Read With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Online
Authors: Christine Quinn
I stayed fairly well composed during the wake’s three sittings, but I lost it at the funeral. Even before it started, I remember my father and sister walking up to the front of the room to pray at my mother’s casket. I was standing in the doorway in the back and couldn’t move. I watched from behind as Ellen turned to my father, crying, “Oh, Daddy.” I must have joined them at some point, because I remember the coffin. I’d already said no to the funeral director when he’d asked me if I’d bring the wine and the host up to the priest during the mass. I’d pointed to my first cousins and said, “They’ll do it!” I just couldn’t.
It was a typical funeral mass, which is similar to a regular mass: two readings, a gospel, and a sermon. There were two priests doing the mass. One came from my family’s church, St. Patrick’s, and one came from St. Rocco’s, a church that my mother liked and attended on occasion. The priests both gave eulogies as well. No one else spoke, which was typical in those days for Catholic funerals.
I had to be taken out of the funeral at one point, because I was so upset. My mother’s friend Mrs. Gorman (the mother of the family I was always sent to visit) walked me around outside. One of my friends said later that since I’d held up so well at the wake, she was surprised when I fell to pieces at the funeral. I begged my father and Ellen to let me skip the cemetery. It was such a long drive, and I just wanted to go home and go to bed. But I had no choice. When we got there, we watched as the plain wooden box was lowered into the ground. The coffin was inside the box to protect it from the dirt.
The priests recited some prayers, we were each given a rose to throw on top of the coffin, and then it was over. Everything went off as my mother had planned, except for the open casket and the fact that we ran out of funeral cards. She hadn’t counted on the huge number of people who would attend. We also didn’t have a gathering at our house or at a restaurant after the funeral, which is typically done, because the funeral was held on Christmas Eve; people had other places to go and things to do.
After the burial, I couldn’t wait to get home, but Ellen had other ideas. She wanted to finish the Christmas shopping and insisted that we go home, change, and drive to the Miracle Mile shopping area in Manhasset, which isn’t far from where we lived. What I didn’t know at the time was that among the notes our mother left for Ellen were instructions regarding Christmas gifts. The note listed the gifts she’d already bought and the ones she wanted Ellen to buy, and she explained where they were supposed to go, including which ones were for me. In the instructions she wrote, “This gift is for Christine,” and each time she wrote my name, she underlined it three times. Ellen thinks she did that because she wanted to be sure that I received the gifts she’d bought for me.
I can’t remember what I got for Christmas that year, but I know what I got from my mother. She left me with a sense of worth and possibility. She left me with a sense that I have a responsibility to continue her mission, to improve people’s lives, and to make sure that nobody is left behind. The urgency she conveyed—because she knew her time was short—gets me up and out every morning. My mother taught me to use every minute, because we never know when our time is up.
O
ur house was a much quieter—and sadder—place at the start of 1983. My mother was gone. My grandmother, too. She had moved into a nursing home before my mother died. Her age and related conditions made it too difficult for us to take care of her. So now it was just Julia, my father, and me living at home. Without any discussion, we quickly fell into our own routines and very much went our separate ways. For me that meant focusing on school and school-related activities, spending time at the stable, and going out with my friends on the weekends.
That sounds sad, and it was, but there were a lot of bright spots for me in those years. I loved high school, Old Westbury School of the Holy Child. It was a place of salvation and great comfort for me in many ways. It hadn’t been my first choice—I’d wanted to go to a coed public high school—but that wasn’t in the cards. My mother and father were both extremely religious, so there was never any question that Ellen and I would go to Catholic school. At my high school, being Catholic was a given, but it was background noise to me. You were taught the way things were, and you weren’t expected to ask questions.
What made Holy Child so special was the fact that it was a small school: there were only twenty-four students in my entire class, and they were all girls. A small school was a great place for me, especially after my mother died, because everyone was so supportive.
Because there were so few of us, we got a lot of individual attention, and no one fell through the cracks. Everyone participated in every aspect of school life, including the sports teams, because you needed everybody to play. So there wasn’t the kind of hierarchy you might have found at a larger school. We did have cool kids, smart kids, and athletic kids, but our classes were so small that nobody cared.
My experience with a single-sex high school was also positive. When you take boys out of the equation, girls wind up focusing on their potential and their skills. I think if every girl went to a girls’ school, regardless of ability to pay, it would be an extremely empowering experience. It certainly was for me.
Also, the emphasis on reading—from the very beginning of my Catholic education right through the Great Books course I had in high school—gave me a lifelong passion for libraries. (In my role as an elected official, I’ve always been a big advocate for keeping libraries open and protecting them from budget cuts. In my early years as City Council Speaker, when there was a budget surplus, we restored funding so that libraries could stay open six days a week instead of five.)
I’m not a fast reader, so it takes me longer than most to finish a book. But I loved the way we learned. Our teachers were terrific. Our classes were interestingly structured. We had a marvelous program in our junior and senior years that put English, history, and theology together under Area Studies. They were team-taught by the three separate departments. One year you did Europe. The next year you did the United States. They put the juniors and seniors together. We had great literature classes. Some of our classes were held in the convent, so we would sit on couches and comfy chairs and listen and talk. That place probably gave me the best sense of confidence about my intellectual abilities.
In grammar school, I had loved reading the biographies of great political and civil rights leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. I learned so much from biographies of nonpoliticians who did important things, like Helen Keller; Booker T. Washington; George Washington Carver, who was born a slave and became a leading botanist; Molly Pitcher, who fought in the Revolutionary War; Marie Curie, who discovered polonium and radium; and Dr. Charles Drew, who discovered plasma. Those biographies got me hooked on politics and government, which I came to love. I saw the evidence that one person could have a positive impact on the world. The biographies also inspired me to want to do something—and to maybe even be the first at something—that made a difference in people’s lives.
Academics and reading weren’t the only inspiring parts of high school for me. For example, you might not think that organizing Sports Night at Old Westbury was the beginning of a life in politics, but I was one of the lead organizers, and I loved it. Lots of schools did it. Some call it Sports Night, but others call it Color Night. Half the school was the blue team, and half the school was the white team, and we had themes. So you’d have to do an entrance that was on the theme, and a dance, and cheerleading, and there’d be athletics. People would work on Sports Night for months. You either did it perfunctorily or you got totally into it. I got totally into it.
My freshman year the theme was “The Wild, Wild White West,” because I was on the white team. Another year it was a mythology theme, and another it was “The Great White Way.” My father always jokes that between the political demonstrations I organize, which can include costumes and thematic signs, my professional career is just an extension of Sports Night. I loved the group activity of it. I actually loved every big activity in high school. I was editor of the newspaper and senior class president—not such a feat in a class of twenty-four. But we had fun both in school and outside. And I had my own car, which made getting to school and going out on weekends a lot easier.
I
had all the freedom a teenager could want, probably too much. My father never set a curfew—I came and went as I pleased. I don’t think he was prepared for raising a typical teenage daughter, especially since my sister hadn’t gone out a lot when she was in high school. And now that my mother was gone, he was thrust into this role that he had no frame of reference for. In the generation in which he grew up, it was the wife’s job to set the rules and keep tabs on what the children were doing. I didn’t always make it easy for him, and I don’t think he was always happy about the things I chose to do, but he never said a word.
Aunt Julia, who still lived with us, financed my social life in the kindest manner. She devised a way to be my unofficial banker. I didn’t have a formal allowance, so whenever I needed money, I’d go to her underwear drawer. She kept a statue of the Virgin Mary in the drawer, and inside the statue was a place where she’d stash bills. She always made sure there were plenty of twenty-dollar bills there, so if I needed cash, I’d take twenty or forty out of Mary. Julia must have checked regularly, because the statue always held what I needed.
My friends and I traveled in packs, mostly, and we had fun. This part of life is when many teenagers start drinking. On a typical weekend, a group of us would go to Manhattan to the Limelight or the Palladium. Or when we stayed on Long Island, we’d go to Malibu in Lido Beach or to TR’s (for Teddy Roosevelt) in Williston Park. We’d go out around nine or ten and meet up with other friends. Sometimes one or more of the girls would bring along a boyfriend or an older brother. Then you’d just go and hang out, dance, and drink. If you weren’t driving, you’d drink until you were drunk. It certainly wasn’t sophisticated, but getting smashed didn’t seem out of the ordinary, at least among the people I knew. We’d sometimes make our way home at three or four in the morning.
From early on I assumed that I wasn’t going to have a romantic life. I just wrote it off. So when my friends talked about boys they liked, the ones they found attractive, and which ones they were going to pursue, it felt irrelevant to me. I had my own philosophy, my own set of goals. I was going to make something of myself. I was going to help people. I was going to have fun. But as far back as I can remember, I subscribed to the belief that you can’t have everything. I had friends, I was smart, and I did pretty well in school, and that was enough. I didn’t worry about my sexuality. I didn’t feel much of anything. I had a couple of dates with boys, and they didn’t work, so I went back to the group and put all other thoughts out of my mind.
My friends and I were a close-knit group, and the fact that there were no boys romantically in my life didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was being what I believed was overweight and unattractive. My sadness and my lack of physical self-confidence meshed together, leaving me feeling powerless and desperate to fix this aspect of my life. I had failed to make my mother better. I had given up on romance. I had to succeed at losing weight. I had to get control over something in my life, and controlling my weight, therefore, became my obsession.
I decided that self-induced vomiting was the answer. I started making myself sick when I was sixteen. It never helped me lose weight. Clearly that wasn’t what it really was about.
And on top of how I felt about the way I looked, I was sad and lonely in the aftermath of my mother’s death. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a fat, motherless kid with pimples who couldn’t figure out how to dress or do her hair or do any of the things girls are supposed to know how to do.
But see, the trouble is you start self-inducing vomiting for one reason, or at least you think that’s why you’re doing it, and it becomes a way to escape the things you’re really feeling. By excessively overeating, you become numbed out. Which is a great place to be if you’re feeling any of the overwhelming things I was feeling as a teenager. And by physically vomiting, you’re expelling more than the ridiculous amounts of food you’ve ingested. You’re expelling whatever you’re feeling, whatever you don’t understand, all of your difficulties—you’re just getting rid of them. I was throwing up the pain of my mother’s death, the overwhelming guilt I felt for my role in her sad life, and my sorrow, my mountains of sorrow.
The other thing you’re doing, by self-inducing vomiting, is making your body do something it’s not supposed to do. And if you are in an exceedingly out-of-control situation, you’ve mastered control over
some
thing, which gives you a false sense of power.
The bulimia and the drinking didn’t have much significance to me then, because I thought everybody was doing it and I assumed I would stop when I wanted to. I was young and thought I was having a good time and could not see into the future. I didn’t know that these ways of coping with misery and guilt would follow me for years. Not until I was an adult would I come to deal with them.
N
ow when I think about my belief that I was overweight, I realize I was actually wrong. After my mother died, my father and Aunt Julia and I took a trip to Maine to look at colleges. When I look at pictures of myself on that trip, I don’t see a fat girl. I looked perfectly reasonable. But when I was a small child, I was clearly very chubby. When I was in high school, I
thought
I was fat, but the pictures don’t bear that out. Unfortunately, my self-image and my need to use it against myself was already set by high school, and it’s been something I’ve struggled with ever since.