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

Voice wasn’t there. My father had switched shifts or changed stations again. I took the radio to the stoop and slowly turned the dial back and forth. Nothing. I went and found my mother and asked if she knew what had happened to The Voice. She didn’t answer. I asked again. Blank face. I asked urgently. She exhaled and looked at the clouds.

    “You know I’ve been asking your father for years to help us,” she said. “Right?”

    I nodded.

    She’d hired lawyers, filed court papers, appeared before judges, and still my father hadn’t paid. So she’d made one last effort. She’d sworn out a warrant for my father’s arrest. The next day two cops handcuffed and dragged my father away from a live microphone while a stunned audience listened on. When they released my father from jail the following day, my mother said, he was insane with anger. He paid a fraction of what he owed us and failed to appear in court a week later. His lawyer told the judge that my father had fled the state.

    My mother waited for all this to sink in. She then told me that within the last twenty-four hours she’d gotten a call from my father. He wouldn’t say where he was, and he threatened that if she didn’t stop dunning him for money, he’d have me kidnapped. Years later I would learn that my father had also threatened to put a contract on my mother’s life, and his voice was so menacing she didn’t dare call his bluff. For weeks she couldn’t start the T-Bird without her hands shaking.

    My father didn’t want to see me, but he might kidnap me? It didn’t make any sense. I squinted at my mother.

    “He’s probably just trying to scare me,” she said. “But if your father shows up at Shelter Rock, or if someone says he’ll take you to see your father, you mustn’t go with them.” She took me by the shoulders and turned me toward her. “Do you hear?”

    “Yes.”

    I pulled away and walked back to the stoop, back to the radio. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe my father was working at a new station, doing one of his funny voices so he couldn’t be recognized. I turned the dial, wiggled the antenna, analyzed each voice, but none was funny like my father, none was deep enough to make my ribs vibrate or utensils tremble. My mother came and sat beside me.

    “Talk about it?” she said.

    “No.”

    “You never say how you feel.”

    “You either.”

    She blanched. I hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. Tears started to run down my cheeks. I thought my mother was telling me the whole truth about my father, which was why it hurt so much, but of course she was editing, holding back the worst. Over the next few years she would gradually reveal the facts, gently paring away the illusion I’d conjured from The Voice, one piece at a time. Still, I always remember the whole story there on the stoop, on that bleak afternoon, because that was when she made the first painful cut.

    My father was an improbable combination of magnetic and repellent qualities. Charismatic, mercurial, sophisticated, suicidal, hilarious, short-tempered—and dangerous from the start. He got into a fistfight at their wedding. Drunk, my father shoved my mother, and when his best man objected to such treatment of the bride, my father decked him. Several guests jumped my father, trying to restrain him, and when the cops arrived they found my father running up and down the sidewalk, assaulting passersby.

    For their honeymoon my father took my mother to Scotland. When they returned she discovered that the trip was supposed to have been the grand prize in a contest for listeners at his radio station. My father was lucky not to be arrested. In the two years they were married he was always verging into lawlessness, befriending mobsters, threatening cabdrivers and waiters, beating up one of his bosses. Toward the end he turned his outlaw ways on my mother. When I was seven months old my father threw my mother on their bed and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. She broke