The Tender Bar (7 page)

On the surface Uncle Charlie didn’t seem like someone who would go in for the silliness of Dickens. He was too melancholy, too full of long rolling sighs. Like my mother, he was a mystery to me. And the more I studied him the deeper that mystery grew.

Every afternoon a man with a sandpapery voice would phone the house for Uncle Charlie. “Chas there?” the man would say, speaking rapidly, as if he were being chased. Uncle Charlie slept most of the day, and my cousins and I knew the rule. If someone from Dickens calls for Uncle Charlie, take a message. If Mr. Sandman calls, wake Uncle Charlie immediately.

It usually fell to me. I liked answering the phone—thinking it might be The Voice—and when it was Mr. Sandman I would ask him to wait, please, then hurry down the hall to Uncle Charlie’s bedroom. Knocking softly I would open the door a crack. “Uncle Charlie?” I’d say. “That man is on the phone.”

From the humid darkness I’d hear the creak of his bedsprings. Then a groan, then a loud sigh. “Tell him I’m coming.”

By the time Uncle Charlie came to the phone—pulling on his robe, clenching an unlit cigarette in his teeth—I’d be crouched behind the bicentennial sofa. “Hey,” Uncle Charlie would say to Mr. Sandman. “Yeah, yeah, here goes. Rio wants Cleveland five times. Tony wants Minnesota ten times. Everybody’s doing the Jets fifteen times. Give me the Bears with the points. They’re due to cover. Yeah. Eight and a half, right? Right. And what’s the under on the Sonics? Two hundred? Uh-huh. Give me the under. Good. See you at Dickens.”

My older cousins told me Uncle Charlie was a “gambler,” that he was doing something illegal, but I didn’t think it could be all that illegal—probably like jaywalking, I figured—until I discovered that the world of gambling, and the special myopia of the gambler, were beyond my comprehension. It happened when I called on my friend Peter. His mother answered the door. “Guess you can’t wear
that
anymore,” she said, pointing to my chest. I looked down. I was wearing my favorite sweatshirt—
WORLD CHAMPION NEW YORK KNICKS
—which I loved nearly as much as my security blanket.

“Why not?” I asked, aghast.

“The Knicks lost last night. They’re not the champs.”

I burst into tears. I ran home and crashed through Grandpa’s back door, then stormed into Uncle Charlie’s bedroom, an unthinkable breach, barging into the sanctum sanctorum even though Mr. Sandman wasn’t on the phone. Uncle Charlie shot up in bed. “Who’s there!” he shouted. He was wearing a Lone Ranger mask, except it had no eyeholes. I told him what Peter’s mother had said. “The Knicks didn’t lose last night!” I cried. “Did they? They couldn’t have lost! Could they?”

He flipped up his mask, lay back in bed and reached for the box of Marlboros that was always on his nightstand. “It’s worse than that,” he said with a sigh. “They didn’t cover.”

In the summer Uncle Charlie and the men from Dickens would commandeer Grandpa’s garage and stage high-stakes poker games that lasted for days. Men would play cards for six hours, walk down to Dickens for food, go home, make love to their wives, sleep, shower, and return to find the game still roaring. I liked to lie in bed late at night, the windows open, listening to the voices raising, calling, and folding. I’d hear cards shuffling, poker chips clicking, bushes rustling as players looked for someplace to pee. The voices were more soothing than a lullaby. For a few days, at least, I would not have to worry about being the last one awake.

While I observed Uncle Charlie’s gambling with growing interest, adults in Grandpa’s house pretended it didn’t exist. Especially Grandma. The phone rang one day and I didn’t reach it in time, so she answered. Since it wasn’t Mr. Sandman, she refused to wake Uncle Charlie. The caller pleaded. Grandma held firm. “Message?” she said, reaching into the pocket of her housecoat for her grocery list and a pencil stub. “Go ahead. Yes. Uh-huh. Boston ten times? Pittsburgh—five times? Kansas City—how many times?” Of course it’s possible she had no idea what the message meant. But I suspect she simply didn’t want to know.

In Grandma’s eyes Uncle Charlie could do no wrong. He was her only son, and they had a bond that looked familiar to me. Unlike my mother, however, Grandma didn’t insist on respect and courtesy from her son. No matter how Uncle Charlie spoke to Grandma—and when hungover he could be vicious—she coddled him, doted on him, called him her “poor boy,” because his bad luck evoked in her an inexhaustible pity. Thank God for Steve, she often said. Steve gave Uncle Charlie a job in that nice dark bar when Uncle Charlie was getting dozens of painful and ultimately useless injections in his scalp. Uncle Charlie needed a place to hide, and Steve came to the rescue. Steve saved Uncle Charlie’s life, Grandma said, and I gathered that she was doing the same thing by letting Uncle Charlie hide in his boyhood bedroom, with the wallpaper—cartoon baseball players—that had been hung when Uncle Charlie was my age.

Many nights when Uncle Charlie was down at Dickens I’d hang out in his bedroom, looking through his stuff. I’d sift through his betting slips, smell his Dickens T-shirts, tidy up his dresser, which was blanketed with cash. Fifties and hundreds lay everywhere, in a house where Grandma didn’t always have enough money for milk. I’d think about taking some money and giving it to my mother, but I knew that my mother would refuse it and be mad at me. I’d stack the bills in neat piles, noticing that Ulysses Grant looked like one of the men I’d seen at the Dickens softball game. Then I’d stretch out in Uncle Charlie’s bed, propped up on his goose-feather pillows, and be Uncle Charlie. I’d watch the Mets and pretend I had what Uncle Charlie called “heavy timber” on the game. I’d wonder if Uncle Charlie ever bet heavy timber against the Mets. A thing like that would bother me more than knowing he was breaking the law.

During a rain delay one night I changed the channel, hoping for an old Abbott and Costello movie, and happened upon
Casablanca
. “I’m shocked—
shocked
—to find that gambling is going on in here.” I sat up. That man in the tuxedo—he was Uncle Charlie. That hound-dog face, that wistful squint, that furrowed brow. And not only was Humphrey Bogart a dead ringer for Uncle Charlie—except with hair—he also talked like Uncle Charlie, lips never wider than the width of a cigarette. When Bogart said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” the hairs on the back of my neck tingled, because it sounded as if Uncle Charlie were in the room with me. Bogart even walked like Uncle Charlie, that flamingo-with-sore-knees gait. Then the topper: Bogart spent every waking hour in a bar. He too had suffered a run of bad luck, apparently, and a bar was where he chose to lie low, along with scores of other refugees playing hide-and-seek with the world. I didn’t need much help romanticizing Dickens, but after discovering
Casablanca
I became a hopeless case. At eight years old I began to dream of going to Dickens as other boys dream of visiting Disneyland.

seven
| NOKOMIS

W
HENEVER SHE FOUND ME IN UNCLE CHARLIE’S ROOM,
Grandma would try to lure me out. Walking in with a stack of clean Dickens T-shirts for Uncle Charlie’s dresser, she’d see me stretched across his bed and give me a look. Then she’d scan the room—stacks of money, betting slips, hats and dice and cigarette butts—and her ice blue eyes would darken. “I’ve got Entenmann’s coffee cake,” she’d say. “Come have a piece with me.”

Her words would be clipped, her movements hurried, as if there were something contagious in that room and we were both at risk. I didn’t give it much thought, because Grandma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread. And not nameless dread. She was quite specific about the various tragedies stalking her. She feared pneumonia, muggers, riptides, meteors, drunk drivers, drug addicts, serial killers, tornadoes, doctors, unscrupulous grocery clerks, and the Russians. The depth of Grandma’s dread came home to me when she bought a lottery ticket and sat before the TV as the numbers were called. After her first three numbers were a match, she began praying feverishly that she wouldn’t have the next three. She dreaded winning, for fear her heart would give out.

I pitied Grandma, and rolled my eyes at her, and yet when we spent time together I found myself dreading right along with her. On my own I was a terrible worrier—I knew this about myself and worried about it—and now and then I worried that if I spent too much time with Grandma, added her dreads to my worries, I’d eventually become paralyzed by fear. Also, Grandma was always teaching me girly things, like how to iron and needlepoint, and while I liked to learn anything new, I worried what these skills would make me.

Still, no matter how much I feared Grandma’s influence, I craved her attention, because she was the kindest person in that house. So when she invited me to the kitchen for cake I always abdicated my throne on Uncle Charlie’s bed and followed close on her heels.

Before the first bite of cake was in my mouth she’d be well into a story. Uncle Charlie was a superb storyteller, as was my mother, but Grandma was the master. She’d learned her craft as a young girl, haunting movie houses in Hell’s Kitchen. After watching over and over whichever western or romance was playing, she’d walk home at dusk and be set upon by poorer kids in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford a ticket. Surrounded by this mob—whom I pictured as a mix of Bowery Boys and Little Rascals—Grandma would re-create dialogue and reenact scenes, and the kids would ooh and aah and applaud, making little Margaret Fritz feel momentarily like a movie star.

Grandma knew her audience. She always stressed a moral sure to have special meaning for her listeners. With me, for instance, she talked about her brothers, three beefy Irishmen straight out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“Those boys didn’t take any crap,” Grandma would say, her version of “Once upon a time . . .” Her classic story about the Brothers Fritz concerned the night they came home and caught their father punching their mother. They were just young boys, my age, but they took their old man by the throat and told him, “Touch Momma again and we’ll kill you.” Moral: Real men take care of their mothers.

From her brothers Grandma would segue to stories about my other set of cousins, the Byrnes, who lived farther east on Long Island. (I couldn’t keep straight in my head how they were related to me—they were the grandchildren of Grandma’s sister.) There were ten Byrne kids—one daughter and nine sons, whom Grandma put on the same pedestal as her brothers. The Byrne Boys had that same combination of brawn and grace, she said, holding them up to me as “perfect gentlemen,” which I resented. Easy for them to be perfect, I’d think—they have a father. Uncle Pat Byrne was dark and Black Irish handsome and played touch football with his boys every night after work.

At eight years old I was unusually gullible, and yet I was still able to divine the ulterior motive behind many of Grandma’s stories. Though she disliked my father, Grandma understood what I got from his voice and what I lost when his voice vanished, and she was doing what she could to summon new male voices for me. I was grateful, and also vaguely conscious that this wasn’t the only substitution taking place during our cake-and-story sessions. Grandma was being called upon to fill in for my mother, who was working longer hours, more determined than ever to get us out of Grandpa’s house.

As Grandma and I spent more time together, as we grew closer, we both worried that she would run out of material. Eventually our worry came true. Her archive of stories exhausted, she was forced to reach into literature, reciting lyrical passages from Longfellow, her favorite poet, whom she’d memorized as a schoolgirl. I liked Longfellow even better than the Brothers Fritz. I stopped breathing when Grandma recited
The Song of Hiawatha,
stared in awe as she described how the Indian boy’s father vanished soon after he was born, and how Hiawatha’s mother then died, which left the boy to be raised by his grandmother, Nokomis. Despite the warnings of Nokomis, despite her sense of dread, Hiawatha set off in search of his father. The boy had no choice. He was haunted by his father’s voice on the wind.

I enjoyed Grandma’s recollections about her epic brothers, and her poetry recitals about heroic men, but I felt embarrassed, even ashamed, because my favorite stories were about a woman—her mother, Maggie O’Keefe. The oldest of thirteen, Maggie was forced to care for her siblings while her mother was sick or pregnant, and she became a folk hero in County Cork for her many sacrifices, including carrying her baby sister piggyback to school when the sister was too lazy to walk. Maggie vowed that her sister would learn to read and write, something Maggie had always longed to do.

What it was that made Maggie leave Ireland, forsake her siblings and parents and flee to New York in the 1800s, we never knew. We yearned to know, because she was the first in a long line of leavers, the matriarch of a clan of men and women who made mysterious and dramatic exits. But her reason for leaving must have been too awful, too painful, because Maggie was said to be a born storyteller, and that story was the one she would never tell.

For her secret torment, for her many fine qualities, Maggie deserved a bit of happiness when she docked at Ellis Island. Instead life got harder. Working as a maid in one of the grand estates on Long Island, she was passing an upstairs window one day when she spotted a gardener beneath a tree, reading a book. He was “despicably handsome,” she said years later, and obviously educated. Maggie fell hard. She confided her love to a friend, another maid, and they conceived a plan. The friend, who knew how to write, would take down Maggie’s thoughts and turn them into love letters, which Maggie would sign and slip into the gardener’s book while he pruned the roses. Naturally the gardener was awed by Maggie’s letters, seduced by her soaring prose, and after a whirlwind courtship he and Maggie married. When he learned that Maggie was illiterate, however, the gardener felt cheated, and thus was born a lifelong resentment, which he used to justify drinking and beating her—until their three boys caught him and took him by the throat.