The Clancys of Queens (11 page)

Mark's party, Mark's way, is a French-country-picnic-themed affair, complete with a spare-tire-size wheel of Gruyère cheese, platter after platter of cod
en papillote
and chicken paillard, a clam bar, and endless cases of Beaujolais. There are a half dozen white-tablecloth-covered round tables with matching white wooden chairs, each table topped with candles encased in vintage glass hurricane lamps and centerpiece vases of Mom's wildflower arrangements. And the whole spread is set out under the enormous canopy of the sole, stunning, ancient elm tree that sits in the middle of the vast front lawn, its leaves fluttering about with each gust of salty beach air. It's nothing short of magical, a Great Gatsby–caliber bash, but even better because all the blue-blooded schmucks have been replaced by Brooklyn Italians.

I'm midway through my umpteenth race-car crawl under the now fully set banquet tables, when my ears perk up. The pristine country quiet is breached by the slow-building grumblings of arriving Riccobonos—a gradual swell that starts with the closing of car doors and the trampling of feet and then suddenly erupts when the first head pokes past the driveway gate. “HELLOOO! Yoo-hoo! We made it!” “WHOA! Will ya getta load of this!! Looks even better than last year!” “Eh,
Mastagotz
! Where are ya? We're here!!” I shimmy out from under the table and book it in their direction.

My aunts and uncles plant kisses on my forehead as they pass, and I gather up my cousins: “Come on, hurry up! Go get your suits on so we can go in the pool before they make us stop to eat!” Mom drops her basket of just-cut flowers and comes running over to give and get hugs. “Hiya, Mel! The place looks beautiful, as always.” Then Mark saunters over from the croquet court, mallet in hand: “All right, can we quit it already? Hugging each other like you've just returned from years in Siberia? The first match of the day starts now—all interested parties, dump the bags, grab cocktails, and meet me courtside!”

Uncle Vinny pipes up: “You're going down,
Mastagotz
! If not now, then later—this year we're making you play Wiffle ball!”

“Ah, yes, Wiffle ball—esteemed sport of morons everywhere. Not a chance.”

“Every year, same shit with you. I bet you don't like it 'cause you suck at it.”

“Highly likely. And I'm starting to think I ‘suck' at croquet, too, seeing as how your brother Sal has been kicking my ass these last few years!”

“As a kid he was always the best stickball player on the block, but croquet—who knew!?”

They were about to head off for the court, when Mom yelled out, “Eh! Vin! Mommy and Daddy aren't here yet!?”

There was a good ten minutes' worth of panic before we heard the limo pull up. Grandma and Grandpa had spent the last half hour stuck behind future secretary of state, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four-star U.S. army general Colin Powell's security brigade, bringing him to his country house, right across the street from Mark's.

Even before the toe of her shoe poked out from the limo door, Grandma's curse words hit the air and traveled mach-speed into each and every one of our ears, “
Fahngool! Che cazzo! Minchia!
Traffic!” and no matter where we were—in the pool, by the croquet court, piling up a plate of chicken paillard—everybody stopped dead, then rushed toward her and got into formation. We lined up one by one, some forty of us—dripping wet, mallet in hand, shoving that last bite of Gruyère into our mouths—in this long, snaking line on Mark's manicured front lawn, and approached to kiss her. (She never, ever kissed you back; she just offered up a cheek.) Meanwhile Grandpa, wearing his standard perma-grin, stood at her side, giving us loving pats on the head, pokes in the belly, and bear hugs, in between still trying to calm her down, “Okay, Rose. It's over now. We are here. Let's have a nice time!” Which, of course, didn't work.

“
Okay Rose?! Okay Rose?!
I'll give you
‘Okay Rose!'
Fahngool!”

After countless games of croquet, one human pyramid made up of all seventeen of my cousins in the lagoon pool (oldest on the bottom, next row on their shoulders, and so on and so on), and one Wiffle-ball tournament (Mark came in for one at-bat, running the bases despite being struck out by Uncle Vinny, who laughed so hard, he actually fell to the grass and rolled around), we had dinner. And then the party moved onto the screened porch for dessert.

Mark had special-ordered these chocolate truffle cakes, so rich they were sliced superthin, which my cousin Danny interpreted as the work of a skimpy caterer, so, after everyone else had had a piece, he kept going back for more. Only after he had been at it a good while did someone finally notice, “Eh!
Gavone!
Don't you think that's enough?!” Then they counted—he had eaten thirteen slices. He was twelve.

We saved one of the most time-honored Riccobono traditions for last: arm-wrestling. The first few matches were goofs—Uncle Sal (down to his tight white crewneck undershirt, a ringer for the Fonz) versus Great-uncle Jelly (as gay as ever in his captain's hat, button-down shirt open to the sternum, and ascot). Then Uncle Sal versus Grandma, who instantly snatched the nearby hands of two of my little cousins, stacked them behind her own, and screamed, “Push! Push, you little
sfacimms
! Grandma don't lose—even if she has to cheat!” After that the real battles began, twenty-minute all-out dogfights, everybody hooting and pounding the tables, as one by one, Uncle Sal took down Grandpa, then my oldest cousins, Anthony and Mike. And at that we called it a night; the sweat-soaked arm wrestlers, the hoarse-throated onlookers, and all their sleepwalking children headed back out to the driveway and pulled away as Mom and I stood there waving good-bye.

When we walked back, we found Mark still sitting on the porch, looking out at the night sky, swirling the cognac in his snifter, and knocking his knees as always. Mom came up behind him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and kissed his left cheek, and I scooted around to give him a rare peck on the right. And then he took her hand, and mine, and we stayed that way, staring up at the moon—neither the three of us, nor the thirty of the departing Riccobonos, having the slightest inkling that this year's Bridgehampton party would be the last.

I'm staring up into the sky again, but this time it's midmorning, in Brooklyn. I'm ten years old, and I'm standing side by side with my grandpa on the shoulder of the Belt Parkway. I have no idea why we're here or what we're looking for, but I'm copying him anyway, feet glued to the grass, head tilted straight back, hawk-eyeing the
nothing
above a giant chain-link fence that surrounds a park that abuts the parkway shoulder. We wait. And we wait. And wait. Between the roar of the cars whizzing by our backs and the zero warning he gave two minutes earlier before pulling off the highway, throwing the car into park, hopping out, trotting around to my side, swinging open the door, and saying nothing beyond, “Come on, Shrimpy!” I am as scared as I am confused. But I went. So here I am.

Earlier this morning, when Mom told me I'd be going with Grandpa to his office today—I had the day off from school, and she had to work—I was thrilled. Having Grandpa stay at our house during the week these last six months has brought two distinct perks: the first is that, at night, when Mom hollers into our room, “Eh, Da! I know the game isn't over, but you gotta shut it off! It's late! Tara has to go to sleep now!” he doesn't. He tiptoes over to the TV, raises his hand up to the knob, then turns back to me, winks, and mutes the volume instead. And we stay up, my legs dangling off the top bunk right above him, the both of us miming victory screams and doing exaggerated soundless boos at the Mets for a good hour past bedtime.

And the second perk is getting to go with Grandpa to his job at the most wonderful Metropolitan Life Insurance Company branch of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I've gone twice before, and both times it went something like this:

We head off in the morning in “Chucky,” Grandpa's beaten-up-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life Buick LeSabre, which I've nicknamed based on the sound the engine makes when he starts it—
chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, Vroom!!
Traveling in Chucky was an experience in itself. The old girl was mostly a sun-worn maroon color, with two exceptions: the first being the half dozen rust-pancake splotches on the hood and trunk; the second being the one door panel Grandpa had replaced, which was gray. Inside were cloth seats that were torn at the seams and a felt ceiling that had started to droop, leaving these giant billowed sections of fabric that very literally sat on your head. The backseat was occupied entirely by a row of overflowing cardboard boxes (his “work papers”) topped with trash: empty fast-food containers, wrappers, napkins, etc. And Grandpa kept receipts and business cards, hundreds of them lumped together, as thick as a novel, attached with rubber bands to the driver's side visor—the whole mess dangling a hair above his eyes as he drove. Every inch of that car was cluttered, even the ashtray, where he kept a bottle of Old Spice on top of a mound of loose change. And, because he refused to drive any less than eight million miles an hour, as soon as we hit the highway, the two of us were instantly in the eye of this tornado of junk—getting thwacked in the head by the odd foam cup that took flight from the backseat, swatting away rogue receipts that had come loose from his visor, peeling off cellophane candy wrappers that suddenly pasted themselves to our cheeks. He grinned away all the while, seemingly oblivious to the whirlwind of crap obstructing his vision, crisscrossing lanes with one hand and trying to tune in the sportscast on 1010 WINS with the other. Until we arrived.

I spent the first several hours in the office in total bliss—i.e., eating M&M's while pounding out gibberish on a typewriter that had been set out on a special desk just for me. Then we took a trip to the Brownsville and East New York housing projects to visit Grandpa's clients, who gave me even more candy and let me pet their cats. Finally, we made an after-work stop at a Bay Ridge public park, where Grandpa and a half dozen other elderly Italian men met up regularly to kick dirt at one another and curse the heavens, a.k.a., play
bocce.
And at that, we called it a day—perfect.

But this one, trip number three, was different. It started the very same way as the first two, except at some point after we took off in Chucky from our house on 253rd Street but before we arrived at Grandpa's office, he pulled off the parkway and onto the shoulder.

After standing at the foot of that fence for what seemed like forever—side by side, staring up, glued still, looking more and more like the lone constituents of some wing-nut cult who believed their messiah was set to emerge from a cloud over the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn—finally I saw something. It was tiny and yellow and came hurtling toward us. It landed on the grass and bounced. And only then did I look down, my eyes scanning the grass in larger and larger concentric circles, growing wider with disbelief. There were tennis balls, everywhere. A minefield of tennis balls!

In a wink Grandpa dropped down onto his hands and knees, stretched out his shirt, and started scooping them up. I did the same and then followed him back to Chucky, parked behind us. He threw open the trunk, and inside there must have been a hundred used tennis balls! We dumped ours on top and got back into the car.

At this point, I was so excited because he was so excited, and he was so excited because he'd just let me in on this secret tennis ball free-for-all—we alone were reaping the rewards of some Parks Department architect's error, it seemed, a grave miscalculation of how high a given tennis ball hit at such-and-such miles an hour could go, with the wind gusts in a particular direction, and the phase of the moon on a chosen Wednesday in autumn in Brooklyn. And their underestimation was to our great benefit.

At seventy-five, my grandpa had been selling life insurance policies for over twenty years—a job that entailed being there when people assigned themselves a retail value while simultaneously imagining their own deaths. In other words, his job was not most people's idea of a good time, but the way he smiled all day long at work, and the way his clients smiled back at him, you'd have thought Bruno “Ricky” Riccobono made his living as a professional provider of free ice cream cones.

He was one of the top salesmen at MetLife for two reasons: 1) he was the first agent at his branch to see poorer people as potential customers, and, having gone door to door in the Brooklyn projects to build his business in the late 1970s, by 1990 he had a large and loyal pool of clients; 2) he wholeheartedly believed in the concept of life insurance: being ready for the worst but hoping for the best (which in this case is just the worst, plus money). He was the happiest guy I knew and nothing if not prepared. To this day I have no idea when or how Grandpa figured out that there were all these tennis balls on this particular shoulder of the Belt Parkway. And it's not that he, or I, or anyone we knew, played tennis. But had that ever changed, we'd have been ready.

Unfortunately, what ultimately claimed the life of Mark's all-out Bridgehampton summer parties was that he didn't share Grandpa's philosophy—it would be another decade before I knew it, but it would seem that Mark's version was more like “be ready for the best. The end.” What I'm saying is, while Mark's Lincoln Continental had a mighty big trunk, there was nary more than a single shirtful of found tennis balls thumping around inside at any one time. Mark had no “insurance policy,” no savings, and when you're not prepared and the worst comes, it's just that, the worst. There's no consolation prize.

Given how careful Grandpa was with his money, how much he constantly impressed that diligence upon us, and how much he loved Mark, it would have killed him to know that one day Mark would face hard times because no one had impressed those same lessons upon him. But, sadder still, a heart attack did the deed long before that day would come. Grandpa died in 1991, at seventy-six, about six months after our famed tennis-ball-harvesting on the Belt Parkway.

Mom and I weren't there, but he was at our house on 253rd Street that night with Grandma—they were headed to Atlantic City in Jersey for a weekend vacation and had decided to break up the driving from Connecticut with a stay in Queens.

The funeral was held two weeks after my eleventh birthday, and though I had known Mark for eight years by then, it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.

I can remember only one thing about my own mourning: a month after Grandpa died, Mom told me she thought it might be good for me to get a new single bed. I refused to let her take away
our
bunk for a full year.

Grandma was wrecked, of course, but after a while she decided to go through those hundreds of receipts from Grandpa's visor, and, having found a good dozen or so from Nathan's in Coney Island, her sadness turned to rage. “Three hot dogs!! THREE!!! With his cholesterol what it was! No wonder he croaked! Had I known, I'd have wrung his neck myself.
Fahngool!
”

Consequently, having a lot more free time and without Grandpa to keep her in check, Grandma became more and more obsessed with hitting the slots in Atlantic City. Mom and I started taking her once a month, and pretty soon she was dropping so much cash that our hotel room and all our meals were comped. She talked constantly about her beloved “comps,” the complimentary offerings casinos afforded the biggest losers, and at eleven I had no trouble subscribing to her logic. Spend half your life savings for a free trip to the shoddy Golden Nugget breakfast buffet and a Betamax VCR? Sounds fair to me.

The king of all the comps was what Grandma referred to exclusively as “the Basket.” It was your standard gift basket, a half dozen unrecognizably branded chocolate-covered treats, nut mixes, and maybe an apple or two, all propped up on fake shredded grass. And once Grandma hit “whale” status in money lost, it was supposed to be in our room whenever we arrived. But it never was. That room could have been on fire, and she wouldn't have noticed, but if “the Basket” wasn't there, she would flip her shit. “
Che cazzo!
Where's the Basket?! You call and tell them to bring it up now!!”

The very first time she asked me to make that call, I was embarrassed and looking for a way out, so I asked, “Grams, why don't you just do it?”

“
Minchia!
Why, she asks!? Why?! Because I don't talk nice, that's why! But you do! You call and you use the nice words, like
Mastagotz
taught you.” I knew exactly what she meant, but I hadn't known that she, or anyone in my family, had noticed that I sounded different when I spoke with Mark, that I used “nice words,” or that I dropped my accent as low as it could go. In fact, I don't think
I
was even aware that I did it, until right then.

If I was indeed a little supergirl, able to jump social strata in a single bound, this was the first time I had been asked to hop into the phone booth, swap outfits, and use my powers in my civilian life. But, of course, I did as Grandma asked: “Good afternoon, I'm calling from Room 203. I don't mean to be a bother, but it seems we're missing our complimentary gift basket. Would it be possible for someone to send it up?”
You bettah get right on it—or my grandma's gonna come down there and rip your fucking heart out!
“Thank you ever so much!”

That was that—I broke superhero protocol for twelve bucks' worth of half-decent snacks. And it felt great.

As it turned out, this year of rule-breaking and risk-taking—by the Parkway with Grandpa, at the casino with Grandma—was just the tip of the iceberg for me. The real risk-taking watershed was still to come, and when it did, I would no longer be a little kid. I would be a preteen Viking girl, forged in the asphalt “fields” of the Catholic Youth Organization sports league alongside a dozen other ponytailed badasses, then tested in the concrete recess battle yard of Middle School 172.