, the slogans of Irish Republicanism, the suddenness of infant death, the confusing dictates of Catholicism, the pomposity of priests and teachers, the mysteries of sex.

As for the humor, it’s not some retrospective literary construct that McCourt devised to make this saga of hard-bitten poverty more palatable: it was there at the time, in the moment. For Frank and his siblings, laugher was a kind of defiance. In fact, it could sometimes seem like the only thing keeping them alive. I think there’s something about the Irish experience that we had to have a sense of humor or die, Frank’s little brother Malachy McCourt once said. At Christmas one year, much later in life, Malachy sent out a card that said, Despair is our only hope.

But if the mordant wit that infuses nearly every page of this book started out as a coping mechanism, it is recognizable also as a staple of a particular storytelling tradition. Here again we’re talking about a phenomenon that is not exclusively but let’s say preponderantly Irish. When my wife, who was born in Poland, first started visiting my big, sprawling Boston Irish family for holiday dinners, she couldn’t understand how we all derived such enjoyment from sitting around a table reciting stories that we all already knew. But of course, the retelling is the whole point—the familiar phrases, comical impersonations, and well-worn gags, the delirious pleasure of the buildup to a punch line you all know is coming. To be sure: it’s not for everyone. My wife has still not quite been able to access the elusive delight of listening to the same anecdote for the hundredth time. But if you were brought up in family that treated storytelling like a competitive sport, you can feel, in these moments, a communion with those who came before you, a link to the old oral tradition.

Long before he wrote a book, Frank McCourt was a world-class exponent of that tradition, a barstool bard who regaled his many friends with outlandish tales of his picaresque adventures. He was a bon vivant, a New York character of the sort Joseph Mitchell might have written about. He’s the funniest man on planet earth, his friend Dennis Duggan told The New York Times in 1994, on the occasion of McCourt’s third marriage, to Ellen Frey. Duggan was a Newsday columnist, and he and other New York writers, like Pete Hamill, would gather at the Lion’s Head Tavern, a pub in Greenwich Village, and listen to McCourt tell stories. For a time, Frank and Malachy took their show on the road with a humorous autobiographical revue called A Couple of Blaguards. Frank may have felt inadequate as a writer in the company of friends who actually wrote for a living, but during all those years, he was honing his stories, finding the music in his own language, working through the chapters of his life the way a stand-up comic massages a routine into shape by exposing it, night after night, to a crowd. If you read Angela’s Ashes today—or if you listen to the audiobook, which McCourt voices himself—you can hear that music, and note his almost incantatory repetition of certain phrases, and feel like what you’re experiencing is some epic poem, lyrical, hilarious, and heartbreaking, a bit of oral tradition that’s been snatched out of the air and preserved on the page forever. It feels alive.

That word lyrical is an interesting one. (McCourt didn’t like it when people described his book in those terms.) I didn’t want it to be ‘charming and lyrical,’ he said. The last thing he was looking to do was sanitize the ugliness of poverty or dress it up in blarney and nostalgia. The good people of Limerick did not appreciate his forthrightness. Not initially, anyway. The portrait of slum life in the city during the 1930s and 1940s was unsparing: a small place full of small-minded people who were prone to cruelty, vanity, hypocrisy, and indifference to the suffering of others. Not exactly Tourist Board material.

But Angela’s Ashes had a way of winning people over, and eventually even the skeptics in Limerick came around. From 2011 to 2019, there was a handsome Frank McCourt Museum in the city’s Georgian Quarter in a building where he once attended school, and visitors to Limerick today can take their pick of multiple Angela’s Ashes walking tours.

I suspect part of the reason Limerick changed its tune, and part of what gives this work such enduring literary value, even three decades on, is that however unblinking McCourt might be in depicting the immiseration of his Irish childhood, the book shimmers with his extraordinary generosity of spirit. Angela is in many ways a pathetic figure, wallowing in bitterness and self-pity. Frank’s father, Malachy—the absentee patriarch who is too proud to beg but not too proud to have his wife out begging, and who barges in after a night of drinking and wakes his children with patriotic songs, demanding that they die for Ireland—is, to one way of looking at it, the book’s villain. By the time he died in 1985, Malachy was living in Belfast and he and Frank were estranged. Of course, it was the time and the place and the institutions and the culture and the economy that set the stage for the struggles of Frank’s childhood. But really, it was Malachy. If he’d been able to quit drinking and hold onto a job and put some food on the table, this would have been a different story.

Yet for all the anger McCourt clearly feels towards his father, and for all the frustration he nurses about his mother, he treats them both with great humanity. Humor helps: if one shared failing of his parents is that they are both incapable of epiphany and, as such, grindingly predictable, Frank makes a narrative virtue of this by bringing us into such intimate acquaintance with their foibles that when his father disappears at night, we find ourselves waiting for the moment when we will hear the strains of Roddy McCorley coming down the lane, knowing it will signal his return. And Frank writes with tenderness about the man with whom he never reconciled, describing the gentle pleasure of sitting with his father in the morning and listening to him read stories aloud from the newspaper as he sips his tea. One unadvertised benefit of privation is that it endowed McCourt with an ability to rhapsodize about the simplest things: listening to Shakespeare plays on BBC Radio, the generous wit of his uncle Pa Keating, the pleasures of buttered toast. Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, he writes, and after the egg, is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea? There’s a cup of tea steaming by my elbow as I write this. It’s been a few weeks now since I reread the book, and I can’t stop making eggs and toast.

One reason that Angela’s Ashes may have resonated so profoundly is that fundamentally it’s an immigrant story. Like Odysseus, McCourt ends up in the same place where he started: the tale begins in New York and concludes there, with young Frank arriving to forge a new life. But most of the book concerns Limerick, this place he left behind when he was nineteen. Roughly thirty million Americans claim Irish ancestry—a far greater number than there are Irish people in Ireland today. As a boy, Frank would gaze at the River Shannon and fantasize about riding those waters straight out into the Atlantic and all the way to America. It’s a journey untold numbers of people made both before and since. One paradox of any immigration story is that you may feel great sorrow and nostalgia for the old country you left behind, but you left for a reason. Frank McCourt’s life began to improve the day he turned his back on Limerick, and yet Limerick stayed with him, defined him, and became his story to tell.

At Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s finest public schools, McCourt would tell his students to write what you know, and some of them—young, bright immigrant kids, brimming with hope and ambition—would write stories about the journeys their families had undergone to leave countries like China or Korea and start over in New York. Their families went through hell to get here, McCourt later observed. I said to them, ‘Jesus Christ! You’re trembling with history!’ From the occasional anecdote their teacher had shared, the students knew a bit about McCourt’s own hard upbringing in a country and an era that felt very distant to their own. Perhaps they recognized that for all the superfucial differences, he was one of them. When he praised their writing and exclaimed at the little Odysseys of immigration they recounted, the students would say, "Mr. McCourt, you should write a book." And eventually, with their encouragement, he did.

I

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.

Above all—we were wet.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest.

From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments to be inhaled with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey and tinged with the odor of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week’s wages.

The rain drove us into the church—our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles.

Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

My father, Malachy McCourt, was born on a farm in Toome, County Antrim. Like his father before, he grew up wild, in trouble with the English, or the Irish, or both. He fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head.

When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anyone would give money for a head like that. When I was thirteen my father’s mother told me a secret: as a wee lad your poor father was dropped on his head. It was an accident, he was never the same after, and you must remember that people dropped on their heads can be a bit peculiar.

Because of the price on the head he had been dropped on, he had to be spirited out of Ireland via cargo ship from Galway. In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone to hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.

After wandering and drinking in America and England he yearned for peace in his declining years. He returned to Belfast, which erupted all around him. He said, A pox on all their houses, and chatted with the ladies of Andersontown. They tempted him with delicacies but he waved them away and drank his tea. He no longer smoked or touched alcohol, so what was the use? It was time to go and he died in the Royal Victoria Hospital.

My mother, the former Angela Sheehan, grew up in a Limerick slum with her mother, two brothers, Thomas and Patrick, and a sister, Agnes. She never saw her father, who had run off to Australia weeks before her birth.

After a night of drinking porter in the pubs of Limerick he staggers down the lane singing his favorite song,

Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?

Nobody spoke so he said it all the louder

It’s a dirty Irish trick and I can lick the Mick

Who threw the overalls in Murphy’s chowder.

He’s in great form altogether and he thinks he’ll play a while with little Patrick, one year old. Lovely little fella. Loves his daddy. Laughs when Daddy throws him up in the air. Upsy daisy, little Paddy, upsy daisy, up in the air in the dark, so dark, oh, Jasus, you miss the child on the way down and poor little Patrick lands on his head, gurgles a bit, whimpers, goes quiet. Grandma heaves herself from the bed, heavy with the child in her belly, my mother. She’s barely able to lift little Patrick from the floor. She moans a long moan over the child and turns on Grandpa. Get out of it. Out. If you stay here a minute longer I’ll take the hatchet to you, you drunken lunatic. By Jesus, I’ll swing at the end of a rope for you. Get out.

Grandpa stands his ground like a man. I have a right, he says, to stay in me own house.

She runs at him and he melts before this whirling dervish with a damaged child in her arms and a healthy one stirring inside. He stumbles from the house, up the lane, and doesn’t stop till he reaches Melbourne in Australia.

Little Pat, my uncle, was never the same after. He grew up soft in the head with a left leg that went one way, his body the other. He never learned to read or write but God blessed him in another way. When he started to sell newspapers at the age of eight he could count money better than the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself. No one knew why he was called Ab Sheehan, The Abbot, but all Limerick loved him.

My mother’s troubles began the night she was born. There is my grandmother in the bed heaving and gasping with the labor pains, praying to St. Gerard Majella, patron saint of expectant mothers. There is Nurse O’Halloran, the midwife, all dressed up in her finery. It’s New Year’s Eve and Mrs. O’Halloran is anxious for this child to be born so that she can rush off to the parties and celebrations. She tells my grandmother: Will you push, will you, push. Jesus, Mary and holy St. Joseph, if you don’t hurry with this child it won’t be born till the New Year and what good is that to me with me new dress? Never mind St. Gerard Majella. What can a man do for a woman at a time like this even if he is a saint? St. Gerard Majella my arse.

My grandmother switches her prayers to St. Ann, patron saint of difficult labor. But the child won’t come. Nurse O’Halloran tells my grandmother, Pray to St. Jude, patron saint of desperate cases.

St. Jude, patron of desperate cases, help me. I’m desperate. She grunts and pushes and the infant’s head appears, only the head, my mother, and it’s the stroke of midnight, the New Year. Limerick City erupts with whistles, horns, sirens, brass bands, people calling and singing, Happy New Year. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and church bells all over ring out the Angelus and Nurse O’Halloran weeps for the waste of a dress, that child still in there and me in me finery. Will you come out, child, will you? Grandma gives a great push and the child is in the world, a lovely girl with black curly hair and sad blue eyes.

Ah, Lord above, says Nurse O’Halloran, this child is a time straddler, born with her head in the New Year and her arse in the Old or was it her head in the Old Year and her arse in the New. You’ll have to write to the Pope, missus, to find out what year this child was born in and I’ll save this dress for next year.

And the child was named Angela for the Angelus which rang the midnight hour, the New Year, the minute of her coming and because she was a little angel anyway.

Love her as in childhood

Though feeble, old and grey.

For you’ll never miss a mother’s love

Till she’s buried beneath the clay.

At the St. Vincent de Paul School, Angela learned to read, write, and calculate and by her ninth year her schooling was done. She tried her hand at being a charwoman, a skivvy, a maid with a little white hat opening doors, but she could not manage the little curtsy that is required and her mother said, You don’t have the knack of it. You’re pure useless. Why don’t you go to America where there’s room for all sorts of uselessness? I’ll give you the fare.

She arrived in New York just in time for the first Thanksgiving Day of the Great Depression. She met Malachy at a party given by Dan MacAdorey and his wife, Minnie, on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. Malachy liked Angela and she liked him. He had a hangdog look, which came from the three months he had just spent in jail for hijacking a truck. He and his friend John McErlaine believed what they were told in the speakeasy, that the truck was packed to the roof with cases of canned pork and beans. Neither knew how to drive and when the police saw the truck lurch and jerk along Myrtle Avenue they pulled it over. The police searched the truck and wondered why anyone would hijack a truck containing, not pork and beans, but cases of buttons.

With Angela drawn to the hangdog look and Malachy lonely after three months in jail, there was bound to be a knee-trembler.

A knee-trembler is the act itself done up against a wall, man and woman up on their toes, straining so hard their knees tremble with the excitement that’s in it.

That knee-trembler put Angela in an interesting condition and, of course, there was talk. Angela had cousins, the MacNamara sisters, Delia and Philomena, married, respectively, to Jimmy Fortune of County Mayo, and Tommy Flynn, of Brooklyn itself.

Delia and Philomena were large women, great-breasted and fierce. When they sailed along the sidewalks of Brooklyn lesser creatures stepped aside, respect was shown. The sisters knew what was right and they knew what was wrong and any doubts could be resolved by the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church. They knew that Angela, unmarried, had no right to be in an interesting condition and they would take steps.

Steps they took. With Jimmy and Tommy in tow they marched to the speakeasy on Atlantic Avenue where Malachy could be found on Friday, payday when he had a job. The man in the speak, Joey Cacciamani, did not want to admit the sisters but Philomena told him that if he wanted to keep the nose on his face and that door on its hinges he’d better open up for they were there on God’s business. Joey said, Awright, awright, you Irish. Jeezoz! Trouble, trouble.

Malachy, at the far end of the bar, turned pale, gave the great-breasted ones a sickly smile, offered them a drink. They resisted the smile and spurned the offer. Delia said, We don’t know what class of a tribe you come from in the North of Ireland.

Philomena said, There is a suspicion you might have Presbyterians in your family, which would explain what you did to our cousin.

Jimmy said, Ah, now, ah, now. ’Tisn’t his fault if there’s Presbyterians in his family.

Delia said, You shuddup.

Tommy had to join in. What you did to that poor unfortunate girl is a disgrace to the Irish race and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Och, I am, said Malachy. I am.

Nobody asked you to talk, said Philomena. You done enough damage with your blather, so shut your yap.

And while your yap is shut, said Delia, we’re here to see you do the right thing by our poor cousin, Angela Sheehan.

Malachy said, Och, indeed, indeed. The right thing is the right thing and I’d be glad to buy you all a drink while we have this little talk.

Take the drink, said Tommy, and shove it up your ass.

Philomena said, Our little cousin no sooner gets off the boat than you are at her. We have morals in Limerick, you know, morals. We’re not like jackrabbits from Antrim, a place crawling with Presbyterians.

Jimmy said, He don’t look like a Presbyterian.

You shuddup, said Delia.

Another thing we noticed, said Philomena. You have a very odd manner.

Malachy smiled. I do?

You do, says Delia. I think ’tis one of the first things we noticed about you, that odd manner, and it gives us a very uneasy feeling.

’Tis that sneaky little Presbyterian smile, said Philomena.

Och, said Malachy, it’s just the trouble I have with my teeth.

Teeth or no teeth, odd manner or no odd manner, you’re gonna marry that girl, said Tommy. Up the middle aisle you’re going.

Och, said Malachy, I wasn’t planning to get married, you know. There’s no work and I wouldn’t be able to support…

Married is what you’re going to be, said Delia.

Up the middle aisle, said Jimmy.

You shuddup, said Delia.

Malachy watched them leave. I’m in a desperate pickle, he told Joey Cacciamani.

Bet your ass, said Joey. I see them babes comin’ at me I jump inna Hudson River.

Malachy considered the pickle he was in. He had a few dollars in his pocket from the last job and he had an uncle in San Francisco or one of the other California Sans. Wouldn’t he be better off in California, far from the great-breasted MacNamara sisters and their grim husbands? He would, indeed, and he’d have a drop of the Irish to celebrate his decision and departure. Joey poured and the drink nearly took the lining off Malachy’s gullet. Irish, indeed! He told Joey it was a Prohibition concoction from the devil’s own still. Joey shrugged. I don’t know nothing. I only pour. Still, it was better than nothing and Malachy would have another and one for yourself, Joey, and ask them two decent Italians what they’d like and what are you talking about, of course, I have the money to pay for it.

He awoke on a bench in the Long Island Railroad Station, a cop rapping on his boots with a nightstick, his escape money gone, the MacNamara sisters ready to eat him alive in Brooklyn.

On the feast of St. Joseph, a bitter day in March, four months after the knee-trembler, Malachy married Angela and in August the child was born. In November Malachy got drunk and decided it was time to register the child’s birth. He thought he might name the child Malachy, after himself, but his North of Ireland accent and the alcoholic mumble confused the clerk so much he simply entered the name Male on the certificate.

Not until late December did they take Male to St. Paul’s Church to be baptized and named Francis after his father’s father and the lovely saint of Assisi. Angela wanted to give him a middle name, Munchin, after the patron saint of Limerick but Malachy said over his dead body. No son of his would have a Limerick name. It’s hard enough going through life with one name. Sticking on middle names was an atrocious American habit and there was no need for a second name when you’re christened after the man from Assisi.

There was a delay the day of the baptism when the chosen godfather, John McErlaine, got drunk at the speakeasy and forgot his responsibilities. Philomena told her husband, Tommy, he’d have to be godfather. Child’s soul is in danger, she said. Tommy put his head down and grumbled. All right. I’ll be godfather but I’m not goin’ to be responsible if he grows up like his father causin’ trouble and goin’ through life with the odd manner for if he does he can go to John McErlaine at the speakeasy. The priest said, True for you, Tom, decent man that you are, fine man that never set foot inside a speakeasy. Malachy, fresh from the speakeasy himself, felt insulted and wanted to argue with the priest, one sacrilege on top of another. Take off that collar and we’ll see who’s the man. He had to be held back by the great-breasted ones and their husbands grim. Angela, new mother, agitated, forgot she was holding the child and let him slip into the baptismal font, a total immersion of the Protestant type. The altar boy assisting the priest plucked the infant from the font and restored him to Angela, who sobbed and clutched him, dripping, to her bosom. The priest laughed, said he had never seen the likes, that the child was a regular little Baptist now and hardly needed a priest. This maddened Malachy again and he wanted to jump at the priest for calling the child some class of a Protestant. The priest said, Quiet, man, you’re in God’s house, and when Malachy said, God’s house, my arse, he was thrown out on Court Street because you can’t say arse in God’s house.

After baptism Philomena said she had tea and ham and cakes in her house around the corner. Malachy said, Tea? and she said, Yes, tea, or is it whiskey you want? He said tea was grand but first he’d have to go and deal with John McErlaine, who didn’t have the decency to carry out his duties as godfather. Angela said, You’re only looking for an excuse to run to the speakeasy, and he said, As God is my witness, the drink is the last thing on my mind. Angela started to cry. Your son’s christening day and you have to go drinking. Delia told him he was a disgusting specimen but what could you expect from the North of Ireland.

Malachy looked from one to the other, shifted on his feet, pulled his cap down over his eyes, shoved his hands deep in his trouser pockets, said, Och, aye, the way they do in the far reaches of County Antrim, turned, hurried up Court Street to the speakeasy on Atlantic Avenue where he was sure they’d ply him with free drink in honor of his son’s baptism.

At Philomena’s house the sisters and their husbands ate and drank while Angela sat in a corner nursing the baby and crying. Philomena stuffed her mouth with bread and ham and rumbled at Angela, That’s what you get for being such a fool. Hardly off the boat and you fall for that lunatic. You shoulda stayed single, put the child up for adoption, and you’d be a free woman today. Angela cried harder and Delia took up the attack, Oh, stop it, Angela, stop it. You have nobody to blame but yourself for gettin’ into trouble with a drunkard from the North, a man that doesn’t even look like a Catholic, him with his odd manner. I’d say that… that… Malachy has a streak of the Presbyterian in him right enough. You shuddup, Jimmy.

If I was you, said Philomena, I’d make sure there’s no more children. He don’t have a job, so he don’t, an’ never will the way he drinks. So… no more children, Angela. Are you listenin’ to me?

I am, Philomena.

A year later another child was born. Angela called him Malachy after his father and gave him a middle name, Gerard, after his father’s brother.

The MacNamara sisters said Angela was nothing but a rabbit and they wanted nothing to do with her till she came to her senses.

Their husbands agreed.

I’m in a playground on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He’s two, I’m three. We’re on the seesaw.

Up, down, up, down.

Malachy goes up.

I get off.

Malachy goes down. Seesaw hits the ground. He screams. His hand is on his mouth and there’s blood.

Oh, God. Blood is bad. My mother will kill me.

And here she is, trying to run across the playground. Her big belly slows her.

She says, What did you do? What did you do to the child?

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I did.

She pulls my ear. Go home. Go to bed.

Bed? In the middle of the day?

She pushes me toward the playground gate. Go.

She picks up Malachy and waddles off.

My father’s friend, Mr. MacAdorey, is outside our building. He’s standing at the edge of the sidewalk with his wife, Minnie, looking at a dog lying in the gutter. There is blood all around the dog’s head. It’s the color of the blood from Malachy’s mouth.

Malachy has dog blood and the dog has Malachy blood.

I pull Mr. MacAdorey’s hand. I tell him Malachy has blood like the dog.

Oh, he does, indeed, Francis. Cats have it, too. And Eskimos. All the same blood.

Minnie says, Stop that, Dan. Stop confusing the wee fellow. She tells me the poor wee dog was hit by a car and he crawled all the way from the middle of the street before he died. Wanted to come home, the poor wee creature.

Mr. MacAdorey says, You’d better go home, Francis. I don’t know what you did to your wee brother, but your mother took him off to the hospital. Go home, child.

Will Malachy die like the dog, Mr. MacAdorey?

Minnie says, He bit his tongue. He won’t die.

Why did the dog die?

It was his time, Francis.

The apartment is empty and I wander between the two rooms, the bedroom and the kitchen. My father is out looking for a job and my mother is at the hospital with Malachy. I wish I had something to eat but there’s nothing in the icebox but cabbage leaves floating in the melted ice. My father said never eat anything floating in water for the rot that might be in it. I fall asleep on my parents’ bed and when my mother shakes me it’s nearly dark. Your little brother is going to sleep a while. Nearly bit his tongue off. Stitches galore. Go into the other room.

My father is in the kitchen sipping black tea from his big white enamel mug. He lifts me to his lap.

Dad, will you tell me the story about Coo Coo?

Cuchulain. Say it after me, Coo-hoo-lin. I’ll tell you the story when you say the name right. Coo-hoo-lin.

I say it right and he tells me the story of Cuchulain, who had a different name when he was a boy, Setanta. He grew up in Ireland where Dad lived when he was a boy in County Antrim. Setanta had a stick and ball and one day he hit the ball and it went into the mouth of a big dog that belonged to Culain and choked him. Oh, Culain was angry and he said, What am I to do now without my big dog to guard my house and my wife and my ten small children as well as numerous pigs, hens, sheep?

Setanta said, I’m sorry. I’ll guard your house with my stick and ball and I’ll change my name to Cuchulain, the Hound of Culain. He did. He guarded the house and regions beyond and became a great hero, the Hound of Ulster itself. Dad said he was a greater hero than Hercules or Achilles that the Greeks were always bragging about and he could take on King Arthur and all his knights in a fair fight which, of course, you could never get with an Englishman anyway.

That’s my story. Dad can’t tell that story to Malachy or any other children down the hall.

He finishes the story and lets me sip his tea. It’s bitter, but I’m happy there on his lap.

For days Malachy’s tongue is swollen and he can hardly make a sound never mind talk. But even if he could no one is paying any attention to him because we have two new babies who were brought by an angel in the middle of the night. The neighbors say, Ooh, Ah, they’re lovely boys, look at those big eyes.

Malachy stands in the middle of the room, looking up at everyone, pointing to his tongue and saying, Uck, uck. When the neighbors say, Can’t you see we’re looking at your little brothers? he cries, till Dad pats him on the head. Put in your tongue, son, and go out and play with Frankie. Go on.

In the playground I tell Malachy about the dog who died in the street because someone drove a ball into his mouth. Malachy shakes his head. No uck ball. Car uck kill dog. He cries because his tongue hurts and he can hardly talk and it’s terrible when you can’t talk. He won’t let me push him on the swing. He says, You uck kill me uck on seesaw. He gets Freddie Leibowitz to push him and he’s happy, laughing when he swings to the sky. Freddie is big, he’s seven, and I ask him to push me. He says, No, you tried to kill your brother.

I try to get the swing going myself but all I can do is move it back and forth and I’m angry because Freddie and Malachy are laughing at the way I can’t swing. They’re great pals now, Freddie, seven, Malachy, two. They laugh every day and Malachy’s tongue gets better with all the laughing.

When he laughs you can see how white and small and pretty his teeth are and you can see his eyes shine. He has blue eyes like my mother. He has golden hair and pink cheeks. I have brown eyes like Dad. I have black hair and my cheeks are white in the mirror. My mother tells Mrs. Leibowitz down the hall that Malachy is the happiest child in the world. She tells Mrs. Leibowitz down the hall, Frankie has the odd manner like his father. I wonder what the odd manner is but I can’t ask because I’m not supposed to be listening.

I wish I could swing up into the sky, up into the clouds. I might be able to fly around the whole world and not hear my brothers, Oliver and Eugene, cry in the middle of the night anymore. My mother says they’re always hungry. She cries in the middle of the night, too. She says she’s worn out nursing and feeding and changing and four boys is too much for her. She wishes she had one little girl all for herself. She’d give anything for one little girl.

I’m in the playground with Malachy. I’m four, he’s three. He lets me push him on the swing because he’s no good at swinging himself and Freddie Leibowitz is in school. We have to stay in the playground because the twins are sleeping and my mother says she’s worn out. Go out and play, she says, and give me some rest. Dad is out looking for a job again and sometimes he comes home with the smell of whiskey, singing all the songs about suffering Ireland. Mam gets angry and says Ireland can kiss her arse. He says that’s nice language to be using in front of the children and she says never mind the language, food on the table is what she wants, not suffering Ireland. She says it was a sad day Prohibition ended because Dad gets the drink going around to saloons offering to sweep out the bars and lift barrels for a whiskey or a beer. Sometimes he brings home bits of the free lunch, rye bread, corned beef, pickles. He puts the food on the table and drinks tea himself. He says food is a shock to the system and he doesn’t know where we get our appetites. Mam says, They get their appetites because they’re starving half the time.

When Dad gets a job Mam is cheerful and she sings,

Anyone can see why I wanted your kiss,

It had to be and the reason is this

Could it be true, someone like you

Could love me, love me?

When Dad brings home the first week’s wages Mam is delighted she can pay the lovely Italian man in the grocery shop and she can hold her head up again because there’s nothing worse in the world than to owe and be beholden to anyone. She cleans the kitchen, washes the mugs and plates, brushes crumbs and bits of food from the table, cleans out the icebox and orders a fresh block of ice from another Italian. She buys toilet paper that we can take down the hall to the lavatory and that, she says, is better than having the headlines from the Daily News blackening your arse. She boils water on the stove and spends a day at a great tin tub washing our shirts and socks, diapers for the twins, our two sheets, our three towels. She hangs everything out on the clotheslines behind the apartment house and we can watch the clothes dance in wind and sun. She says you wouldn’t want the neighbors to know what you have in the way of a wash but there’s nothing like the sweetness of clothes dried by the sun.

When Dad brings home the first week’s wages on a Friday night we know the weekend will be wonderful. On Saturday night Mam will boil water on the stove and wash us in the great tin tub and Dad will dry us. Malachy will turn around and show his behind. Dad will pretend to be shocked and we’ll all laugh. Mam will make hot cocoa and we’ll be able to stay up while Dad tells us a story out of his head. All we have to do is say a name, Mr. MacAdorey or Mr. Leibowitz down the hall, and Dad will have the two of them rowing up a river in Brazil chased by Indians with green noses and puce shoulders. On nights like that we can drift off to sleep knowing there will be a breakfast of eggs, fried tomatoes and fried bread, tea with lashings of sugar and milk and, later in the day, a big dinner of mashed potatoes, peas and ham, and a trifle Mam makes, layers of fruit and warm delicious custard on a cake soaked in sherry.

When Dad brings home the first week’s wages and the weather is fine Mam takes us to the playground. She sits on a bench and talks to Minnie MacAdorey. She tells Minnie stories about characters in Limerick and Minnie tells her about characters in Belfast and they laugh because there are funny people in Ireland, North and South. Then they teach each other sad songs and Malachy and I leave the swings and seesaws to sit with them on the bench and sing,

A group of young soldiers one night in a camp

Were talking of sweethearts they had.

All seemed so merry except one young lad,

And he was downhearted and sad.

Come and join us, said one of the boys,

Surely there’s someone for you.

But Ned shook his head and proudly he said

I am in love with two, Each like a mother to me,

From neither of them shall I part.

For one is my mother, God bless her and love her,

The other is my sweetheart.

Malachy and I sing that song and Mam and Minnie laugh till they cry at the way Malachy takes a deep bow and holds his arms out to Mam at the end. Dan MacAdorey comes along on his way home from work and says Rudy Vallee better start worrying about the competition.

When we go home Mam makes tea and bread and jam or mashed potatoes with butter and salt. Dad drinks the tea and eats nothing. Mam says, God above, How can you work all day and