I stole my father’s bar. I never meant to. It began as a joke, and not even mine. I had recently joined the staff of the Baltimore Evening Sun, which was owned by the same company as The Sun, where my father had worked as an editorial writer for most of my life. I had landed my dream job in my dream city, Baltimore. (Don’t scoff.) I was thirty and finding my way in the world. I needed a bar, my bar, in Baltimore, something a step up from the dives and icehouses of my twenties, a decade spent in Texas. I can’t remember what the other Baltimore contenders were. Midtown Yacht Club, with peanuts on the floor? The Calvert House, a mere two blocks from The Sun building? I did love Alonso’s, a dim place that didn’t take credit cards and served a dish called the Fish Thing, but it was way up on the north side.
My father preferred the Brass Elephant, a gracious town house in the city’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, just five blocks from The Sun. His drink of choice was a gin martini, although my father would stipulate—as will I—that “gin martini” is redundant. The only true martini is made from gin and dry vermouth, with just the tiniest whiff of the latter. Olives or lemon peels are okay, but why would you want to displace even a drop of gin with those foreign objects?
My father was famous for drinking martinis—and for giving them up, usually for a week or so at the beginning of a new year. “So Long, Lippman” was the headline on an op-ed column written by his good friend and fellow martini connoisseur G. Jefferson Price III. But Lippman always came back. More than one photograph was taken of my father and the last martini of the year; the best showed him in a snowy backyard in hat and scarf, holding the quite chilly martini aloft.
That said, I don’t think I ever saw my father inebriated except once, on a Christmas Eve at my home, where my sister noticed there was a slight waver to his walk and asked if he was ill. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just not used to that expensive gin Laura buys.” My father swore by cheap gin, Beefeater, which he kept in the freezer. I think he was rather disappointed with my flirtations with Tanqueray and Hendrick’s.
But that was later. In the fall of 1989, a colleague of my father’s thought it would be hilarious if I was sitting at the bar at the Brass Elephant when my father arrived for an after-work drink to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. He did think it was funny. Sort of. Like many fathers of daughters, mine did not want me to embrace all the things he loved—newsrooms and martinis among them. He offered to pay my way through graduate school if I would choose any other profession. “I’m afraid newspaper work coarsens a woman,” he said once when I used a profanity so mild that it could have slid past Standards and Practices on a network sitcom.
After seeing me with a martini at the Brass Elephant Bar, he went there less and less, while I went there more and more. It could have been a coincidence. He retired from the newspaper in 1995, lured by a generous buyout, began spending most of his time in the small Delaware beach town where my parents would eventually settle. The bar was mine.
The Brass Elephant was hushed and civilized, a grown-up bar for proper grown-ups, something I wanted to be when I was thirty. A quarter of a century later, I no longer remember why I was so anxious to be a grown-up. I bought my first house within a year of turning thirty. (My father advised against it.) Within three years, I would marry a man who loved the Brass Elephant as much as I did. My father paid for the tent that covered my backyard. Within ten years, I would find myself lying to that same man, now a so-called househusband, pretending that I had to work later than necessary so I could go to the bar with a female friend instead of coming straight home, as he expected me to. Instructed me to.
When I started writing crime novels set in Baltimore, I gave the Brass Elephant to my series character. Private investigator Tess Monaghan was never more my proxy than when sitting at the Brass Elephant bar, the light from the setting sun slanting through the pink-and-green stained glass window, a plate of farfalle pasta or the divine mozzarella en carrozza in front of her. Eventually the bar created an eponymous drink in her honor; a menu from the party celebrating that drink hangs in my office. The drink had peach schnapps in it. I don’t much care for schnapps and—now it can be told—I didn’t love the drink, although it wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared.
I can admit that now because the Brass Elephant closed in 2009. A new place has opened in the same spot, but I don’t have the heart to go there. Because, in some ways, I don’t want to be reminded of the young woman who used to climb the mahogany staircase to the second-floor bar, the woman who was in such a hurry to be a grown-up. I find it easier to romanticize the dives of my true youth, where the mistakes and stakes were smaller. The Brass Elephant, through no fault of its own, became the backdrop to a failed first marriage and a roller-coaster ride of a newspaper career. For even as my career as a novelist took off, my career as a reporter stalled, a crazy, sad story that no one really believes, so I’ve learned to stop telling it. My father worked at The Sun for thirty years and I set my goal at thirty-one, having landed there at a much younger age than he did. We were somewhat competitive, my father and I. At any rate, I lasted only twelve years at The Sun, which eventually swallowed the Evening Sun, twenty in newspapers overall.
I last visited the Brass Elephant in 2012, when I was writing a novel to be published in early 2014. I made it the hangout for a band of devoted John B. Anderson volunteers who repair there on Election Night to lick their wounds. A very young woman talks to the bartender, who remembers her father, a man who disappeared four years earlier to evade federal charges for running a gambling operation. The bartender claims to know what her father would have thought about the 1980 presidential election and the young woman yearns to believe him. She knows surprisingly little about her father.
I wish I had asked the bartender of my day more questions about my father. Because, while my father is still alive—and still enjoys a daily martini, just one, at which he nips off and on while watching Law & Order reruns—my father tells fewer and fewer stories. His memory is problematic. He’s no longer quick, and my father was famously quick, an award-winning columnist who packed more in six hundred words than others could in fifteen hundred. Whenever I visit or call, the one thing he always asks is if I know any gossip from our old workplace. I don’t. In a way, the Baltimore Sun is like another Brass Elephant. A newspaper is still published in the building, but it’s not the newspaper I knew and certainly not the one for which my father worked, a sober, well-regarded place with foreign bureaus and, back in the day, a policy that required my father to travel first-class when covering presidential elections. While my father watches Law & Order, it is my mother and my husband who stalk his family tree, genealogical detectives on a case as cold as a martini straight from the shaker.
And I have said goodbye to the Brass Elephant, although poetic license would allow me to revive it in the pages of my books. I briefly aspired to finding a new bar—there’s a cool, hipsterish place a block from my house—but the fifty-something self-employed writer requires much less watering than the thirty-something newspaper hack. I go to restaurant bars for lunch now—a ladylike salad, a glass of wine, never a martini. I had one at a steakhouse the other night and it was as if someone had slipped me a roofie; I fell asleep facedown on the sofa and could barely be roused to stumble into bed. I am only five years away from my own sixtieth birthday and I would prefer not to find my daughter sipping a martini anywhere on that celebratory day, given that she will be not quite nine at the time. I really hope she won’t be a writer, although she has expressed some interest in what I do. The other day, I showed her a prize I had won. Her eyes brightened at the shiny, inexpensive object: “Can I have it?”
And although my father will probably not read this essay—he is reading less and less these days—it’s as good a place as any to issue an apology for doing what children have always done and will always do when it comes to their parents’ possessions and memories and lives.
Daddy, I’m sorry I stole your bar.