The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy Read Free Book Online Page A

parents lived in an apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, one neighborhood over from where Mom had grown up. But after a year they moved to a house in Rosedale, Queens—which my mother then called “the country.” Dad considers their having bought a house together the reason it “wasn’t all bad, you see? That’s something!” For my mom’s part, the plus side was: “Well, he taught me to drive! He let me use his green Dodge Dart—paid for lessons and everything.”
    Neither of my parents has offered me much in the way of romantic stories from their time together following that fateful night at McNulty’s Bar and Dance Club. What they have given me is some idea of what their lives looked like in the few years before I was born, which helped me understand why those romantic stories were missing in the first place.
    My father was then assigned to the 75th precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—which at the time had the highest homicide rate in the city’s history. My mother spent a long while trying to convince him to find another type of work. “I was scared shit,” she told me, “but your father sincerely wanted to help people, and he thought this was the way to do that. I loved him for it, but I didn’t think it would pan out that way. He didn’t listen to me—didn’t complain either, though. He didn’t talk about it at all, as a matter of fact. But it wouldn’t be long before I could see that the job was changing him.”
    Having earned her degree in social work from St. Joseph’s, Mom was hired as a caseworker for Catholic Charities. It was 1974, and she was assigned to split her time between their Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, offices, two of the roughest neighborhoods in New York City at the time. In the former, she worked mostly with teenage girls fleeing gangs. For a long while she felt she was in over her head, but she liked to listen, and the girls trusted her enough to talk. As she puts it, “Hard as they had it, those girls had hope, and I saw them progress.”
    It was a very different story at her Queens assignment. In Far Rockaway my mother split her time between counseling alcohol- and drug-addicted teens at a clinic and tracking down families who had abandoned their terminally ill children at a local hospital (unfortunately, this is something of a known phenomenon). One of the teens she counseled was a poor Irish addict named Teresa, whom my mother grew particularly close with. After a year of consistently making her regularly scheduled appointments, one day Teresa was late. Finally my mom went out into the neighborhood looking for her. She found her, not far from the clinic, dead in the street from an overdose. Just a short time later, after my mom had successfully counseled a woman who had stopped visiting her ill child to return to the hospital, the child died an hour before the mother arrived. “It was like some terrible, terrible movie,” she remembers.
    After six years, she was coming home from her job as dejected and depressed as my father did from his. And when she became pregnant with me, she knew that, once I was born, she would have to take a break from her job.
    My mom stayed home with me until my first birthday. My parents were barely able to pay their bills on my dad’s NYPD salary alone, and she had reached a point where she was looking under the couch cushions for change to buy me milk every week. So when a friend mentioned that her boss was looking for someone to clean his apartment, Mom decided to take the job. “No drug overdoses, no dying children, and—sad as it was—better pay.”
    —
    The boss’s apartment was in a neighborhood about fifteen miles from where we then lived in Rosedale, Queens, less than ten from where my mom had grown up in Brooklyn, less than five from where she’d once worked, in the city, and yet she had never even heard of this part of town before. “A lot of people haven’t heard of it. Don’t worry,