The Tender Bar (9 page)

“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.”

Sheryl settled my nerves by making lots of jokes, and by mocking everyone who gave us candy. As we walked away from a house she’d mutter, “Could you turn down the volume on those pants, mister?” If the porch lights came on as we approached a front door, she’d call out, “Don’t put on the coffee—we’re not staying!” I was cackling, having a wonderful time, though every now and then I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was following us.

“Jeez,” Sheryl said. “You’re making
me
jumpy.
Relax
.”

“Sorry.”

We were holding hands and rounding Chester Drive when Aunt Ruth’s station wagon pulled up alongside us. Glaring at Sheryl, ignoring me, Aunt Ruth hissed, “Get. In. This.
Car
.”

Sheryl hugged me good-bye and told me not to worry. I walked to Grandpa’s, but stopped halfway. What would Hiawatha do? I had to make sure Sheryl was all right. She needed my protection. I circled back up Plandome Road and as I got close to Aunt Ruth’s house I crept through alleys and backyards until I reached her back fence. Standing on a trash can I saw shadows in a window and heard Aunt Ruth screaming. I heard Sheryl say something, then more screaming, then glass shattering. I wanted to rush the house and save Sheryl, but I was too scared to move. I wondered if McGraw would come to his sister’s defense, and if he’d then be in trouble. It would all be my fault.

I walked slowly to Grandpa’s, rubbing off my mustache, stopping now and then to peer in the windows of houses. Happy families. Glowing fireplaces. Children dressed as pirates and witches, sorting and counting their candy. I was willing to lay heavy timber that not one of those kids knew anything about ambushes or embargoes.

nine
| DICKENS

M
Y MOTHER LANDED A BETTER JOB AS A SECRETARY AT NORTH
Shore Hospital, and her salary was just enough for us to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Great Neck, a few miles from Grandpa’s. I would still attend fifth grade at Shelter Rock, she explained, and after school the bus would still drop me at Grandpa’s, but when my mother finished work each night we’d go to our new—
home
. I noticed that she didn’t trip over the word, but emphasized it.

More than any previous apartment to which we’d escaped, my mother adored that place in Great Neck. Its hardwood floors, its high-ceilinged living room, its tree-lined street—every detail was precious to her. She furnished the apartment the best she could, with castoff items from the hospital’s recently redecorated waiting rooms, junk the hospital had been ready to throw out. Sitting in those hard plastic chairs, we’d wear the same tight faces as the people who had previously occupied them. We too were braced for bad news, but in our case it would be an unexpected car repair or an increase in rent. I worried that when it came, when my mother realized we would have to give up the Great Neck apartment and return to Grandpa’s, this disappointment would be different. This one might destroy her.

I was becoming a chronic, constant worrier, unlike my mother, who still fended off worry by singing and speaking in positive affirmations (“Everything’s going to be fine, babe!”). Sometimes I’d let her lull me into thinking that nothing frightened her, until I’d hear a scream from the kitchen and run to find her standing on a chair, pointing at a spider. As I killed the spider and carried it down the hall to the trash chute I’d remind myself that my mother wasn’t so brave, that I was the man of the house, and thereafter I’d redouble my worrying.

Roughly once a year my mother would drop all pretense of optimism, cover her face with her hands and sob. I’d put my arms around her and try to cheer her up, by repeating her positive affirmations back to her. I didn’t believe them, but they seemed to help my mother. “That’s very true, JR,” she’d say, snuffling. “Tomorrow
is
another day.” Not long after we moved to Great Neck, however, her annual crying jag was unusually severe, and I went to Plan B. I broke out a monologue I’d seen a comedian deliver on
The Merv Griffin Show.
I’d written it down on a sheet of loose-leaf paper and tucked it into my schoolbook for just such an occasion.

“Hey folks!” I said, reading from the sheet. “Glad to be here, glad to be here. Not lying either. No sir, I hate a liar. My father was a liar. He told me he had a hand in transportation—he thumbed his way cross-country!”

My mother slowly lowered her hands from her face and stared at me.

“Yep,” I continued. “My father told me our living room furniture went back to Louis the XIV. It would have gone back to Louie if we hadn’t paid by the fourteenth!”

My mother pulled me to her and said she felt horrible about frightening me, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m so tired,” she said. “Tired of worrying and struggling and being so—so—
alone
.”

Alone. I wasn’t offended. No matter how close my mother and I were, the lack of a man in our lives made each of us feel, at times, alone. Sometimes I felt so alone that I wished there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me, first The Voice, then McGraw, but she misunderstood. She said it was a sin to complain about being bored when so many people in the world would kill to have boredom be their biggest problem. I said I wasn’t bored, I was lonely. She said I wasn’t being the strong man she’d asked me to be. “Go sit on a chair and look at the sky,” she said, “and thank God you don’t have a pain.”

I went upstairs and rummaged in a crawl space, where I found a record player and a 1940s manual typewriter. Using these items to offset my isolation, I began listening to Frank Sinatra records while creating something I called the
Family Gazette
. The inaugural issue rolled in early 1974, with a front-page “profile” of my mother and a four-line analysis of the Nixon administration. There was also a short editorial decrying the international trade in “marrowanna” and a brief, muddled summary of the rift in the family. I handed the first copy to Grandpa. “Family Gazette?” he said. “Hah! This is no fam, fam,
family
.”

With tomorrow’s edition of the
Family Gazette
put to bed, I’d often go for a ride on my bike, up the steep slope of Park Avenue, site of Manhasset’s oldest and, for my money, best houses. Riding back and forth outside some splendid old pile, I’d peer in the windows, contemplating the secret of life—getting in. I’d smell the woodsmoke curling from the chimney, so deliciously intoxicating. Rich people, I decided, must shop at some secret store, where they bought extra-fragrant firewood. And that same store must sell magic lamps. Rich people had the best china and drapes and teeth, of course, but they also had lamps that cast an excruciatingly cozy glow. By contrast every lamp at Grandpa’s threw off the brain-scalding glare of a prison searchlight. Even moths avoided the lamps at Grandpa’s.

Returning to Grandpa’s house I’d complain again to Grandma about being lonely. “Go sit on a chair and look up at the sky. . . .”

Finally I went down to the basement.

Like the bar, Grandpa’s basement was dark and remote and strictly off-limits to children. The basement was where the furnace rumbled, the cesspool backed up, and cobwebs grew as big as tuna nets. As I ventured down its rickety stairs I was ready to bolt at the first sound of something scuttling across the cement floor, but within minutes I determined that the basement was the ideal hiding place, the only part of Grandpa’s house that offered quiet and privacy. No one could find me down there, and the furnace was better than The Voice at drowning out all the adult fury upstairs.

Pushing boldly into the basement’s far-flung corners, I discovered its greatest attraction, its hidden treasure. Stuffed in boxes, stacked on tables, spilling from suitcases and steamer trunks, were hundreds of novels and biographies, textbooks and art books, memoirs and how-to manuals, all abandoned by successive generations and severed branches of the family. I remember gasping.

I loved those books at first sight, and it was my mother who had predisposed me to love them. Beginning when I was nine months old, and continuing until I started school, my mother had taught me to read, using fancy flash cards she’d ordered through the mail. I always remembered those flash cards with the clarity and vividness of banner headlines, their crimson letters against a field of cream, and behind them my mother’s face, composed of the same lovely colors, her roses-and-milk complexion wreathed by auburn hair. I loved the look of those words, the shapes of them, the subliminal association of their typeface with the pretty face of my mother, but it may have been their functionality that won my heart. Like nothing else, words organized my world, put order to chaos, divided things neatly into black and white. Words even helped me organize my parents. My mother was the printed word—tangible, present, real—while my father was the spoken word—invisible, ephemeral, instantly part of memory. There was something comforting about this rigid symmetry.

Now, in the basement, I felt as if I were standing up to my chest in a tidal pool of words. I opened the largest and heaviest book I could find, a history of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Given my mother’s warnings about my father I felt a connection with this Lindbergh baby. I stared at photos of his little corpse. I learned the word “ransom,” which I thought must be something like child support.

Many of the basement books were too advanced for me, but I didn’t care. I was content to revere them before I could read them. Stacked in one cardboard box was a magnificent leather-bound set, the complete Dickens, and because of the bar I valued these books above all the others, and hungered to know what they said. I gazed longingly at the sketches, especially one of David Copperfield, my age, in a bar. The caption read: “My first purchase in the Public House.”

“What’s this about?” I asked Grandpa, handing him
Great Expectations
.

We were eating breakfast with Grandma.

“A boy who has great ex, ex, expectations,” he said.

“What are—expectations?”

“They’re a cur, cur,
curse
.”

I ate a spoonful of oatmeal, confused.

“For instance,” he said. “When I mar, mar, married your grandmother, I had great ex, ex, expectations.”

“Fine way to talk to your grandson,” Grandma said.

Grandpa laughed bitterly. “Never marry for sex,” he said to me.

I ate another spoonful of oatmeal, sorry I’d asked.

Two books from the basement became my constant companions. The first was Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Book,
in which I met Mowgli, my cousin as much as McGraw. I spent hours with Mowgli and his adopted fathers, Baloo, the kindly bear, and Bagheera, the wise panther, both of whom wanted Mowgli to become a lawyer. At least that’s how I read it. They were always nagging Mowgli to learn the Law of the Jungle. The second book was a crumbling old volume from the 1930s called
Minute Biographies.
Its butterscotch pages were filled with thumbnail life stories and pen-and-ink portraits of great men through history. I loved its lavish use of exclamation marks.
Rembrandt—Painter Who Played with Shadows! Thomas Carlyle—The Man Who Dignified Work! Lord Byron—The Playboy of Europe!
I cherished its reassuring formula: Every life began in hardship and led inexorably to glory. For hours I would look deeply into the eyes of Caesar and Machiavelli, Hannibal and Napoleon, Longfellow and Voltaire, and I committed to memory the page devoted to Dickens, patron saint of abandoned boys. His portrait in the book was the same silhouette Steve had nailed above the bar.

I was so engrossed in
Minute Biographies
one day that I failed to notice Grandma standing above me, holding a dollar. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “Uncle Charlie’s having a nicotine fit. Run down to the bar and get him a box of Marlboro Reds.”

Go to Dickens? Go
inside
Dickens? I grabbed the money, tucked
Minute Biographies
under my arm and ran to the corner.

When I reached the bar, however, I stopped. With one hand on the doorknob I felt my heart racing, and I didn’t know why. I was drawn to the bar, but the draw was so powerful, so irresistible, I thought it might be dangerous, like the ocean. Grandma was always reading me articles from the
Daily News
about swimmers being dragged out to sea by riptides.
This must be what a riptide feels like
. I took a deep breath, opened the door, and dove in. The door slammed behind me and I was engulfed in darkness. An alcove. Ahead was a second door. I pulled its handle and the rusty hinges squeaked. Stepping forward again I found myself in a long narrow cave.