The Tender Bar: A Memoir

by J. R. Moehringer

  “If he had, he’d have found it hard too. Creative minds, you know.”

  “You’re kind. But I’m an idiot. At my high school I felt like Einstein—now I realize why. Half the kids were stupid and the other half were stoned. At Yale I’m the stupid one. And the stupider I feel the less I go to class, which makes me fall more behind, which makes me feel stupider.” I leaned back in my seat. “I was going to go to law school,” I said quietly. “Fat chance. And I don’t know how I’m going to break that news to my mother.”

  “Your mother’s bent on you going to law school?”

  “Very bent.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “I’d just like to—write.” The first time I’d ever said it aloud.

  “Bravo! The noblest calling! Poetry?”

  “Newspapers.”

  “No. You look like a poet. You pout like a poet. Maybe a novelist?”

  I shook my head. “I’d just like to be a newspaper reporter.”

  “Ah well.” He slumped, disappointed. “That’s fine too.”

  “I’d rather write other people’s stories.”

  “Why not your own?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Well there is something to that. And there is a magic about newspapers, I’ll grant you. I do love picking up the Times each morning and seeing all that teeming life.”

  “Tell that to my mother.”

  “She’ll be happy if you follow your heart. And if you graduate.”

  The word made my stomach clench. I swallowed half my scotch in one gulp.

  “Make yourself happy,” the priest said. “That’s the way to make Mother happy.”

  “I’ll bet you’re not the only son of a single mother.”

  “Fifth son in a family of ten. But my mother had her heart set on my becoming a priest—so I’m not unsympathetic to your plight.”

  “You’d love Manhasset. Nothing but big Catholic families.”

  “Sounds like paradise.”

  “There’s one main road, with lots of bars. At the top is the most popular church, St. Mary’s, and at the bottom is the most sacred bar.”

  “A cosmology worthy of Dante. Shall we?” He rattled the ice in his empty cup again. I pulled my wallet from my pocket. He waved me off. My treat, he said, going to the bar.

  I was starting to feel the scotch warming my extremities. My toes were full of scotch. My fingernails, hair, eyelashes—scotch. I wondered if Father Amtrak was slipping something into my drink, but I put the thought from my mind. “You know,” I told him when he returned with the next round, “you talk a lot of sense for a priest.”

  He slapped his thigh and yelped with laughter. “I’ll have to remember that!” he said. “Oh I’ll have to tell that one to the other priests at the conference.”

  He locked his fingers behind his neck and stared at me. “I think we’ve reached some very important decisions here tonight, JD.”

  “JR.”

  “First, you’re going to bring up those grades.”

  “I guess so.”

  “‘The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.’ Logan Pearsall Smith.”

  “Who?”

  “Very wise man. Essayist. Book lover. Born eons before you.”

  “You know a lot about books, Father.”

  “I spent a lot of time alone as a boy.”

  “I thought you came from a big family.”

  “Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around. Now, I was making another point. Oh yes. Second, you’re going to be a writer. I’m going to enjoy looking for your stories in the newspaper. You’re going to write about real people and the things they do on this unavailing star.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I try to say what’s on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I’m shitting the pages. Sorry.”

  “Can I tell you something?” the priest asked. “Do you know why God invented writers? Because He loves a good story. And He doesn’t give a damn about words. Words are the curtain we’ve hung between Him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don’t strain for the perfect sentence. There’s no such thing. Writing is guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the reader’s as much as yours. Think about that the next time you curl a piece of paper into your typewriter.”

  I took my Yale notebook from my backpack. “Would you mind if I write that down, Father? I’m trying to get in the habit of writing down things smart people say to me.”

  He pointed to my Yale notebook, which was three-quarters filled.

  “Looks like you’ve run across a great many smart people.”

  “These are mostly things I’ve overheard in Publicans. That’s the name of my uncle’s bar.”

  “It’s true what you say about bartenders and priests.” He looked out the window. “Two consonant callings. We both hear confessions, we both serve wine. There’s a fair bit in the Bible about publicans too, though the word meant something different in the time of Jesus. ‘Publicans and sinners,’ that’s the phrase, I think. They were synonymous.”

  “I was practically raised by publicans. My uncle and the men at the bar kept an eye on me when my mother wasn’t around.”

  “And your father?”

  I fanned the pages of my notebook and didn’t answer.

  “Well,” the priest said. “Well. You were lucky to have so many men pitch in.”

  “Yes, Father. I was.”

  “People just don’t understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you’re in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.”

  twenty-five | SINATRA

  The inspiration I took from my talk with Father Amtrak wore off as quickly as the scotch. I went into a tailspin that winter of 1984. I stopped studying, stopped going to classes. Most dangerous of all, I stopped worrying. Each morning I stretched out on the window seat, reading novels, smoking cigarettes, thinking about Sidney, and when the weekend came I rose, put on my overcoat and took the train to New York, then on to Publicans, where I would visit with the men for two days straight, returning to Yale late Sunday. The men seldom asked why I was home from school so much, why I was majoring and minoring in Publicans. When they asked in a general way how things were going, I mumbled about Sidney, but I never let on that I was courting disaster, that expulsion was now more than a possibility. It was a certainty. I didn’t know what their reaction would be, and I didn’t want to know. I was afraid they might be pleased, which might force me to reconsider my feelings for them and the bar. Also, I was afraid that I might be pleased, that I might take pride in describing the mess I was making of my life. For the first time I suspected a self-destructive streak in myself, a suspicion bolstered when I read a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and greedily highlighted passages about his landing on academic probation at Princeton and dropping out. I caught myself thinking that maybe failing out of college was a prerequisite to becoming a writer.

  On the first warm day of March I sat on the ledge outside my second-floor bedroom window. The air was soft, the students passing on the street below were in shirtsleeves. They looked brisk and cheerful. They were off to classes and practices, and I wanted to join them, but I couldn’t. I’d dug too deep a hole for myself. I wondered what would happen if I just fell off the ledge. Would I die or merely break my collarbone and make a scene? It wasn’t a suicidal impulse, more a bleak fantasy, but I recognized it as a new and alarming turn in my thoughts.

  Then I saw Sidney. She was coming down Elm Street, in my direction, wearing a white blouse and a short suede skirt, her hair in a barrette. O
n the sidewalk below a group of boys saw her too. They elbowed each other and grinned. “Check this out,” one muttered. “Damn,” said another. One of the boys was polishing an apple against his shirt. As Sidney approached he stopped midpolish. His lips formed a small startled O. He extended the apple toward Sidney, and she reached out and grabbed it, without slowing her pace. She reminded me of the men from the bar, hitting the ocean in full stride. She took a bite of the apple and kept walking, never looking back, as if there were nothing remarkable about strangers offering her tributes as she passed. I heard in my head Uncle Charlie’s voice the night he first saw Sidney. You’re in deep shit, my friend.

  Days later a highly placed dean, the dean of deans, called me to his office. The case of John Joseph Moehringer Jr. had been referred to him by my professors, many of whom, he said wryly, were feeling “neglected.” The dean was “alarmed” to hear of my poor attendance, “distressed” by my plummeting grades. He waved a hand over his desk, across which he’d spread my transcript. If “matters” didn’t improve, he said, he’d have no choice but to phone my “parents” and discuss my leaving school.

  “John,” he said, looking at my legal name across the top of my transcript, “is anything wrong? Anything you’d care to share with me?”

  I wanted to share it all, every detail, from Professor Lucifer to Sidney. The dean looked so kind, with his round rimless eyeglasses, his distinguished crow’s-feet, and the dashing spray of gray at each temple. He looked like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I yearned for a man to tell me I had nothing to fear but fear itself. Rather than Roosevelt’s cigarette in a holder, the dean clenched in his teeth a black pipe that pumped out a delicious aroma—brandy, coffee, vanilla, woodsmoke—the distilled essence of paternal concern. The rope of blue smoke from his pipe fooled me for a second into thinking Franklin Dean Roosevelt and I were enjoying a fireside chat. Then I remembered that we weren’t father and son but dean and student, that we weren’t speaking heart-to-heart, but sitting knee-to-knee in his cramped office above the school that was about to give me the boot. “It’s complicated,” I mumbled.

  I couldn’t talk with so fine a man about madness and lust. I couldn’t confess to Franklin Dean Roosevelt that I was hounded by mental images of Sidney with other men. You see, Dean, I can’t concentrate on Kant because I keep picturing a certain grad student caressing my ex-girlfriend while she straddles him, her blond hair spilling across his—No. For this dean, Kant was the ultimate turn-on. Kant was his Penthouse. I looked at his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and knew he wouldn’t understand my not finding all the excitement I needed in books. I didn’t understand it myself. He’d lose whatever sympathy he had for me, and if I couldn’t have his respect, at least I could have his pity. I sat, letting the seconds explode on a mantel clock somewhere behind me, savoring his pipe smoke and looking everywhere but his eyes. I would let him break the silence.

  But he had nothing to say. What was there to say about such a boy? He puffed his pipe and watched me as though he were at a zoo and I were an interesting, if sluggish, creature.

  “Well,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, as if to go.

  “Maybe a tutor?” he suggested.

  Of course a tutor would help, but I barely had money for books, and whatever I had left over was reserved for the train to Publicans, which my roommate called the Disorient Express. I told Franklin Dean Roosevelt I would consider a tutor, that I would try harder, but as I left his office I thought the best thing to do would be to go back to my room and start packing. I couldn’t imagine I had more than a month left at Yale.

  Instead, improbably, I got on with it. Shortly after my meeting with the dean I broke my habit of running off to Publicans every weekend. I scraped and clawed my way through the semester, passing all but one class, a turnaround made possible by two encouraging voices always in my ear. One was my mother, who wrote beautiful letters in which she promised there would be other Sidneys, but never another Yale. If I believed in love, she wrote, and she knew that I did, then I shouldn’t abandon my first love, Yale, to mourn my second, Sidney. I would look back on this time, my mother wrote, and remember remarkably little of it, except the extent to which I tried or did not try.

  If I’d read my mother’s latest letter a dozen times and still couldn’t get Sidney out of my mind, I’d turn up the volume on that other soothing voice—Sinatra. He gave my heartbreak musical accompaniment and, more important, intellectual justification. Memorizing dates for a history exam, or theories for a philosophy exam, I’d also be memorizing Sinatra, whose lyrics became my new mantras. Rather than tell myself, I will not worry about something that will not happen, I chanted, Guess I’ll hang my tears out to dry. It helped. After committing his lyrics to memory, I explicated them, looked for meaning beneath the words, as Professor Lucifer once hoped I’d do with Keats. I typed the best lyrics on index cards and pinned them above my desk. They read like one long misogynist monologue, the kind of thing you might hear any night of the week in Publicans, but the way Sinatra said it, with bravado and pathos and without the Long Island accent, made it sound more sophisticated, more tenable. Sinatra told me that women were dangerous, even lethal. Sidney was just a beautiful woman, he said, and being betrayed by a beautiful woman was a rite of passage for any young man. He’d walked through the same fire. You’ll live, he promised. The pain will put hair on your chest. My love for Sinatra was already deep, but that spring I developed a physical dependence on his voice.

  I also heard my father’s voice toward the end of that semester. He phoned me out of the blue to suggest another visit, and promised that this one would be better, more meaningful, because he’d quit drinking. He was on “the straight and narrow,” he said, and if I ever needed to talk, I should phone him, collect. I told him about Sidney, and my struggle to stay afloat at Yale. He recommended I consider dropping out. College isn’t for everyone, my father said.

  When school let out in May I went to Manhasset to spend the summer. I told my mother I’d have a better chance of finding a summer job in New York than in Arizona. But of course the truth was that I wanted to catch up on lost time at Publicans. My first night at the bar I celebrated two milestones—my academic survival and Sidney’s graduation. In my mind the latter was the greater cause for rejoicing, because from now on I’d have Yale to myself. Never again, I told Uncle Charlie, would I have to hear rumors about Sidney, or witness her biting other boys’ apples.

  As senior year began I was myself again. Going to class, writing for the News, close to the number of credits needed for a diploma. I sat at my desk, typing a paper, listening to Sinatra, feeling strong. All at once, out of nowhere, my happiness got the best of me. I heard new meanings in Sinatra’s lyrics. If Sidney is no different than other women, I reasoned, maybe I should forgive her. If beautiful women lie and cheat, such is the price of loving a beautiful woman. I wondered where Sidney was at that moment. Had she broken up with the grad student? Did she think of me? Did she ever want to hear my voice?

  She answered on the second ring. She cried, said she missed me, and we made plans to meet for dinner the next night.

  We sat at a table in a dark corner of the restaurant, and the waiter knew to leave us alone. Sidney explained carefully, in detail, why she’d done what she’d done. She’d been unhappy at Yale, she said. Depressed, homesick, she’d behaved in ways that she now couldn’t believe, and she placed most of the blame on her first love. She’d been sixteen, and he was a much older man, who misused her, and cheated on her. The experience left her disillusioned and cynical, with warped ideas about fidelity.

  She was older and wiser now, she promised, touching my arm. As was I, she added. She saw it in my eyes, she said—a new strength and self-assurance, which she found “insanely attractive.” By the time our waiter brought the check Sidney was on my lap. “So,” she whispered in my ear, “would you like to take me back to your place and show me your etchings?”

  Standing in the middle of my bedroom,
undoing her blouse, Sidney glanced at my desk. “What’s all this?” she asked, pointing to a stack of papers.

  “Stories.”

  “About?”

  “A dumb rube and the beautiful girl who crushes his heart.”

  “Fiction or non?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She took a pen from the desk and wrote a giant heart on one of the pages, and inside she wrote, in her perfect architect handwriting, “The End.” Then she turned off my gooseneck lamp. In the dark I heard the antique buttons of her blouse hit the floor.

  This time, I told myself, everything would be different. Success with both Sidney and Yale depended on balancing the two, devoting myself to neither. I had to do a better job of managing my time and emotions, especially the latter. In the past I’d led with my heart, displayed my desperation like a badge of honor. I’d thought I was being honest, but I’d been a sucker. This time around, I vowed, I’d be cool.

  Sidney noticed the difference, and it made her act different as well. Though I no longer talked about the future, Sidney wouldn’t shut up about it. Many nights we sat in bars, long after last call, after the other barstools had been turned upside down and the bartender wanted to go home, and she would make lists of names for our future children. On Friday afternoons she would insist that I take the train south to spend the weekend with her and her parents. (She was living with them until she decided what she wanted to do with her life.) Her parents were different too. They didn’t frown at things I said. They smiled encouragingly when Sidney and I discussed living together. After dinner we’d all move into the living room to drink cocktails, read the Times, watch public television, as if we were already a family. When Sidney’s parents went up to bed, Sidney and I would stoke the fire and she’d read Proust while I studied. Sometimes I would look out the window and imagine some little boy watching from across the street. Once or twice I felt that part of me was still out there, in the woods, peering in.

  On my twentieth birthday Sidney and I drove to Boston, which Sidney thought would be a good place to live together after I graduated. The city was close to her family, so she wouldn’t be homesick, but far enough that we could blaze our own trail and be independent. “Won’t this be a lovely place to start our new life?” she said, speeding up and down the narrow streets of the North End. “We’ll have a cute little apartment. And every night we’ll build a great big fire and drink coffee and read to each other from Remembrance of Things Past.”