The Tender Bar

by J. R. Moehringer

  My response to the loss of McGraw was to hurl myself deeper into my three hobbies—baseball, the basement, and the bar—and combine them into one three-headed obsession. After an hour throwing the ball against the garage, pretending to be Tom Seaver, I’d go down to the basement and read about Mowgli or great men. (Dante—He Glorified Hell!) Then, with The Jungle Book and Minute Biographies in my basket, my mitt slung on the handlebar, I’d ride my bike to Dickens and do figure eights across the street, observing who came and went, particularly the men. Rich and poor, natty and decrepit, all manner of men stopped at Dickens, and each walked through the door with a heavy tread, as though laboring under an invisible weight. They walked as I walked when my backpack was full of schoolbooks. But when they walked out, they floated.

  After a while I’d pedal from the bar to the field down the street, where boys played pickup games of baseball every afternoon. If the game went late we’d invariably have a visitor. Twilight was that witching hour when drinkers at Dickens checked their watches, drained their cocktails and hurried home. Leaving the bar they would often spot our game and undergo powerful flashbacks to their childhoods. Salesmen and lawyers would toss aside their briefcases and beg for one swing of the bat. I was pitching when such a man appeared, grinning, shooting his cuffs. He marched toward me like a manager intending to pull me for a reliever. A foot away he stopped. “The fuck are you supposed to be?” he said.

  “Tom Seaver.”

  “Why’s it say ‘P I’ on your shirt?”

  I looked down at my white undershirt, on which I’d drawn “41” with a Magic Marker. “That’s forty-one,” I said. “Tom Seaver’s number.”

  “Says P I. Wha’s that—Pi? You a math whiz or sumpin’?”

  “That’s a four, that’s a one. See? Tom Terrific.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tom T’rific, I’m Dead Drunk.”

  He explained that he needed to “sweat off the booze” before going home to “the lil’ missus.” Therefore he’d be our pinch runner. All the boys looked at each other. “You dopes,” he said. “Haven’t you ever hurr of a pinch runner? The pinch runner stands nexa home plate and runsa bases erry time a batter makes contact!”

  “What if nobody makes contact?” I said.

  “Ho!” he said. “Cocky! I like that. Just throw the fucking ball, Tom.”

  I waited for the pinch runner to get set. Then I fired a speedball at the batter, who hit a slow dribbler to third. The pinch runner sprinted toward first, his limbs spastic, his necktie streaming behind him like a ribbon tied to a car antenna. He was out by a mile. He kept running. He headed for second. Out again. He ran to third. Out. No matter how many times we threw him out or tagged him out, the pinch runner wouldn’t stop. He sprinted for home. Head lowered, he dove through the air, belly-flopping onto the plate, where he lay motionless as we all gathered around him, Lilliputians gathering around Gulliver. We discussed whether or not he was dead. At last he rolled onto his back and started to laugh like a maniac. “Safe,” he said.

  All the boys laughed with him, none more than I. I was a serious boy—my mother was serious, our situation was serious—but this man at my feet was the opposite of serious, and I noted that he’d come from Dickens. I couldn’t wait to join him. I couldn’t wait to become him.

  Instead I became more serious. Everything became more serious.

  I’d assumed that sixth grade would be a cinch, like all grades before it, but for some reason the workload doubled and turned dramatically harder. Also, my schoolmates all at once seemed much smarter than I, and more aware of how the world worked. My friend Peter told me that when you applied to college, you had to present a list of all the books you’d ever read. He already had fifty books on his list, he bragged. I don’t remember all the books I’ve read, I told him, panicking. In that case, Peter said, you probably won’t be allowed into college.

  “What about law school?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly from side to side.

  In Mrs. Williams’s sixth-grade science class we had to sign a contract, binding us to do our best. What Mrs. Williams intended as a clever motivational device, I saw as a death warrant. I scrutinized that contract, wishing I were a lawyer already, so I could find a loophole. Each morning, the contract in my backpack, I would board the bus for school as if headed for labor camp. Shortly after I got on, the bus would pass a retirement home. I’d press my face against the window and envy those old people, sitting in their rockers, free to watch TV and read all day. When I mentioned this to my mother, she said very quietly, “Get in the T-Bird.”

  Steering us around Manhasset my mother told me that I needed to stop worrying. “Just try your best, babe,” she said.

  “That’s the same thing Mrs. Williams’s contract says,” I complained. “How do I know what my best is?”

  “Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.”

  She didn’t understand. According to my black-or-white view of the world, it wasn’t enough to do my best. I had to be perfect. To take care of my mother, to send her to college, I needed to eliminate all mistakes. Mistakes had led to our predicament—Grandma marrying Grandpa, Grandpa denying my mother’s wish to go to college, my mother marrying my father—and they continued to cost us. I needed to correct those mistakes by avoiding new ones, and by getting perfect grades, then getting into a perfect college, then a perfect law school, then suing my imperfect father. But with school getting harder, I couldn’t see how I was going to be perfect, and if I were imperfect, then my mother and Grandma would be disappointed with me, and I’d be no better than my father, and then my mother would sing and cry and peck at her calculator—this was how my mind raced on the playground as I watched the other kids playing tetherball.

  My mother sat me down one night in the dining room, Grandma by her side. “Mrs. Williams phoned me at work today,” she said. “Mrs. Williams tells me that at recess you sit on the playground, staring off into space, and when she asked what you were doing, you told her you were—worrying?”

  Grandma made her tsk-tsk sound.

  “Now look,” my mother said. “When I feel myself starting to worry, I just tell myself, I will not worry about something that will not happen, and that always calms me, because most of the things we worry about will never happen. Why don’t you give that a try?”

  Like Mrs. Williams with her contract, my mother thought her affirmation would motivate me. Instead it hypnotized me. I converted it into an incantation, a mantra, and chanted it on the playground until I induced a trancelike state. I used my mantra as both a spell, to ward off disasters, and a club, to beat back the onslaught of worrisome thoughts about disasters. I’m going to be left back and have to repeat sixth grade. I will not worry about something that will not happen. I’m going to fail out of school and then I won’t be able to take care of my mother. I will not worry about something that will not happen. I’m just like my father. I will not worry . . .

  It worked. After I’d repeated my mantra a few thousand times Mrs. Williams announced that we’d be taking a break from our many assignments. All the kids cheered, and I cheered the loudest. “Instead,” Mrs. Williams said, “we’ll be planning the annual Sixth-Grade Father-Son Breakfast!” I stopped cheering. “Today,” she continued, holding up construction paper and glue, “we’re going to design and make our own invitations, which you’ll bring home to your fathers after school. Saturday morning we’ll cook our fathers breakfast and read to them from our schoolwork and everyone will get a chance to know each other better.”

  When class ended Mrs. Williams called me to her desk. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I saw your face.”

  “I don’t have a father.”

  “Oh. Is he—did he—pass on?”

  “No. I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t have one.”

  She stared out the window beside her desk, then turned back to me.

  “Is there an uncle
?” she said.

  I frowned.

  “A brother?”

  I thought of McGraw.

  “Anyone who can fill in?”

  Now it was my turn to look out the window.

  “Can’t I please just not come to the breakfast?”

  Mrs. Williams phoned my mother, which prompted another dining room summit. “How can they be so asinine?” Grandma said. “Don’t they know what the world is like nowadays?”

  My mother stirred milk into a cup of coffee while I sat by her side. “I should’ve told the school about JR’s father,” she said. “But I didn’t want them to treat him—I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to say something to you both,” Grandma said. “Now don’t jump down my throat. But, well, okay, what about Grandpa?”

  “Oh not that,” I said. “Can’t we just embargo the breakfast?”

  Grandpa came into the dining room. He was wearing stained chinos, a flannel shirt crusted with oatmeal drippings, and black shoes with holes in the toes big enough to see his socks, which also had holes. As always, his fly was open.

  “Where’s that crumb cake you’ve been bragging about?” he asked Grandma.

  “We have something to ask you,” Grandma said.

  “Speak, Stupid Woman. Speak.”

  My mother tried. “Would you be able to fill in for JR’s father at his school’s Father-Son Breakfast?” she asked. “This Saturday?”

  “You’d have to put on clean pants,” Grandma said. “And comb that hair. You can’t go looking like this.”

  “Shut your goddamned mouth!” He closed his eyes and scratched his ear. “I’ll do it,” he said. “Now get the goddamned cake. Stupid Woman.”

  Grandma went into the kitchen with Grandpa. My mother gave me a blank face. I knew she was imagining what would happen if Grandpa referred to Mrs. Williams as Stupid Woman.

  On Saturday morning my mother and I left our apartment in Great Neck at dawn. I wore a corduroy blazer and corduroy pants. At Grandpa’s my mother and Grandma fumbled with my necktie, which was brown and wider than the runner on the dining room table. Neither of them knew how to make a Windsor knot.

  “Maybe he can skip the tie,” Grandma said.

  “No!” I said.

  We heard footfalls on the stairs. The three of us turned to see Grandpa descending slowly. His hair was slicked back, his jaws were shaved so smooth they were blue, his eyebrows and nose hairs and ear hairs were plucked and trimmed. He wore a pearl gray suit, set off by a black necktie and an Irish linen handkerchief. He looked finer than he’d ever looked for any secret Saturday rendezvous.

  “The hell’s the mat, mat, matter?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Grandma and my mother said.

  “We can’t tie my tie,” I said.

  He sat on the bicentennial couch and motioned for me to come near. I walked to him and stood between his knees. “Stupid women,” I whispered. He winked. Then he yanked my tie. “This tie is shit,” he said. He went upstairs and selected a tie from his closet, which he wrapped around my neck and knotted swiftly, expertly. I smelled lilac aftershave on his cheeks as he worked under my Adam’s apple, and I wanted to hug him. But we were rushing out the door, Grandma and my mother waving to us as though we were embarking on a long sea voyage.

  As the Pinto went putt-putting up Plandome Road, I looked at Grandpa. He didn’t say a word. By the time we reached Shelter Rock he still hadn’t said anything, and I realized this had been a terrible mistake. Either Grandpa was tense about meeting new people, or he was irked about sacrificing his Saturday. Whatever the reason, he was miffed, and when miffed Grandpa was likely to say or do something that people in Manhasset would talk about for fifty years. I wanted to jump out of the car and make a run for it, hide under Shelter Rock.

  The moment we pulled into the school parking lot, however, Grandpa changed. He wasn’t on his best behavior, he was on someone’s else’s behavior. He got out of the Pinto as though stepping from a limousine at the Academy Awards, and walked into the school as if he’d endowed the joint. I fell in alongside him and as we met the first wave of teachers and fathers, Grandpa put a hand lightly on my shoulder and turned into Clark Gable. His stutter disappeared, his manner softened. By turns he was gracious, funny, self-deprecating—and sane. I introduced him to Mrs. Williams and thought within minutes that she might have a crush on the old gent. “We’re expecting big things from JR,” she gushed.

  “He’s got his mother’s brains,” Grandpa said, clasping his hands behind his back, standing ramrod straight, as if a medal were about to be pinned on his chest. “I’d rather see him concentrate on the baseball. You know, this boy has a rifle for an arm. He could play third base for the Mets someday. That was my position. Hot corner.”

  “He’s lucky to have a grandfather who takes such an interest.”

  The students served the fathers scrambled eggs and orange juice, then joined them at long tables set up in the middle of the classroom. Grandpa’s manners were impeccable. He didn’t dribble crumbs down his shirtfront, didn’t make any of the explosive noises that normally indicated he was full and digestion was under way. Sipping his coffee he educated the other fathers on a variety of subjects—American history, etymology, the stock market—and gave a sensational account of the day he saw Ty Cobb go five for five. The fathers stared, like boys listening to a ghost story around a campfire, as Grandpa described Cobb sliding into second base, “screaming like a banshee,” the blades of his sharpened cleats aimed at his opponent’s shins.

  When I brought Grandpa his fedora and helped him into his topcoat, everyone was sorry to see him go. In the Pinto I let my head fall back against the seat and said, “Grandpa—you were amazing.”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Don’t tell anyone—they’ll all want one.”

  At home Grandpa went straight upstairs while Grandma and my mother sat me down in the dining room and debriefed me. They wanted every detail, but I didn’t want to break the spell. And anyway, I didn’t think they would believe me. I told them everything went fine and left it at that.

  Grandpa didn’t reappear until later that afternoon when the Jets game started. He sat down in front of the TV wearing his stained chinos and oatmeal-crusted shirt. I sat beside him. Every time something interesting happened I looked his way, pointedly, but he didn’t flinch. I said something about Joe Namath. He grunted. I went to find Grandma, to discuss my Jekyll-Hyde grandfather, but she was busy making dinner. I went to find my mother. She was taking a nap. I woke her, but she said she was tired, and asked me to let her sleep a little while longer.

  My mother had good reason to be tired. She was slaving to pay for our Great Neck apartment. But in early 1975 we discovered another reason. She had a tumor on her thyroid.

  In the weeks before her surgery Grandpa’s house was actually quiet, everyone filled with dread. I alone remained calm, thanks to my mantra. I wore out my mantra. When I overheard Grandma and Uncle Charlie whispering about my mother, and the risks of her surgery, and the chance that her tumor would be malignant, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. I will not worry about something that will not happen.

  On the day of the surgery I sat under the pine tree in Grandpa’s backyard, saying my mantra to the pinecones, which Sheryl once told me were the “pine tree’s babies.” I wondered if the pine tree was the mother or the father. I placed the pinecones closer to the tree, reuniting them with their mother-father. Grandma appeared. A miracle, she said. My mother was out of surgery and everything was fine. What she didn’t say, what she didn’t know, was that I’d done it. I’d used my mantra to save my mother.

  Bandaged around her neck, my mother left the hospital a week later, and our first night in Great Neck she went straight to bed. I ate a bowl of noodles and watched her sleep, saying my mantra under my breath, wafting it over her like a blanket.

  Grandma and Grandpa congratulated my mother on how quickly she recov
ered after the surgery. Good as new, they said. But I noticed something different. My mother was given to more blank faces than ever. She would touch her bandage and look at me, blankly, and though she shed the bandage eventually, the blank faces didn’t stop. Sitting with her, doing my homework, I’d look up and catch her staring at me, and I’d have to say her name three times to bring her out of it. I knew what she was thinking. While she’d been sick and out of work, our bills had piled up. We were going to lose that Great Neck apartment. We were going to have to return to Grandpa’s. Any day now I would wake to find my mother pecking at the calculator, talking to her calculator. Any night now she would cover her face and sob.

  When the inevitable moment came, my mother took me by surprise. “We’re a family, you and I,” she said, sitting me down at the kitchen table. “But we’re also a democracy. And I’d like to put something to a vote. Do you miss the cousins?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. So here it is, babe. How would you feel about moving to Arizona?”

  Images flooded my mind. Riding horses with McGraw. Climbing mountains with McGraw. Trick-or-treating with Sheryl.

  “When can we leave?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to think about it?”

  “No. When can we leave?”

  “Whenever we want.” She smiled, a fragile smile, but fierce. “It’s a free country.”

  eleven | STRANGERS IN PARADISE

  Just eighteen months in the desert had turned the cousins into precious metals. Their hair was gold, their skin copper, their faces a stunning bronze. As they ran toward us at Sky Harbor Airport, my mother and I took a half step back. Bundled in our dark coats and woolen mufflers, we looked and felt like refugees from another century. “How white you are!” Sheryl shouted, holding her forearm next to mine. “Look! It’s chocolate—vanilla! Chocolate—vanilla!”