The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer Read Free Book Online

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.”

    “Yes.”

    “What do you think?”

    “You’re funny.”

    “Would you like to be a disc jockey when you grow up?”

    “I’m going to be a lawyer.”

    “A lawyer? Jesus, of all things. Why?”

    I