The Clancys of Queens (5 page)

By the time he met my mom, Dad had already put in two years as a trainee at the 101st police precinct in Far Rockaway. You couldn't go into the police academy until you were twenty-one, but trainees were paid a minimal salary to do clerical work in the station, and my dad was so underweight that one of his superiors told him he needed to use the three years to bulk up anyway. His boss insisted he eat a pound of bananas a day, which my dad did for so many days that at some point, and forever after, his face started contorting at the mere sight of one.

At nineteen, after my parents had been dating for a year, my mother tried to move out of her parents' house to be on her own. Her plan was to live with her friend Barbara “Rollie” Iorollo and experience a little independence before deciding whether or not to marry my dad. But, knowing that my grandmother wouldn't go for that plan, she plotted a quick escape.

Rollie pulled up outside my grandparents' brownstone one night, engine running, and my mom, suitcase in hand, walked up to my grandmother in the living room and blurted out the lines she had been rehearsing for an hour: “Ma, my friend is here to pick me up, and I'm leaving. I'm going to move in with her, and—”

But before my mom could finish, my grandmother started wheezing. As my mom remembers it, Grandma went from zero to sixty in a flash—her chest started heaving, little beads of sweat rolled down the sides of her face, her inhalations growing longer and louder by the second, until, suddenly, with a great slap to the heart, she collapsed into a chair. My mother dropped her luggage and ran to her side.

“I'll DIE! I'll die if you leave!!” Grandma screamed. My mother fell to the floor, wrapped her arms around my grandmother's legs, and sobbed, “I won't go, Ma. Please! Please calm down! I'll stay, I promise.” To this day, my mother isn't sure if my grandmother faked it. But that near heart attack, feigned or not, may be the reason I am here.

On Sunday, July 22, 1973, my mom walked down the aisle at St. Francis Xavier Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to meet my father at the altar. My parents' reason for dating hadn't boiled down to much more than a mutual physical attraction paired with a mutual “This is just what ya do” philosophy. So there they were, getting married in a ceremony officiated by not one but two priests—Father Petrowski and Father Maloney, the former of her home parish and the latter of my father's St. Virgilius in Broad Channel.

At the wedding reception, per Italian tradition, my parents went from table to table with a cream-colored satin string-tie satchel collecting
abusta,
envelopes filled with money.

And then, per Irish tradition and to my mother's dismay, everyone on my father's side, from the geriatric great-aunts to the pimply-faced teenage nephews, got good and drunk. In defense of my Irish family, and according to my mother, only a small handful of them truly went overboard. And, if Italian tradition had not been to lock up their daughters so tightly (even that night at McNulty's my grandfather waited outside in his truck for my mom, and afterward, on all of my parents' dates before the wedding, she was always to be home by 9:00 p.m.), she may well have seen this coming, and either not have been so shocked or at least known when it was in good fun or not. (Unfortunately, as the subsequent years progressed, with the murder rate in his precinct climbing and the day-to-day violence my father saw on the job taking its toll on him, my mother would learn the difference between “good, fun drinking” and the other kind.)

Following the wedding my parents lived in an apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, one neighborhood over from where Mom had grown up. But after a year they moved to a house in Rosedale, Queens—which my mother then called “the country.” Dad considers their having bought a house together the reason it “wasn't all bad, you see? That's something!” For my mom's part, the plus side was: “Well, he taught me to drive! He let me use his green Dodge Dart—paid for lessons and everything.”

Neither of my parents has offered me much in the way of romantic stories from their time together following that fateful night at McNulty's Bar and Dance Club. What they have given me is some idea of what their lives looked like in the few years before I was born, which helped me understand why those romantic stories were missing in the first place.

My father was then assigned to the 75th precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—which at the time had the highest homicide rate in the city's history. My mother spent a long while trying to convince him to find another type of work. “I was scared shit,” she told me, “but your father sincerely wanted to help people, and he thought this was the way to do that. I loved him for it, but I didn't think it would pan out that way. He didn't listen to me—didn't complain either, though. He didn't talk about it at all, as a matter of fact. But it wouldn't be long before I could see that the job was changing him.”

Having earned her degree in social work from St. Joseph's, Mom was hired as a caseworker for Catholic Charities. It was 1974, and she was assigned to split her time between their Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, offices, two of the roughest neighborhoods in New York City at the time. In the former, she worked mostly with teenage girls fleeing gangs. For a long while she felt she was in over her head, but she liked to listen, and the girls trusted her enough to talk. As she puts it, “Hard as they had it, those girls had hope, and I saw them progress.”

It was a very different story at her Queens assignment. In Far Rockaway my mother split her time between counseling alcohol- and drug-addicted teens at a clinic and tracking down families who had abandoned their terminally ill children at a local hospital (unfortunately, this is something of a known phenomenon). One of the teens she counseled was a poor Irish addict named Teresa, whom my mother grew particularly close with. After a year of consistently making her regularly scheduled appointments, one day Teresa was late. Finally my mom went out into the neighborhood looking for her. She found her, not far from the clinic, dead in the street from an overdose. Just a short time later, after my mom had successfully counseled a woman who had stopped visiting her ill child to return to the hospital, the child died an hour before the mother arrived. “It was like some terrible, terrible movie,” she remembers.

After six years, she was coming home from her job as dejected and depressed as my father did from his. And when she became pregnant with me, she knew that, once I was born, she would have to take a break from her job.

My mom stayed home with me until my first birthday. My parents were barely able to pay their bills on my dad's NYPD salary alone, and she had reached a point where she was looking under the couch cushions for change to buy me milk every week. So when a friend mentioned that her boss was looking for someone to clean his apartment, Mom decided to take the job. “No drug overdoses, no dying children, and—sad as it was—better pay.”

The boss's apartment was in a neighborhood about fifteen miles from where we then lived in Rosedale, Queens, less than ten from where my mom had grown up in Brooklyn, less than five from where she'd once worked, in the city, and yet she had never even heard of this part of town before. “A lot of people haven't heard of it. Don't worry, it's
technically
part of Manhattan,” her friend reassured her.

After rattling and scraping her way down a dingy side street somewhere in Long Island City, Queens, my mother arrived at the base of an ominous, rusted-metal drawbridge that looked like it belonged in some Pennsylvania steel-mill town, not New York City. At the sight of it she threw the car into park, and, for what felt like the tenth time since she'd left our house twenty minutes earlier, she once again combed over the directions. And, once again, she was shocked to find that she was still on course.

Go over weird little bridge.

The bridge crossed a tiny expanse of water nowhere near wide enough to be the East River, and it delivered her not onto a Manhattan street, but directly into a six-story, monolithic parking garage with the word
MOTORGATE
in Helvetica painted vertically down a concrete beam.

Mom spiraled her way up the garage ramp until she finally found an empty slot.
Take elevator to street. Take red bus. Get off at 505 Main St.
The “red bus” part grabbed her attention—all other city buses at the time were blue or green. And as soon as the elevator doors opened at street level, idling right outside was a red bus with the words
RED BUS
printed along its side.

After watching everyone in front of her board the red bus without paying, when it was her turn to step inside, Mom started to go for her change purse anyway. “It's okay, miss,” the driver said, “it really is free.” Now she was warier than ever—the only free bus rides in New York City she'd ever heard of were the ones that took you to the psych ward or prison.

From what she could see, Main Street was the only street on this peculiar little island, and it had just one lane going in each direction, with red buses going to and fro and hardly any other cars on the road. Lining both sides of the street were hulking buildings with all the charm of those prefab concrete jobs favored in Eastern Bloc countries, and on their ground levels, a handful of small dim shops with generic, uniform signage:
DRY CLEANER
,
DELI
,
RESTAURANT
.
Manhattan, my ass,
my mother thought
. This is the strangest and ugliest place I have ever seen.

Once again she checked her directions—this time to be sure she hadn't missed the part about a portal transporting her to some dystopian future.

It wasn't until she was standing right in front of 505 Main Street that Mom was finally sure she wasn't in the year 2075, or 1960s Czechoslovakia, and that her friend's description of her boss as a “well-off businessman” made sense. With the prerequisite backward head tilt she surveyed this brand-new twenty-story beast of a building, then stutter-stepped a few times in front of the revolving doors, like a kid getting ready to jump into a game of double Dutch, before figuring out how and when to hop in. With a rush of air and a glint of light, she was suddenly inside a cavernous lobby that smelled appropriately of floor polish and air freshener but with a puzzling hint of chlorine. To her right, sitting at a chest-high, half-moon reception desk was a doorman in full uniform and cap. To her left was a long row of glass windows behind which was the source of the mysterious chlorinated air: an Olympic-size indoor pool.
Wow,
she couldn't help thinking,
so this is how people with money live.

Though my mother didn't know it at the time—and it's probably a good thing that she didn't—only ten years earlier this neighborhood was still officially named Welfare Island. For over a hundred years it was best known for having almshouses for the city's poor, a smallpox hospital, a place called the New York City Lunatic Asylum, and a penitentiary where Billie Holiday and Mae West (my grandmother's hero) once served time. In 1971, after nearly all these institutions had shuttered their doors and the island was largely abandoned, a complete redevelopment effort was set into motion. The construction of several residential complexes began, including a few luxury high-rises—505 Main Street was among the very first—and Welfare Island was renamed Roosevelt Island (with the wonderfully self-effacing tagline, “Manhattan's
other
island”).

And it is in this very place that my mother's journey from being a cleaning lady to the type of person who “summered in the Hamptons” began.

In the end, my mother cleaned the businessman's apartment for a full year before they actually met, but she says she knew the very minute she first walked into his place that she would like him. For a person whose prized possession at the age of twelve was an antique vase, it might come as no surprise that it wasn't the
size
of his place that most impressed her (though her friend forgot to tell her it was a duplex) or even the panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline (though she spent nearly a half hour at the end of the job staring out the window), but his antique furniture and artwork.

She had presumed that a single, well-off man's apartment would be some terrible display of wealth and nothing more—a smattering of the tacky 1980s furniture she despised, purchased by an assistant or some hip minimalist decorator, maybe. Instead, she opened the door, and her feet stayed glued to the floor; it was as if she was right back at Uncle Jelly's home (only better, and minus the antique mahogany birdcage collection, making it slightly more possible that this businessman was not gay).

The floors were covered in antique Persian rugs, and the walls were lined with gold-framed paintings and brass candle sconces. The rustic round farmhouse table in the dining room was fully set with white linen napkins, real silverware, and fine porcelain plates, and behind it was a matching pine hutch that held floral-painted soup tureens, pitchers, and bowls. In the living room were tufted wingback chairs with claw feet, a brass-tacked olive-green leather couch with a worn steamer trunk for a coffee table, and a highly polished, ornate wooden inlaid desk. All the pieces were from completely different eras, but they worked together—she could tell right away how carefully chosen, looked after, and loved they were. She was blown away.

One day my mom arrived to her cleaning job to find a note on the kitchen counter next to a heap of dirty pots and pans in the sink:

So sorry for the extra dishes. I have been taking an Indian cooking class and experimenting like mad! —Mark

My god,
she thought,
an Indian cooking class?
Who
is
this guy?
He was a complete departure from any man she'd ever known.