The Clancys of Queens (4 page)

*
“Quarter waters” are what city kids called a sugary, Kool-Aid–like drink sold in tiny plastic barrels with a foil top. They could be found on the very bottom shelf, or just the floor, of any deli refrigerator in Queens and were the cheapest drink option. I don't think they're around anymore—I guess they just didn't sell once the price went up. “Fifty-cent waters” doesn't have the same ring.

My mother was always out of place, even when she wasn't. As a kid she preferred the Brooklyn Botanic Garden or the library to the ball games and beauty parlors where other girls with names like Carmella Riccobono hung out. And when all her friends were squirreling away their allowances and birthday money for records and roller skates, she was saving hers for a porcelain vase she had spotted at her uncle Jerry's antiques shop in upstate New York.

Going from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Uncle Jerry's home in Pleasant Valley every summer was the only family vacation my mother and her five siblings had ever had, and my grandmother squeezed as much mileage from it as she could:
Madonna! If you don't stop with the noise, nobody is going to Jerry's! You had better finish that good food I made you, or nobody is going to Jerry's! You don't want to listen? Nobody is going to Jerry's!

My grandmother's incessant threats, though brilliant at invoking both fear and guilt, were nonetheless empty—they
always
made it to “Uncle Jelly's.” My mom and her siblings gave him this nickname not because they couldn't pronounce
Jerry,
but because it suited him. His un-Americanized name was Giulio, which, like Jelly, was a lot more appropriate for a man who was forever in an ascot and captain's hat, collected nineteenth-century birdcages, and whose life partner, John, was an interior decorator.

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 had 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.”