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116 FRANK MCCOURT My marriage had collapsed and I was adrift and alone. I tried alcohol but that was the curse of my family and better avoided. At midnight I planted a chair in the middle of the kitchen and dared the demons to come. In various forms they came: priests, teachers, old girlfriends. They howled. They told me what a despicable man I was, a failure as son, brother, husband, father. I agreed, Oh, yes, yes, you’re right, till a long solemn comforting face appeared in their midst: Gary Cooper. In the movie High Noon, Sheriff Gary Cooper has just married Grace Kelly. They are packing and waiting for the train that will take them on their honeymoon. But there’s disturbing news: on that same train the bad guys are coming to town. Can you blame Sheriff Cooper if he says, “Waal, this is my honeymoon and I’ve done enough for this town and I deserve this one happy moment in my life”? Of course it depends on who you are, your values, your sense of community responsibility, your romantic or ideological soul, your morality—if you want to call it that. Can you blame Coop if he ducks the coming menace, skips the train and lights out for the wide-open spaces on horse and buggy, Grace smiling by his side, Grace thinking of intimacies to come, babies gurgling? No, it is not to be, not yet anyway. Coop has to do the right thing and that is to wait, secure that badge on his vest, sling on those guns, and face the bad guys. Grace is not pleased. Would you? Be pleased, that is? High Noon at Midnight  CH025.qxd 7/15/09 7:47 AM Page 116 HIGH NOON AT MIDNIGHT 117 Grace Kelly is exquisitely beautiful and I often wondered what she was doing in that desolation of a town anyway. Why wasn’t she back east serving high tea on Fifth Avenue? She was so desirable you couldn’t blame the Sheriff for entertaining thoughts of flight—or did he? No, sir. No, ma’am. Sorry, Grace, but he knew what he had to do. No Hamlet he. The bad guys had to be dealt with—and there was only one Sheriff in town. The theme song broke my adolescent heart: Do not forsake me, oh, my darling, On this our wedding day . . . ay. I was forced to take sides, Grace or Coop. No fence straddling, lad. I pushed it as far as my teen mind would go. Hitch up that old buckboard and head out, man. To hell with the town and citizens who wouldn’t give a damn anyway if you were shot to bits on your wedding day. Take what you have and go. At least you have Grace and a future. It’s risky either way. If you leave, what will she be thinking? Years down the road will she tell the children how their daddy threw his badge in a drawer, unbuckled his gunbelt, and put the town behind him? That was the part that often made me, the Coop stand-in, feel uneasy—what Grace might be thinking. Would there be respect as we rode the buckboard and I giddy-upped the horse? Would she cast me the occasional loving glance? You could never say, “Grace, honey, I did it for you, turned tail and ran.” She’d assure you that you did the right thing but . . . but you would never know. Never. Yes, yes, you knew you loved Grace, but there’s something else in the world and what the hell is it? The bad guys are coming, dictating the course of your life. Bad guys are always coming and you have to stay, badgeless and gunless, and face them. You can dodge, you can run, but where and for how long? I didn’t know it at the time but I was beginning to listen to the still small voice within, the Coop conscience, and I was troubled. In Ireland no one had encouraged me or my generation to think for ourselves. Before confessing our sins we were told to examine our conscience, and that was simply a list of sins—not the small voice. I hadn’t discovered yet the truth of that fine old platitude , “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” The dictum from the church was “A man’s gotta do what the church tells...

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