“And there are several good law schools in the area,” I said.
“I thought you were going to be a newspaperman?”
“Lawyers make more money than newspapermen.”
“We don’t need money,” she said. “We have love.”
But we needed money too. Since the laundry disaster sophomore year I’d held a series of part-time jobs, always earning just enough to pay for booze and books, but senior year I found full-time work at a bookstore-café next to the Center for British Art. The store would have been Bill and Bud’s idea of paradise. Its front wall was plate glass from floor to ceiling, so the sales floor was always flooded with natural light, and a horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the fiction section served gourmet coffee and pastries. My job was to sit on a stool at the cash register and ring up the occasional sale. Since the place catered almost exclusively to homeless people and grad students—who took advantage of the free-refill policy, guzzling coffee until they were jittery as crackheads—sales were few, and I had plenty of time to read and eavesdrop on conversations about art and literature. The atmosphere was invigoratingly, absurdly intellectual. I once watched a fistfight break out between two busboys over who would get to keep Jacques Derrida’s silver pipe cleaner, which the famous literature professor had left beside his plate after eating a sandwich.
I was also in charge of the bookstore stereo, which meant Sinatra all the time. Grad students would clap their hands over their ears and plead for something else. Even the homeless complained. “Jeez kid,” a homeless man shouted at me, “a little Crosby would be nice for a change.” I relented one winter day and played Mozart. Bud’s favorite—the Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat. I opened my copy of Chekhov and my eye fell on the line “We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.” I snapped the book shut and felt the words hit my bloodstream like an Uncle Charlie martini. I’d found peace, I’d heard angels, and the sky was full of diamonds—it was snowing, thick feathery flakes, making the glass-walled store feel like a snow globe. I watched the snow sprinkle the campus, sipped my coffee, listened to Mozart, and told myself—warned myself—this might be it. I might never be happier. I was going to graduate, I was applying to law schools, I was reunited with the love of my life. Even my mother was feeling better. She was having some success selling insurance, and dating again.
A customer approached the counter. I rang up his book and as I handed him his change I heard something smash against the front window. I turned, the customer turned, everyone turned. A huge snowball was flattened against the glass. Outside, in the middle of the street, Sidney stood with a hand on her hip, beaming. I ran outside, picked her up and twirled her in circles. I told her that one minute ago I thought I’d never be happier, and now I was twice as happy, and it was all her doing. “I love you,” she said, over and over.
In my memory it seems like five minutes later that I was walking out of Sterling Library, a rough draft of my senior thesis in my backpack, and it was spring again. I bumped into Franklin Dean Roosevelt. He congratulated me on how well I looked. He added pointedly—with some emotion—that he was looking forward to seeing me, above all people, in a mortarboard and gown on commencement day.
Sidney and I went skinny-dipping in a secluded cove that she knew of in Long Island Sound. We swam to a wooden float far from shore and lay on our backs in the sun, holding hands, talking in low voices, for some reason, though there was no one near us. In fact the world seemed to have been covered in a second Great Flood, of which we were the only survivors.
“Tell me the truth,” I said.
“Always,” she said.
“Have you ever been this happy?”
“Never,” she said. “I never dared to hope that I would be this happy.”
My mother wrote to say she’d bought an airplane ticket and a new blue suit for my graduation. I read her letter under my spreading elm, then looked up at the high branches, bursting with new green buds, and fell peacefully asleep. When I woke it was twilight. Walking back to my room I spotted a handbill announcing guest lecturers coming to speak on various topics. Who has time to sit in a stuffy lecture hall and listen to these drones, particularly at the start of spring? The name of one drone caught my eye. Frank Sinatra. Poor bastard. A geeky economics professor at MIT, and he’s named after the coolest man on the planet.
I read more closely. The handbill seemed to suggest that this Frank Sinatra coming to Yale was Frank Sinatra, singer. He’d been invited to speak about his “art.” I read the words over and over. A joke, obviously. Then I realized the date. April 1. Very funny.
My schoolmates, however, swore it was no joke. Sinatra was coming, they said, though they didn’t care. I went by the lecture hall on the appointed day. No crowd, no commotion. I sat on the steps and watched cars go by. Some joke. Standing to go I saw a student hurrying up the steps with a huge ring of keys. “You here for Sinatra?” he asked.
“He’s really coming?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Where is everybody?”
“It’s only two o’clock.”
“I thought there would be a line, people hoping to get a good seat?”
“It’s not like George Michael is coming.”
He let me in. I picked a good seat and waited while the hall filled around me. There were still empty seats when Sinatra stepped quietly through a side door, no entourage, no bodyguards, flanked only by his wife and a frowzy dean. He sat calmly beside the lectern and crossed his legs, waiting.
He didn’t look the way I’d pictured him. He was thicker and more avuncular than I’d expected. He seemed no more exceptional than the dean who fluttered about the podium, adjusting the microphone, maybe because Sinatra was dressed like the dean. In every photo I’d ever seen, Sinatra wore a tux, or a sharkskin suit with a thin tie. That day he wore a tweed blazer, charcoal slacks, a golden necktie, and polished cordovan loafers. Sinatra was trying to look collegiate, to fit in. My heart went out to him.
I watched his eyes. I’d seen those blue eyes so many times, on album covers, in movies, but no camera could convey their full blueness from a few feet away. They darted left and right, sweeping the room like blue searchlights, and I noticed that they turned different shades of blue as they moved—indigo, royal, navy. Behind the blueness I saw something more striking. Fear. Frank Sinatra was afraid. Eating a plate of pasta with hit men didn’t scare him, but speaking to a roomful of nerds made him sweat. His hands shook as he fumbled with note cards and slipped them into his breast pocket. He glanced at his wife, down front, who sent him a you-can-do-it smile. Watching him writhe, seeing him suffer the same desire to be liked that I’d suffered for four years at Yale, I wanted to shout, Relax, Frank! You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together!
The dean said a few introductory words and Sinatra stood and walked to the lectern. He coughed into his fist several times, to clear his throat, and began. The Voice was scratchy. It sounded like my oldest vinyls. He thanked us for inviting him to speak on the subject of his “art,” and though he was an artist, he said, he wanted us to know first and foremost that he was a saloon singer. He loved saloons, and clearly loved the word. Every time he said “saloon” his vocal cords relaxed and his streetwise Hoboken accent reemerged, overtaking his valiant attempt at Ivy League elocution. A saloon was the birthplace of his voice, he said. A saloon was the launch pad of his identity. A saloon was where his mother took him as a boy and sat him on the bar and told him to sing for all the men. I looked around. Was everyone getting this? Frank Sinatra grew up in a bar! No one seemed all that surprised, but I was pounding my fist on my thigh.
I hadn’t thought it possible to feel more grateful to Sinatra. I already gave him half the credit for getting me over Sidney, getting me back together with Sidney, and helping me graduate. But when he made me feel there was nothing wrong with loving saloons, that growing up in a saloon didn’t disqualify a young man for success, or happiness,
or the love of someone like Sidney, I wanted to rush the podium and wrap my arms around him. I wanted to thank Sinatra for seeing me through a dark time, for singing me through. I wanted to invite him to Publicans, and I almost did. I raised my hand to speak during the question-and-answer session. If you love saloons, Frank, have I got a saloon for you! But before The Voice could call on me, the dean stepped forward and said it was time for our honored guest to leave.
Sinatra thanked us for our time and, looking relieved, slide-stepped out the door.
twenty-six | JR MAGUIRE
In the days before graduation, I had one last assignment, one last requirement to fulfill, though this one was self-imposed. I needed to legally change my name. I needed to jettison JR, and Junior, and Moehringer, to sweep aside those burdensome symbols and replace them with something normal, some name that didn’t come from the German neighbor of my father’s pseudonymous father. I wanted to deny my father and refuse my name, and I wanted a name that Sidney wouldn’t be able to deny or refuse when I asked her to take it in marriage.
But I had to hurry. Yale was days away from printing diplomas for the Class of 1986, and I resolved that whatever name appeared on my diploma would be my name for keeps. I’d worked too hard for that diploma, vested it with too much meaning to have it bear any name other than my legal name. I would not let my identity fork. I would not go through life with two different names, the second coming of Johnny Michaels, aka John Moehringer.
I spent hours and hours in Sterling Library, compiling lists of potential names. I looked through novels, poetry anthologies, baseball encyclopedias, volumes of Who’s Who, collecting lyrical names, unusual names, ultramasculine names. I imagined myself for five minutes at a time as Chip Oakwood, Jake McGunnigle, Clinton Vandemere. I practiced my new signature as Bennett Silverthorne, Hamilton Gold, and William Featherstone. I went to sleep as Morgan Rivers and woke as Brock Manchester. I gave serious consideration to becoming Bayard Something or Other, but after stealing the man’s shirt I couldn’t justify stealing his name. I experimented with the names of nineteenth-century baseball players, like Red Conkright and Jocko Fields, and went around campus for an afternoon thinking of myself as Grover Lowdermilk. I tried medleys of terribly British names I found in the annals of Parliament, like Hamden Lloyd Cadwallader. Eventually I realized that every name I liked, all the names on my short list, were just as prone to mockery as JR Moehringer.
In the end I settled on Charles Mallard. Plain. Simple. Charles in honor of Uncle Charlie, Mallard because it sounded moneyed and Old World. Charles Mallard was a man who wore neckties adorned with pictures of pheasants, and knew how to clean a twelve-gauge, and bedded all the best-looking girls at the club. Charles Mallard was who I thought I wanted to be. Charles Mallard I was. For one weekend. At the last minute a buddy saved me from formalizing this fantastic mistake by pointing out that I was letting myself in for a lifetime of being called Chuck Duck.
I decided to remain JR, but I would make JR my legal first name. Then I’d no longer be lying when I told people it didn’t stand for anything. For my last name I’d take my mother’s maiden name, Maguire. JR Maguire. Sidney wrote it in her architect handwriting on the front of my Yale notebook. Very handsome, she said. Below it she wrote, “Sidney Maguire.” We both agreed it had a certain ring to it.
The clerk at New Haven Superior Court said changing your identity was a breeze. “Fill out this form,” she said, sliding a sheet of paper toward me, “and you can be anyone you want.”
“I want to change my first name to JR. Just JR. That’s okay?”
“Just JR? It wouldn’t stand for anything?”
“No. That’s the whole point. Is that legal?”
“Change your name to R2D2 for all the state of Connecticut cares.”
“Great.”
“What will the last name be?”
“Maguire.”
“JR Maguire,” she said. “What’s your name right now?”
“John Joseph Moehringer Jr.”
She hooted. “Oh boy,” she said. “Definitely an improvement.”
I took the form to my room and phoned my mother to tell her what I was doing. She wasn’t thrilled—Grandpa’s name had its own unhappy associations for her—but she understood. The change would cost seventy-five dollars, I told her, which I didn’t have. Courting Sidney had left me a little short. My mother said she would wire me the money right away.
Counting my seventy-five dollars as I left Western Union, I decided to give John Joseph Moehringer Jr. a proper sendoff. I walked into town and stopped into a bar. I saw my friend Bebe, the only other student at Yale who delighted in barrooms as much as I. Hey, I told her, guess who died. Junior! That’s right, Junior Moehringer is dead! Long live JR Maguire! She laughed nervously, no idea what I was talking about. Let me buy my friend Bebe a drink, I told the bartender, and then I explained myself, giving them both a brief history of my name and how much I hated it and why I was shaking it off at last.
“Bon voyage, Junior!” I said, raising my beer.
“See ya, Junior!” Bebe said, clinking her bottle against mine.
“Sayonara, asshole!” the bartender shouted.
I woke the next morning with a throbbing head. I lay on my back, eyes closed, trying to piece together what happened after I left Western Union. I remembered making a toast. I remembered Bebe and the bartender laughing and saying something like, “JR Maguire is on fire. What’s your desire, JR Maguire!” The rest was a void. I thought about phoning Bebe, asking her what happened—then it all came roaring back to me. I jumped out of bed and rifled through the pockets of my jeans. The seventy-five dollars was gone. All of it. Junior, that sneak, that rat, had gotten me drunk and rolled me.
I sat at my desk and looked at the form. JR Maguire. Such a handsome name—and I’d screwed it up. Worse, I’d drunk it up. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and told myself that I didn’t deserve a name so handsome. I deserved to go through life as JR Moehringer. A cross between an alias and a lie.
Sidney kissed me and said she didn’t care about my name. Days later I discovered that what she didn’t care about was me. Once again she was seeing someone on the side.
I learned the truth in her bathroom. An envelope on the counter was addressed to Sidney in a man’s blocky handwriting. I read it several times. “Is Junior still in the picture? If so, why? I can’t wait to [illegible] when I see you again.”
When I handed Sidney the letter she asked, “Where did you get that?” She took it from me and told me about him, a few facts I would rather not have known. He was a trust-fund kid with a fast yacht and a much better name. He was from her hometown, he was funny, he was smart—but he was just a friend, she pleaded. I wanted to believe her, or forgive her, but even Sidney didn’t expect me to. I tried to think of something to do besides break up, but I couldn’t, and Sidney couldn’t either. Days before graduation we said good-bye, forever.
I yearned to hit Publicans for my traditional post-Sidney binge, but there wasn’t time. It was graduation day. My mother was there, standing in my room, wearing her new blue suit, smiling into space, thinking back, I knew, on all the days when such a moment was unimaginable.
As I marched across Old Campus in my black gown and mortarboard, I heard the bells in Harkness and remembered the first time I’d heard them, seven years earlier. I recalled how they had tormented me, but now, as I took my seat among my fellow graduates, all torments fell away, and in their place was a radiant gratitude, which I ranked as the day’s true achievement, more than the diploma I was about to receive.
Only one sad moment marred that splendid afternoon. It all happened so fast, I wondered later if I’d imagined it. Just after the ceremony Sidney stepped out from the crowd, holding a large bouquet of lilies. She thrust them at me and kissed my cheek. She whispered that she was sorry, that she would always love me, then turned—short skirt, tanned legs, heels—and walked across New Haven Green. I watched her disappear in
the shadow of my spreading elm, one sanctuary dissolving into another.
I felt no anger. Instead I felt with unusual clarity how young we were, Sidney no less than I. Maybe it was the tassel hanging in my eyes, making me think with self-conscious maturity, but for a brief moment I recognized and appreciated how much, despite her sophistication, Sidney was a girl. We both pretended to be adults, but that’s all it was, pretending. We craved the same things—safety, sanctuary, financial security—and Sidney may have craved them more than I, because she’d enjoyed them growing up and knew how important they were. In her desperation to obtain them, she had acted out of panic, not malice.
Driving my mother to Manhasset I refused to think of Sidney. I concentrated on the good things about the day while my mother studied my diploma. “It’s all in Latin,” she said.
“Except for my name—a mix of German and gibberish.”
“Primi Honoris Academici? What does that mean?”
I shook my head. “No clue.”
A diploma I couldn’t read, a name I couldn’t abide. I didn’t care. I prized that diploma, considered it a second birth certificate. My mother ran her finger over the name. “JR Moehringer,” she said. “You got Yale to print JR? And with no dots?”
“Some last-minute negotiating.”
“What happened to JR Maguire?”
“I had—a change of heart.”
She looked at my hand on the steering wheel. “And the Yale ring?” she asked.
“Let’s talk about that over dinner.”
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 25