I was born in Liberty Hospital in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1934. Not the high rent district then or now. My birth certificate, signed by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, notes that my mother was Miriam Lynch and my father was Thomas F. McCann. I don’t know anything about my parents’ life together before I was born. I don’t know how they met, when they met, or how long they had known each other before they got married.
What I do know is that when I was born, my dad worked on a newsstand at Penn Station. His salary was twelve dollars a week for a six-day week. He told me he supplemented this meager income by being a “runner” for a Penn Station bookie, which earned him another dollar a day. It was a job that a year later landed him in jail. But he never brought much money home. He gambled most of it away; money was always a problem for our family. He also drank to excess. We lived in rented places. We never owned anything or had a car or took a vacation or had a bank account.
Yet until I was eight or nine, I thought he was a good dad and better than most fathers in our neighborhood. I didn’t see much of him, but when I did, I remember the only thing I really didn’t like was his breath. I didn’t know what the smell was; I later discovered it was beer and whiskey and cigarettes, all of which contributed to his death. From an early age, I saw him indulge these habits first-hand. When I was four or five, he would take me into Brady’s Bar and Grille, on the corner of the street where we lived, and sit me up on the bar. I didn’t like it. The bar was always wet with beer, and the wetness would seep through my short pants. I was afraid people would see it and think I’d wet my pants. Even worse than the wet bar was the bathroom. A handwritten sign on the door read “Used Beer Department,” which says it all. It was a foul place. I can’t begin to describe the smell. I’ve been in a lot of dirty bathrooms all over the world, but Brady’s was by far the worst.
When I was a little older, he worked for the Union News Company, which ran several restaurants in New York stations as well as ferry terminals on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, including one in Weehawken that my dad managed. He worked afternoons and evenings seven days a week and told us he slept in his office many nights. I never had dinner with my father, though once in a while he would take me over to the Weehawken restaurant, and I’d return to Brooklyn on the subway by myself. He was fired from that job for stealing seventy-five dollars from the cash box. It was around this time I realized he was an alcoholic and a gambler. To this day, I don’t know which is worse.
After that I became less tolerant of my father and cared less about him. I ignored him whenever possible. When I was twenty, he came to me and asked if I could get him a job at the company I was working at. Against my better judgment, I got him a low-level job there, and he soon got drunk and made a scene that embarrassed me. So I arranged to have him fired. Yes, I had my own father fired. It was the right thing to do.
I never knew his parents and know very little about them. In my late twenties I moved to Boston and didn’t see him much. My children never knew him. He was not in their lives. When I got the news that he had cancer and had perhaps a year to live I sent him money each week so he could continue to gamble and check the racing results each day to see if he picked a winner. I did this despite the fact that I never gamble. I hate to lose. I do not even buy a lottery ticket.
Yet when he died, he faced death well. I hope when my time comes, I handle it as well as he did. He dealt with death better than he did anything else in his life. For the year it took for him to die, knowing that he was terminally ill, he waited calmly and bravely. My sister, Mimi, told me he never asked, “Why me?” He never complained about pain or expressed any fear of death.
Perhaps he welcomed death because his life was very unhappy. He remained a gambler to the end. The last thing he did on this earth, hours before he died, was to place a bet from the hospital with his bookie. He had also been in a loveless marriage. The night before he died, my mother spoke at length about their problems. She told me things I didn’t want to hear. But I think it made her feel better.
When I got the news that he’d died, I felt nothing. A couple of days later, looking down at his frail body in its coffin in a New York funeral home, I still felt nothing. At his wake, I walked up to the coffin with visitors, including his bookie, who made a point of telling me that my father’s last bet “ran out of the money.” I felt guilty about not feeling even the slightest bit of sadness. I started to wonder what was wrong with me that even standing in front of the body of the man who gave me life, I felt no emotion, no sorrow for a wasted life, no relief that it was over . . . not a single tear.
When the funeral home was closing for the night, I walked up to the coffin for the traditional last look of the day, and I noticed for the first time that my father’s hands looked very small. They were folded across his waist, with rosary beads entwined in his fingers. I had never seen him in that position in life and certainly never saw rosary beads in his hands. His hands looked small, half the size of mine, and I suddenly remembered a moment long ago when his hands were not twice as small as mine but twice as big. When I was five years old, he took my small hand in his as we crossed Liberty Avenue, a busy Brooklyn street, with two sets of trolley tracks, heavy trucks, passenger cars, and even horse-drawn carts. I felt very safe holding my father’s hand. I didn’t have to look both ways. I had my hand in his, and I knew that he would do the looking for both of us.
Another memory followed, from a couple of years later when I was seven or eight and getting washed and dressed to go to school. It was cold outside. And inside. We had to boil water in large pots on the gas stove. Three pots produced only about three inches of water in the bathtub. That morning, my father came into the bathroom as I was about to put the cold cloth to my face to wash my face and neck. Without saying a word, he took the facecloth from me and held it tightly in his hand for a minute, then switched the facecloth to his other hand and held it tightly again. When he handed it back to me, it was warm.
I cried. Those memories reminded me of a time when my dad cared about me more than he cared about the things that drove us apart. So I cried, as a son should when his father dies. I know more about my mom’s background. Let me start with her grandfather. His name was Lincoln Campbell, named so because he was born on April 14, 1865, the night President Lincoln was assassinated. His mother died giving birth to him. His father was so distraught over the loss of his wife that he blew his brains out that night. ln those days suicide (like cancer) was considered dishonorable and a “weakness,” especially in prominent families. And the Campbells were prominent—Major Duncan Campbell had come from Scotland to the Colonies to fight in the Revolutionary War, fallen in love with Catherine Bayard, married, and then, with a lot of help from William Bayard, founded New York’s first savings bank.
So the family decided to put the baby up for adoption and have nothing further to do with him. A month after he was born, Lincoln was adopted by a Brooklyn family named Green. Lincoln became Lincoln Green. Mr. Green owned a butcher shop and taught his adopted son the business at an early age.
I met my great-grandfather. In his old age he came to live with us. He told me he’d left school after he learned to read and write and was taught enough arithmetic so that he could “change money.” He didn’t find out he was adopted until he was sixteen, and the night Mrs. Green told him, he left and never contacted the Greens again. So much for gratitude. That coldness is a trait that I am sorry to say runs through the family to this day.
At eighteen or nineteen, Lincoln married Maria Deering, a German immigrant referred to by everyone in the family as the Duchess. Because her mother had been a lady in waiting to a German duchess, Maria affected royal ways. She was a tyrant: profane, selfish, short-tempered, and at times violent. Lincoln, on the other hand, was a quiet, easy-going loner. He was a Brooklyn butcher and certainly no duke. Together he and Maria produced seven children, many of whom the Duchess handed off to her eldest daughter, May, to raise. May was my grandmother. I always called her Nanny, and she would be a very important person in my life.
Young May worked day and night taking care of the house and raising her sisters and brothers. One morning around nine, the doorbell rang, and May, as usual, answered it. A short, stocky bald man, about thirty-five, was on the stoop. He stepped back, looked up at her and said, “You don’t know me, May. But I know you. My name is Mr. Lynch, and I live up the street. I’ve been looking at you for the past couple of years. I am ready to get married and raise a family. I am a hard-working man. I am sober. ln fact, I do not drink at all. Never did, nor do l smoke. I’m not religious, but I respect those who do follow a religion. I suppose you are Catholic, and that is all right with me. I don’t care what you are as long as you are not Jewish or from that part of the world. I have a very good job. I am a master cabinetmaker. I have saved my money and have it in a secret hiding place. I do not trust banks. I will not tell you how much, but I am ready to take a wife. I want to know if you would consider becoming my wife.”
I know what Mr. Lynch said word for word because Nanny told the story many times, and in the telling it never varied. She told him to come back at five o’clock and she’d give him her answer. When she told the story, she said that she was fifteen at the time, but my mother said the records revealed that she was only fourteen. Mr. Lynch came back at five, and Nanny said she would marry him. He said he was delighted and told her that the next day he was going up to Boston to build some showcases for a department store and would be back in six weeks. He asked her to find some nice rooms (what apartments were called at the time), to furnish them, and to write him a note giving him the address of their new apartment. He said they would be married the day he returned.
At that point he reached into his pocket, pulled out a fat roll of bills, and handed her $800, an enormous amount of money at that time. That night, after everyone went to sleep, Nanny left the house and never returned, exactly as her father had done. She stayed the night with a friend, Mrs. Miriam Mullins. Nanny would name her only daughter, my mother, Miriam. The next day she found an apartment and spent $400 furnishing all five rooms. She returned the balance to Mr Lynch. He came back six weeks later, and they were married at City Hall.
I wish I could say they lived happily ever after. Until the day he died, Nanny addressed him as Mr. Lynch. And referred to him that way. They had nothing in common but the children they produced. Mr. Lynch was an indifferent parent, except to the eldest son, Charles, and only daughter, Miriam. Mr. Lynch was one of seven brothers, most of whom were strange and difficult men, roughnecks who grew up in violent, crime-ridden New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mr. Lynch was an ardent baseball fan, and his oldest boy, Charlie, became a major league player—not good enough for the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Yankees, but good enough to be signed by the Cincinnati Reds. Unfortunately, he broke his wrist in his first spring training, which in those days meant the end of his baseball career.
Miriam was another favorite, and Nanny claimed he “spoiled her.” A third child, a boy, died at age four when somebody threw a huge stone and hit him in the head. The last born of the four, my uncle Arthur, always was and always will be my hero. He was named after Dr. Arthur Lauer, Nanny’s doctor and, according to my mother, the love of Nanny’s life. He died from pneumonia at the age of forty-one, and my mother said you could hear Nanny’s wailing a block away.
Uncle Charlie became an alcoholic at an early age and died at forty-three. He always called me “peckerhead” long before I knew what a pecker was. My grandfather, Mr. Lynch, died in his early fifties, leaving Nanny a widow in her late twenties. His last words to her were, “May, you are the cleanest woman I have ever known,” words she cherished. Because she was meticulous about keeping her home clean.
My mother, on the other hand, was not so meticulous, and it led to conflict between her and Nanny. After her father died, my mother continued the family tradition of leaving home at a young age. She went to live with the family of her best and lifelong friend, Evelyn Wolf. The Wolfs were Jewish, and my mother became Jewish. She learned Yiddish, developed Jewish mannerisms and speech patterns, loved the food, and dated only Jewish men. She had jet black hair, a dark complexion, and a Jewish sense of humor. Miriam is a biblical Hebrew name, so all her life people though she was a Jew. She loved that.
My mother had several phobias. I don’t know if that word had been coined in the twenties or thirties, but I know not all of them had been identified. It seems new ones are being discovered all the time. She was afraid of the dark, afraid to go out of the house, afraid of dying. She almost never rode a train, bus, or trolley. Her many phobias were very limiting, to say the least. And they placed a burden on my sister and me—me first because I was older than Mimi. But Mimi did far more for my mother than I did. And for my father as well.
From the time I was eight until I was sixteen or so, I bought all her clothes including shoes, girdles, garter belts, stockings. Outfitting her was easy: I knew her sizes and the styles she liked. Most important of all, I knew how much we could afford to pay. The Brooklyn shopkeepers knew me. I would select three or four dresses, a couple of pairs of shoes, and so on, and take them to her “on approval.” She would pick what she wanted, and I would take the other things back to the store. If she didn’t like any of my selections, she would send me back to choose others. It was system, and it worked all those years.
My mother was always surrounded by men because she was attractive and smart, with a great sense of earthy humor. She was a good storyteller and an equally good listener. She loved me. She thought I was great. We had fun together. We made each other laugh even when there wasn’t much to laugh about. She laid down no arbitrary rules for me. She did the best she could.
Her mother, Nanny, didn’t like my mother or anything about her. They were as opposite as two people could be. Nanny woke at dawn each day, washed her hair each morning and brushed it a hundred strokes a side. She went grocery shopping, did laundry by hand, washed dishes (and actually dried them by hand), and cooked a full breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My mother did none of those things, and what made it worse was that Nanny lived with us.
My mother was a bedwetter. She claimed that her mother would take the urine-soaked panties and rub her nose in the foul-smelling cloth. Simple as that. Much as I loved her, I could see Nanny doing that. She was a strict German and strong disciplinarian and had been trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man.
All her life my mother was preoccupied with death. She frequently gave detailed instructions about what to do when she died—the coffin, the service, even what to do with her two dogs. She wanted to be laid out in high-heeled shoes and stockings even though the coffin would be closed below the waist. She gave us strict instructions as to the new dress she wanted—light blue, with a high neck and full, sheer sleeves. All her directives were carried out.
My mother did lie to me once. It was a big lie, and it changed my life. I did not find out about it until a couple of months before she died. I was angry at the time, but now I’m glad she told me. Her lie changed my life for the better.