The Clancys of Queens

by Tara Clancy

  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.

  As Mom was cleaning Mark’s apartment, I was making a mess of ours. One day I toddled up to the end table that held my mother’s treasured vase and took a swat at it. From as early as I can remember straight up to today, my father has told and retold the story of what came next between his baby girl and his wife’s beloved antique vase with the same long-drawn-out sense of drama he otherwise reserves for retellings of horse races, ball games, and bar fights. And like any storytelling dad worth his salt, the tale always starts the same way: “I ever tell you ’bout the time…?”

  “Yup, you have. But tell it again, Da!” He shakes his head no, feigning that he isn’t going to go on, and I urge, “C’mon! What’s the story?”

  “What? What!? You damn near got us killed, is what!! Musta turned away no more than a second, and by the time I turn back, there you are, all shit-eating grin, just about to take a swing. Your mother’s most prized possession! And I think, oh, boy, this is it—Mel’s gonna kill us both! Now, as luck would have it, you couldn’t reach it, short little shit that you were, but you musta clipped the table edge, and that thing just took off, straight up into the air! Higher and higher it went, till it just stopped, as if the little bastard was giving me a wink before, of course, down it came! Now, I’m on the couch, right? And I figure I got one shot here, so I make like I’m stealing second base, stretching my leg out and under it, and—I shit you not—that vase hit my thigh, lengthwise, and started to roll, straight down, over my knee, down my shin, all the way to my toes and right onto the floor, without as much as a chip. Scooter, it was a miracle if I ever saw one!”

  As my parents tell it, the vase incident was a poor primer for the havoc-wreaking tear I would go on in the final months of their relationship. There was the time, just after my second birthday, when I crept up to the cooler my dad kept next to his recliner on game days, stole one of his Budweiser nips, and ran off to hide. Some thirty minutes of fruitless searching had passed before my poor mother collapsed in the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet, sobbing into her hands as she contemplated calling the cops about her missing daughter. Only then did she hear the giggling and found me, a few feet away, hiding in the shower stall with a bit of a buzz on, holding a half-drunk Bud.

  Next up was the time my father decided to relax by sprawling out on the hardwood floor of our living room with a pillow under his head, and I ran up behind him and purposefully snatched it away: whack! “Man, much as that hurt, I popped right up, ’cause I wanted to kill ya, but, soon as I turned to look, you were already halfway up the stairs. I yelled bloody blue murder at you, but when I was done, I thought, little shit is fast, though!” Thereafter, whether calling me home for dinner from the lot in Broad Channel or toasting me at my wedding, my father never referred to me as “Tara” again. “Yup, Scooter, that’s how you got your nickname.”

  And my pièce de résistance, the third installment in this trilogy of two-year-old terror: the infamous shower debacle of 1982. Whenever my mother needed a shower but was taking care of me on her own, her routine was to plunk me into a playpen she wedged in the doorway of our bathroom. Then she’d hop into the tub and spend a minute trying to find that perfect point where the curtain was closed enough to keep the water from getting out but open enough that she could still see me. One particular day it looked something like this: she gave herself a quick rinse, then checked that I was there. She put shampoo in her hair, then checked that I was there. She rinsed out the shampoo, baby’s still there. She put conditioner in her hair, baby’s there. She rinsed it out, no baby. She ripped open the curtain. No baby! She leaped out of the shower. NO BABY!

  In a panic, she snatched a towel from the rack and ran into the living room, where she still didn’t see me, but instead saw that way down at the other end of our house a small stool had been pulled up near the back door, which was swinging open in the breeze. With the shower still running and her soaking wet, wearing nothing but a towel, she darted out that door and into our backyard, only to find that the fence gate was also wide open. Now frenzied, Mom ran out into the street, where finally she spotted me, halfway down the block, running full steam toward the intersection.

  Living up to my nickname, I was pretty fast even at two, and, given my good head start, my mother struggled to catch up, especially since she couldn’t get to full speed while still using one hand to hold up her towel. So, in what may be the world’s only example of maternal-instinct-driven streaking, she dropped the towel and sprinted, buck naked, in full view of our Queens street.

  Mom caught me just before I stepped off the curb. Not that there was any real danger anymore—by then the street was a parking lot of stopped cars, guys honking, whistling, and cheering like Christmas had come early. She did the only thing she could think of at the time, which was to use my body to hide hers, like a toddler turned fig leaf. And then she walked backward, carrying me in her arms, until we made it to the discarded towel.

  —

  My parents’
nine-year marriage would convert, in “Catholic years,” to all of about three minutes. Plus, my father being one of seven children, and my mother being one of six, the fact that I am an only child is nearly statistically impossible for Catholics. I cannot exist. I do, of course, but I am the first and only only child in the history of both sides of my family.

  Because I was just two years old when my parents split, I’ve never known them together. The consolation for that is, I’ve never known them together. Those old, dark days of two rough jobs, too little money, too much drink, and too little in common were only ever spoken about reluctantly, in dribs and drabs, after a lot of prodding, when I was well into adulthood. And the few photos that exist of my parents during their marriage capture only their rosiest moments.

  Those pictures weren’t dug up from the bottom of long-buried shoeboxes until I was a teenager. Seeing them for the first time gave me a smile, quickly cut short by a queasy “oh, shit” feeling I can only liken to seeing photos of happy people waving to the crowd as they pull away from port onboard a great ship you then realize is the Titanic.

  Eventually I was charmed by the photos, finding, however ironically, that seeing my parents in the early days of their marriage was a pretty satisfying source of closure—the official portrait of my dad, baby-faced with a side part, in his police blues; the three-part series of my mom in a tight pair of bellbottoms kneeling in a field plucking daisies; the shot of them holding hands and flashing smiles as they led the recessional out of St. Francis Xavier; him mid-dive in a pair of belted short-short swim trunks; all ninety pounds of her climbing a pool ladder; and the two of them together on a balcony overlooking the beach, him bare-chested beneath a fully unbuttoned short-sleeve guayabera shirt, her in a halter-top bikini, his right arm disappearing behind her back, a half-smoked cigarette and a half-full glass in his left hand raised in a toast to the camera.

  My mother met Mark for the very first time in a conference room at a Detroit hotel. She was a ball of nerves in a red skirt suit, arranging tent cards and glasses of water on the table for the clients and wondering when he would arrive.

  Having cleaned his apartment for over a year, she knew he was a tall man from the size of the suits in his closet, but still, she was in shock when he walked in—he had steel-blue eyes, reeked of intelligence, and stood six feet, ten inches tall.

  She had just taken the job as his administrative assistant. The position was very part-time—two or three days a month—and required traveling to big cities around the country. Mark was a business consultant with a growing clientele, and he needed some on-the-road assistance, particularly to set up his conference rooms and film his presentations. Mom had done very little traveling in her life and was thrilled at the chance to see new places.

  They had dinner together that first night, and, as my mom describes it, all “the bells and whistles went off” for her. By the second night of the trip it was clear that there was a mutual attraction.

  They dated very casually at first, but Mom still felt she shouldn’t be in his employ anymore. She took a waitressing job and saw Mark every other weekend, when I was with my father. But by the time I was four, some three years after her first day as his cleaning lady, there was no denying that they were in love.

  —

  When my mom decided to quit working for Mark after they started dating, it was for two clear reasons. Reason one was my grandfather’s legendary mantra, which she first heard at sixteen. It was her inaugural day working with him at the Yankee Stadium concession stand, and he had been showing her the ropes for so long, he was down to strings—this ursine man in an apron, trying his best to be dead serious yet unable to shake his trademark ear-to-ear grin and sweet, singsong delivery:

  “Oh! And angle the cup when you pour the beer so you don’t get too much foam—people want their money’s worth!

  “And don’t put too many peanuts in the bag that you can’t twist the top closed—they’ll lose half of ’em before they get back to their seats!

  “And for CRYIN’ OUT LOUD, remember, management counts the cups!! No freebies!” It was the fourth time he had brought up “the cups,” and for a second she lost focus, so he started chomping his pair of tongs open and closed in the air to get her attention. When she turned to face him, in a single, superfast swoop he plucked two hot dogs off the row of rolling rods with his right hand, landed them smack in the middle of their respective buns in his left, winked, and said, “All work is honorable, Carmella.”

  —

  Reason two was that, while the clanging of the tongs still rang true in her ears, on top of that—for her—working was more than an honor; it was a hard-won dream. She was the first woman in the history of her family to want a career, the second to finish high school, and the sole person—male or female—to earn a college degree. Waiting tables until the want ads proffered a better use of that degree was fine by her, especially since she had fought so hard to avoid the alternative—i.e., not working. Her mother didn’t understand why she wanted to go to college in the first place, then strongly encouraged her to drop out when she and my father got engaged in her junior year. After I was born, despite the fact that my parents were barely scraping by on my father’s salary alone, my dad didn’t want her to go back to work either. So, in the end, that Mark was in a position to pay her way was not nearly as impressive to my mom as the fact that he knew her well enough never to offer.

  Like my mother, Mark was divorced, and their decision not to marry or live together full-time was born of two consequent, shared philosophies: “been there/done that/didn’t work” and “see each other on the weekends, read books in between.”

  More than anything else, though, when it came to raising me, my mom felt that in order to fully do it her way, it had to be fully on her dime. So, that’s why she went on to live a dual life: weekdays in Queens, weekends at Mark’s duplex on Roosevelt Island or his home in the Hamptons, back and forth week after week, month after month. And every other weekend I was right there with her—the two of us like superwomen, able to jump social strata in a single bound!

  Like all Hamptons-goers, the very first thing I did when I got to Mark’s country estate was peruse the grounds. Unlike any other Hamptons-goer in the history of Hamptons-going, I did not do so by strolling about draped in white linen and dangling a goblet of Chablis, but by way of a blue plastic Power Wheels 4x4 pickup with a windshield decal that read HIGH RIDER.

  As a young tomboy with a mussed pageboy haircut, legs covered in black-and-blues, and a perpetual Dalí dirt mustache, that “truck” was to me what the antique porcelain vase was to my mother. Mark had bought it for me at the Bridgehampton Caldor (think Target of the 1980s) after I hopped over the door of the display model straight into the driver’s seat, one-handed the steering wheel, and stuck my bent elbow out the window like a kindergarten cowboy. He and my mother laughed all the way to the cash register. Then they let me drive out of the store. Even with the pedal to the metal I trailed several feet behind as they walked through the parking lot, but I was in heaven anyway, inching past rows of vintage convertible Benzes and brand new Saab 900s with my head held high, maxing it out at 3 mph.

  Since I had first received my Power Wheels pickup, Mark always had it charged up and ready for me to ride whenever I arrived. He parked it right next to the front door of the Main House—forty bucks’ worth of glittery, ’80s blue plastic with flame decals, faux monster-truck tires, a “chrome” front, and a row of frog lights lining the roll bar (it would be ten years before I learned they were called fog lights—they looked like frogs’ eyes!), standing sentinel over a million-dollar, five-bedroom, immaculately restored early 1900s farmhouse that was once on the cover of House Beautiful magazine.

  —

  I was seven the day I ran out of the limo into my mother’s outstretched arms as she screamed “Chickenellahh!!” The second I saw my truck, I wriggled out of my mom’s bear hug and took off running. It could take me upward of two hours to do my sta
ndard full sweep of the property, both because I made countless stops, and because HIGH RIDER and I moved at a slower pace than most people walked. So for the trek Mom always packed me a picnic lunch: a red-checkered blanket, a thermos of orange juice, and a sandwich wrapped in a paisley cloth napkin (at his country home, Mark used only this type of napkin, otherwise known to me as a bandana, and for years I would crack myself up thinking that my little turkey and cheese belonged on Axl Rose’s head). I checked the “trunk” to be sure my lunch was there, and right before I hit the gas, I put on my full-face, adult-size motorcycle helmet.

  On another trip to Caldor I had snatched said helmet off a shelf and gone running toward a mirror to see myself with it on. It was so big and heavy that as soon as I pulled it over my tiny head, I went face-first into the glass. After that initial hit, I bounced backward, and within seconds my scrawny body was trailing my gigantic helmeted noggin, like some possessed real-life marionette, careening headlong into racks of cheap ladies’ blouses and chintzy sweaters. Once again, Mark laughed his way to the cash register and bought it for me.