The Clancys of Queens (10 page)

A seventy-year-old, put-out-to-pasture former teacher assigned to oversee the “lunchroom,” she demanded that we eat without talking in anything more than a hushed whisper. Really—some two hundred kids, desperate to get out to the recess yard, were prevented even from chitchatting or laughing with any enthusiasm for a full fifteen minutes. If you spoke a single loud sentence, she would call you up to the front of the room and have you finish your lunch alone on a side bench, then bar you from going outside to the yard for the whole remaining recess.

I always sat with Esther, who spent ten of the fifteen minutes putting her index finger to her lips to remind me to keep my voice down. But once, after a fellow rebel got put in the clink for a giggle, I couldn't take it anymore. I stood up on my chair, let out a booming, pitch-perfect Tarzan howl, then jumped off and started running in circles around the auditorium with Mrs. Golden close at my heels. The entire room instantly went bat-shit. Kids were pounding their chairs into the linoleum, pumping their fists in the air, and screaming at the tops of their lungs like I had just hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium. Then, of course, I was caught and dragged to the bench. When Mrs. Golden released everyone to the recess yard some five minutes later, Esther stopped at the door, turned, and came to sit next to me on the bench for the entire rest of recess. I could cry thinking about it now, but at the time I just gave her a love punch to the shoulder.

We still maintained some autonomy. There was no way I was joining the Color Guard, but I woo-hoo'ed for Esther when she marched by cradling the New York State flag propped in her weird, flag-holding, leather-belt contraption while “My Country, 'Tis of Thee” pumped out of the staticky auditorium speakers at any given ceremony. And Esther never once joined me on one of my fourth-floor excursions to asbestos-land, but always seemed genuinely concerned when she would ask me afterward if I had any trouble breathing.

As Esther had suspected, not long after we met, her mom stopped going to the Group, and so, by the start of fifth grade, her life of ricocheting between worlds was now over. The little bit of a Montana accent she had picked up soon faded and, with it, any additional questions from snooping classmates who might have wanted to hear her story. My social-strata-hopping life, however, was still in full swing, though I have no memory of wanting, or needing, to tell anyone other than Esther the details of it (at least not for many more years).

It's hard to imagine that no one at PS 133 ever questioned why, if it were a Wednesday after school, I would be playing handball with the rest of the kids, but every other Friday I would be getting into the stretch limousine Mark had sent to pick me up, but I truly can't recall a single real conversation about it back then (at least not anything more than, “Wow, is that thing here for you?”
Yup. Bye!
). This had been my life since kindergarten, and by fifth grade the only change was that Esther often hopped into that limo with me.

When we jumped in with our high-tops, Table Talk cherry pies, bags of puffy Cheez Doodles, and quarter waters, we would sometimes find Mark inside: six feet and ten inches of pinstripe, sitting way down in the far end of the car, with his face buried in the
Times
and his knees, each the height of a four-year-old, slowly swinging out and in, then bumping at the center, then back out again, all in perfect rhythm as we drove. Meanwhile, Esther and I would play city-kid patty-cake, a superfast smacking of palms and laps and palms and laps, as we sang, “Went to the store to get a stick of butter, saw James Brown sitting in the gutter, took a piece of glass, shoved it up his ass, never seen a motherfucker run so fast, rockin' robin!” We dropped our voices to a whisper for the expletive finale, but even if we hadn't, Mark likely wouldn't have cared. To his credit, he never asked us to change.

We played many more rounds and more varieties of patty-cake—“Miss Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, toot-toot, Miss Lucy went to heaven, the steamboat went to hel/lo operator, please give me number nine, and if you disconnect me, I will chop off your behind/the 'frigerator there was a piece of glass, Miss Lucy sat upon it and broke her little ass/k me no more questions…”—in the Barn, or the Cottage, or on Adirondack chairs courtside while Mark practiced croquet. And at night we roller-skated around and around the screened-in porch of the Main House overlooking the lagoon pool, singing songs and showing off our choreographed moves while Mark smiled and swirled the cognac in his snifter, and Mom clapped along.

Esther and I would walk loops around his Bridgehampton estate, gabbing away, so far immersed in some imaginary fantasy-world game that the whole rest of the real world faded away, just the way we did on the asphalt recess yard at PS 133. And some odd Saturday nights with Mark we'd sit side by side at the swanky-white-tableclothed French restaurant on Main Street, just the way we did in the cramped auditorium lunchroom. In lieu of my typical lunch of a cold slice of Grandma's frittata (she sent it via the Grandpa Express all the way from Westport every week), I tended to go for the sole meunière, and instead of her usual bologna on white with mayo, Esther always,
always,
got the duck à l'orange. (Hey, Mrs. Fucking Golden, get a load of us now!)

By the end of fifth grade, we had likely spent as many days together in Bridgehampton as we did at Dad and Jackie's new place, as we did at my new house on 253rd Street, and at Esther's old one, on 237th. She knew all the Gregory's regulars and my rowdy Clancy family from Dad's house parties, and I got to know her older brothers—if you can call getting to know them being chased around and around the ten-square-foot patch of grass and asphalt of her backyard with brooms or paint rollers or whatever instruments of intimidation were on hand that day.

Beyond the average disdain older brothers have for their little sisters and her little friends, it likely didn't help our status with them that Esther regularly bragged about her duck à l'orange dinners when they were stuck at home having her mom's maximum-bang-for-the-buck vats of buttered noodles, or that Mark had once sent a limo to pick us up at Esther's house. Or, worse, that on one long weekend, when Mark expected bad traffic, he forewent the limo entirely and instead chartered a private plane.

My mother picked Esther and me up from PS 133 that day and drove us to the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in her beat-up Cutlass while doing her mascara in the rearview and smoking a cigarette. Sashaying out onto the tarmac—the three of us now doing our best impression of anyone with an upbringing different from ours—we met Mark, walking ahead in great strides, pinstripes like flagpoles now, carrying our bags headlong into the wind, his tie, her perm, and our backpack straps sailing backward as we went.

The pilot asked me if I wanted to take the copilot's seat.
Of course
I did, and, surprising all of us, he actually let me fly the thing or, to be realistic, steer it a few inches to the left for three seconds. In other words, at age ten, with Grandma and Broad Channel recently gone from my day-to-day life, when I was FLYING A PLANE over Shea Stadium, where my mother and grandfather had once sold hot dogs, and when I was sitting in front of the millionaire whose apartment my mom used to clean—THIS should have been the very moment my untethered spinning reached maximum velocity and I went spiraling off into the stratosphere, never to return. But I didn't, perhaps because also sitting in that plane was Esther. And she'd be there when we landed, and when we were back in school the following week, and the next weekend, whether we were at Dad's place or hers, the two of us spinning, together.

So while I may never have been truly tethered to a single reality, I was okay, in large part, because I was tethered to her.

Once a year, usually sometime after we finished dessert, I'd work up the nerve to ask Mark, “So, what was it like in your house, as a kid, growing up?” And once a year, he'd pause, look me in the eye, and say something along the lines of, “Now, I'd say that the tarte Tatin was quite good, possibly
very
good, but it likely would have benefited from somewhat less sugar. What are your thoughts?” And I'd take the hint…until the next year.

But after I had asked that same question a half dozen times in as many years, just once, following his standard pause and look, instead of steering me off course with a critique of the evening's pastry, Mark did give me an answer, of sorts. It felt like a broken-off bit of a much larger, much darker thought. A garbled little pair of words that just shot out of his subconscious like a pinball, ricocheted around his brain for a split second, then rocketed straight toward the drain: “Booze and grease…just booze and grease.”

He seemed as shocked to have said those words aloud as Mom and I were to have heard them. Afterward, for an emotionally very long but in reality very short moment, we all sat in silence shifting our gaze back and forth from the tablecloth to the curtains. Tablecloth. Curtains. Tablecloth. Curtains. Finally, mercifully, Mark started back in with his review of the soufflé.

I was eleven, too young to have a deep understanding of what summarizing the whole of your early family life and childhood home as “just booze and grease” might mean, but just old enough to know not to ask for an explanation. Which is maybe why, that same night, after his immediate diversion on dessert, he continued:

“My father had this old recliner, this tattered, grease-stained thing, and, after he'd come home from the mill, he'd pull it up to the television, right up there, an arm's length from the screen, and then he'd take a stack of Mallomars cookies and line them up on the armrests, six or so to a side, and during the commercial breaks he'd put two of them back to back, mash them together, ratchet open his jaw, and shove the whole mess in! Like this.” And then he squashed an imaginary pair of the famous marshmallow-domed chocolate-covered treats between his fingers and rammed them two-knuckles-deep into his mouth.

Mom and I waited for him to burst out laughing before we joined in.

And that was it—those two tiny tidbits were the only things he ever told me directly about his childhood.

Over the years Mom did manage to glean a lot more details about Mark's past, but the fuller picture came together at such a glacial pace that she couldn't recall exactly when she learned what, let alone when she shared that information with me.

She knew that he grew up in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a bleary mill town near Providence, Rhode Island, in what we would come to learn was the 1930s. (Among his many quirks, he never, ever, celebrated his birthday, nor revealed the date. Mom knew he was considerably older than she from the get-go, but it wasn't until she snuck a peek at his passport on a trip—a whole six years after they started dating—that she learned his actual age. He was twenty years her senior.)

He had just one sibling, a brother, who was a couple of years younger and exactly one inch shorter, a measly 6
'
9
"
. After the age of twelve neither of them had a single pair of pants that went much past their mid-calves.

Mark's grandfather, father, and uncles hadn't gone beyond high school, and all worked at the town paper mill, but Mark went to Providence College on a basketball scholarship. He wasn't a very good high school player, but, considering his extraordinary height, the college coaches took him on anyway, presuming they could teach him. They couldn't. He was a self-described “god-awful, bench-warming ignoramus” for all four years.

Right after graduation he got married and became a fireman. But by his mid-twenties he left the fire department to take a job as the mail boy at the New England Bell Telephone Company in the hope of climbing the corporate ladder. He did.

After that he got a job as the branch manager of a local bank and soon rose to managing several branches. And then he got a management position at IBM. He moved to Westchester, New York, where the company's headquarters were located, and, once there, he and his wife had two daughters.

Mark left IBM several years later when he was offered the job of executive vice president of Citibank. Shortly afterward, somewhere around his fiftieth birthday, he got divorced. Not long after that, he got laid off. And so, he put it all on the line and decided to start his own management consulting company. He convinced two Citibank colleagues to join him: a female executive signed on as his vice president and Sally, the mutual friend of my parents from Broad Channel, became his secretary. And that was the whole operation. By the time Mom became his short-lived third employee just a few years later, his consulting services were being sought after by Fortune 50 companies, and Mark had officially catapulted from “booze and grease” to Bridgehampton.

At age eleven, I still wouldn't have described Mark as a “new money” guy with “old money” taste, but I definitely could have told you that he was very different from my parents and grandparents. And I might have been able to articulate that difference with a side-by-side comparison of their hobbies, or music preferences, but mostly by how they would have cursed somebody out. Dad's arsenal of insults ranged from the almost quaint—ya piece a' work, ya jerk, ya mope—to a terrible, exhaustive collection of racial, ethnic, and religion-based epithets, the only possible consolation to this being that most of them were so antiquated that it would be years before I had any idea that he wasn't just making weird sounds when he got angry: Nip, Yid, Wop, Zip, Mick. Huh?

Grandpa just didn't have it in him to yell at real people in real life, but on occasion he'd hurl a “fathead” or “banana-head” at the ball game on TV. Grandma, meanwhile, addressed the people she loved most in this world as “devil semen” (
sfacimm
), even if she was just calling you home for dinner, but she did reserve a few choice phrases for people who actually wronged her: e.g.,
Fanabla,
puttana!
(Go to hell, whore!).

I don't mean to leave Mom out, but, well, suffice to say, she got mugged on the subway once—a group of girls pinned her down on the floor of the train, tore open her blouse, and ripped the necklace right off her neck—and the worst she could muster when describing them was “not nice people.”

But, for Mark, fatheads,
sfacimms,
mopes, and worse, were imbeciles, dimwits, or morons. So he not only walked the old-money walk—art, antiques, croquet—he talked the old-money talk. And when you put the two together, it might have appeared he was affecting high society in a Hollywood movie–style attempt to slip undetected into some elite social scene and climb the ranks, if it weren't for one thing: us. And by us, I don't just mean Mom and me; I mean all thirty-two members of my Riccobono family. Because by the time I was eleven, it was clear that Mark didn't have, or want, an upper-crust circle of friends. In fact, by then, Mark was just Riccobono number thirty-three, and, like the rest of us, his family became his friends.

I'm crawling top speed along the front lawn in Bridgehampton through a thirty-foot tunnel maze of banquet tables. Above me, the catering staff are setting out triangular infantries of wineglasses, short stacks of real porcelain cheese plates, salad plates, and dinner plates, and row after row of Mark's solid silver antique cutlery—every few feet I accidentally bump a table leg, setting off a symphony of rattling dinnerware, before poking my head out and yelling to the nearest caterer, “Sorry! I'll slow it up!”

Above the tables and the caterers and the trees and the clouds, smashed in the backs of tiny prop planes, are my Uncle Vinny, Aunt Jeanie, and their six kids. In another are my Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Marlene, and their three sons. In yet another are my Aunt Lucille, Uncle Ed, and their two kids. This entire little fleet is about to drop bombs of loud Brooklyn-bred Italians onto the tarmac of East Hampton Airport.

And that's not even half of them. The remaining platoons—Aunt Joanne, Uncle Tony, and their three kids; Uncle Sal, his two sons, and his girlfriend, Patty; Great-uncle Jerry and his boyfriend, John; and Grandma and Grandpa—are all coming via limousine. In other words, it's an all-out air and ground assault, the lot of them just seconds from making landfall, where they will swell into a small army and send wafts of garlicky air out into the nostrils of old WASPs who'll either drop dead mid-swing at the sixteenth hole or be struck with a sudden urge for spaghetti.

This is the fourth inaugural attack of The Riccobonos on The Republic of Bridgehampton, a.k.a. the annual summer party Mark throws for our family. He first broached the idea at one of our basement parties on 251st Street, years earlier, crammed next to Aunt Lucille and Uncle Tony in our tiny Queens basement, eating a meatball on a metal folding chair. I remember him saying two things: 1) having attended all of our parties, he wanted to return the favor—Mark was by then a regular at my uncles' Jets tailgates and could be seen, any given Sunday, standing there in his Burberry coat at 8:00 a.m., drinking Delamain cognac out of a plastic cup. And he never missed a Christmas Eve, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, or Easter at Grandma's, who also refused any of the more traditional offers of thanks; i.e., food or money: “Can you bring something? What you gonna bring? Some junk shit you buy at the store? I cook, from scratch!
Stunad!
” Or: “What, you want me to take your money, like I'm some
puttana
on the street?! I cook! I pay! Don't ask again!
Che cazzo!
” And, 2) if we accepted the invitation, there was one hitch: he insisted on supplying all transportation, to avoid what he dubbed a “Riccobono rendezvous.” Everyone shot him the eye, knowing some ball busting was coming, and then he impersonated one of my uncles, in a mock-conversation with another of my uncles, organizing a family get-together,
“Okay, I got it all figured—Jimmy picks up Vinny, who picks up Tony, who picked up Lu, who picks up Joanne, who picked up Cah-mella, who picks up Patty, who tells Sal to pick up Danny, to pick up Peter, to pick up Jeannie
—and maybe, just maybe, after you all have crisscrossed the tristate area several hundred times and burned a tanker's worth of gasoline, you manage to show up for dinner.” Everybody cracked up, and then Grandma coined a term of her own, a nickname for Mark, “Okay, your party, your way,
Mastagotz
” (something akin to Mr. Big Dick, which quickly became what everyone in our family, from the age of sixteen up, also called him).