The Tender Bar Read Online Free PDF Page B

itself, the 1,800-ton glacier that had skittered downstate many millennia before, like one of the marbles I pitched on the playground at Shelter Rock Elementary School, a mile away. Legends surrounded Shelter Rock. For centuries its sharp outcrop, a natural canopy of stone, had shielded people from animals and elements and enemies. Revered by Native Americans who lived along Manhasset Bay, the rock was then prized by Dutch cow farmers who came to Manhasset seeking their fortune in the 1600s, then adopted by British colonists who came seeking religious freedom in the 1700s, then co-opted by millionaires who built their grand estates along Shelter Rock Road in the 1800s. If things got really bad at Grandpa’s, I figured, my mother and I could live alongside Shelter Rock. We could sleep under the canopy and cook our meals over an open fire, and though it would be rough, how much rougher could it be?

    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