With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir

by Christine Quinn

  Long before the concept of overscheduled children existed, my mother had us rocketing around. We took every lesson she could find: horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, diving lessons, French lessons, ballet lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Then there were the painting classes, pottery-making classes, and an array of nature courses in the summertime at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. (That’s what sparked my sister’s interest in geology.) Sometimes we’d have several in one day.

  My mother would pick me up at school, and then in the car I’d change out of my Catholic school uniform and into my horseback riding clothes. Then after that lesson, off came the blue jeans and on went the ballet leotard—all in the back-seat of the car. (It’s a skill that has come in handy in my life as Speaker of the City Council—sometimes I have to go to five different events in a day. While going from a parade of some kind to a public hearing and then to a political dinner, I often have to change in the back of the car. The only difference is that now I also have to put on makeup while the driver is navigating New York City streets and traffic. One lesson I quickly learned is never try to put on eyeliner while the car is moving. I do it anyway.)

  Whether I liked the lessons or not, I had to go to them. I loved the nature classes, and I liked painting. My father’s apartment is still full of paintings that I made when I was in elementary school.

  What I liked best was going to the stable. I started riding when I was four and rode until I went to college. When I was growing up on Long Island, horseback riding was available to just about everybody. Stables were all over the place, and the lessons were not very expensive. At first we rented a school horse, and then when I was in junior high school, they bought me a horse of my own. My first horse was named Classy. I loved her. And then I got Arthur, my second horse. I would take lessons year-round and then go to local horse shows, where I got to compete against other riders.

  In summers, when I was old enough, I spent the whole day at the stable. It was like going to camp. Whether I rented a horse or had my own, I had to be at the stable almost every day to ride it and later take care of it, so I learned what it meant to be responsible for another living creature. I also learned about doing physical work in all kinds of weather, because no matter the weather, you still had to take care of your horse. And I really liked the other kids who hung around at the stable. It was great being around a big gang of people who were all working on the same thing.

  Ellen had her own horse when she was little, too. My parents, in a typically well-meaning but ill-informed fashion, had bought her a failed racehorse. The horse was so small my parents called her Little One. Actually, if you shaved her hooves, she was just a big pony. Racehorses are trained to run, not to carry little girls, so the first thing Ellen’s horse did was buck her off and break her nose. Ellen had that small horse—or pony—for quite a while.

  You might think my father was making an executive salary to be able to afford all these lessons and extras for his daughters. That wasn’t the case. My mother’s family subsidized much of it. My mother’s sister, Julia, lived with her parents (until she moved into our house, along with my grandmother, when I was in fourth grade). She was a bookkeeper at a department store, and since she lived at home she didn’t have to pay rent, buy food, or pay a lot of bills, so she used her money to splurge on Ellen and me.

  Ellen and I had more lessons than the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, but as I was growing up, my mother began to apologize because I didn’t get as many lessons as Ellen did. She worried that I was not well-enough prepared for life because of that. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I remember thinking, “More lessons? There aren’t enough hours in the day!” That was before I knew she was ill.

  I always wondered what my mother’s obsession with lessons was all about. She would pick me up and drive me around from place to place even when she was clearly not feeling well or was very tired. When I was six, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ellen just recently told me that after the diagnosis, our mother’s primary goal was to see me through grammar school. I wonder if she ran herself ragged because she knew she didn’t have much time. Perhaps that was part of it. But it’s hard to know because she had done the same thing with Ellen. My mother was determined that her daughters would succeed at whatever we decided to do.

  Her mission in life was to make her daughters well-rounded, independent women: women who would have many skills and lots of experiences. This made it possible for us to have conversations with all kinds of people about all kinds of things. I’m grateful for that gift to this day.

  She had been a career woman before Ellen was born, working for Catholic Charities as a social worker, a job she loved. She majored in biology in college at Mount St. Vincent’s, and her plan was to become a doctor. But that wasn’t possible. The demand for places in medical schools from veterans returning from the war made it improbable that a woman like my mother would be admitted. This was a time when working women of all sorts stayed home, and many of them moved to new houses in the suburbs. Despite this disappointment, my mother respected doctors and held them in high regard, making sure we always had the best medical care. To this end, she developed an interview, or grilling, technique that allowed her to find out everything about a doctor—from their college GPA through the ins and outs of their specialty training. It served her well.

  Mommy left work in 1956, when Ellen was born. My father’s job was to provide for the family, and he took great pride in that role. My mother’s job was to be a mother and take care of the house. But she didn’t give up on trying to have an impact on the world around her, even if it was limited to helping people in the neighborhood. She believed strongly in the importance of helping people—or, if you put it in a religious framework, which I think she did, corporal works of mercy or living the beatitudes.

  Whenever there was an injustice in the neighborhood, Mommy took care of it. Ellen remembers, “She had this ridiculous trench coat with excessive jewelry on it, and whenever anything required her attention in the neighborhood, she would grab her trench coat, head out the door, and whatever the problem was, she’d get it resolved.” For example, we had Italian neighbors who didn’t speak English; she would go with them to the school over and over, to help their kids get the services they needed.

  Although she really wanted to, going back to work was not in the stars for my mother. It frustrated her terribly. In the years before she died, she was trying to teach herself typing so she’d have a better skill set when she started looking for a job. She had a typewriter on her desk and next to it was a self-instruction book called How to Type. She was frustrated and angry that she didn’t get to do the things she wanted to do. Angry that she was sick. Angry that she was scarred. Angry that her life didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped. Just thinking about all her sorrows makes me sad for her.

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Being Irish

  Growing 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 liv
ed, 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.”

  The 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 firefight
ers.

  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.