With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir
Read With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Online
Authors: Christine Quinn
To Mary Callaghan Quinn
and Anthony L. Catullo Jr.,
two people who knew New York
City was always home
C
ONTENTS
P
ART
II. L
EARNING
M
Y
C
ITY
, F
INDING
M
YSELF
P
ART
III. T
HE
C
IRCLE OF
J
OY AND
S
ORROW
W
hen I was a kid, I fell in love with libraries. I loved the silence. I loved the smell of the books, and the hushed sounds of people stepping from room to room. It was always exciting to check out books at the librarian’s desk and to clutch them in the crook of my elbow as we left. Biographies of people who changed the world were everything to me.
I still love libraries, and for me the two lions that sit on either side of the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue are dear friends. I watch them and imagine their moods and feelings. I think about their reactions to the events that crown our city, and the attacks that harm it. For me, the lions symbolize both my aspirations and those of my city.
Patience and Fortitude, they are called. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave the lions their names during the Great Depression. He knew our citizens would rise to the occasion, and to spur them on, he named the lions. La Guardia was known for his passions for the poor and the powerless. He brought energy and hope to our city, when it was mired in the Great Depression. That’s another reason I love the lions.
And then there’s Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department who died in the attacks of September 11. He rushed into the command center of Tower One, and when the second tower went down, he died. Many New Yorkers remember the picture of Father Judge’s body being carried out of the building. It still brings tears to my eyes. I learned that when he was low, he would walk up Fifth Avenue from his rectory and stand across the street from the library and look at the lions and pray for patience and fortitude. Whenever I think about Patience and Fortitude, I find myself thinking about him and his good works—with the poor, the homeless, people with AIDS, and anyone else who was struggling to get by in difficult circumstances—and how patience and fortitude served him well in his work.
I love those lions. They make me think of La Guardia’s endless energy and hope, of Father Judge’s faith and courage.
I may not be famous for patience. I like to get things done, done on time and done right. And New Yorkers on the whole are an impatient lot. We run across the avenue when the traffic light turns yellow, and we check our watches when a line moves slowly. The tempo of our city is fast and exciting. I find myself exhilarated by it. The energy fits my personality. So patience is something I try for, but don’t always achieve.
But when it comes to fortitude, we can’t be beat. That energy that has us tapping our toes when a subway is slow—that’s the same energy that makes us get up in the morning and accomplish whatever we need to do. That’s the energy that built our skyscrapers and attracted the artists, the writers, the performers. That’s the energy that fuels every immigrant community in our town, from the settlers of New Amsterdam to the people who live in all our boroughs today, in all the amazing variety of their cultures and languages. And that’s what has sustained me through my life.
Most of us don’t have it easy, and neither did I. We encounter difficulties that call for patience, and we face obstacles that demand fortitude. That’s life, and that’s the story of my life, just as it may be the story of yours. But we keep on trying to make it through, somehow, with hope for patience and trust in our fortitude.
During the holiday season, Patience and Fortitude are often bedecked with beautiful holly wreaths around their necks. I love the dressed-up lions. They make me stop and think of all the things we can celebrate in this magnificent town of ours, and they remind me of the work that is still to be done and the fun that is still to be had.
So I have a ready answer to the unfortunate politician’s question “Who is your favorite New Yorker?” I always say that I have two favorites, Patience and Fortitude.
M
y mother gave wonderful parties. She hated living in the suburbs, but she loved entertaining. She kept a bag in the credenza in the dining room that was filled with place cards for every occasion. There were place cards decorated with drawings of the
Niña,
the
Pinta,
and the
Santa Maria
for Columbus Day; George Washington’s head for Washington’s Birthday (that was before they combined Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays into a single national holiday); and wreaths for Christmas. You name the holiday, she had a set of place cards for it.
One year she threw a Mickey Mouse party for my birthday. It was Mickey and Minnie, all the way. The house was festooned with Mouse stuff, and my mom sent me around the neighborhood so I could give all the kids who were invited mouse ears to wear and a long black shoelace for a tail. Another year was the Raggedy Ann birthday party—my mother
loved
theme parties. And it wasn’t just for kids. Her New Year’s parties were famous. The entertaining dwindled around the time I was six, but she did give one last New Year’s Eve party when I was in seventh or eighth grade. In an attempt to replicate the Times Square ball drop, she strung netting along the ceiling of the playroom and filled the netting with balloons, which cascaded down at the stroke of midnight. The parties stopped completely when she became too ill.
A great hostess, she was also a terrible cook. I mean terrible. Still, I was her eager helper. Usually that meant going with her when she picked up takeout, but on occasion she would cook, usually out of a can. Every vegetable I ever had at home, aside from iceberg lettuce, was canned. I recall once suggesting to my mother that we follow a recipe for tomato sauce that appeared on the back of a ketchup bottle, which I thought would be better than just getting the sauce out of a can. It wasn’t half bad, so my mother decided to save the recipe. And she used it often, reading the recipe off the back of the bottle she had saved. I loved helping my mother. We adored each other from the very beginning.
My sister remembers watching my mother and me preparing this “homemade” spaghetti sauce. I was maybe eight years old, standing side by side with my mother at the stove, which was nothing unusual because I was always at my mother’s side. I was on a step stool so I could reach over the pot and pour jars of ketchup into it. The ketchup went all over the kitchen, but nobody cared.
My dad tells a story about her cooking when they were first married. Shortly after the wedding, my parents invited the priest who had married them over for dinner. My mother asked my father, “How do you make a roast beef?” He said, “Oh, it’s easy, you just put salt and pepper on it, and roast it for a couple of hours at 350, and you’re good to go.” (My father didn’t have any sisters, so he and his brother had helped in the kitchen.)
So my father came home from work, and my mother was in the bedroom—which was in the back of their apartment—getting ready, and the kitchen was filled with smoke. She hadn’t taken the meat out of the wrapper or put it in a pan. She just sprinkled salt and pepper on the outside and put it in the oven at 350 degrees, as instructed (or at least that’s how my father tells the story). They took the priest out to dinner. She was a terrible driver, too, and she hated driving.
Cooking and housekeeping—which my mother also loathed—and driving the car were what suburban motherhood was all about. This was a problem. Throughout her life, she was a die-hard city person. She missed the city. She felt isolated. She despised housework and gardening. Although my father adapted better to the suburbs, he missed the city as well. He never stopped talking about his magical childhood on Ninety-sixth Street and First Avenue, which was not such a great neighborhood when he was growing up, a rough part of town, but he loved it and still tells endless stories about the neighborhood as if it were paradise.
S
o why did my parents choose this suburban life? In part because it was what people were doing in that era, and in part because in the late 1950s it wasn’t so easy to find an affordable apartment for a middle-class family in a good neighborhood in Manhattan. That’s what pushed people to the suburbs. It still does. My parents wanted a nice home for the family—this was well before I was born, but my sister, Ellen, was around. So without doing much planning or research, they opened up the
New York Times,
saw an ad for a development in Glen Cove, Long Island, and got in the car to investigate.
They found a house on a dead end. It was a classic four-bedroom, center-hall colonial, with a two-car garage on an acre of land. My mother was sold on it without much looking around because in her mind dead ends meant no cars and lots of space for children to play safely. Libby Drive would be perfect.
It was for me. You could be out all day after school and into the long summer evenings. We would play baseball (with a tennis ball) or basketball, ride our bikes, or just run around. Lots of the neighbor families had kids, and I knew everyone, so there was no need for playdates or other arrangements. I just went outside and looked for the other kids. I’m told that I was very good at organizing the other kids, so I came to be known by the adults as the Mayor of Libby Drive. My mother loved this aspect of our life, and she extended her love of party favors and planning to other parts of the neighborhood children’s lives. For holidays like Halloween, she would make personalized candy bags for all the neighbor kids. But not just any candy. Before the holiday, she would determine what each child’s favorite was—and that would fill the bag, personalized by favorite and by name. Presenting each child with their own bag brought her such joy.