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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The
Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Nurture When we read most memoirs or
biographies, we look to learn lessons that we can apply to our own lives. The
lesson from J.R. Moehringer’s The
Tender Bar is that one can find nurturing and community almost anyplace. Moehringer is a fine writer (Los Angeles Times Pulitzer-Prize winner) and his skills make
reading this book a delight. The title refers to Publicans, the bar in When not crouched over the radio,
listening to the Voice, I was tuned to my mother’s frequencies, monitoring
her moods. I watched her, analyzed her, followed her
from room to room. It was more than attachment, more than protectiveness. It
was partly a pursuit, because no matter how intently I watched and listened,
my mother was often a complete mystery to me. When happy, when expressing
joy or love, my mother could be marvelously loud. But when sad or hurt, when
frightened or worried about money, my mother would fall silent and her face
would go blank. Some people interpreted this tendency as coldness. They
couldn’t have been more wrong. Even at seven years old I understood that my
mother’s silences and blank faces concealed an emotional cauldron. What
seemed a lack of feeling was an overflow, a surge.
My mother would slip behind her mask of feigned calm for the sake of
discretion, as someone might step behind a screen when changing. There had always been a
trace of the unfathomable about my mother, according to Grandma, who told me
a story by way of explanation. When my mother was in second grade, the
teacher asked the class a question and my mother shot her hand in the air.
She knew that answer and couldn’t wait to shout it out. But the teacher
called on someone else. After a few minutes the teacher noticed my mother’s
hand still hovering. Dorothy, she said, put down your hand. I can’t, my
mother said. Put down your hand, the teacher said. My mother’s eyes filled
with tears. The teacher sent my mother to the principal, who sent my mother
to the nurse, who concluded that my mother wasn’t faking. Her hand and arm
were truly stuck in the upright and locked position. Grandma was summoned to
school, and she described to me with some wonderment that long, strange walk
home, my mother a half step behind, her hand rigidly aloft. Grandma sent my
mother to bed—the only thing she could think to do—and in the morning, when
the sadness or disappointment presumably had worn off, my mother’s arm fell
to her side. Though she was mysterious
by nature, some of my mother’s mystery was by design. The most honest person
I’ve ever known, she was a beautiful liar. To avoid giving pain, to cushion
the blow of bad news, she’d fib or baldly fabricate without the slightest
hesitation. Her lies were so well crafted, so expertly told, that I never
gave them a second thought. As a result, every now and then, sorting through
childhood memories, I still come upon one of my mother’s lies, like an
elaborately painted Easter egg that was hidden too well and forgotten. The earliest lie I can
remember came about when my mother and I had moved into a small apartment
five minutes from Grandpa’s house. At last, she said, we’ve escaped. She was
loudly, riotously happy, until she got laid off from her job. Soon I found
food stamps in her purse. “What are these?” I asked. “Coupons,” she said
brightly. She didn’t want me to know
we were broke. She didn’t want me to worry more than I already did. For this
same reason she lied when I asked if we could buy a TV. “You know, I’ve been
meaning to buy us a TV,” she said. “If only the TV makers weren’t on strike.” I nagged her for weeks
about the TV strike, and she concocted detailed stories on the fly about
picketers at the factory and breakdowns in the negotiations. When she’d
saved enough for a used black-and-white Zenith, she came to me and announced
that management had caved. For years I believed there had been a bitter work
stoppage among Long Island’s TV makers, until I heard myself telling people
about it at a dinner party and saw them staring at me. On those rare occasions
when my mother was caught in a lie, she was refreshingly unrepentant. She
had a “relationship” with the truth, she explained coolly, and like all
relationships it required compromises. Lying, she believed, was no greater
sin than turning down the volume on the radio to protect me from The Voice.
She merely notched down the volume on the truth. Her most inspired lie
marked a watershed in our relationship, because it concerned my most
cherished possession, my security blanket. Made of mint green satin, quilted
with thick white thread, the blanket was my other addiction, besides The
Voice. I grew edgy when it was out of reach. I wore it as a poncho, a sash, a
scarf, and sometimes as a bridal train. I regarded my blanket as a loyal
friend in a cruel world, while my mother saw it as a disorder in the making.
Seven was too old for a security blanket, she said, trying to reason with me,
but when did reason stand a chance against obsessive love? She tried seizing
the blanket, but I howled as though she were hacking off my arm at the joint.
Finally I woke one night to find her on the edge of my bed. “What’s wrong?” I
asked. “Nothing. Go back to
sleep.” Over the next few weeks I
noticed my security blanket getting smaller. I asked my mother. “Maybe it’s
shrinking in the wash,” she said. “I’ll use colder water.” Many years later I
learned that my mother had crept into my room each night and taken a scissor
to my security blanket, snipping off an imperceptible slice, until it became
a security shawl, a security washcloth, a security swatch. Over time there
would be more security blankets, people and ideas and particularly places to
which I would form unhealthy attachments. Whenever life snatched one from
me, I would recall how gently my mother pared away my first. The one thing my mother
couldn’t lie about was how deeply Grandpa’s house offended her. She said
Grandpa’s house made the Amityville Horror look like the Taj
Mahal. She said Grandpa’s house should be burned
down and the soil plowed with salt. She said Grandpa’s house was Manhasset’s
answer to Though I didn’t love the
Shit House, I didn’t despise it the way my mother did. The sagging roof, the
duct-taped furniture, the exploding cesspool and bicentennial sofa—all
seemed a fair trade for being with my cousins, whom I adored. My mother
understood, but Grandpa’s house sapped her energy to such an extent that she
couldn’t take any pleasure in the compensations it held for me. She was so
tired, she said. So terribly tired. More than returning to
Grandpa’s house, more than moving our stuff yet again, what seemed to
devastate my mother was the moment she realized that our next return was
inevitable. I remember waking in yet another one-bedroom apartment, going out
to the kitchen and finding my mother pecking at her calculator. I could tell
she’d been pecking at it since dawn, and she looked as if the calculator had
been pecking at her. I’d long suspected she had conversations with her
calculator, as I did with the radio, and that morning I caught her
red-handed. “Who are you talking to?” I asked. She looked up and gave me her
blank face. Mom? Blank. Before my eyes she was reverting to that catatonic
schoolgirl with her hand in the air. Each time we returned to
Grandpa’s, my mother would insist that we take regular mental-health breaks.
Sunday afternoons we’d climb into our rust-spackled 1963 T-Bird, which
sounded like a Civil War cannon, and go for a drive. We’d start on It always seemed as if a
misty rain was falling during our drives, so my mother and I couldn’t get out
of the car for a closer look. We’d sit with the engine and heater running and
the windshield wipers slinging back and forth. My mother would study the
house and I would study my mother. She had lustrous auburn hair, which she
wore to her shoulders, and green-brown eyes that turned a shade greener
whenever she smiled. Her most common facial expression, however, was one of
enormous self-command, like a young aristocrat posing for her coming-out
portrait. It was the look of a woman who could be gentle, and fragile, but
who would assuredly be fierce when protecting those she loved. I see in some
photos of my mother that she was aware of her ability, in hard times, to set
aside her delicate qualities, to fight like hell, and she took a certain
pride in it. The camera captured her pride in a way my seven-year-old eye
couldn’t. The only pride I noticed as a boy was the pleasure she took in her
sense of style. Petite and slim, my mother knew what looked good on her. Even
when we were broke she managed to look classic, which probably had more to do
with her carriage than with her clothes. After we’d been sitting
there for some time, the owners of the house would hear the T-Bird and peer
through their windows at us. My mother would then jerk the T-Bird into drive
and we’d rumble south on Just beyond the rock my
mother and I would come to a stretch of rolling hills where the houses were
even more astonishing than those on the water. Prettiest houses in the world,
my mother said. Every few hundred yards, through a tall padlocked
wrought-iron gate, we’d glimpse another lawn wider and greener than the
outfield at Shea Stadium, stretching toward another
replica of the Irish castles in my storybooks. “This is where the Whitneys live,” she said. “And that’s where the Paleys live. And that’s where the Paysons
live. Isn’t that lovely?” Hanging a U-turn at the
last mansion, heading back to Grandpa’s, my mother would invariably start to
sing. She’d warm up with “I Got You Babe,” because she liked the line, “They
say our love won’t pay the rent—before it’s earned our money’s all been
spent.” Then she’d belt out her favorite, an old Tin Pan Alley tune. Oh!
we ain’t
got a barrel of money, Maybe
we’re ragged and funny, But
we’ll travel along, Singin’
a song, Side
by side She always sang at the top
of her voice, but volume couldn’t mask her frustration. Those mansions
tormented my mother as much as they fascinated her, and I understood. I felt
the same way. Pressing my forehead against the car window as the mansions
flew by, I’d think: So many beautiful
places in the world, and we’re barred from them all. Obviously the secret
of life was getting in. Why
couldn’t my mother and I figure out how it was done? My mother deserved a
home. It didn’t even need to be a mansion, just a little cottage with a rose
garden and cream-colored curtains and rugs that were soft and clean and
kissed your bare feet as you walked across them. That would be plenty. It
made me mad that my mother didn’t have nice things, madder still that I
couldn’t provide them for her, and furious that I couldn’t say any of this
aloud, because my mother was singing, striving to stay upbeat. Taking care of
my mother meant saying nothing to disrupt her fragile optimism, so I would
press my forehead against the window, harder, until it hurt, and shift my
focus from the mansions to my reflection in the glass. Though I kept my feelings
bottled tight, eventually those feelings fermented, then fizzed to the
surface in the form of odd behavior. I turned overnight into a compulsive and
neurotic child. I set about trying to fix Grandpa’s house—straightening rugs,
restacking magazines, retaping furniture. My
cousins laughed and called me Felix, but I wasn’t being neat, I was going
crazy. Besides doing what I could to make the house less offensive to my
mother, I was trying to put order to chaos, a quest that led me ultimately to
seek a more dramatic rearrangement of reality. I began dividing life into absolutes.
Manhasset was this way, I thought— why not the world? In Manhasset you were
either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk, church or bar. You were
“Gaelic or garlic,” as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn’t admit, to him
or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors. Life was governed by
polar opposites, I decided, as proved by the stark contrast between the Shit
House and the Whitney mansion. Things and people were either perfectly bad,
or perfectly good, and when life didn’t obey this black-or-white rule, when
things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I
turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and
separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I
built a barricade of delusions against it. My other delusions were more obvious
and therefore more troubling to my mother. I became extravagantly
superstitious, collecting phobias as other boys collected baseball cards. I
avoided ladders and black cats, threw salt over my shoulder, knocked on wood,
held my breath walking past cemeteries. So determined was I not to step on a
crack, for fear of breaking my mother’s back, that I
weaved down the sidewalk like a drunk. I spoke “magic” words three times to
ward off dangers, and watched for signs and omens from on high. While
listening for my father’s voice I also listened for the voice of the
universe. I communed with rocks and trees and inanimate objects, especially
the T-Bird. Like a horse whisperer I petted its dashboard and begged it to
keep running. If the T-Bird broke down, I worried, my mother would break
down. Irrational fears hounded me, and the worst was the fear of being the
last one to fall asleep in Grandpa’s house. If everyone but me was asleep, I
felt unbearably alone, and my limbs went cold and rigid. It may have had something
to do with the absence of all voices. When I confided this fear to my cousin
Sheryl, five years older than I, she put her arm around me and said the
perfect thing. “Even if we’re all asleep you can be sure Uncle Charlie and
everyone down at Dickens will be awake.” My mother hoped I’d outgrow my odd
behavior. Instead I grew worse, and when I began throwing tantrums she took
me to a child psychiatrist. “What’s the boy’s name?” the
psychiatrist asked as my mother and I settled into chairs across from his
desk. He was jotting notes on a legal pad. “JR,” my mother said. “His real name.” “Those are his
initials, no?” “No.” “Well.” The
psychiatrist dropped his legal pad on his desk. “There’s your answer.” “Pardon?” my mother said. “The boy is obviously suffering an
identity crisis. He has no identity, which causes rage. Give him a name—a proper name—and you’ll have no more
tantrums.” Rising, my mother told me to put my
jacket back on, we were leaving. She then gave the psychiatrist a look that
could have cracked Shelter Rock in two and in measured tones informed him
that seven-year-olds do not suffer identity crises. Driving back to Grandpa’s
she gripped the steering wheel tightly and ran through her repertoire in
three-quarter time. Suddenly she stopped singing. She asked what I thought of
the doctor’s remarks. Did I dislike my name? Did I suffer from an identity
crisis? Was something or someone causing me to feel—rage? I peeled my eyes from the mansions
flying by, turned slowly from the window to my mother, and gave her my own
blank face. Readers will smile, choke with tears,
and wince on many of the pages of The
Tender Bar. Moehringer’s life experiences are
unlikely to match that of many readers, but all will be touched in reading The
Tender Bar because of the humanity, caring, love and support shown by so
many people. Steve Hopkins,
May 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Tender Bar.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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