With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (3 page)

In the end, I believe my mother wanted Ellen and me to have all the things that had eluded her. She wanted us to be able to do whatever we wanted in life. And when we figured out what we wanted to do, she expected that we would do it exceedingly well. My mother would be pleased to know that both her daughters wound up doing things we love. And we’ve both worked to be the best we can at what we do.

C
HAPTER
2

Being Irish

G
rowing up in Glen Cove, I knew that my family was different from the other families in our neighborhood. First of all, my parents were much older than my friends’ parents. Today a woman having a child at age forty is not uncommon, but these were the postwar years, when women married young and had their babies right away. Second, my sister and I were ten years apart. Most of my friends had brothers and sisters around the same age, so they played together and went to the same school at the same time. I was eight when Ellen went away to college. It wasn’t bad, just different.

But most important, we were the only family on the block with live-in relatives. If this had been the Bronx or Queens or just about any neighborhood in Brooklyn where immigrants lived, it probably wouldn’t have been in the least bit odd. But in Glen Cove, as in many postwar suburbs, the nuclear family was the rule. Mother stayed home, Father worked, and there were usually no more than two children.

I
was in fourth grade when my mother’s father died and my grandmother and my mother’s sister, Julia, moved in with us. You would think that the addition of two people to our household would have changed our home life in significant ways, but it didn’t, in large part because both my grandmother and my aunt were quiet and kept to themselves, and also because they had always been involved in our family, even before they moved in. My grandmother tried desperately not to bother anyone, and to anybody who knew her, she came across as meek and mild. She must have been in her eighties when she moved into the guest room, and I remember my parents and everyone talking about how they expected her to wither away and die after my grandfather’s death because he was supposed to be the strong one whom she relied on. But despite her mild nature, she was capable of rising to the occasion when her life was on the line.

Her maiden name was Nellie Shine. Her married name was Nellie Callaghan, and it’s entirely unclear how old she was, but at some point in her teen years she came to America. She was poor. She and her family had lived in Newmarket, County Cork, in Ireland. She came to New York because her parents had died, and her eldest sister had taken in an orphan from the village, and there simply wasn’t enough money for all of them. Her sister told Nellie that she had to go to America to be with her brother and her cousin. So she got on the next available ship—which happened to be the
Titanic
.

Notwithstanding “women and children first,” more first-class men than third-class girls got off the
Titanic
alive. My grandmother was one of those girls. She was once quoted in a book about the Irish on the
Titanic.
When she was asked, “How did you get out?” she said, “When the other girls dropped to their knees to pray, I took a run for it.” Once I rather cheekily said to a priest, “I guess my grandmother knew there was a time for praying and a time for running.” He, quite wisely, said, “No, Christine. Your grandmother knew you could pray while running.” I think that’s exactly what happened on that day, and also during those days in Glen Cove after my grandfather died. It is a great metaphor for the struggle of all immigrants and for the city of New York.

I didn’t know about my grandmother’s place in history until my mother told me. And my mother only found out by accident when she was in the eighth grade. Her class had a lesson about the
Titanic,
and they read the
New York Times
account of the disaster. My mother came home from school that day and said, “Mom, it’s so strange. We read a story in the
New York Times
about the sinking of the
Titanic,
and there was a girl on the ship with the same name as yours, Ellen Shine.” My grandmother said, “No, that was me.”

It’s an Irish thing. My grandmother never spoke a word to me about escaping the sinking ship, and our mother forbade Ellen and me to ask her anything about it. I’m guessing that the primary reason she didn’t talk about it was that she’d been traumatized by the experience. I don’t know this from her directly, but many years later, when she was in a nursing home and suffering from dementia, I would visit her, and she would scream, “Get in the boat! Get down! He has a gun!” In eyewitness accounts of the ship’s sinking, there are reports of ship’s officers shooting men who tried to rush the lifeboats despite the strict order that women and children should be the first to board. I felt terrible that she relived the most frightening experience of her life over and over again. But there was nothing we could do to keep her from thinking that she was still in a lifeboat on the night of April 15, 1912.

As I said, when my grandmother moved in with us, my mother’s sister, Julia, came with her. She’d never married, and she lived at home with her parents, so when my grandfather died, it just made sense that both she and my grandmother would come to live with us. Aunt Julia moved into my sister’s room, and then whenever Ellen came home to visit, Julia stayed in my room, which had two beds. Julia had never lived on her own. She was exceedingly generous, but she was not particularly independent or strong. She was even quieter than my grandmother, and I had very little real communication with her. It’s difficult to know the reason: maybe because she was a simple and somewhat passive person, or maybe because she was mostly deaf—or both.

My aunt and mother both developed progressive hearing loss, starting in late high school. They never knew why, but my father’s theory was they had some kind of viral infection or they had lead poisoning from the paint in the apartment where they grew up. By the time I was born my mother’s deafness was pretty far advanced, but she could still hear the television if it was turned up really loud and talk on a special telephone, at least until she became totally deaf. There was a light over the phone that flashed when the phone rang, and there was a volume control that let you amplify the sound.

If you didn’t know it, you couldn’t really tell my mother was deaf except for a bit of a speech impediment. I never noticed it at all, but other people commented on it. She also had trouble with words she hadn’t learned before she went deaf, like
Parmesan cheese,
which she called “paramecium cheese.” She loved Burger King, but she couldn’t say
Whopper;
she called it a “whooper.”

T
he biggest change that came in the wake of my grandfather’s death, beyond my aunt and grandmother moving in, was the end of our summers at Rockaway Beach. For my mom’s whole life, my maternal grandparents had rented half of a two-family house or a bungalow close to Rockaway Playland, an old amusement park that’s long gone. Rockaway is a barrier island off the coast of Queens that was long popular with working-class New Yorkers. In those days, before the urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s leveled huge sections of the Rockaways, people would rent these tiny bungalows on narrow lanes for the summer. The women and children would go out for the whole season, and the men would join them for weekends or commute to the city every day by subway. We went out for the day, for a weekend, or for weeks at a time.

We’d spend most of the day at the beach, although the waves were often too big and the tide too strong for a young child to go swimming. The adults brought hot tea in Thermoses—very Irish—and we’d all have crunchy sandwiches for lunch (crunchy because of the sand that invariably got into them). Then we’d go back to the bungalow, where my grandfather was always cooking these huge pieces of meat. Having been a firefighter, he was a very good cook, which probably explains why my grandmother and my mother were so terrible in the kitchen.

My grandfather was a very big guy, and he’d stand over the stove, enveloped in smoke, wielding an enormous chef’s knife that his brother had given him. He’d make hams and steaks and roast beef or pot roast. The bungalow would feel like it was 9,000 degrees, and we’d have this huge dinner, which was the last thing we wanted to eat after a day at the beach. It was hot even without the cooking, and no one had air-conditioning. After dinner we went to the amusement park or to one of the arcades and almost always got ice cream.

In the summer, we’d also have barbecues in Glen Cove and other parties, especially before my mother got cancer but sometimes after, too. Mommy would invite extended family, many of whom were police officers. At these events, my grandmother would again show the quick thinking she wasn’t always given credit for. In those days most police officers carried their guns all the time. So, since there would undoubtedly be drinking at the parties, my grandmother was concerned. Her solution was to stand at the front door holding a dresser drawer and making everybody put their guns into it. Then she would lock up the drawer and tuck the key into her bra. At the end of the evening, she would decide who was sober enough to get their gun back.

My grandfather Callaghan, who only had a third-grade education, started out in America as a milkman, then became a firefighter and rose to the very high rank of battalion chief in the New York Fire Department. When La Guardia was mayor, part of my grandfather’s job was to pick him up and drive him around to watch the big fires. La Guardia loved the firefighters.

When my grandfather retired, he opened a liquor store in the Bronx not far from where my grandparents lived in Inwood, a neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. I often visited their apartment, and it is one of the ways I came to love New York City and why I moved to Manhattan as soon after college as I could.

On some of my visits, my grandparents took me shopping at the now-long-gone Gimbels department store in Herald Square and to see Julia, who worked there as a bookkeeper, and get her employee discount. But what Pa liked best was taking me shopping for Mary Janes at a neighborhood shoe store. Pa loved these shoes, and got them for me in every conceivable color. Mary Janes are low-cut leather shoes with a little strap across the instep that’s fastened with a buckle or button. They have a rounded toe box, a very low heel, and a thin sole. They’re totally appropriate for a little girl for dressy occasions, especially when they’re made of patent leather.

From my grandparents’ house in Inwood, I’d walk hand in hand with this giant of a man to his car, and we’d drive over a bridge to a shopping district in the Bronx, where we’d go to the same shoe store again and again.

The problem was, the shoes never fit me. I have a low anklebone, and the way Mary Janes are made, they would cut into my ankle and I’d wind up with blisters. It didn’t matter when I was really little, but as I got older I hated wearing them because they hurt. But Pa loved these shoes—and for him, getting his granddaughter fancy party shoes was a mission. Blisters or not, he believed they were essential. Getting party shoes for a little girl clearly meant more than just a fashion statement.

Working in Gimbels, buying Mary Janes—the Callaghans had an affinity for shopping. And it wasn’t lost on my mother—she was a championship shopper. She had tons of stores she loved—each one had a different specialty for her, a different reason we went there. We would spend hours looking, trying things on, discussing items—sometimes buying but not always. And always eating in the store’s restaurant for lunch. They had great names. Lord and Taylor’s was the Bird Cage—it was filled with colorful fake birds and birdcages.

She had some particular tastes. In the age of panty hose, she was a nylons-and-white-gloves gal. Forward-thinking in some ways but old-fashioned in others. In the 1970s she and I would search and search for stores that carried stockings—it was a quest.

My mother also loved to shop for my father. Recently, somebody complimented him on his dashing outfit. He opened up the jacket, and there was a Saks label. He was still wearing a jacket she had bought him thirty years ago! My father also still wears the navy overcoat my mother bought him for his father’s funeral in 1970.

M
y father’s father, Pa Quinn, died when I was four, and my father’s mother, who I called Nana, had only a few more years of good health after he died before she entered a nursing home. Both of them were born in Ireland. My grandfather, Martin Quinn, was born in 1894 in County Clare and came to New York in 1913. My grandmother, Ellen Lancer, came from Schull, which is in West Cork, sometime around 1911 or 1912, joining her sister, who was already here. Both of them worked as domestics.

Nana’s first job was with a family that lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Then she went to work as a chambermaid for a wealthy family in Oyster Bay, on Long Island. At the time she met my grandfather, she was working as a lady’s maid for a family that lived in a house between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, around where Rockefeller Center is now. My grandfather was a streetcar operator on Sixth Avenue (and then later a bus driver, after the trolleys were put out of service). No one knows exactly how they met—it wasn’t the kind of thing they talked about—but in all likelihood Nana met Pa Quinn while riding a streetcar he was driving.

Nana was a tough cookie—smart and in charge—which you had to be when you were a lady’s maid, the second-highest rank for a female servant, just below housekeeper. (
Downton Abbey
fans, take note.) She had a lot of responsibilities. She traveled through Europe two or three times with the family she worked for. Along the way she picked up a working knowledge of some of the foreign languages she heard.

The Quinns were married in 1924, and after having their two boys, Lawrence and Martin, who they nicknamed Buddy, they moved to Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood just north of where I live now. It was full of Irish immigrants who worked, among other jobs, on the Hudson River docks loading and unloading cargo ships. My father tells me that one of my grandfather’s uncles, Uncle Mike, had a saloon on Ninth Avenue somewhere between Thirty-eighth and Forty-fifth Streets.