The Tender Bar (3 page)

Seated around the lopsided dining room table, we’d all talk at once, trying to distract ourselves from the food. Grandma couldn’t cook, and Grandpa gave her almost no money for groceries, so what came out of that kitchen in chipped serving bowls was both toxic and comical. To make what she called “spaghetti and meatballs,” Grandma would boil a box of pasta until it was glue, saturate it with Campbell’s cream of tomato soup, then top it with chunks of raw hot dog. Salt and pepper to taste. What actually brought on the indigestion, though, was Grandpa. A loner, a misanthrope, a curmudgeon with a stutter, he found himself each night at the head of a table with twelve uninvited guests, counting the dog. A Shanty Irish reenactment of the Last Supper. As he looked us up and down we could hear him thinking,
Each of you has betrayed me tonight
. To his credit Grandpa never turned anyone away. But he never made anyone feel welcome either, and he often wished aloud that we’d all just “clear the hell out.”

My mother and I would have left, gladly, but we had nowhere else to go. She made very little money, and she got none from my father, who wanted no part of his wife and only child. He was a hard case, my father, an unstable mix of charm and rage, and my mother had no choice but to leave him when I was seven months old. He retaliated by disappearing, and withholding all help.

Because I was so young when he disappeared, I didn’t know what my father looked like. I only knew what he sounded like, and this I knew too well. A popular rock ’n’ roll disc jockey, my father would speak each day into a large microphone somewhere in New York City, and his plummy baritone would fly down the Hudson River, tack across Manhasset Bay, zoom up Plandome Road and burst a millisecond later from the olive green radio on Grandpa’s kitchen table. My father’s voice was so deep, so ominous, it made my ribs vibrate and the utensils tremble.

Adults in Grandpa’s house would try to protect me from my father by pretending he didn’t exist. (Grandma wouldn’t even refer to him by name—Johnny Michaels—but simply called him The Voice.) They would lunge for the dial whenever they heard my father and sometimes hide the radio altogether, which made me wail in protest. Surrounded by women, and two remote men, I saw The Voice as my only connection to the masculine world. Moreover it was my only means of drowning out all the other hateful voices in Grandpa’s house. The Voice, hosting a party every night in the same olive green box as Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison and the Beatles, was the antidote to all the discord around me. When Grandma and Grandpa went to war over the grocery money, when Aunt Ruth threw something against the wall in anger, I’d press my ear close to the radio and The Voice would tell me something funny or play me a song by Peppermint Rainbow. I listened so ardently to The Voice, achieved such mastery at shutting out other voices, that I became a prodigy at selective listening, which I thought was a gift, until it proved to be a curse. Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune in and which to tune out, a lesson I learned long before most people, but one that took me longer than most to put to good use.

I remember feeling particularly lonely one day as I tuned in my father’s show. For his first song my father played the Four Seasons, “Working My Way Back to You,” then said in his smoothest, silkiest tone, in which you could hear the smile on his face, “I
am
working my way back to you, Momma—but be patient, ’cause I’ve only got a paper route.” I closed my eyes and laughed and for a few moments I forgot who and where I was.

two
| THE VOICE

M
Y FATHER WAS A MAN OF MANY TALENTS, BUT HIS ONE TRUE
genius was disappearing. Without warning he would change shifts or switch stations. I’d counter by taking a portable radio outside to the stoop, where the reception was better. With the radio on my lap I’d wiggle the antenna and slowly turn the dial, feeling lost until I found The Voice again. One day my mother caught me. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking for my father.”

She frowned, then turned and went into the house.

I knew that The Voice didn’t have the same tranquilizing effect on my mother. In her mind my father’s voice was “full of money,” as Fitzgerald wrote of another careless voice in Manhasset. Hearing my father boom from the radio, my mother didn’t hear his jokes, his charm, his voice. She heard every child-support payment he’d failed to make. After I’d spent the day listening to The Voice I’d often see my mother looking through the mail for The Voice’s check. Dropping the stack of envelopes on the dining room table she’d give me a blank face. Nothing. Again.

For my mother’s sake I would try to keep the radio volume low. Now and then I would even try to give up The Voice altogether, but it was hopeless. Everyone in Grandpa’s house had at least one vice—drinking, smoking, gambling, lying, cursing, sloth. The Voice was mine. As my dependence grew, so did my tolerance, until it was no longer enough merely to listen. I began talking back. I’d tell The Voice about school, Little League, my mother’s health. She was exhausted every night after work, I told The Voice, and I worried about her constantly. If I timed it just right—listening when The Voice was speaking, speaking when The Voice was not—it almost felt like a conversation.

Eventually my mother caught me. “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

“No one.”

She put a hand to her mouth and looked stricken. I turned the volume lower.

One afternoon, just after The Voice had signed off the air, the phone rang in Grandpa’s living room. “Answer it,” my mother said, her tone strange. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said The Voice.

I swallowed. “Dad?”

I’d never used that word before. I felt a release of pressure inside me, as if a cork had popped. He asked how I was. What grade are you in? That so? You like your teachers? He didn’t ask about my mother, who had secretly arranged the call after overhearing my latest conversation with the radio. He didn’t explain where he was or why he never visited. He made small talk as though we were old army buddies. Then I heard him take a long puff on a cigarette and exhale so hard that I thought a jet of smoke would spurt through the phone. I could hear the smoke in his voice, and thought his voice
was
smoke. This was how I pictured my father—as talking smoke.

“So,” he said, “how’d you like to go to a baseball game with your old man?”

“Wow! Really?”

“Sure.”

“Mets or Yankees?”

“Mets, Yankees, whoever.”

“Uncle Charlie says the Mets came into Dickens the other night.”

“How is your Uncle Charlie? How’s he doing down at the bar?”

“They play the Braves tomorrow night.”

“Who?”

“The Mets.”

“Oh. Right.”

I heard the click-clock of ice cubes in a glass. “Sure,” he said. “Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at your grandfather’s—six-thirty.”

“I’ll be ready.”

I was ready at four-thirty. Sitting on the stoop, wearing my Mets cap, slugging my fist into the pocket of my new Dave Cash mitt, I peered at every car that approached the house. I was waiting for my father, but I didn’t know what that meant. My mother hadn’t saved any photos of him, and I hadn’t yet been to New York City to see his face on billboards and buses. I didn’t know if my father had a glass eye, a toupee, a gold tooth. I couldn’t have picked him out of a police lineup, something my grandmother often suggested I’d need to do one day.

At five Grandma appeared at the door. “I thought he was coming at six-thirty,” she said.

“I want to be ready. In case he’s early.”

“Your father? Early?” She made a tsk-tsk sound. “Your mother called from work. She told me to tell you to bring a jacket.”

“It’s too hot.”

Again she made a sound and walked off. Grandma was no fan of my father, and she wasn’t alone. The whole family boycotted my parents’ wedding, except my mother’s rebellious brother, Uncle Charlie, four years younger, who walked my mother down the aisle. I felt ashamed to be so excited about my father’s visit. I knew it was wrong to welcome him, to think about him, to love him. As the man of my family, as my mother’s protector, I should have been prepared to demand money from my father the moment he showed his face. But I didn’t want to scare him off. I longed to see him even more than I longed to see my beloved Mets in person for the first time.

I bounced a rubber ball on the front stoop and tried to concentrate on the good things I knew about my father. My mother had told me that before he went into radio my father had been a “stand-up,” and people “rolled in the aisles” when he performed. “What’s a stand-up?” I asked. “Someone who stands up in front of people and makes them laugh,” she said. I wondered if my father would stand up in front of me and make me laugh. Would he look like my favorite comedian, Johnny Carson? I hoped so. I promised God I’d never ask for another thing if my father looked like Johnny Carson—those twinkly eyes, that kindly trace of a smile always playing at the corners of his mouth.

A terrifying thought made me stop throwing the ball against the stoop. What if my father, knowing how the whole family felt about him, didn’t want to pull into the driveway? What if he slowed down on Plandome Road, checked to see if I was there, then sped away? I sprinted to the sidewalk. Now I could jump through his window as he slowed down and away we’d go. Leaning sideways like a hitchhiker I stared at each man who drove by, trying to decide if that could be my father. Each man looked back, concerned, irritated, wondering why that seven-year-old boy was staring at him so intently.

Just after eight I returned to the stoop and watched the sunset. The horizon turned the same orange as the uniforms of the Dickens softball team and the NY on my Mets cap. Uncle Charlie left for the bar. Striding across the lawn, his head down, he was so intent on polishing his sunglasses with a Kleenex that he didn’t see me.

At eight-thirty Grandma appeared at the door. “Come in and eat something,” she said.

“No.”

“You have to eat.”

“No.”

“A bite.”

“We’re going to have hot dogs at the stadium.”

“Hm.”

“He’s just late. He’ll be here.”

I heard Grandpa tuning in the Mets on channel 9. Normally, because of his poor hearing and all the noise in the house, he blared the TV. That night, for my sake, he kept the volume low.

At nine I tried something new. If I don’t look at this next car, I thought, if I don’t so much as glance at the driver, it will be my father for sure. I employed this strategy, in which I had full confidence, on thirty cars.

At nine-thirty I made small concessions to the inevitable. I took off my Mets hat. I took off my mitt and used it as a seat cushion. I ate a piece of Grandma’s chicken.

At ten I ran inside to pee. Hurrying down the hall I heard the crowd at Shea Stadium roar as someone hit a home run.

At eleven the game ended. I went inside, put on my pajamas and climbed under the covers. Seconds after I turned off the light Grandpa appeared at the foot of my bed. If Lyndon Johnson had appeared at the foot of my bed I couldn’t have been more astonished.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About your father.”

“Oh,” I said, nonchalant, pulling at a loose thread in my security blanket. “I’m glad he didn’t come. I didn’t like those pants I was wearing anyway.”

Grandpa nodded, then left the room.

I lay in the dark and listened to Grandma and Grandpa in the kitchen, talking about my father “standing up JR.” They stopped talking as a car pulled into the driveway. I heard gravel crackling under tires, an engine idling. My father! I bounded out of bed and ran out of the bedroom. At the end of the narrow hall that led to the front door was my mother. “Oh no,” she said. “What are you doing here? Didn’t you go to the game?”

I shook my head. She walked quickly toward me and I wrapped my arms around her, startled by how much I loved her and how intensely I needed her. As I held my mother, clung to her, cried against her legs, it struck me that she was all I had, and if I didn’t take good care of her I’d be lost.

three
| SECURITY BLANKET

W
HEN NOT CROUCHED OVER THE RADIO, LISTENING
TO THE
Voice, I was tuned to my mother’s frequencies, monitoring her moods. I watched her, analyzed her, followed her from room to room. It was more than attachment, more than protectiveness. It was partly a pursuit, because no matter how intently I watched and listened, my mother was often a complete mystery to me.

When happy, when expressing joy or love, my mother could be marvelously loud. But when sad or hurt, when frightened or worried about money, my mother would fall silent and her face would go blank. Some people interpreted this tendency as coldness. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Even at seven years old I understood that my mother’s silences and blank faces concealed an emotional cauldron. What seemed a lack of feeling was an overflow, a surge. My mother would slip behind her mask of feigned calm for the sake of discretion, as someone might step behind a screen when changing.

There had always been a trace of the unfathomable about my mother, according to Grandma, who told me a story by way of explanation. When my mother was in second grade, the teacher asked the class a question and my mother shot her hand in the air. She knew that answer and couldn’t wait to shout it out. But the teacher called on someone else. After a few minutes the teacher noticed my mother’s hand still hovering. Dorothy, she said, put down your hand. I can’t, my mother said. Put down your hand, the teacher said. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. The teacher sent my mother to the principal, who sent my mother to the nurse, who concluded that my mother wasn’t faking. Her hand and arm were truly stuck in the upright and locked position. Grandma was summoned to school, and she described to me with some wonderment that long, strange walk home, my mother a half step behind, her hand rigidly aloft. Grandma sent my mother to bed—the only thing she could think to do—and in the morning, when the sadness or disappointment presumably had worn off, my mother’s arm fell to her side.