At eight years old I was unusually gullible, and yet I was still able to divine the ulterior motive behind many of Grandma’s stories. Though she disliked my father, Grandma understood what I got from his voice and what I lost when his voice vanished, and she was doing what she could to summon new male voices for me. I was grateful, and also vaguely conscious that this wasn’t the only substitution taking place during our cake-and-story sessions. Grandma was being called upon to fill in for my mother, who was working longer hours, more determined than ever to get us out of Grandpa’s house.
As Grandma and I spent more time together, as we grew closer, we both worried that she would run out of material. Eventually our worry came true. Her archive of stories exhausted, she was forced to reach into literature, reciting lyrical passages from Longfellow, her favorite poet, whom she’d memorized as a schoolgirl. I liked Longfellow even better than the Brothers Fritz. I stopped breathing when Grandma recited The Song of Hiawatha, stared in awe as she described how the Indian boy’s father vanished soon after he was born, and how Hiawatha’s mother then died, which left the boy to be raised by his grandmother, Nokomis. Despite the warnings of Nokomis, despite her sense of dread, Hiawatha set off in search of his father. The boy had no choice. He was haunted by his father’s voice on the wind.
I enjoyed Grandma’s recollections about her epic brothers, and her poetry recitals about heroic men, but I felt embarrassed, even ashamed, because my favorite stories were about a woman—her mother, Maggie O’Keefe. The oldest of thirteen, Maggie was forced to care for her siblings while her mother was sick or pregnant, and she became a folk hero in County Cork for her many sacrifices, including carrying her baby sister piggyback to school when the sister was too lazy to walk. Maggie vowed that her sister would learn to read and write, something Maggie had always longed to do.
What it was that made Maggie leave Ireland, forsake her siblings and parents and flee to New York in the 1800s, we never knew. We yearned to know, because she was the first in a long line of leavers, the matriarch of a clan of men and women who made mysterious and dramatic exits. But her reason for leaving must have been too awful, too painful, because Maggie was said to be a born storyteller, and that story was the one she would never tell.
For her secret torment, for her many fine qualities, Maggie deserved a bit of happiness when she docked at Ellis Island. Instead life got harder. Working as a maid in one of the grand estates on Long Island, she was passing an upstairs window one day when she spotted a gardener beneath a tree, reading a book. He was “despicably handsome,” she said years later, and obviously educated. Maggie fell hard. She confided her love to a friend, another maid, and they conceived a plan. The friend, who knew how to write, would take down Maggie’s thoughts and turn them into love letters, which Maggie would sign and slip into the gardener’s book while he pruned the roses. Naturally the gardener was awed by Maggie’s letters, seduced by her soaring prose, and after a whirlwind courtship he and Maggie married. When he learned that Maggie was illiterate, however, the gardener felt cheated, and thus was born a lifelong resentment, which he used to justify drinking and beating her—until their three boys caught him and took him by the throat.
While Grandma was telling me stories late one night, Grandpa appeared in the kitchen. “Give me some cake,” he said to her.
“I’m right in the middle of a story,” she said.
“Give me a piece of goddamned cake and don’t make me ask you twice, you goddamned stupid woman!”
Where Grandpa was merely cold with his children, and off-putting with his grandchildren, he was ugly to Grandma. He belittled her, bullied her, tormented her for sport, and his cruelty was crystallized in his name for her. I never once heard him call her Margaret. He called her Stupid Woman, which sounded like a perversion of certain Indian names—Great Bear and Laughing Water—in Hiawatha. I didn’t understand why Grandma allowed Grandpa to mistreat her, because I didn’t understand the depth of her dependence on him, emotional and financial. Grandpa understood, and exploited it, keeping her in rags to match his own. Out of the forty dollars he gave her each week for food and household expenses, there was nothing left over for a new dress or shoes. Her daily outfit was a tattered housecoat. It was her garb of submission, her sackcloth.
After Grandpa left the kitchen—after Grandma had served him his cake—there was a dreadful silence. I watched Grandma, her gaze riveted on her plate. She removed her thick glasses and touched her left eye, which was now fluttering, twitching, a nervous tic. A photo taken when Grandma was nineteen shows her blue eyes calm and steady, her round face framed by crinkly blond hair. It wasn’t a conventionally pretty face, but the features were harmonized by vitality, and when that vitality was gone—dreaded away, bullied away—the features fell out of tune. Along with the twitching eye, the nose sagged, the lips retracted, the cheeks sank. Every day of degradation and shame showed. Even when she was silent, Grandma’s face was telling a story.
Though I didn’t understand why Grandma couldn’t fight back, why she didn’t heed her genetic legacy and leave, I understood quite well after that visitation from Grandpa why she told all those stories about men. It wasn’t for my benefit alone. She was her own best audience, reminding herself, reassuring herself, that good men do exist, that they might ride to our rescue any moment. As she continued to stare at the crumbs I felt that I should say something, that someone should say something before we were both swallowed by the silence. So I asked, “Why are there so many bad men in our family?”
Without looking up she said, “It’s not just our family. There are bad men everywhere. That’s why I want you to grow up to be good.” Slowly she raised her eyes. “That’s why I want you to stop being so angry all the time, JR. No more tantrums. No more security blankets. No more asking for TV sets and toys your mother can’t afford. You need to take care of your mother. Do you hear?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother works so hard, and she’s so tired, and she has no one but you to help her. No one else can do it. She’s counting on you. I’m counting on you.”
Each time she said the word “you,” it sounded like a drum. My mouth went dry, because I was trying my best, but Grandma was saying that my worst fear, the thing I worried about most, was coming true. I was falling short. Failing my mother. I promised Grandma that I would do more, then asked to be excused and went quickly back down the hall to Uncle Charlie’s room.
eight | McGRAW
What are you doing?” my cousin McGraw asked. He was standing in the middle of the backyard, swinging a bat at an imaginary pitch, making a sound—koosh—like the ball connecting. I was sitting on the stoop, the radio in my lap. I was nearly nine and McGraw was seven.
“Nothing,” I said.
A few minutes passed.
“No, really,” he said. “What are you doing?”
I lowered the volume. “Trying to see if my father is back on the radio.”
After shooting another pretend pitch into the gap, McGraw adjusted his plastic Mets batting helmet, which he never took off, and said, “What if there was a machine that let you see or hear your father whenever you wanted? How cool would that be?”
McGraw’s father, my Uncle Harry, hardly ever came around, but his absence seemed more pointed than my father’s because Uncle Harry lived just one town over. And his appearances were scarier, because he sometimes hit Aunt Ruth and the cousins. He once poured a bottle of wine over Aunt Ruth’s head in front of McGraw. Another time he pulled Aunt Ruth by her hair along the floor in front of all the cousins. He even slapped me, across my face, which gave me a cold dead feeling deep inside my chest.
McGraw was my best friend and closest ally in Grandpa’s house, after my mother. I often introduced him as my brother, and I wasn’t lying. I was searching for something truer than the truth. How could McGraw not be my brother, when he led the same life, steered by the same coordinates? Absent father. Weary mother. Shady uncle. Sad grandparents. One-of-a-kind first na
me that prompted teasing and confusion. Also, as with my name, there was some mystery about the origins of McGraw’s. Aunt Ruth told Grandpa that McGraw’s name was inspired by John McGraw, the legendary baseball manager, but I also overheard her telling my mother that she’d picked the most rugged name she could find, to ensure that McGraw, surrounded by sisters, wouldn’t be a sissy.
I shared Aunt Ruth’s concern. I too feared that McGraw and I were doomed to sissyhood. When McGraw, who was more easygoing than I, didn’t worry about such things, I forced him to. I initiated McGraw into my neuroses, drilled into his head the notion that we were growing up without the manly arts, like auto repair and hunting, camping and fishing, and especially boxing. For McGraw’s own good I commanded him to help me stuff Uncle Charlie’s golf bag with dishrags and newspapers, and with this makeshift punching bag we taught each other to throw left-right combinations. I dragged McGraw against his will to the duck pond by the railroad tracks, where we cast hooks baited with Wonder Bread into the scummy water. We actually caught something, a speckled fish that looked like Barney Fife, which we brought to Grandpa’s. We put it in the bathtub and forgot about it. When Grandma found it she scolded us severely, which confirmed my paranoia that we were living under a tyranny of the feminine.
Despite our identical lives McGraw and I were different boys, and our differences seemed to grow out of our relationships with our mothers. McGraw tended to fume at his, whom he called Ruth, while I clung to mine, whom I never once called Dorothy. She was always Mom. My mother let me wear my hair like Keith Partridge, McGraw’s mother gave him a military buzz cut every two weeks. I was intense, McGraw was laid back. I was prone to brood, McGraw was a giggler, and his giggle was a distinctive, symphonic trill that conveyed an irrepressible joy. I was finicky about food, McGraw ate everything in sight and washed it down with gallons of milk. “McGraw,” Grandma would cry, “I don’t have a cow in the backyard!” To which he’d respond with a fit of giggles. I was dark and skinny, McGraw was blond and big, and bigger all the time. He grew like a boy in a fairy tale, breaking chairs, hammocks, beds, the basketball hoop on the garage. Since Uncle Harry was a giant, it seemed logical to me that McGraw was growing like a beanstalk.
McGraw wouldn’t talk about his father, and wouldn’t talk about why he wouldn’t talk about his father. I suspected, however, that whenever a train went across the trestle spanning Manhasset Bay, making a clacking sound audible from one end of Manhasset to the other, McGraw couldn’t help but think about his father, a conductor on the Long Island Railroad. Though McGraw wouldn’t say so, I believed the sound of the train affected him the way radio static affected me. Somewhere in that white noise is your old man.
When McGraw did get to see his father, it wasn’t a visit but an ambush. Aunt Ruth would send McGraw inside some bar to demand money from his father or to have him sign some papers. I could always tell when McGraw had come back from one of these bar ambushes. His chubby cheeks would be flushed, his eyes glassy. He’d look traumatized, but also excited, because he’d just seen his father. He’d want to play baseball in the backyard right away, to burn off the adrenaline and anger. He’d swing the bat hard, whip the ball against the target we’d chalked on the garage—hard. After one bar ambush he threw the ball so hard that Grandpa said he was sure McGraw would knock the garage down.
There was always one other surefire way to tell if McGraw was upset. Like Grandpa, he stuttered. His stutter was much subtler than Grandpa’s, but the sight of McGraw fighting to form words never failed to pierce my heart and renew my awareness that he was one of the people in that house who needed my protection. In every photo from those years I have a hand on McGraw’s shoulder, a hold of his shirt, as if he’s my charge, my ward.
One day McGraw was carted off to see his father, but it wasn’t the typical bar ambush. They spent time together, ate cheeseburgers, talked. McGraw even got to steer the train. When he came back he was clutching a grocery bag. Inside was one of his father’s conductor hats, big and heavy as a fruit bowl. “It’s my dad’s,” McGraw said, removing his Mets helmet and putting on the conductor hat. The visor dropped over his eyes, the band fell below his ears.
The grocery bag also contained hundreds of railroad tickets. “Look!” McGraw said. “We can take these and go somewhere. Anywhere! Shea Stadium!”
“These tickets are punched,” I said, trying to dampen his enthusiasm, because I was jealous that he’d seen his father. “They’re no good, stupid.”
“My father gave them to me.”
He snatched the grocery bag away from me.
Wearing his conductor hat, and a change belt his father also gave him, McGraw appointed himself conductor of the living room. He staggered back and forth, imitating the high-wire walk of a conductor going down the aisle of a moving train, though he looked more like Uncle Charlie coming home from Dickens. “Tickets!” he said. “All tickets. Next stop—Penn Station!” We all had to fish in our pockets for coins, no exceptions, though Grandma bought many rides on the bicentennial sofa with cookies and glasses of cold milk.
Aunt Ruth pulled the emergency brake on McGraw’s living room locomotive. She told McGraw she was suing his father for child support, and McGraw would have to testify in court. McGraw would be called to the witness stand, where he’d have to swear on the Holy Bible that Uncle Harry had left his wife and six kids to starve. McGraw moaned and put his hands over his ears and ran out the back door. I ran after him and found him behind the garage, sitting in mud. He could barely speak. “I’ve got to stand up and say bad things about my father!” he said. “He’ll never want to see me again! I’ll never see my father again!”
“No,” I told him. “You don’t ever have to say anything bad about your father if you don’t want to.” I would smuggle him to Shelter Rock before I let that happen.
The case never did go to court. Uncle Harry gave Aunt Ruth some money and the crisis passed. But there were no more visits between McGraw and his father for a long time after that. Quietly McGraw took off his conductor’s hat, put on his Mets helmet, and we all went back to riding the bicentennial sofa for free.
In the spare bed we shared in a far corner of Grandpa’s room, McGraw and I would lie awake at night and talk about everything except the subject that bound us, though sometimes that subject would intrude. Grandpa liked to sleep with the radio on, so every few minutes a deep-voiced announcer would make me stop and listen. And every train going by in the distance would make McGraw lift his head. After McGraw fell asleep I’d listen to the radio and the trains and watch the moonlight fall through the window in wide canary yellow stripes across McGraw’s chubby face. I’d thank God for him, and I’d worry about what I’d do if he weren’t there.
And then he was gone. Aunt Ruth moved the cousins to a house some miles up Plandome Road. She was determined to escape Grandpa’s house too, though it had nothing to do with the conditions or the overcrowding. After a nasty fight with Grandma and Grandpa she left in a blaze of temper, staying away and keeping the cousins away. She forbade them to visit.
“Did Aunt Ruth kidnap the cousins?” I asked Grandpa.
“You might say that.”
“Will she ever bring them back?”
“No. We’re em, em, embargoed.”
“What’s embargoed?”
I’d heard this word many times in 1973. There was a Middle East embargo, meaning the Arabs refused to sell us gas, which was the reason you couldn’t buy more than ten gallons at a time at the Mobil station next to Dickens. What did that have to do with Aunt Ruth?
“It means we’re on her sh, sh, shit list,” Grandpa said.
Furthermore, Aunt Ruth had barred me from her house. I was prohibited from seeing McGraw and the cousins.
“You’re on her shit list too,” Grandpa said.
“What did I do?”
“Guilt by association.”
I remember the McGraw Embargo of 1973 as a time when I too ran out of gas. I moped through the days, listles
s, glum. It was October. The sugar maples throughout Manhasset turned into torches of red and orange, and from the highest hilltops the town looked as if it were on fire. Grandma was always telling me to go out and play, enjoy the autumn colors and the crisp weather, but I would just lie on Uncle Charlie’s bed, watching TV. I was watching I Dream of Jeannie one night when I heard the front door open, followed by Sheryl’s voice.
“Anybody home?”
I ran out of Uncle Charlie’s bedroom.
“What’s this?” Grandma cried, hugging Sheryl.
“You’re behind enemy lines?” my mother said, kissing her.
Sheryl waved her hand. “Pshaw,” she said.
Sheryl feared no one. Fourteen years old, she was the prettiest of Aunt Ruth’s daughters, and the most defiant.
“How’s McGraw?” I asked her.
“He misses you. He told me to ask what you’re going to be for Halloween.”
I looked down.
“I can’t take him trick-or-treating,” my mother said. “I’m working that night.”
“I’ll take him,” Sheryl said.
“What about your mother?” Grandma said.
“I’ll run him around the block,” Sheryl said, “fill his little bag with loot, and be home before Ruth knows I’m gone.” She turned to me. “I’ll pick you up at five.”
I was on the stoop at four, dressed as the Frito Bandito. I wore a poncho and a sombrero, and I drew a black handlebar mustache in Magic Marker below my nose. Sheryl was right on time. “Ready?” she said.
“What if we get caught?” I said.
“Be a man.”
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 6