The Tender Bar (5 page)

“JR,” my mother said.

“His real name.”

“JR.”

“Those are his initials, no?”

“No.”

“Well.” The psychiatrist dropped his legal pad on his desk. “There’s your answer.”

“Pardon?” my mother said.

“The boy is obviously suffering an identity crisis. He has no identity, which causes rage. Give him a name—a
proper
name—and you’ll have no more tantrums.”

Rising, my mother told me to put my jacket back on, we were leaving. She then gave the psychiatrist a look that could have cracked Shelter Rock in two and in measured tones informed him that seven-year-olds do not suffer identity crises. Driving back to Grandpa’s she gripped the steering wheel tightly and ran through her repertoire in three-quarter time. Suddenly she stopped singing. She asked what I thought of the doctor’s remarks. Did I dislike my name? Did I suffer from an identity crisis? Was something or someone causing me to feel—rage?

I peeled my eyes from the mansions flying by, turned slowly from the window to my mother, and gave her my own blank face.

four
| GRANDPA

I
T HIT ME ONE DAY. I REALIZED THAT MY MOTHER WASN’T
offended so much by Grandpa’s house as by its owner. The needed repairs saddened her because they reminded her of the man who refused to make them. Catching her glance in Grandpa’s direction, then seeing her sink into a bottomless gloom, I got it, though I assumed her problem with Grandpa had something to do with how he looked.

Along with his house, Grandpa let himself go to pot. He wore pants with patches, shoes with holes, shirts wet with his saliva and leavings from his breakfast, and he went days without combing his hair or putting in his teeth or bathing. He used and reused his razor so many times that his cheeks looked as if he’d been clawed by a wild cat. He was crusty, rumpled, sour-smelling, and one other thing that my mother could never tolerate—lazy. Grandpa had long since stopped trying. As a young man he’d lost or shed whatever ambition he’d possessed. When his dreams of becoming a professional baseball player crumbled to dust he drifted into the insurance business, enjoying a success that turned his stomach. How cruel of fate, he thought, to make him excel at a job he loathed. He got his revenge on fate. The moment he amassed enough money to generate a dependable income for the rest of his life, he quit. From then on he did little more than watch his house fall apart and make his family cringe.

We cringed that much more when he took his act on the road. Every day at dusk Grandpa would walk uptown to greet the rush-hour trains from the city. As commuters stepped onto the platform and discarded their final-edition newspapers, Grandpa would dive into one of the garbage cans and fish a newspaper out, intent on saving himself a few cents. Seeing him with his legs sticking out of a garbage can, no commuter could have imagined why that poor old hobo wanted that final edition in the first place—to check the closing prices on his sizable portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Grandpa had a photographic memory, an astounding vocabulary, a firm command of Greek and Latin, but his family wasn’t able to enjoy his intellectual gifts because he never engaged us in actual conversations. He kept us at bay with a ceaseless patter of TV jingles, advertising slogans and non sequiturs. We’d tell him about our day and he’d shout, “It’s a free country!” We’d ask him to pass the beans and he’d say, “Tastes good like a cigarette should.” We’d mention that the dog had fleas and he’d say, “Don’t tell everybody—they’ll all want one!” His private language was a fence he put around himself, a fence that grew a few inches taller the day he overheard one of my cousins urging the constipated dog to “do boo-boo.” Thus was born Grandpa’s signature phrase. At least a dozen times a day he’d say, “Do boo-boo,” which might mean hello or let’s eat or the Mets lost—or nothing at all. It’s possible that Grandpa talked this way to compensate for his stutter, rehearsed phrases being easier to say. It’s also possible, however, that he was moderately insane.

Grandpa had two passions, one a secret, one not. Every Saturday morning he’d come downstairs with his hair brushed, his teeth in, his clothes pressed and spotless. From the pocket of his blue pinstripe suit a lace handkerchief would rise like a fresh orchid. Without a word he’d get into his Ford Pinto and putter away, not returning until late, sometimes not until the next day. No one asked where Grandpa went. His Saturday rendezvous was like the cesspool, so obviously foul it didn’t require comment.

His nonsecret passion was words. For hours Grandpa would sit in his bedroom, solving crossword puzzles, reading books, gazing at a dictionary under a magnifying glass. He considered Shakespeare the greatest man who ever lived, “because he
invented
the Eng, Eng, English language—when he couldn’t find a word, he made one up.” Grandpa credited his etymological passion to his Jesuit schoolteachers, who, when they couldn’t make him memorize a word, beat it into him. Though the beatings worked, Grandpa believed they also caused his stutter. Priests made him love words, and made it hard for him to say words. My first example of irony.

One of the few tender moments I ever shared with Grandpa came about because of a word. It happened when he accidentally answered the phone. With his stutter and poor hearing he tended to avoid the phone, but he chanced to be walking past just as it rang, and picked up. A reflex, maybe. Or else he was bored. Unable to hear what the caller was saying, he waved me over. “Translate,” he said, shoving the phone at me.

The caller was conducting a survey for a consumer-research company. She rattled off a list of products, cars and foods, none of which Grandpa had ever used, driven or tasted. Grandpa offered his opinion about each one, lying merrily.

“Now then,” the caller said. “What’s the best thing about the town where you live?”

“What’s the best thing about Manhasset?” I translated.

Grandpa thought carefully, as though being interviewed by the
Times
. “Its proximity to Manhattan,” he said.

I relayed his answer to the caller.

“Fine,” the caller said. “And lastly, what is your annual income?”

“What’s your annual income?” I translated.

“Hang up.”

“But—”

“Hang up.”

I set the phone on the cradle. Grandpa sat in silence, his eyes closed, and I stood before him, rubbing my hands together, my habit whenever I couldn’t think of something to say.

“What’s ‘proximity’?” I asked.

He stood. He put his hands in his pockets and jiggled some coins. “Closeness,” he said. “For in, for in, for instance, I have too much prox, prox, proximity to my family.” He laughed. A chortle at first, then a raucous haw-haw, which made me laugh. We were both laughing, cackling, until Grandpa’s laughter became a coughing fit. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and hocked it full of phlegm, then patted me on the head and walked away.

After that brief exchange I felt a new emotional proximity to my grandfather. I started to get ideas about winning him over. Maybe I could ignore his faults, focus on his good points, whatever those might be. I just needed to climb over his linguistic fence. I wrote a poem about him, which I grandly presented to him one morning in the bathroom. He was lathering his jaws for a shave, using a beaver-hair brush that looked like a giant mushroom. He read the poem, handed it back to me and turned back to his reflection in the mirror. “Thanks for the pl, pl, plug,” he said.

Later I had a pang. Would befriending Grandpa mean betraying my mother? I realized I should get her permission before I went any farther, and so at bedtime I sounded her out, asked her to tell me again why we hated Grandpa. She tucked my atrophying security blanket under my chin and chose her words carefully. We didn’t hate Grandpa, she explained. In fact she hoped I could find a way to get along with him as long as we lived under his roof. I should continue talking to Grandpa, she said, even when he didn’t answer me. And I shouldn’t pay too much attention to the fact that she didn’t talk to him. Ever.

“But why don’t you?” I asked. “Why do you get so sad whenever you look at him?”

She stared at the peeling wallpaper. “Because,” she said, “Grandpa is a real-life Scrooge, and not just with money.”

Grandpa hoarded love, my mother said, as if he were afraid of one day running out. He’d ignored her and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Charlie while they were growing up, gave them no attention or affection whatsoever. She described one family outing at the beach when she was five. Seeing how sweetly the father of her cousin Charlene played with his children, my mother asked Grandpa to put her on his shoulders in the ocean. He did, but then carried her past the waves, and when they were out far, when she could barely see the shore, she became frightened and pleaded with him to let her down. So he threw her. Down she went, plunging to the bottom, gulping seawater. She fought her way to the surface, gasped for air and saw Grandpa—laughing. You wanted to be let down, he told her, oblivious to her tears. Staggering out of the surf, alone, my mother had a precocious epiphany: Her father was not a good man. In that realization, she told me, came a release. She felt independent. I asked her what “independent” meant. “Free,” she said. She looked again at the peeling wallpaper and said more softly, “Free.”

But there was one other thing, she said, which cut deeper. Grandpa had forbidden my mother and Aunt Ruth to attend college, and he did so at a time when there were no student loans or financial aid available, so they couldn’t circumvent him. More than his neglect, this was the blow that altered the trajectory of my mother’s life. She’d longed to attend college, prepare for some exciting career, but Grandpa denied her that chance. Girls become wives and mothers, he decreed, and wives and mothers don’t need college. “That’s why you’re going to get the education I didn’t,” my mother said. “Harvard or Yale, babe. Harvard or Yale.”

It was an outrageous statement for a woman who earned twenty dollars a day. And she didn’t stop there. After college, she added, I would attend law school. I didn’t know what a lawyer was, but it sounded awfully boring, and I mumbled words to this effect. “No, no,” she said. “You’re going to be a lawyer. That way I can hire you to sue your father for child support. Ha.” She smiled, but she didn’t look as if she were kidding.

I cast my mind into the future. After I became a lawyer, maybe my mother could pursue her long-deferred dream of attending college. I wanted that for her. If my being a lawyer could make that happen, I’d be a lawyer. Meanwhile I’d forget about befriending Grandpa.

Rolling onto my side, away from my mother, I promised her that with my first paycheck as a lawyer I would send her to college. I heard a gasp, or a gulp, as if she were fighting her way up from the bottom of the ocean, and then I felt her lips on the back of my head.

five
| JUNIOR

D
AYS BEFORE MY EIGHTH BIRTHDAY THERE WAS A KNOCK AT
Grandpa’s door and The Voice was coming out of a man in the breezeway. The sun was behind the man, shining directly into my eyes, which made it impossible to discern his features. I could see only the outline of his torso, a massive block of pale white muscle in a tight white T-shirt, set atop two bowed legs. The Voice was a giant tooth.

“Give your father a hug,” The Voice commanded. I reached up, tried to wrap my arms around him, but his shoulders were too wide. It was like hugging the garage. “That’s no hug,” he said. “Give your father a proper hug.” I stood on my toes and squeezed. “Harder!” he said. I couldn’t squeeze any harder. I hated myself for being so weak. If I couldn’t hug my father hard enough, if I couldn’t grab hold, he wouldn’t come back.

After a sidebar with my mother, who stole nervous looks at me the whole time, my father said he was driving me into the city to meet his family. Along the way he entertained me with a dizzying Babel of accents. Apparently The Voice wasn’t his only voice. Besides being a stand-up, he said, he’d once been an “impressionist,” a word that was new and beautiful to me. He demonstrated. He was a Nazi commandant, he was a French chef. Now he was a Mafia thug, now a British butler. Jumping abruptly from voice to voice, my father sounded like the radio when I turned the dial quickly back and forth, a trick that made me nervous even as it made me laugh.

“So,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “you like living at your grandfather’s house?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

“Little of both?”

“Yes.”

“Your grandfather’s a good man. Marches to his own drummer, but I like that about him.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about that.

“What do you
not
like about living at your grandfather’s?” my father asked.

“It makes my mother sad.”

“And what do you
like
about living there?”

“Its proximity to my mother.”

My father whipped his head toward me, took a drag of his cigarette, and stared.

“Your mother says you listen to your old man on the radio a lot.”