Our Kingston was in a small alcove called Mount Marion on the banks of Esopus Creek. There might have been another world beyond there, but we didn’t need it. Once you turned off Old King’s Highway onto Clint Finger Road, you drove through a patch of woods and the road closed up behind you. Mount Marion was where we went to be outside of order.
Grandma Millie’s father, Pellegrino, bought the property in Mount Marion for four thousand dollars in 1954, and after Millie retired from the phone company in New York, she and Grandpa moved in, leaving their apartment on Fifty-eighth Street in New York City, where they raised my father and his three brothers and sister. It was a lot and a one-story house, but Grandpa added a second floor—a clumsy jumble of rooms he put together from a kit that made it look like two different houses stuck together. There were never fewer than half a dozen cars and motorcycles in the driveway, parked at odd angles and in various states of disrepair—one or two on cinder blocks, waiting to be hauled off to the junkyard. A large square gravel patch in the front yard stood in for a driveway, and the grass was knee-high right up to the door. There was a big weeping willow tree in the side yard that shaded Grandma Millie’s vegetable garden.
There were two large rooms downstairs—the living room with a TV and couch that doubled as extra bedding, and the Knotty Pine room. Grandma and Grandpa’s room was off the living room next to the room where Norma stayed.
The Knotty Pine room was part of the original house and was named after the pine-paneled walls Grandpa bought with a rare windfall from the track. It creeps, somehow, into every story that is repeated about those summers. It had French doors on the side, which I thought made the house sophisticated, and a long oak table right down the middle.
On the side wall, beside the French doors, was a scuffed wooden dresser and a mirror wedged with old photos. The drawers of the dresser were stuffed carelessly with Grandpa’s betting sheets, shotgun shells, and unpaid bills. It was the only neat room in the house, because Grandma gave us a dollar or two every week to clean it up.
A makeshift wooden ladder led up to a loft, where my older sister and I usually slept. It had two twin-sized mattresses on the floor, and boxes of letters, papers, and discarded knickknacks stacked in the corners. There was a fluorescent mural on one wall that had been sprayed by one of Grandma Millie’s adopted strays on an acid trip. At the back of the Knotty Pine room a door led out to a screened-in porch. From the porch you could see all the way down to Esopus Creek, which divided the short strip of houses where we were and the rental cabins across from us. The creek was muddy green, with tree branches hanging low on both banks. We often bathed in it because the plumbing in the house was unreliable. We kept a bottle of Flex Balsam shampoo out on the dock and when the mood struck, we jumped into the creek in our shorts, soaped up, and then swam underwater to rinse, leaving a trail of soap scum. Then we dried off in the sun on the dock. The water in the house was no good for drinking, even by the flexible standards of my grandparents. Grandpa had jury-rigged a hose with a pump to bring in the water directly from the creek. We could wash the dishes with it, but it had to be boiled first for drinking. On Saturday mornings Grandpa filled the back of his brown station wagon with empty milk jugs and drove over to Maryann’s friend Jeannie’s house in Lake Katrine, a town over, and filled them up from her tap.
Mount Marion as we knew it orbited around Grandma Millie. The house was like a termite mound of wriggling, rotating DiFalcos, each one cheerfully bringing new members to the colony. Grandma Millie was their queen, heaped right in the middle. She was three hundred pounds, with a raspy voice and a mischievous wink. She had a jowly face marked with bright-red rouge and creamy green eye shadow caked in the creases. She wore cheap rubber flip-flops and big, bright muumuus that she bought on sale at Montgomery Ward—whether it was eighty degrees out or ten. She was always smiling, a fleshy mass of love; everyone competed for her attention, from the box boys at the Pink Store to the old ladies who ran bingo. There was a place here for everyone.
Aunt Maryann was her daughter, my father’s younger sister. She was large like her mother, with the same grin and the same wayward wink. She also inherited from Millie a chameleonlike ability to be any age at any moment. She had a head of thick black hair that she made bigger with an even thicker black hairpiece when she went out. She lived in Mount Marion year-round and ran the house like an Egyptian princess with shimmery blue eyelids and clingy outfits. She was perfectly certain of where she should be at any given moment; most often it was at the head of the long oak table in the Knotty Pine room with a glass full of Riunite.
In the summer the air in Kingston was thick with mosquitoes and the Mount Marion house was a centrifugal fusion of love, cigarettes, and sticky wine. It was a hot spot for a revolving “rat pack” of twenty-somethings that included my uncle Joey, aunt Maryann, my other “uncles”—Freddy, Johnny, PJ from Fifty-Eighth Street, Jimmy from the cabins across the creek—and whoever else might be passing through. Millie collected people like green stamps, cashing them in when she needed a favor. She found them, and Maryann carefully worked them into the routine. Millie stumbled upon Tammy in the butcher department at Waldbaum’s and befriended her for the discounts and good cuts. She brought Tammy home and Maryann matched her up with Johnny.
Tammy and Johnny were doomed from the start. Tragic lovers. After years of dating and infidelity and boozy shouting matches on the dock, there was nothing left for them to do but get married. Johnny had a deep, hoarse laugh and spent one summer in a full body cast after he broke his neck in a car accident. I remember him sipping beer through a straw in The Kingston Hospital. His brother PJ died young from too much whiskey but Johnny lived, ten years longer than he was supposed to. “His liver,” the doctors gravely told Tammy one hospital stay. “You should make arrangements.” She went to Seamon-Wilsey for an urn. Jimmy and Freddy went to visit him during this fluorescent-lit vigil and brought him a meatball parmigiana hero from Angelo’s. He walked out of the hospital proclaiming the healing powers of a good meatball parm and drank his way through ten more years. Tammy moved out after that, but according to family legend, she routinely drove by Johnny’s trailer for the rest of his life, affectionately waving the urn and yelling out her window, “Die already, you son of a bitch.”
They were in and out of jobs, all of them—construction and odd labor. A few of them made a decent living bringing pot from the city and selling it in the Kingston bars on weekends. When Grandma Millie got wind of this, she wanted a piece of the action and started growing her own pot in the vegetable garden under the weeping willow. During card games in the Knotty Pine room, Larry sat at the table with a big mound of it and a pack of EZ Widers and rolled perfectly shaped joints that he stuffed into cigarette packs.
Maryann brought Larry home from People’s Choice, a popular bar where she worked, and he hung around for three years. He was famous for his skill at rolling joints and for teaching us all to drive a stick shift. Learning to drive a stick shift with Larry was a rite of passage in Kingston. You didn’t really arrive until Larry put you behind the wheel of his green two-door Subaru and ran alongside the car, yelling through the driver’s window, “The clutch is on the left, no, the left!” One summer, my younger brother found the brake just inches before lurching the Subaru into the creek. After that we practiced in the field across the road. Larry was fifteen years old when Maryann discovered him in the bar, and he was devoted to her. I was twelve that summer, but in my eyes he was big, sitting around the table in the Knotty Pine room, drinking beer and playing cards with the grown-ups.
Our family spent almost every summer weekend in Kingston. My parents packed us into our white wood-paneled station wagon—four of us squished in the backseat, my older sister up front, in the middle. We drove up Route 17 making up songs, picking fights, and yelling out landmarks: Motel on the Mountain, Angel Bridge and Devil Bridge, Red Apple Rest.
“We’re almost to Red Apple Rest,” my mother would say. “And we’re not stopp
ing unless it’s quiet!” And then we watched out the windows, hushed, for the big, red wooden apple that meant hot dogs and cotton candy. It loomed large and as animated in our unshaped stories as the optometrist’s sign in The Great Gatsby, marking our entrance to Kingston and the summer the way the big, round spectacled eyes marked East Egg.
The bridges were just past Sloatsburg, and the Tuxedo Motel. They were a pair of cast-iron structures built high over the water, higher, it seems, than they needed to be, and we personified them. The black one was Devil Bridge, because it was dark and rusty and looked sinister. When we approached it we all yelled out, “Devil Bridge!” and my sisters and I crossed our fingers and raised our feet. Angel Bridge came up next and was shiny and unspoiled, with glinting silver beams. “Angel Bridge!” we all yelled, and then my brothers crossed their fingers and raised their feet. We were quiet and serious as we approached the bridges, ready to act. I don’t remember what the consequences were if we didn’t raise our feet, but I never considered testing fate.
Two or three times a summer Grandpa loaded the grandkids into his rusted brown Cadillac, and we took the Thruway north to exit 24, then I-87 to Saratoga—the upstate town where the Rockefellers, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts summered—to the racetrack, where I caught a glimpse of another life. A life of wide-brimmed hats and white gloves, of pressed slacks and pastels. Of people getting out of fancy cars. I saw boys like the one I would later marry, with neat khaki shorts and blue blazers. Clean, short hair. They sat in a separate part of the track, in boxes, eating sandwiches, while we ate in the greasy restaurant, thrilled with our big plates of the breakfast special.
Grandpa taught us about the horses, boxing trifectas, and long shots. Grandma Millie taught us to steal. She called it night-raiding. She dressed us up in black clothes, a big festive event—like Halloween—and equipped us with pillowcases and flashlights. We were instructed to fill the pillowcases with crops: corn from the Boises’ farm, tomatoes and zucchini from the garden next door. Apples from the orchard at the end of the dirt road. She had us pumped up like Little League champs. There were anywhere from five to fifteen cousins here during any given summer, and everyone wanted to go night-raiding, even more so after the neighbor fired his shotgun at my brother and me, as we ran dropping the pears we had taken from his tree.
During the day Millie carried on a more sophisticated subterfuge at Waldbaum’s, slipping choice cuts of meat into the great folds of her housedress. She had an ideal shape for camouflage and could tuck a small bag of groceries beneath her enormous breasts. I went with her on one of these shopping trips. She wheeled her shopping cart through the store, filling the large area with lower-priced items and setting more expensive things, like meat, in the front—where you might put a purse or a baby. Then she draped her breasts over the cart and leaned forward, pushing it along with her body. I watched her make a five-pound roast disappear this way. Her arms stretched out along the sides; she looked simply relaxed on a slow, heavy stroll through the store. She hummed to herself, glanced casually, like the other shoppers, up and down the aisles. She pushed her way to the checkout line, where, still leaning over, she set the items from her cart out on the belt. When the cashier had rung her up, chatting with her the whole time—they all knew Millie—she wheeled the cart out of the store and emptied her housedress onto the front seat of the car. A box of Devil Dogs had found its way in there, too. She didn’t think of it as stealing so much as pocketing stuff.
Millie possessed a number of traits that I have since learned are peculiar, but when I was ten, nothing she did seemed unusual. She seemed like anyone’s grandmother, a huge, huggable mass of unconditional love who slipped us cigarettes and pocketed things from Waldbaum’s.
The police were called to the house once, to fish a dead deer out of the creek, and there was a brief panic about the pot. Millie saw the black-and-white car with roof lights snaking down the road, and she called for backup.
“Maryann, get out there quick. The cops are coming! Get Freddy!”
Johnny and Freddy ran out and propped an old pickup canopy against the side of the house to cover the crop, and when the officers pulled up, Millie sauntered out the front door in her muumuu with a fly swatter, swatting the air at imaginary flies. Painting a picture, in her mind, of a woman with nothing to hide.
She led the officers around to the creek, where they found the deer, chatting them up like a southern belle. After that, she replanted the marijuana on a remote patch of the Boises’ cornfield directly across from our driveway. It wasn’t on her property, and she had room for a bigger crop. My aunts and uncles were making a nice side income by this point, selling pot to the Mount Marion summer population.
Kingston was a town where the same dramas repeated every payday somewhere along Route 9W—at People’s Choice or Partners or the Dew Drop Inn. Women left their boyfriends, then went back, and then clung to another man in the bar. There were fistfights, tears, and whiskey with beer chasers. Led Zeppelin played on the jukebox, and my aunts and uncles were in the middle of all of it. My grandparents’ house was at the dead end of a winding dirt road, and all the walls between adulthood and adolescence dissolved behind their door—especially the year I turned ten, when I was allowed to stay for the whole summer with my older sister, away from the watchful eyes of our parents.
The loft was the best place to be. I liked to sleep there, because I could lie down on the floor, lean over the edge, and have a front-row seat to the theater going on below. Wide-eyed and fascinated, I watched the Knotty Pine group passing out six-packs of Schlitz and smoking up cartons of Marlboro reds or Larry’s cigarettes. Maryann kept everything in check; she oversaw nighttime operations, which was when everything important happened. She set their schedule, loose as it was. She decided where, when, or even if they’d go out. There were nights that the group of them sat so long at the oak table—getting up only to pee in the bathroom by Grandma’s room, if it was working, or off the back porch—that the bars would close, and they’d stay up all night in the house, getting drunk and playing cards. Those were the best nights. If they remembered anyone was in the loft, they would shout up, “You better be asleep. Don’t make us come up there!” Then back to their roundtable. On the nights Maryann bartended they all followed her to People’s Choice, where the drinks were strong and often free. We’d hear them stumble in as the sun was rising and watch them wake up in the afternoon—bloodshot and bleary-eyed, and ready to start all over again.
Sometimes they’d let us tag along, and then Jeannie would drive us to the bar and we’d dance by the jukebox while Maryann finished cleaning up. She’d turn the music up loud and teach us to two-step to Donna Summer and Sister Sledge.
Our days were spent in or on the creek, in cutoff jeans and T-shirts—swimming, jumping off the rope swing, and fishing for dinner. We didn’t care when the board of health condemned the creek one summer. My uncles just took down the sign. Each of the houses along the creek had a dock, and sometimes I spent entire afternoons sitting on ours with a fishing pole. There wasn’t much to catch—mostly catfish and eels—but I loved the simple ritual: picking earthworms out of a can, stringing them on a hook, and waiting for a tug on the line. The dock was also where the rowboat was tied up, and the rowboat led to the cabins.
A boy drowned in the creek one year, just off the falls on a sunny day—the only kind of day I remember. He was older than I was, in his twenties probably, and not a local. The sun was straight over us like a spotlight, and he and his friends were swimming around the deep spot that the rest of us knew to avoid. I saw him go under. I saw my brother Anthony and Matt Nucci running from the cabins. I saw Uncle Freddy diving in.
They said the boy screamed, but I don’t remember that, just my brother running so fast and then diving into the deep, muddy spot with Freddy. Their heads crashing the surface to gulp air, and diving down again. The ambulance came, and my brother climbed up on the bank. Silent minutes crept by while the rescue crew put their diving gear
on, the rest of us staring at the water, frozen, picturing the body on the bottom of the creek.
We watched from the bank, my brother and Matt still dripping, while the rescue workers combed the bottom for his body. When they pulled him up, twenty minutes had gone by, and he was splotched purple and blue, and bloated—his stomach stretched out like he was pregnant. They pumped his chest and then took him to The Kingston Hospital.
“Twenty-two feet,” one of the men told my brother. “You never would have gotten down there, and if you had it wouldn’t’ve helped. He filled up like a Coke bottle and sank. Wasn’t a thing you kids could’ve done.”
“They kept him hooked up to life support, but they never got him back,” I heard Aunt Marsha tell Maryann the next day. “They said it was his sneakers. Those big leather high-tops. They pulled his feet down just like weights were tied to his legs.”
Uncle Freddy had almost drowned once, too, in the creek. It was one of the stories about him that ended with, “That was before Marsha.” There was a group on the dock one night dropping acid, and Freddy jumped into the creek. He started thrashing and screaming, and a nameless man—one of the strays who was staying at the house—jumped into the water and pulled him out.
Neither of these events changed the routine of the Kingston summers.
I learned everything I needed to know about growing up in that cluster of farms and houses and summer cabins. It had the way that some small towns do of harboring eccentrics, like us. We were an unusual assortment of adults and kids, lined up like tipsy ants, weaving in and out of my grandparents’ house. We lived exactly on the fray. It was the kind of place where everyone knew what you bought at the Pink Store, the brand of cigarette you smoked, whose car was parked at your house.
Millie’s was a house of firsts: first cigarettes, first drinks and petty crimes, first crushes—mine was Frankie McGarrigal.
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