by Tara Clancy
They had met at my great-grandfather’s restaurant, where Uncle Jerry, along with all four of his brothers, worked as waiters. It was family-style Italian trattoria on the second floor of a factory building on West 37th Street in Manhattan’s garment district, with checkered tablecloths, finger-loop gallon jugs of wine served by the glass, and no menus—the brothers announced the day’s specials. “Today we have chicken or porgies. What’ll it be?” The joint was as simple as simple could be, but it was nonetheless called the El Dorado.
(I have always admired the overwhelming optimism of immigrants who name their humble restaurants after grand wonders, like the greasy Chinese takeout joint called The Great Wall of China, or the bare-fluorescent-tube-lit Indian place with tablecloth-less, church-basement-style card tables called Taj Mahal 2. And I feel a strange pride that my great-grandfather did the same thing, maybe even more so for his choosing the mythical South American city of gold over something actually Italian.)
After a few years together Uncle Jerry left the restaurant to work with John in the decorating business, and they bought a home upstate.
A sprawling country house on a lake with a screened-in flagstone porch, library, fully appointed Victorian-era dining room, and a half dozen bedrooms meticulously decorated with antique furniture, Oriental rugs, and lush silk curtains, Uncle Jerry’s home was my mother’s very own Versailles. Back in Brooklyn, Mom shared a twin bed with her youngest sister, Lucille, in their parents’ bedroom. And, though a three-bedroom apartment housing a family of eight was not exceptionally small by Brooklyn standards, Uncle Jerry’s space was a complete revelation for her.
While Mom’s brothers and sister did a perfunctory spin around the house before darting outside to play in the grass and trees, she would slowly work her way through each room, running her fingers across the mahogany dressers and night tables, ogling the candelabra and porcelain statues. Midafternoon, when Uncle Jerry would announce that he was heading over to his little antiques shop nearby, she was the only one interested in tagging along.
It was on one of these trips that she first spotted the vase. She was only eleven years old, helping her uncle tidy up, when it peeked out from behind her feather duster. She stopped, straining her neck to follow the winding pattern of birds and flowers around the back, afraid to actually touch the vase to turn it around. Eventually she stepped back to gain perspective, time flying by as she fantasized about where it might have come from, how many homes it had been in, and what the types of people who’d owned such a delicate and beautiful thing might have looked like.
The vase’s $75 price tag was one hell of a sum in 1963. And my grandmother just could not understand. “Minchia! What a little girl wants with such a thing, I’ll never know?!” But my mother was undeterred. And, after combining all the allowance money she had saved for years, and pleading on her birthday and Christmas that, instead of toys and dresses, her parents, grandparents, and multitudes of aunts and uncles consider contributing toward her vase fund, when she was twelve years old, it became hers. Since then, the vase has gone wherever my mother has. That is, for over fifty years she has been the type of person who owns such a delicate and beautiful thing; hers are the homes in which it has lived.
By Mom’s teenage years, as most of her friends hardened into rough-around-the-edges Brooklyn types, she bloomed into a flower child, at least in her head. God knows, she wasn’t allowed to act on that. My grandmother practiced a mighty brand of “smother love”—born only to Depression-era, street-fighting, crucifix-swinging Catholics, the defining characteristic of whom was a perpetual sense of impending doom that extended from this world to the next. So maybe my mom hummed “Age of Aquarius” to herself before going to bed, but that was it; no way was my grandmother letting her buy those “wackadoo” records. For my mother, even being allowed to join friends for a trip to Coney Island or the movies was a real rarity, and sleeping over at a friend’s house was completely forbidden. In fact, having friends at all was something my grandmother questioned, “What, you don’t have enough cousins!?”
My mother was desperate to go to college, not least because it meant getting out from under my grandmother’s constant eye. But Grandma hadn’t finished high school, and, though all of my mother’s five siblings had, none of them went to college. So, again, just like wanting the vase, or friends, my mother’s interest in continuing her education was something my grandmother just could not understand, “What for? You’re gonna get married, no!?” Still, Mom begged and begged, and when that didn’t work, she offered to split the tuition.
Starting in high school and throughout college my mother worked the concession stands at Yankee and Shea stadiums on the weekends with her dad. And at seventeen she also took on a weeknight job manually stamping routing numbers on checks in a production line of teenage girls in the basement of the Chase Bank offices at One Penn Plaza in Manhattan.
All in all, with the money from both jobs, Mom had enough to pull off half the tuition at St. Joseph’s College. That the school was Catholic and in Brooklyn were the only reasons my grandmother allowed her to “throw her money away,” adding, “Stunad!” (stupid idiot) and slowly shaking her head before giving her daughter a short, slight smile and agreeing to kick in the other half. There is still a whole lot of love in smother love.
Sitting on a canvas-wrapped stack of newly laundered tablecloths locked inside the unlit cargo compartment of a tinny box truck, my mother was pretty damn literally delivered to her fate.
She was eighteen, a freshman at St. Joseph’s and still living at home in Brooklyn, when she was invited to a party in Rockaway, Queens. Neither she nor my grandmother had a driver’s license, never mind a car, but my grandfather had the truck he drove for Linens of the Week. If it was a special occasion, and a weekend, he was more than happy to offer his kids a lift—throughout high school my mother and her girlfriends had ridden to all their school dances in the back of that truck, teetering atop bags of clean, folded napkins, aprons, and dishrags.
So, in the summer of 1970, having accepted a new college friend’s invitation to a party, and after what was likely my mom’s very last ride in the back of my grandfather’s linens truck, she slipped off her stack of tablecloths, hurried down 108th Street in Rockaway, and headed into McNulty’s Bar and Dance Club, where she’d meet a guy from the next town over, Broad Channel.
Carmella Ann Riccobono met Gilbert Francis Anthony Clancy Junior at the bar in McNulty’s, and they quickly took to the dance floor. As she describes him, “He had that ‘Irish look,’ which I liked—the opposite of me, I guess—sparkly blue eyes, light brown hair. He was very cute, really, but short. What is he, five-eight, your father? So what?! He could dance!”
“Yeah, I danced,” my dad has admitted. “You got girls if you danced, so I did. Was pretty good, too!”
My father was twenty to her eighteen. Her father was a truck driver; his had been a sign painter. She had five siblings; he had six: Gilbert, Arthur, Margaret, Dennis, Gilbert again (my dad, and, nope, we have no idea why either), Thomas, and Michael.
Like my mother, he wanted to go to college, but while my mom’s family was working class, my dad’s was poor. Neither of his parents had finished high school, nor did most of his siblings, and though he graduated with honors, he knew his family needed him to kick in as soon as possible. Five years before my parents met, when Dad was fifteen, his father had to stop working. My grandfather had been so severely burned by mustard gas back in the war that, all those years later, his left leg had to be amputated and replaced with a wooden prosthetic. The whole thing would have been incredibly tragic save for the fact that my father entertained the family by throwing darts at it. Even my grandfather got a kick out of it…until the one day my dad missed and got him in the real leg.
“Nobody had money back then” is Dad’s response to how having to go to work straight out of high school to support his family made him feel. “The guy who owned Johnson’s—you know, the bar—his kid always h
ad the stuff he wanted, Lionel trains ’n’ all that, and, yeah, I loved trains, so I was jealous of that, but other kids growing up in Broad Channel didn’t have three meals a day—the Spencers, phew! Nuns at St. Virgilius used to put the leftover rice pudding from lunch aside for them kids to bring home as dinner! You wanna talk about college?! Look, Scooter, we didn’t have it that bad, but we didn’t have money either.”
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 w
as 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.
