We all got into the car again, and I drove us out Woodhaven Boulevard to the “better” neighborhood Joe and Ellen moved to some years ago. The party was being held in the downstairs room of a big restaurant/catering hall of that indigenous Queens oxymoron: an Irish American restaurant. After we arrived and I eventually made my way over to the steam table, the menu of parties past spread itself out before me: manicotti, fried rice, meatballs, macaroni and cheese. So there, Thomas Wolfe. No matter: the bar, as predicted, was open throughout the event, and the point, as it always was at the Sullivans’ parties, was to talk, drink, dance, have fun. Food was just fuel. But my first reaction upon stepping into the room did turn out to be food-related. “They’ve finally put on a little weight,” I thought to myself when I saw Cathy and Pat, whom I hadn’t seen since my dad’s funeral. They were always reed-thin—Pat, especially, a tall, skinny, black-haired, ivory-skinned beauty whose body type was perfectly in sync with the Twiggy years of our very early girlhood. Even after their accumulated pregnancies, they reverted back to the almost anorectic silhouette of their mother. Next to them, I’ve always felt fat, even though weight has never been much of an issue for me. Now, at last, they looked more like women than girls. And, indeed, they are women: both of them teachers, both longtime wives and mothers to older kids, some already in college. Together with their parents, Cathy and Pat crowded around Molly, whom they’d never met before, and talked to her sweetly and told her how pretty she looked in her party dress and how very happy they were to see her at last.
When I was trying to get pregnant and stay pregnant, Ellen Sullivan, who had learned of some of my struggle from my mother, wrote to me and told me she was saying a novena for me. That means attending a special Mass the first Friday of every month. Her devotion and concern made me cry. Now she was getting to meet the baby she prayed would come. Except this was a baby whose arrival no one in that room could have anticipated in the olden days of our childhood when all the world was white and Catholic. During the party, Pat, then Cathy, came up to me laughing and quoted something my mother had said to their mother: “Who would have guessed, Ellen, that I would have a Jewish son-in-law and a Chinese granddaughter!” Sounds like my mom all right: the combination of wonderment and bemused acceptance and, underneath it all, the need for reassurance about something else “different” her daughter has done. “Who would have guessed” was probably the thought Cathy and Pat and a lot of their relatives in that room had when they looked at me and my tiny familial band of outsiders. To express the general good-natured surprise through the voice of my mother was a way to make it less judgmental, to keep it, in a manner of speaking, inside the family. But surely I’m selling the Sullivans short. Even if their extended family was still remarkably homogeneous, they must have non-Catholic friends, maybe even a few nonwhite or out-of-the-closet work buddies. The world has changed so much. Even in this Celtic snow globe of a room, well, there’s me and Rich and Molly.
Throughout that afternoon, through the terrific step dancing (Cathy, for old times’ sake, and a young niece who’s now carrying on the tradition) and Clancy Brothers songs, and electric-slide shimmying (the Sullivans knew all the moves and all danced in unison!) and moving speeches, I felt the same old sense of yearning and restlessness. I would love to be part of a family this large and cohesive; that said, I would go nuts if I couldn’t go off by myself regularly to read and, instead, had to do something like this almost every weekend—the First Communions, confirmations, birthday parties—the relentless social round of a large Irish Catholic family. No doubt, I idealize this family and underestimate the degree to which the social revolutions of the past thirty years have chipped away at its solidity. Indeed, one of Pat’s teenaged daughters sported a tight dress and dyed blond hair. Her quieter older sister looked a bit like Emily Dickinson as we know her from her one authenticated photograph. That sister’s eyes were smart, alert, and measuring as she listened to the speeches of her extended family. Both of Pat’s daughters live “away” at college—the serious one downtown at NYU, which, I know, caused some consternation among the family. Since men have always benefited more from the Irish Catholic status quo, it’s not surprising that these two women of the younger generation, not their brothers, were the ones who visually embodied some degree of departure from the program.
One of the Sullivans’ sons—who was a boy of about ten when I’d last seen him—got up to give a testimonial to his parents. Francis is now a lawyer, and he’s tall and handsome and at ease in front of an audience. Among other things, he told a story about how his mother, Ellen, once stayed up all night to type a college paper for him that was due the following morning. Then she got herself dressed and traveled the subway into New York that morning to her secretarial job. I was moved by Francis’s proud love for his parents and by the way all the Sullivans obviously felt they could depend on one another. I’ll always envy their all-for-one, one-for-all togetherness, while knowing that, to mangle Hemingway’s famous short-story title, it’s a way I’ll never be. Large gatherings of people that spout the pronoun “we” most of the time make me edgy.
After the first hour or so, I left Rich and Molly at the diversity table to talk with Jim O’Brien, Cathy’s husband. In my senior year at the all-girls Catholic high school we all attended, I was desperate for a date for the prom and Jim agreed to be my “fix-up.” (Almost everyone I knew had to be fixed up with a date: one girl in my class was even escorted by her cousin, a priest, who came in his Roman collar and black suit.) Jim and I were not romantically copasetic, but he and Cathy were, and they married shortly after her college graduation. By then, Jim had become a fireman, something he’d always dreamed of being. Now he told me he’d suffered a back injury on the job a few months earlier and was out on disability from his firehouse in lower Manhattan. We talked about work: how lucky we both were to have jobs that, for the most part, we loved, jobs that engaged us and made us feel part of something larger. I told Jim that I thought I had the best job imaginable: telling people about good books and why they should read them. On his “best days,” Jim gets to save people’s lives. No contest, of course, but we need bread and roses too.
We were interrupted by the presentation of embossed formal testimonials from the pope, Rudolph Giuliani, and the President and Mrs. Bush. The Sullivans, like most of my own cousins, had forsaken their Democratic roots and were now Republican. Joe and Ellen got up to talk about their lives together and the struggle they had raising four children on one salary in small apartments in Sunnyside. As it goes without saying at an Irish party, there was not a dry eye in the house. Joe mentioned the people who weren’t present, in body, in the room with us that day, among them my father. I thought about how my father always sat off to the side at the Sullivans’ parties. A nondrinker and a minimal talker, he preferred to stay at home, to smoke and read one of his World War II adventure novels.
The music and dancing resumed, and the deejay, much to Molly’s delight, handed out party favors—hats and plastic guitars—to the little kids. That was always one of the most endearing aspects of being with the Sullivans: they loved kids and would never dream of having an adults-only party. By now Molly had started to warm up to all these strangers, and she and I took some turns on the dance floor, performing together her favorite twirl-around-and-fall-down dance. I’m so proud of her and so proud to be her mother. Rich always says she’s a big improvement on our gene pool. All the pre-adoption anxieties—about how having a daughter of a different race would make me feel, once again, “odd,” or not quite that child’s “real mother”—disappeared the minute I held her. No other child could possibly be mine—although not exclusively mine. I erratically beam happy pictures, reassuring thoughts, and words of gratitude to Molly’s unknown biological mother and father in China—extended, if invisible, family.
Years earlier, when I was in the thick of my “extreme adventure” to have a child, I begrudged the Sullivan sisters—and all the other fertile friends I had—their
children. Now it wasn’t an issue: they had their kids, I had mine. That’s another warm aspect of this party: the undercurrent of competition that marked my years of growing up with the Sullivans seemed to have disappeared. Who was the smartest in class? Who got the most scholarships to college? Who was the prettiest? Who got a boyfriend first? Who got married and had kids first? Now, who cared? It didn’t seem to matter who had what and who did what. We were all just happy to be together in that room again; maybe we’d all lived through enough not to begrudge one another our life victories. “You’re writing a book!” Pat Sullivan said to me as she hugged me at the end of the party. “That’s so great!” (Apparently, my mother had been talking.) I was touched. Neither writing nor reading had ever been her passion; although she was almost always the smartest girl in our class, she was a math, not an English, whiz. Pat told me that her oldest daughter—the one who looks a little like Emily Dickinson—wanted to be a writer. It figures: the writer is always standing off to the side, observing.
After the party we went back to my mother’s apartment and slept, badly, all three of us in my old bed. The next morning Rich and I packed up our car, kissed my mother good-bye, and drove onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I was behind the wheel as we sped alongside the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and lower Manhattan, once again, rose up at our elbows. “There’s New York,” I ritually said to Molly. “It’s the most beautiful sight in the world.” We drove up onto the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Molly and Rich kept looking back at the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, all the other skyscrapers, until we passed the high midpoint of the bridge, nosed down into New Jersey, and the whole skyline disappeared.
On the Thursday after the attack, when classes at Georgetown resumed, I stopped into the office of one of my colleagues, who’s also a native New Yorker, to share the shock. I said to her, “All this makes what we do pretty irrelevant, doesn’t it?” This colleague is wiser than I. She replied: “No more irrelevant than it ever is. We’re always teaching and learning within the shadow of our own mortality.” Her remark reminded me of something my father once told me, about how the USS Schmitt had a makeshift library on it, spottily stocked with the classics and adventure stories. Distraction, sure, but essential nourishment for the mind and spirit as well. Books are always necessary cargo. So many of us reach for them, irrationally, even in potentially dangerous situations that threaten to wreck our ability to concentrate—as military helicopters whirl above our heads (like they did in our neighborhood in Washington for weeks after the attack) or U-boats silently glide in the waters below us. In the weeks that followed September 11, I and many of my other reader friends coped by reading mysteries, stories that specifically set out to explore, in Raymond Chandler’s great phrase, “a world gone wrong.” The mystery genre, both its British and American strains, came of age during wartime, and there’s something about it that suits tense times— something to do with the way the detective probes deeply into a problem no one else can quite get a handle on, as well as something to do with the mystery novel’s often uneasy sense of resolution. The mystery story I thought about most during this period was the one I love the best, The Maltese Falcon. A third of the way through that novel, Sam Spade tells a story about a missing-person case he once solved, involving a man named Flitcraft. Flitcraft, a businessman, vanished one afternoon on his way to lunch. Years later Spade found him; here’s how he recalls Flitcraft’s explanation for his disappearance:
Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. . . . He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.1
I mentioned Flitcraft in a piece I did for Fresh Air about post– September 11 reading. One astute listener, however, noticed that I ended the anecdote too early and e-mailed to tell me so. Spade does go on to say that, after his life-altering epiphany, Flitcraft eventually got used to beams “not falling” and fell into a routine that re-created the rut of his former life. A lot of us Americans have already gotten used to September 11; we’ve gotten used to having the works exposed and the lid warped and wobbling. You can read that Flitcraft anecdote a lot of ways. Spade seems to be laughing at the essential ploddingness of human nature; but maybe it also testifies to how resilient people are in their very ordinariness.
Since September 11, I’ve been in sporadic e-mail contact with Cathy Sullivan. Her husband, the firefighter Jim O’Brien, had not been on duty that morning. (The back injury he told me about at the anniversary party turned out to be his probable salvation.) Jim spent weeks down at Ground Zero looking for his missing “brothers.” His best friend, a fellow firefighter, was missing, later confirmed dead, and many of the firefighters he served with and the younger recruits he had trained were lost. Lots of the newsmagazine articles published in the aftermath of September 11 mentioned the prevalence of Irish and Italian names on the lists of the victims: firefighters and police and white-collar banking types who worked in the Towers. So many of the dead were Catholics and outer-borough residents; a lot of them still lived with their parents. Reading The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” page every morning, I often felt like I could have been looking at a program from some mythical reunion of my old St. Raphael’s classmates. That trip up to New York on September 8 turned out to be a reconnection with the world I knew as a child—the world that a lot of New Yorkers still lived in—before it vanished for so many.
I’ve said that I love Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life. Obviously aspects of his identity—Irish Catholic, outer-borough type, reader, and writer— speak to my own. But it’s a paragraph Hamill wrote about the New York skyline that, for me, constitutes the most magical moment in the whole memoir. He recalls living in Brooklyn as a kid during World War II. On the evening of D Day, he and his neighbors climb the stairs up to the roofs of their tenements. Hamill, who’s about eight, keeps asking his mother what they’re all doing on the roof, and she keeps telling him to be quiet, to just keep on looking toward Manhattan as the sky gets darker. Here’s what Hamill says happened as night fell and darkness enveloped the city:
And then, without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light: dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared . . . the whole city roaring for light. There it was, gigantic and brilliant, the way they said it used to be: the skyline of New York. Back again. On D Day, at the command of Mayor La Guardia. And it wasn’t just the skyline. Over on the left was the Statue of Liberty, glowing green from dozens of light beams. . . . The skyline and the statue: in all those years of the war, in all the years of my life, I had never seen either of them at night. I stood there in the roar, transfixed.2
To read that passage these days, to experience that longed-for return of a missing skyline, well, Hamill makes me imagine what that miracle would be like. Such is the power of words, of writing, of books. Words can summon up a skyline from the dark; they can bring back the people you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present.
“But that only happens in books,” my mother, pretty much immune to the power of the written word, would say.
Exactly. That’s why I can’t stop reading them.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been written were it not for the intellectual generosity and sense of adventure possessed by my editor, Kate Medina. In what seems like another lifetime, Kate asked me if I would like to write a book. I said yes, and we were off! But little did I realize that the arrival of my daughter (roughly two w
eeks after Kate and I made a verbal handshake over the phone) would drain almost all available writing time from my already lively work schedule. Kate has been patient and encouraging throughout the long period it’s taken me to write this book, and her literary insights and editorial suggestions have improved it immeasurably. I feel honored to have her as my editor.
Associate editor Robin Rolewicz has been delightful to work with; I’ve especially appreciated her unwavering mental focus and calm in the face of impending deadlines. Robin’s predecessor at Random House, Frankie Jones, also deserves my thanks for her close reading of an early version of the book and her helpful suggestions.
It’s a commonplace—and, sadly, often true—assumption that books aren’t carefully copyedited anymore. Happily, my manuscript fell into the meticulous hands of Random House associate copy chief Beth Pearson and superhuman copy editor Margaret Wimberger. Never before have I thought twice about whether my father belonged to the Steamfitters’ Union or the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union or some variant of either. Truly, any mistakes that stubbornly still remain in this manuscript are my own.
Every writer should be so lucky to have an agent like Stuart Krichevsky. He’s funny (really funny), kind, and savvy—and so very smart about literature and the world of ideas that, many times in our conversations, I’ve wished that we could take a break from talking about my book (yet again) and instead talk about some of the other books that he obviously loves and knows so well. Stuart’s assistant, Shana Cohen, is wise beyond her years and has been a much appreciated booster of this book from its earliest stages.
I started listening to Fresh Air in my graduate school days in Philadelphia. I remember admiring Terry Gross’s intellectual curiosity and breadth of knowledge, worn so much more lightly than the mantle of theory-encrusted erudition I then was struggling to assume. I became the show’s book reviewer in 1989, and that job continues to be the highlight of my professional life. Because of the high standards set by Terry and by the show’s extraordinary executive producer, Danny Miller (thanks for giving me that second chance, Danny!), I’ve learned how to be a better critic—to talk about books in a way that, I hope, does justice to them without draining them of their life and artistic sense of play. Phyllis Myers has been my longtime producer and good friend for much of my career at Fresh Air; over the years, she’s backed me up, corrected me, improved my writing, and saved me from all manner of public humiliation. Before Phyllis, Naomi Person was my producer and remains my friend; Naomi really taught me in a start-from-scratch way how to review books for radio.
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