Free The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer Page A

whom I never once called Dorothy. She was always Mom. My mother let me wear my hair like Keith Partridge, McGraw’s mother gave him a military buzz cut every two weeks. I was intense, McGraw was laid back. I was prone to brood, McGraw was a giggler, and his giggle was a distinctive, symphonic trill that conveyed an irrepressible joy. I was finicky about food, McGraw ate everything in sight and washed it down with gallons of milk. “McGraw,” Grandma would cry, “I don’t have a cow in the backyard!” To which he’d respond with a fit of giggles. I was dark and skinny, McGraw was blond and big, and bigger all the time. He grew like a boy in a fairy tale, breaking chairs, hammocks, beds, the basketball hoop on the garage. Since Uncle Harry was a giant, it seemed logical to me that McGraw was growing like a beanstalk.

    McGraw wouldn’t talk about his father, and wouldn’t talk about why he wouldn’t talk about his father. I suspected, however, that whenever a train went across the trestle spanning Manhasset Bay, making a clacking sound audible from one end of Manhasset to the other, McGraw couldn’t help but think about his father, a conductor on the Long Island Railroad. Though McGraw wouldn’t say so, I believed the sound of the train affected him the way radio static affected me. Somewhere in that white noise is your old man.

    When McGraw did get to see his father, it wasn’t a visit but an ambush. Aunt Ruth would send McGraw inside some bar to demand money from his father or to have him sign some papers. I could always tell when McGraw had come back from one of these bar ambushes. His chubby cheeks would be flushed, his eyes glassy. He’d look traumatized, but also excited, because he’d just seen his father. He’d want to play baseball in the backyard right away, to burn off the adrenaline and anger. He’d swing the bat hard, whip the ball against the target we’d chalked on the garage—hard. After one bar ambush he threw the ball so hard that Grandpa said he was sure McGraw would knock the garage down.

    There was always one other surefire way to tell if McGraw was upset. Like Grandpa, he stuttered. His stutter was much subtler than Grandpa’s, but the sight of McGraw fighting to form words never failed to pierce my heart and renew my awareness that he was one of the people in that house who needed my protection. In every photo from those years I have a hand on McGraw’s shoulder, a hold of his shirt, as if he’s my charge, my ward.

    One day McGraw was carted off to see his father, but it wasn’t the typical bar ambush. They spent time together, ate cheeseburgers, talked. McGraw even got to steer the train. When he came back he was clutching a grocery bag. Inside was one of his father’s conductor hats, big and heavy as a fruit bowl. “It’s my dad’s,” McGraw said, removing his Mets helmet and putting on the conductor hat. The visor dropped over his eyes, the band fell below his ears.

    The grocery bag also contained hundreds of railroad tickets. “Look!” McGraw said. “We can take these and go somewhere. Anywhere! Shea Stadium!”

    “These tickets are punched,” I said, trying to dampen his enthusiasm, because I was jealous that he’d seen his father. “They’re no good,
stupid
.”

    “My father gave them to me.”

    He snatched the grocery bag away from me.

    Wearing his conductor hat, and a change belt his father also gave him, McGraw appointed himself conductor of the living room. He staggered back and forth, imitating the high-wire walk of a conductor going down the aisle of a moving train, though he looked more like Uncle Charlie coming home from Dickens. “Tickets!” he said. “
All
tickets. Next stop—Penn Station!” We all had to fish in our pockets for coins, no exceptions, though Grandma bought many rides on the bicentennial sofa with cookies and glasses of cold milk.

    Aunt Ruth pulled the emergency brake on McGraw’s living room locomotive. She told McGraw she