It was around eight when Gary showed us to our table, and maybe an hour later when we said no to dessert and yes to espresso. It’s rare for her to have coffee, especially late in the day, and my surprise must have shown in my face. “It could be a long night,” she said. “I figure I’d better be awake for it.”
“I can see how much you’re looking forward to it.”
“About as much as you are. It’s got to be like a wake without a corpse. Except last night would have been the wake, so what’s this? The burial?”
“I guess.”
“I always thought the Irish wake made a lot of sense. Pour down the booze until you can think of something good to say about the deceased. My people cover the mirrors, sit around on hard wooden benches, and stuff themselves with food. I wonder what it was like last night.”
“I’m sure he’ll tell us.”
We finished our coffee, and I signaled our waitress for the check. Gary brought it himself. How many years had we known him? How many years had we been coming here a couple of times a month?
It seemed to me that neither he nor the restaurant had changed. He always looked as though something reminded him of a joke, and the light in his blue eyes hadn’t dimmed any. But his beard, still hanging from his long jaw like an oriole’s nest, showed some gray now, and his age showed at the corners of his eyes. And it was a night to notice such things.
“I didn’t see you last night,” he said. “Of course I didn’t go over until we closed up shop here. You’d probably headed for home by then.”
“That would be—”
“The big fella’s place. You’re friends, aren’t you? Or have I got it wrong, as I so often do?”
“We’re close friends,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”
“I don’t, not really. But he’s part of the neighborhood, isn’t he? I doubt I’ve been in Grogan’s a dozen times in as many years, but I made sure I got there last night.”
“Paying your respects,” Elaine suggested.
“And watching my neighbors take advantage of the open bar. A sight guaranteed to raise or lower your opinion of the human race, depending where it was to begin with. And, you know, being present for the end of an era, and isn’t that the most overused phrase at our command? Every time a sitcom’s canceled, someone proclaims it the end of an era.”
“And once in a while it is,” she said.
“You’re thinking of Seinfeld.”
“Well, yeah.”
“An exception,” he said, “that proves the rule. As is the shuttering of Grogan’s Open House. A fixture in the local landscape, and soon enough the building will be gone and no one will remember what used to be there. Our town, forever reinventing itself. I heard they made the owner such a good offer that he was willing to risk Mr. B’s wrath for selling the building out from under him. And I also heard that Mick owned the building, no matter whose name might be on the deed.”
“You hear lots of things,” I said.
“You do,” he agreed. “I’m pleased to report that the era of hearing things is still going strong.”
For longer than I’ve known him, my friend Mick Ballou has been the proprietor of Grogan’s Open House, a Hell’s Kitchen saloon at the southeast corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. The place began as a hangout for the neighborhood hoodlums, or at least that segment thereof who pledged some sort of undefined allegiance to the man himself. In recent years it has attained a certain degree of raffish respectability, even as the neighborhood has gentrified around it. The new people who’ve moved into refurbished tenements or new high-rise condos like to stop in for a draft Guinness and point out what may or may not be bullet holes in the walls.
Mick has always tended to hire Irish lads as bartenders, most of them fresh transplants from Belfast or Derry or Strabane, but a Northern Ireland accent never kept a new man from learning how to make a Wild Mustang or a Novarian Sunset. The new crowd liked bellying up to the bar next to old neighborhood regulars, and a man who’d worked half a century as a subway motorman would be transformed in the telling into a desperate character with blood on his hands. The old fellows didn’t mind; they were just trying to make a glass of beer last until the next pension check arrived.
“Don’t come on the Friday,” Mick had told me. “’Twill be our last night, with the whole of the West Side sure to come out for it. An open bar until the taps run dry, and there’ll even be a bit of food.”
“And everybody’s welcome but me?”
“You would be welcome enough,” he said, “but you would hate it, as I expect to hate it myself. I won’t have Kristin there, and wouldn’t be there my own self had I any choice in the matter. Come on the Saturday, and bring herself.”
“Friday’s your last night,” I said.
“It is. And the following night there’ll be none but the four of us. And haven’t our best nights always been after closing time?”
We walked down Ninth and over Fiftieth, where the last of the Street Fair vendors were dismantling their booths. “Like nomads in Central Asia,” Elaine said. “Packing their yurts and heading for richer grazing.”
“A few years back their flocks would have gone hungry here,” I said, “or been prey for the local wolves. Now they sell T-shirts and Gap knockoffs and Vietnamese sandwiches, and the block association spends the fees installing security cameras and planting more ginkgo trees.”
“And look at the ornamental light posts,” she said. “Like the ones we saw in Paris.”
Grogan’s came into view as we neared Tenth Avenue. The tavern occupied the ground floor, with three levels of rental units above it. All the apartment windows facing the street had big white X’s on them, indicating that the building was scheduled for demolition. No light showed behind the X’s, and Grogan’s looked to be dark as well. I wondered if perhaps Mick had changed his mind and gone home, and then I saw one light glowing dimly through the front door’s little window.
We hesitated at the curb, although there were no cars coming, and Elaine responded to my unvoiced thought. “We have to,” she said.
Kristin unlocked the door for us. A light glowed softly in a leaded glass shade hanging over a table way in the back. There were four chairs grouped around the table, the only chairs in the room that hadn’t been put up on top of other tables. Mick wasn’t at the table, and I didn’t see him anywhere else, either.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “So’s himself.” She rolled her eyes. “‘So’s himself.’ Listen to me, will you? He’s in the office, he’ll be out in a minute. And now that you’re here—”
She arranged a cardboard CLOSED sign so that it covered the window. “Double duty,” she said. “Tells them we’re closed and keeps them from seeing there’s a light on.”
“All the world sees you as a Jewish-American Princess,” said the former Elaine Mardell. “Yet it’s clear you were born to be an Irish saloonkeeper.”
“A wee village pub in Donegal,” Kristin said. “On the wind-swept shores of Lough Swilly. That’s our favorite fantasy. The funny thing is I think I could actually enjoy it well enough. And so could he, for three weeks tops. Then he’d want to put a match to the adorable thatched roof and come home.”
She led us to the table. Her drink was iced tea, and we said that sounded good to us, too. Mick’s bottle of twelve-year-old Jameson was on the table, along with a glass and a little water pitcher. The Jameson bottle is clear glass, so I could note the color of its contents. I still like the color of good whiskey. Or of bad whiskey, for that matter, because the color doesn’t say anything about the quality. All it tells you is that you’ve got a thirst for it.