The Tender Bar (25 page)

Spring came. I spent every warm night on the canal, wondering if the Admissions Committee had decided about me that day, or if they would decide in the morning, or perhaps the following afternoon. I looked at the stars reflected on the water’s surface and wished on each one. Please.
Please.
I didn’t know what I would do if I didn’t get in. As a backup I’d applied to Arizona State, but I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for going there. If Yale rejected me, I thought, I’d probably just light out for Alaska. Sometimes I let my mind run with this fantasy, pretending the canal was a wild river in the Yukon, where I lived in a log cabin, fishing and reading, subsisting on grizzly-bear meat, hardly ever thinking about Yale, except on snowy nights, sitting by the fire, combing the lice out of my beard and petting my dog—Eli.

Whenever I climbed down from the bank of the canal and returned to the apartment I’d find my mother awake, working at the kitchen table. We would talk awhile, about everything but Yale, and then I’d go to bed and listen to Sinatra until I fell asleep.

On April 15 a letter arrived. My mother put it in the middle of the kitchen table. We might have stared at it all day if she hadn’t begged me to open it. I took the letter opener she’d bought me when we visited Yale and slit the envelope. I removed the one sheet of onionskin, unfolded it, read silently.

“Dear Mr. Moehringer: It is a great pleasure to inform you that the Admissions Committee has voted to offer you a place in the Yale Class of 1986.”

“What is it?” my mother said.

I continued to read in silence. “I am also pleased to notify you that your financial need has been met.”

“Tell me,” my mother said.

I handed her the letter. Oh dear God, she said, reading, tears filling her eyes. She held the letter against her heart. I grabbed her and danced her around the living room, in and out of the kitchen, and then we sat side by side at the table and read the letter over and over. I shouted the letter, she sang the letter, and finally we fell silent. We couldn’t say anything else. We didn’t dare, and we didn’t need to. We both believed in words, but there were only three words for this day, this feeling. We got in.

I phoned Grandpa’s house and told them. Then the phone call that counted. Publicans. I’d never phoned Uncle Charlie at the bar before, so he assumed the worst. “Who died?” he said.

“Just thought you might be interested to know that your nephew got accepted to Yale.”

Pause. I heard fifty voices in the background, a baseball game on TV, glasses clinking. “No shit,” he said. “Hey everyone! My nephew got into Yale!” He held up the phone and I heard cheers, followed by a riotous, boozy chorus of “Boola Boola.”

At the bookstore I walked calmly into the stockroom, as though I were there to pick up my paycheck. Bill and Bud were reading. I remember—I will always remember—that Bud was sitting on his stool, listening to Mahler’s Symphony no. 1. “Any word?” he said.

“About what?” I said.

“You know,” Bill said.

“What? Oh. Yale? I got in.”

Both men were weepier than my mother.

“He’s got to get cracking now,” Bill said to Bud, who was wiping his eyes, blowing his nose, sniffing his fist. “Boy oh boy he’s got a hell of a lot of reading to do this summer.”

“Plato,” Bud said. “He should read
The Republic
right away.”

“Yes, yes,” Bud said, “they’ll start him on the Greeks, to be sure. But maybe he should read some plays. Aeschylus?
Antigone
?
The Birds
?”

“What about Thoreau and Emerson? How can he go wrong with Emerson?”

They took me around the store, filling a shopping bag with coverless books.

On my last day of work at the bookstore Bill and Bud and I stood in the back room, eating bagels and drinking champagne. A going-away party, though it felt like a funeral. “Listen,” Bill said to me, “Bud and I have been talking.”

They stared at me as though I were a caged bird they were getting ready to release into the wild.

“It might be wise,” Bud said, “to lower your expectations.”

“You seem—afraid for me,” I said.

Bill cleared his throat. “We just think there are some things you’re not—”

“Ready for,” Bud said.

“Like?”

“Disillusionment,” Bud said without hesitation.

Bill nodded.

Champagne nearly came through my nose.

“I thought you were going to say booze and drugs,” I said. “Or girls. Or rich kids. Or mean professors. But—
disillusionment
?”

“Disillusionment is more dangerous than all those things put together,” Bud said.

He explained, but I wasn’t listening. I was laughing too hard. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be sure to watch out for—disillusionment! Ha ha ha!” Bud gave his fist a vehement sniff. Bill smoothed his knit tie. Poor dopes, I thought. Hiding in the back room all this time had warped their minds. Disillusionment.
How can I be disillusioned when everything from here on is going to be perfect?

We turned off the lights and left the store. I shook their hands and went one way, they went the other, and that was the last I ever saw of Bill and Bud. When I returned to Arizona that Christmas and visited the store, a man at the cash register told me they had been fired. He wouldn’t say why, and I could only hope it had nothing to do with all those coverless books.

“How are you going to get along without me?” I asked my mother at the airport.

She laughed, until she realized I wasn’t kidding. “Just take care of
yourself,
” she said. “And always know I’m happy thinking of the marvelous experiences you’re having.”

I wanted to stay in Arizona that summer, spend time with my mother. Absolutely not, she said. Sheryl had arranged for me to return to the law firm, to earn some spending money for college, and my mother wanted me to have as many days as possible going to Gilgo with Uncle Charlie and the men.

We sat, waiting for my flight to be called, looking at the screen listing the departures and arrivals. I said something about all the departures and arrivals in our life together. My mother hooked her arm through mine. “You’ll have lots of vacations,” she said. “Before you know it you’ll be coming—home.”

She still tripped over that word.

My flight began to board.

“You’d better go,” my mother said.

We stood.

“I should stay. A few weeks more.”

“Go.”

“But—”

“Go JR,” she said. “Go.”

We looked at each other, not as if we wouldn’t see each other for a long time, but as if we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We’d been concentrating so intently on getting by, and getting in, that we hadn’t taken a good look at each other for years. I looked at her now, her green-brown eyes wet, her lip trembling. I threw my arms around her and felt her hugging me back tighter than ever. “Go,” she said. “Please just go.”

Sitting on the plane, waiting to pull away from the gate, I looked out the window and berated myself for letting my mother down. At the pivotal moment of our good-bye I hadn’t said anything profound. If ever a moment called for profundity, that was it, and I’d muffed it. I felt even more ashamed about the reason. I wasn’t sufficiently traumatized. I was excited to be starting my life, which meant that I was an ingrate and a bad son. I was abandoning my mother without the slightest guilt, blithely waving good-bye over my shoulder.

Sometime after my plane took off I realized why I wasn’t traumatized about saying good-bye. I’d been saying good-bye to my mother since I was eleven. Sending me to Manhasset, urging me to bond with Uncle Charlie and the men, my mother had been weaning me from her, and herself from me, by imperceptible degrees. It might have been the fleecy clouds streaming by the window of the plane that made me understand. My mother had subtly, secretly snipped away a sliver of herself every summer.

Thereafter, I’d have to contend with all security blankets by myself. And none would be more secure, or more smothering, than Steve’s bar.

PART II

They say best men are molded out of faults,

And, for the most, become much more the better

For being a little bad

—
William Shakespeare,
Measure for Measure

twenty-one
| THE DEVIL AND MERRIAM WEBSTER

T
HE CABDRIVER SET MY SUITCASES ON THE CURB OUTSIDE PHELPS
Gate. There were families everywhere and he looked left and right for mine, as if I’d had a family when he picked me up at Union Station and they must have fallen out of the cab on the way to the campus.

“You alone?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Need some help with your stuff?”

I nodded.

He hoisted one of my suitcases and we walked side by side under a tall archway, through a long dark tunnel, into the bright spacious green of Old Campus. Even Yale’s front door, I thought, is designed to reenact and symbolize the whole promise of the place—darkness yielding dramatically to light.

We asked for directions to Wright Hall, which turned out to be a century-old dormitory building not much sturdier than Grandpa’s house. My room was at the top of a five-flight staircase, and there were people already in it. One of my three new roommates was unpacking his underwear with the help of his parents and sisters. He and I shook hands while his mother lunged at the cabbie. “You must be so proud!” she cried. “Isn’t this a fabulous day to be a parent?”

Flustered, the cabdriver doffed his hat and shook the mother’s hand. She introduced herself and her husband, and before she could ask the cabdriver if he preferred to summer on the Vineyard or the Cape, I handed him his money and thanked him.

“Oh,” the mother said. “I didn’t—”

“Good luck,” the cabdriver said to me, doffing his hat again as he backed out the door.

Everyone looked at me. “Flying solo today,” I said.

The mother gave a fake smile. My son is living with this vagabond? The sisters went back to folding jockey shorts. “So,” my new roommate said, trying to break the tension, “what does JR stand for?”

A second roommate came through the door with his parents and his limousine driver right behind, toting a matching set of designer luggage. Introductions were made. The second roommate’s father, an elegant man with an ominous glare, cornered me and began bombarding me with questions. Where was I from? What high school did I attend? He then asked what I’d been doing with myself all summer. “Working at a law firm in Manhattan,” I said proudly.

“What firm?”

I told him the name. He didn’t react. “It’s a small firm,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.” He frowned. I’d lost him. I tried to recover. “Though the partners did break away from a much larger and more prestigious firm several years ago.”

This was true. And yet when the father asked which larger firm that was, I drew a blank. I blurted the first three lawyerly names that came to mind—Hart, Schaffner and Marx. As luck would have it the father was in the clothing business. He knew Hart Schaffner Marx, makers of men’s suits, knew them well. I saw the father conclude that I was a liar and a fool and turn from me in disgust.

Time to get some air.

I hurried off to the same spreading elm where I’d retreated when I first visited Yale with my mother. Sitting with my back against the elm I watched my schoolmates arrive, a flotilla of families sailing with the wind up College Street, in cars that cost three times what my mother earned in one year. I never thought until that moment how odd I might appear, showing up at Yale alone, and I never anticipated how different my schoolmates would be from me. Aside from the tangibles—clothes, shoes, parents—what I noticed that first day was their self-confidence. I could almost see their self-confidence rising off the campus in shimmering waves, like the August heat, and like the heat it sapped my strength. I wondered if self-confidence could be acquired, or if, like fathers and flawless skin, it was just something you were born with.

One confident boy stood out from all the rest. He reminded me of a photo Bud had once shown me of a marble bust from antiquity. Caesar, I thought. His eyes gleamed with that same imperial confidence. They were the eyes of his father, or uncle, or whoever that man was helping him lug his stereo to his room, and they bedazzled everyone who walked by. This was the first day of the school year, and yet this boy gave all indication that he was about to graduate. He had Yale wired. He knew everyone, and those he didn’t know he stopped, eager to know them. He held up his chin slightly, as though each person he addressed were standing on a stepladder, a pose that accentuated his regal bearing, as well as his beaky nose and jutting jaw. He smiled as if he had a winning lottery ticket in his pocket, and I supposed he did. His success was that assured. He looked like someone to whom nothing bad would ever happen.