The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy

Author:Tara Clancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Once a year, usually sometime after we finished dessert, I’d work up the nerve to ask Mark, “So, what was it like in your house, as a kid, growing up?” And once a year, he’d pause, look me in the eye, and say something along the lines of, “Now, I’d say that the tarte Tatin was quite good, possibly very good, but it likely would have benefited from somewhat less sugar. What are your thoughts?” And I’d take the hint…until the next year.

But after I had asked that same question a half dozen times in as many years, just once, following his standard pause and look, instead of steering me off course with a critique of the evening’s pastry, Mark did give me an answer, of sorts. It felt like a broken-off bit of a much larger, much darker thought. A garbled little pair of words that just shot out of his subconscious like a pinball, ricocheted around his brain for a split second, then rocketed straight toward the drain: “Booze and grease…just booze and grease.”

He seemed as shocked to have said those words aloud as Mom and I were to have heard them. Afterward, for an emotionally very long but in reality very short moment, we all sat in silence shifting our gaze back and forth from the tablecloth to the curtains. Tablecloth. Curtains. Tablecloth. Curtains. Finally, mercifully, Mark started back in with his review of the soufflé.

I was eleven, too young to have a deep understanding of what summarizing the whole of your early family life and childhood home as “just booze and grease” might mean, but just old enough to know not to ask for an explanation. Which is maybe why, that same night, after his immediate diversion on dessert, he continued:

“My father had this old recliner, this tattered, grease-stained thing, and, after he’d come home from the mill, he’d pull it up to the television, right up there, an arm’s length from the screen, and then he’d take a stack of Mallomars cookies and line them up on the armrests, six or so to a side, and during the commercial breaks he’d put two of them back to back, mash them together, ratchet open his jaw, and shove the whole mess in! Like this.” And then he squashed an imaginary pair of the famous marshmallow-domed chocolate-covered treats between his fingers and rammed them two-knuckles-deep into his mouth.

Mom and I waited for him to burst out laughing before we joined in.

And that was it—those two tiny tidbits were the only things he ever told me directly about his childhood.

Over the years Mom did manage to glean a lot more details about Mark’s past, but the fuller picture came together at such a glacial pace that she couldn’t recall exactly when she learned what, let alone when she shared that information with me.

She knew that he grew up in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a bleary mill town near Providence, Rhode Island, in what we would come to learn was the 1930s.

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