With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (2 page)

The one thing missing from my perfect childhood was a dog. It took a while for me to discover why I couldn’t convince my parents to get me one. It turns out that my sister, Ellen, who is ten years older than I am, did have a dog when she was little. She was named Dolly the Collie. Ellen also had another pet, Daisy the Duck. Dolly the Collie and Daisy the Duck would go around the neighborhood together, and sometimes Daisy would ride on Dolly’s back. When Ellen was out playing with the neighborhood kids, Dolly would go looking for her and herd the children into a pack as if they were sheep. Then Daisy would waddle in and join them.

Unfortunately, one day some of the children resisted Dolly’s herding and she nipped them, the way collies herd sheep. This was not good. Then at some point a raccoon ate Daisy the Duck. And soon afterward Dolly got sick and had to be put down. So none of it ended well, and my father refused to get another dog. It was, to quote my father, “a debacle.” In response, he has adopted the position that he’s not supportive of living things, from plants to puppies, in a house. (He’s careful not to include children in that group.) I wasn’t around for Daisy and Dolly, but their story epitomizes the funny and highly unique aspects of my family—when things were going well. It also fairly explains the edict against dogs.

E
llen was ten years old when I was born. The family had been in the suburbs since she was two. I came as a surprise. In that era women had their babies young, and there weren’t a lot of women who got pregnant at forty. My mother was excited and a bit embarrassed. I think it probably also came as a shock to Ellen. It had taken my parents five years to have her, and when my mother didn’t get pregnant in the years that followed, they’d just assumed that more children were not in the cards, although it was never open for discussion. They just didn’t talk about such matters. But when my mother knew I was on the way, the conversation turned to the choice of my name.

Tradition dictated that I had to be named after a family member, and my parents settled on Julia, after my aunt and my maternal great-grandmother. For some reason, my sister objected. My father tells me that Ellen was already upset that she would have to share my mother with a baby, after ten years of having her all to herself. So in an attempt to make Ellen feel better about her new sister, they let her pick my name.

The story goes that Ellen chose Babe, after Babe Didrikson, a famous Olympic athlete and golfer. (She was also a lesbian—was that prophetic?) Ellen had been reading about her and liked the name. Babe Quinn? That didn’t go over too well with my mother, who suggested that she try again. So Ellen decided to name me after Christine, a girl who lived across the street, and whom my mother wasn’t that fond of. And since my mother was “sick of Quinn, Quinn, Quinn,” as my father says, I was given my mother’s maiden name, Callaghan, as my middle name. Christine Callaghan Quinn. My sister chose the first name, my mother the second, and the third was my father’s. This triumvirate was the central core of my childhood. Even though Ellen was a lot older, she was my friend and protector.

My father worked as an engineer at Sperry Gyroscope, which was only twenty minutes by car from Libby Drive. My father was a veteran of World War II. He served in the navy in the Pacific. After the war, like millions of other veterans, he used his GI Bill benefits to get an education. He went to college and graduate school. He became an electrical engineer and spent the next thirty-two years at Sperry (which became Sperry Rand and, later, Unisys Corporation). In that day, each specialty had its own union, and my father was shop steward for the electrical engineers.

My dad’s union responsibilities meant the world to him, and three times in his life he had to go out on strike. I think one reason he cared so much about his union was that his father, who had been a streetcar operator on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, was a proud member of the TWU (Transit Workers Union). Years later I learned that before the streetcar operators had a union, they had to get to the garage at least an hour before the cars were due to go out. You wouldn’t be guaranteed a streetcar to drive until you got there, and if all the cars were taken, you didn’t work that day. When the union came in, it changed all that. (You’ll get to know my father, Lawrence Quinn, as you read this book, but just for starters, he is a smart man who has dedicated his life in different ways to the service of others. He may not show much emotion in a traditional way, but he demonstrates it by showing up every time he’s needed for support and strength.)

Although Ellen named me, we couldn’t have been more different. She was skinny and had strawberry blond hair and a classic Irish complexion. My mother always said that when I was born I looked like a Butterball (as in, one of those round frozen turkeys), and Ellen looked like a chicken. I had tons of that Irish black hair and was chubby. Ellen remembers that when our mother brought me home from the hospital, I was so alert that she half expected me to stick out my pudgy little hand, shake hers, and introduce myself.

Our physical differences didn’t go unnoticed, and as I grew up, my father never hesitated to joke about how there are two types of Irish bodies. He would say that my sister, Ellen, looked like the famine had never ended. And that I would have married well in Ireland because I’d have been helpful on the farm. He’d say, “You’re big-boned. You would have been good back in Ireland in the fields flipping sheep.”

Mommy made no secret of the fact that she hated her upper body and was always on a diet. She thought she was fat, but she didn’t have the faintest idea how to lose weight. Here’s an example of her idea of a diet: we’d go to Burger King, and she’d get a Whopper and have just half the bun. One time when I was in elementary school, she put me on a doctor-supervised diet. I’d go once a week to get weighed. That made sense. And then if I lost weight, I’d be rewarded. That sounds good, in theory, but my reward was an ice-cream cone that I could eat on the way home. See what I mean?

T
hings were a bit disorganized in the house. It just wasn’t my mother’s focus. Keeping things in order wasn’t a priority for her. For example, if you were looking for scissors and tape, you’d never find them in the same drawer—you were lucky if you found them at all. Dinner at the Quinn house was almost always determined by the route home from the last lesson of the day. If it was ballet in Port Washington, for example, we passed Burger King or Roy Rogers on the way home, so it would be Burger King or Roy Rogers for dinner. I guess it’s no surprise that my kitchen skills are less than stellar, although I recently taught myself to bake. I like baking because you follow the recipe, you do what you’re told, and it largely works out.

My mother, who as I’ve said hated to drive, spent much of her day behind the wheel of our car taking us for lessons. Glen Cove and the neighboring towns at the time offered a lot of chances for lessons. When I was just a month old, my mother started schlepping me with her in the car. She laid me in a laundry basket in the backseat and tied the basket’s handles to each of the doors. “You went everywhere with us,” Ellen told me. “One time I turned around, and you were standing up in the basket.” The first time I ever stood up was in that basket in the backseat of the car. For the first few years of my life, I was just along for the ride, picking Ellen up and dropping her off. And then when I was three or four, it started for me, too.

Long before the concept of overscheduled children existed, my mother had us rocketing around. We took every lesson she could find: horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, diving lessons, French lessons, ballet lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Then there were the painting classes, pottery-making classes, and an array of nature courses in the summertime at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. (That’s what sparked my sister’s interest in geology.) Sometimes we’d have several in one day.

My mother would pick me up at school, and then in the car I’d change out of my Catholic school uniform and into my horseback riding clothes. Then after that lesson, off came the blue jeans and on went the ballet leotard—all in the back-seat of the car. (It’s a skill that has come in handy in my life as Speaker of the City Council—sometimes I have to go to five different events in a day. While going from a parade of some kind to a public hearing and then to a political dinner, I often have to change in the back of the car. The only difference is that now I also have to put on makeup while the driver is navigating New York City streets and traffic. One lesson I quickly learned is never try to put on eyeliner while the car is moving. I do it anyway.)

Whether I liked the lessons or not, I had to go to them. I loved the nature classes, and I liked painting. My father’s apartment is still full of paintings that I made when I was in elementary school.

What I liked best was going to the stable. I started riding when I was four and rode until I went to college. When I was growing up on Long Island, horseback riding was available to just about everybody. Stables were all over the place, and the lessons were not very expensive. At first we rented a school horse, and then when I was in junior high school, they bought me a horse of my own. My first horse was named Classy. I loved her. And then I got Arthur, my second horse. I would take lessons year-round and then go to local horse shows, where I got to compete against other riders.

In summers, when I was old enough, I spent the whole day at the stable. It was like going to camp. Whether I rented a horse or had my own, I had to be at the stable almost every day to ride it and later take care of it, so I learned what it meant to be responsible for another living creature. I also learned about doing physical work in all kinds of weather, because no matter the weather, you still had to take care of your horse. And I really liked the other kids who hung around at the stable. It was great being around a big gang of people who were all working on the same thing.

Ellen had her own horse when she was little, too. My parents, in a typically well-meaning but ill-informed fashion, had bought her a failed racehorse. The horse was so small my parents called her Little One. Actually, if you shaved her hooves, she was just a big pony. Racehorses are trained to run, not to carry little girls, so the first thing Ellen’s horse did was buck her off and break her nose. Ellen had that small horse—or pony—for quite a while.

You might think my father was making an executive salary to be able to afford all these lessons and extras for his daughters. That wasn’t the case. My mother’s family subsidized much of it. My mother’s sister, Julia, lived with her parents (until she moved into our house, along with my grandmother, when I was in fourth grade). She was a bookkeeper at a department store, and since she lived at home she didn’t have to pay rent, buy food, or pay a lot of bills, so she used her money to splurge on Ellen and me.

Ellen and I had more lessons than the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, but as I was growing up, my mother began to apologize because I didn’t get as many lessons as Ellen did. She worried that I was not well-enough prepared for life because of that. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I remember thinking, “More lessons? There aren’t enough hours in the day!” That was before I knew she was ill.

I always wondered what my mother’s obsession with lessons was all about. She would pick me up and drive me around from place to place even when she was clearly not feeling well or was very tired. When I was six, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ellen just recently told me that after the diagnosis, our mother’s primary goal was to see me through grammar school. I wonder if she ran herself ragged because she knew she didn’t have much time. Perhaps that was part of it. But it’s hard to know because she had done the same thing with Ellen. My mother was determined that her daughters would succeed at whatever we decided to do.

Her mission in life was to make her daughters well-rounded, independent women: women who would have many skills and lots of experiences. This made it possible for us to have conversations with all kinds of people about all kinds of things. I’m grateful for that gift to this day.

She had been a career woman before Ellen was born, working for Catholic Charities as a social worker, a job she loved. She majored in biology in college at Mount St. Vincent’s, and her plan was to become a doctor. But that wasn’t possible. The demand for places in medical schools from veterans returning from the war made it improbable that a woman like my mother would be admitted. This was a time when working women of all sorts stayed home, and many of them moved to new houses in the suburbs. Despite this disappointment, my mother respected doctors and held them in high regard, making sure we always had the best medical care. To this end, she developed an interview, or grilling, technique that allowed her to find out everything about a doctor—from their college GPA through the ins and outs of their specialty training. It served her well.

Mommy left work in 1956, when Ellen was born. My father’s job was to provide for the family, and he took great pride in that role. My mother’s job was to be a mother and take care of the house. But she didn’t give up on trying to have an impact on the world around her, even if it was limited to helping people in the neighborhood. She believed strongly in the importance of helping people—or, if you put it in a religious framework, which I think she did, corporal works of mercy or living the beatitudes.

Whenever there was an injustice in the neighborhood, Mommy took care of it. Ellen remembers, “She had this ridiculous trench coat with excessive jewelry on it, and whenever anything required her attention in the neighborhood, she would grab her trench coat, head out the door, and whatever the problem was, she’d get it resolved.” For example, we had Italian neighbors who didn’t speak English; she would go with them to the school over and over, to help their kids get the services they needed.

Although she really wanted to, going back to work was not in the stars for my mother. It frustrated her terribly. In the years before she died, she was trying to teach herself typing so she’d have a better skill set when she started looking for a job. She had a typewriter on her desk and next to it was a self-instruction book called
How to Type.
She was frustrated and angry that she didn’t get to do the things she wanted to do. Angry that she was sick. Angry that she was scarred. Angry that her life didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped. Just thinking about all her sorrows makes me sad for her.