The Tender Bar (34 page)

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.”

Yale had recently mailed my mother a catalog of rings, which for some reason captured her imagination. She’d become strangely obsessed with buying me a ring as a graduation present. She said I must have a ring. A ring, she said, was part of the Yale experience. Like a diploma, she believed, a ring would be proof that I’d gone to Yale. “Sparkling proof,” she said.

I didn’t want a ring. I told my mother about my aversion to men’s jewelry, and I pointed out that Yale rings were expensive. She wouldn’t listen. You must have a ring, she insisted. Fine, I said, send me the catalog, I’ll order a ring. But I would pay for it myself, by working extra hours at the bookstore-café.

Over dinner at Publicans my mother knew I hadn’t kept my word, that the money for the ring had gone the way of the money for the name change. “You promised you were going to order a ring,” she said in a disappointed voice.

“And I did.”

From the breast pocket of my blazer I removed a velvet box and slid it across the table. She cracked the box open. Inside was a Yale ring. A woman’s ring. I explained that Yale had been our dream, and our accomplishment. I told my mother that I couldn’t have gotten into Yale without her, and certainly couldn’t have gotten through without her. “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “you graduated from Yale today too. And you should have some proof. Sparkling proof.”

Her eyes welled with tears, and she tried to speak, but her voice caught in her throat.

After dinner we moved into the barroom. Uncle Charlie was behind the stick and in my honor he played Sinatra all night. “This is your ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’” he said, cranking the volume on “My Way.” When a young hippie wannabe in a suede coat with fringes along the sleeves asked Uncle Charlie to please play something else, Uncle Charlie glared at him and slowly raised the volume.

Steve gave my mother a big hello. He complimented her ring and flashed a chivalrous variation of the Cheshire smile. Cager tipped his visor to my mother and told Uncle Charlie he wanted to buy her a drink. “Dorothy,” Uncle Charlie said, “you’re backed up on The Cage.”

I tried to whisper something to my mother about Cager’s time in Vietnam. I wanted her to know what an honor it was to have Cager buy her a drink. But Fuckembabe interrupted. “Your son,” he said to my mother, “splitches the sploozah like nobody else in this casbah, especially when he walla wallas the umpty boodles, I wanna tell you!”

“Oh?” she said, looking to me for help. “Thank you.”

While my mother was talking to Uncle Charlie and Fuckembabe, Cager tapped me on the shoulder. He asked what subject I’d chosen for a major. History, I said. He asked why. I told him one of my professors had said that history is the narrative of people searching for a place to go, and I liked that idea.

“So how much do they get for a Yale education these days anyway?” he asked.

“About sixty thousand,” I said. “But most of that was paid for by grants and loans and scholar—”

“And what year was the Magna Carta signed?”

“Magna—? I don’t know.”

“Just as I thought. Sixty thou, down the drain.” He lit a Merit Ultra and took a swallow of Budweiser. “Magna Carta—1215. Foundation of English law. Bulwark against tyranny. They let you out of fucking Yale without knowing that?”

He sounded as though my graduation had set his teeth on edge. And he wasn’t the only one. Colt sounded standoffish too, like Yogi Bear stealing a picnic basket that turns out to be empty. Were the men, like Sinatra, somehow intimidated by Yale? I couldn’t stand to think Yale might be a barrier to the bar, so I downplayed my diploma, talked up my shitty grades and my emasculation by Sidney, and sure enough their mood improved.

When the kitchen closed, people in the restaurant drifted into the barroom for nightcaps, followed by the waiters and waitresses, now off duty, ready for their first cocktails of the night. Everyone congratulated me and flattered my mother and reminisced about their own graduations. My cousin Linda arrived and presented me with two gifts. The first was news that McGraw would be home next week. He’d just finished his first year at Nebraska, where he’d earned a baseball scholarship, and I was dying to see him. Her second gift was a silver pen from Tiffany. Linda knew I harbored indistinct notions of becoming a writer. My mother didn’t know, however, or didn’t want to know, so Linda’s pen pointed the way to the conversation we’d been dodging for years. At long last—nestled in Publicans, brazen with scotch—I admitted to my mother that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. Law school wasn’t for me. School of any kind wasn’t for me. I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry.

My mother held up her hand. Wait, she said. Slow down. Her heart wasn’t set on my being a lawyer. She only pushed me in that direction, she said, because she wanted me to make a contribution to the world, and to build a career, instead of just punching a clock. She’d be happy if I was happy, no matter what career I chose. “What is it you think you might like to do instead of law school?” she asked sweetly.