The Tender Bar

The author explains that he had intended to legally change his name before his graduation. His full name, John Joseph Moehringer Junior, had always required some explanation and reminded him of his father. He tried to find suitable new first and last names before Yale printed his official diploma, and he decided on J. R. Maguire. However, he got distracted at a bar and missed the name documentation deadline. After this, he regretfully decided that he “deserved to go through life as J. R. Moehringer” (215).

Moehringer shares the painful memory of discovering Sidney’s repeated cheating, and though he tried to think of solutions, he couldn’t, and they parted ways. His mother attended his graduation, during which he realized that while he and Sidney had tried to act grown up, they were both young, inexperienced, and insecure. He felt that her faults were made out of a sense of panic, and not malice, but he also knew that they would not be together again.

To celebrate his graduation, Moehringer and his mother went to Dickens, now renamed Publicans, for a drink. Moehringer noticed that the men at the bar seemed defensive and skeptical about his graduation from university, and he wondered if they felt alienated by Yale’s upper-class aura. He quickly deferred to talking about his poor grades and his breakup, which put the men at ease once again.

When his cousin Linda gave him a writer’s pen as a present, Moehringer had the opportunity to admit to his mother that he did not want to go to law school or even pursue any more schooling of any kind. His mother confessed that she had only set the goal of law school for him so that he would expect to have an interesting, challenging career rather than “punch a clock” his whole life (219). Moehringer remembers how impossible it felt to articulate to his mother what he wanted, since he could not decide himself. However, he told his mother he was going to be a novelist and write a book about Publicans while living at his grandfather’s house.

His mother persuaded him to still seek paid work, and he reluctantly accepted a full-time position selling homeware at a store in Manhasset. He was astonished by his success in selling high-value items at his job and received prizes for doing so. Instead of feeling accomplished, the author worried that his destiny was to be a clerk in the Home Fashion department and that he would never achieve anything beyond it.

Moehringer was alarmed at how much he liked his job and realized that, having grown up in a poor environment, he had developed a “fetish” for beautiful homeware such as the expensive things he sold so well. He then received a letter from Sidney asking him to dinner, and, after ripping it up and piecing it back together, he phoned her and agreed.

At Sidney’s suggestion, he also decided to send his Yale school newspaper articles to the New York Times, expecting rejection.