Kitchen Privileges: A Memoir - Hardcover

Clark, Mary Higgins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743240901 ISBN 13: 9780743240901

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

In a charming, bittersweet memoir of growing up in the Bronx during the Depression, America's Queen of Suspense shares her recollections of her father's death in 1939, her family's financial woes, and her mother's creation of a rooming house, bringing in a colorful assortment of tenants who will change the lives of the Higgins clan. (Biography)

About this title

About the Author

The #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark has written thirty-seven suspense novels, four collections of short stories, a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. With her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, she has coauthored five more suspense novels, and also wrote The Cinderella Murder, All Dressed in White, The Sleeping Beauty Killer, and Every Breath You Take with bestselling author Alafair Burke. More than one hundred million copies of her books are in print in the United States alone. Her books are international bestsellers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

My first conscious memory is of being three years old and looking down at my new baby brother with a mixture of curiosity and distress. His crib had not been delivered on time, and he was sleeping in my doll carriage, thereby displacing my favorite doll, who was ready for her nap.

Luke and Nora, my father and mother, had kept company for seven years, a typical Irish courtship. He was forty-two and she pushing forty when they finally tied the knot. They had Joseph within the year; me, Mary, nineteen months later; and Mother celebrated her forty-fifth birthday by giving birth to Johnny. The story is that when the doctor went into her room, saw the newborn in her arms and the rosary entwined in her fingers, he observed, "I assume this one is Jesus."

Since we weren't Hispanic, in which culture Jesus is a common name, John, the first cousin of the Holy Family, was the closest Mother could get. Later when we were all in St. Francis Xavier School and instructed to write J.M.J., which stood for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, on the top of our test papers, I thought it was a tribute to Joe and me and Johnny.

The year 1931, when Johnny made his appearance, was a good one in our modest world. My father's Irish pub was flourishing. In anticipation of the new arrival, my parents had purchased a home in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. At that time more rural than suburban, it was only two streets away from Angelina's farm. Angelina, a wizened elderly lady, would show up every afternoon on the street outside our house, pushing a cart with fresh fruit and vegetables.

"God blessa your momma, your poppa, tella them I gotta lotsa nicea stringabeans today," she would say.

Our house, 1913 Tenbroeck Avenue, was a semidetached six-room brick-and-stucco structure with a second half bath in a particularly chilly section of the basement. My mother's joy in having her own home was only slightly lessened by the fact that she and my father had paid ten thousand five for it, while Anne and Charlie Potters, who bought the other side, had only paid ten thousand dollars for the identical space.

"It's because your father has his own business, and we were driving an expensive new car," she lamented.

But the expensive new car, a Nash, had sprung an oil leak as they drove it out of the showroom. "It was the beginning of our luck going sour," she would later reminisce.

The Depression had set in with grim reality. I remember as a small child regularly watching Mother answering the door to find a man standing there, his clothes clean but frayed, his manner courteous. He was looking for work, any kind of work. Did anything need repairing or painting? And if not, could we possibly help him out with a cup of coffee, and maybe something to eat.

Mother never turned away anyone. She left a card table in the foyer and would willingly fix a meal for the unexpected guest. Juice, coffee, a soft-boiled egg and toast in the morning, sandwiches and tea for lunch. I don't remember anyone ringing the bell after midafternoon. By then, God help them, they were probably on their way home, if they had a home to go to, with the disheartening news that there was no work to be had.

I loved our house and our neighborhood. Mine was the little room, its window over the front door. I would wake in the morning to the clipclop of the horses pulling the milk and bread wagons. Borden's milk. Dugan's bread and cake. Sights that have passed into oblivion as surely as the patient horses and creaking wagons that teased me awake and comforted me with their familiarity all those years ago. A box was in permanent residence on the front steps of our house to hold the milk bottles. In the winter, I used to gauge the temperature by checking to see if the cream at the top of the bottles had frozen, forcing the cardboard lids to rise.

During the summer, in midafternoon, we'd all be alert for the sound of jingling bells that meant that Eddy, the Good Humor Man, was wheeling his heavy bicycle around the corner. Looking back, I realize he couldn't have been more than in his early thirties. With a genuine smile and the patience of Job, he waited while the kids gathered around him, agonizing over their choice of flavor.

All of us had the same routine: a nickle on weekdays for a Dixie cup; a dime on Sunday for a Good Humor on a stick. That was the hardest day for making up my mind. I loved burnt almond over vanilla ice cream. On the other hand, I also loved chocolate over chocolate.

Once the choice had been made, the trick for Joe and John and me was to see who could make the ice cream last the longest so that the other guys' tongues would be hanging out as they watched the winner enjoy those final licks. The problem was that on hot Sundays the ice cream melted faster, and it wasn't unusual for the one who made it last the longest to see half the Good Humor slide off the stick and land on the ground. Then the howls of anguish from the afflicted delighted the other two, who now had the satisfaction of chanting, "Ha, ha. Thought you were so smart."

Eddy the Good Humor Man had lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand up to the knuckle. He explained that there had been something wrong with the spring of the heavy refrigerator lid, and it had smashed down on those fingers. "But it was a good accident," he explained. "The company gave me forty-two dollars, and I was able to buy a winter coat for my wife. She really needed one."

The Depression didn't really hit our family until I was in the third or fourth grade. We had a cleaning woman, German Mary, whom we called "Lally" because she would come up the block singing, "Lalalalaaaaa." Years later, she became the model for Lally in my second book, A Stranger Is Watching. Back then, she was the first perk to go.

We always had two copies of the Times delivered each day. One copy was saved, and I delivered it to the convent on my way to school the next morning. In those days the nuns were not allowed to read the current day's paper. But as times got increasingly tough, they were out of luck. Mother had to cancel the delivery of both papers. I guess when you think about it, the delivery guy was out of luck, too.

I wrote my first poem when I was six. I still have it because Mother saved everything I wrote. She also insisted that I recite everything I wrote for the benefit of anyone who happened to be visiting. Since she had four sisters and many cousins, all of whom visited frequently, I am sure there must have been regular if silent groans when she would announce, "Mary has written a lovely new poem today. She has promised to recite it for us. Mary, stand on the landing and recite your lovely new poem."

When I was finished thrilling everyone with my latest gem, my mother led the applause. "Mary is very gifted," she would announce. "Mary is going to be a successful writer when she grows up."

Looking back, I am sure that the captive audience was ready to strangle me, but I am intensely grateful for that early vote of absolute confidence I received. When I started sending out short stories and getting them back by return mail, I never got discouraged. Mother's voice always rang in my subconscious. Someday I was going to be a successful writer. I was going to make it.

That's why, if I may, I'd like to direct a few words to parents and teachers: When a child comes to you wanting to share something he or she has written or sketched, be generous with your praise. If it's a written piece, don't talk about the spelling or the penmanship; look for the creativity and applaud it. The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged. Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.

I also started writing skits, which I bullied Joe and John into performing with me. I served as writer, director, producer, and star. I remember Johnny's plaintive request, "Can't I ever be the star?"

"No, I wrote it," I explained. "When you write it, you get to be the star."

Mother's unmarried sisters, May and Agnes, were our most frequent visitors and therefore the longest suffering witnesses to my developing talent. May was eleven months older than Mother and, like her, had been a buyer in a Fifth Avenue department store. Ag, the second youngest in the family, fell in love at twenty-four with Bill Barrett, a good-looking, affable detective, fourteen years her senior. There was one fly in the ointment: old Mrs. Barrett, Bill's mother, who spent most of her life with her feet on the couch, had begged Bill not to marry until God called her. She was sure her death was imminent and wanted him under her roof when her time came.

Months became years. Everyone loved Bill, but from time to time I could hear Mother urging Agnes to ask him about his intentions. They had been keeping company for twenty-four years when God finally beckoned a Barrett, but it was Bill, not his mother, who died. At ninety-five she was still going strong. Her other son, who'd been smart enough to marry young, shipped her to a nursing home. Guess who visited her regularly? Agnes.

At seven I was given a five-year diary, one of those leather-bound jobs with four lines allotted for each day and a tiny gold key which, of course, locks nothing. The first entry didn't show much promise. Here it is, in its entirety:

"Nothing much happened today."

But then the pages began to fill, crammed with the day-to-day happenings on Tenbroeck Avenue among friends and family.

When Mother's sisters and cousins and courtesy cousins came to visit, the stories would begin around the dining room table, over the teacups.

Nora, remember Cousin Fred showing up for your wedding?...

Mother had sent an invitation to some remote cousins in Pennsylvania, forgetting that Cousin Fred had a lifetime railroad pass. He and his wife showed up on her doorstep the morning of the wedding, their nine-year-old grandson in tow. The lifetime pass included the family. Mother ended up cooking breakfast for them and having the kid running around the house while she and May dressed.

Nora, remember how that fellow you were seeing invited Agnes to the formal dance and Poppa was in a rage? "No man comes into my house and chooses between my daughters," he said.

I loved the old stories. The boys had no patience for them, but I drank them in with the tea. As long as I didn't fidget, I was always welcome to stay.

Our next door neighbor, Annie Potters, often joined the group. Charlie, a chubby policeman, was Annie's second husband. She'd been widowed during the flu epidemic of 1917, when she was twenty years old. That husband, Bill O'Keefe, rested in her memory as "my Bill." Charlie was "my Charlie." They married when both were in their late thirties.

"I was so lonesome," Annie would reminisce. "Every night I'd cry in my bed for my Bill. But nobody wants to hear your troubles, so I always kept a smile on my face. They called me the Merry Widow. Then I met my Charlie."

Charlie died many years later, at the age of seventy, and two years after that Annie married "my Joe." When God called him to join his predecessors, Annie began looking around but hadn't connected by the time she was reunited with her spouses.

A woman with a jutting jaw and dyed red hair, Annie had one of the first permanent waves ever given in the Bronx.

Unfortunately, when the heavy metal coils were removed, 60 percent of her hair permanently disappeared with them. Nevertheless, when she looked in the mirror, she saw Helen of Troy and conducted herself accordingly. Annie was the model for my continuing character, Alvirah, the Lottery Winner.

At home, the money situation grew tighter, and my father was looking more and more exhausted. His routine had been to sleep until eleven, have brunch, go to "the place," as he called the pub, come home at five o'clock for a family dinner, then go back to the place until three in the morning.

As he had to let one bartender go, then a waiter, and finally the extra bartender, he began to get up earlier and earlier to take over the ordering of supplies and the other details that his employees had formerly handled.

The problem was that in those days people ran tabs. They charged drinks, they charged their dinners, and then they couldn't pay their bills. If credit was refused, they simply went somewhere else where new credit was easily granted in the hope that payment eventually would be made.

Mother said that the people who were lucky were the ones who worked for the government -- teachers, firemen, policemen. Maybe that was the reason that when I reached dating age, her prayer for me was that I'd marry an Irish Catholic with a city job, so I'd always have a pension.

But things were tight even in the city government. Mayor LaGuardia disbanded the Policemen's Glee Club, of which Charlie Potters was a charter member. That meant that

Charlie was back directing traffic and could be heard muttering about how "the fat little midget bastard in City Hall was destroying the city's culture."

Annie's father, Mr. Fitzgerald, lived with his daughter and her husband. Known on the block as Old Man Fitz, he'd sit by the hour on the divider between our stoops, puffing on a pipe, his skinny behind protected by a thick pillow. Every so often he'd moan, "Oh, my God," which if you happened to be passing by was a touch unnerving.

Mother decided that if she rented the little room, my room, it would bring in extra money, and so we took in a boarder. We could not know then that our first roomer was but a preview of coming attractions. She was a slender lady of uncertain age, with pale skin, limpid eyes, and wispy hair that she wrapped in a loose chignon.

Her wardrobe was sufficient to clothe a convention of similarly sized women. Her effects began to arrive the week before she joined us: a steamer trunk, suitcases, hat boxes. I wondered if she thought she had rented the whole house.

Then she arrived, and a problem soon became evident. She began her morning toilette at 5:30 A.M. Back and forth from the little room to the bathroom she flip-flopped on backless high-heeled sandals. The tub roared. The sink gushed.

She flushed the toilet at two minute intervals. It was Joe's theory that she was giving individual pieces of Kleenex a ride through the sewer system.

The bathroom shared a common wall with my father's bedroom. Daddy was already sleep-deprived, so the last thing he needed was our new tenant. She lasted only one week, so I got my little room back again, at least temporarily.

Saturdays we went to the movies. Ten cents bought an afternoon's entertainment consisting of a double feature, previews of coming attractions, a cartoon, Movietone News ("The eyes and ears of the world") and a Lone Ranger serial.

On the way home, we went to confession, hoping to avoid Father Campbell, who could have headed the Spanish Inquisition. I remember trembling as I confessed that I had looked up a bad word in the dictionary.

The word was "damn," and my curiosity had been aroused by the difference between ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743240901
• ISBN 13: 9780743240901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224