In the Shadow of the Cedar - A Memoir

By Eileen McCartin Love

"In the Shadow of the Cedar - A Memoir" by Eileen McCartin Love tells the story of a girl's growing up within the gravitational pull of her family's ancestral home on Cedar Drive. For years the author was captivated by her mother's often haunting tales of the individuals who lived in that beloved place: the trio of Irish immigrant girls who occupied the attic dormitory; the sweet young mother who tragically died in childbirth in an upstairs room; the crippled grandmother who stepped in to rear the six motherless children. There was also the folklore that surrounded the neighborhood, at the center of which was the "deadly" local lake rumored to have no bottom! The sorrowful tales were lived out, side by side, with episodes of laughter and merriment too, as the six mischievous children played jokes on one another, taunted their patient grandma, and ran roughshod over the neighborhood, past turn-of-the-century houses belonging to stars of the entertainment, literary, and business worlds.

A distance away from Cedar Drive the author spends most of her girlhood exploring the far reaches of her suburban backyard and reveling in her mother's stories of long ago, looking for points of intersection between her life in the 1960s and her mother's in the 1920s. The result is a book that is equal parts funny and poignant, and speaks to universal truths about self and family. Told in a series of lively vignettes, it is filled with wonderfully descriptive stories, sprinkled with period references spanning the 1920s through the 1990s, all played out in front of the rich tapestry of an Irish Catholic backdrop.

At its heart, this is a story of two lives intertwined, those of a mother and daughter. The author recounts life under the canopy of her mother's lively memories from another time and place. Eventually, restless with wonderment about her mother's past, the writer has a soul-altering encounter with the house on Cedar Drive, and comes away with a renewed understanding about the things that really matter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098319045

Book preview

Copyright © by Eileen McCartin Love, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-09831-903-8 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-09831-904-5 (eBook)

~ To My Mother ~

When we close our eyes we are all the ages we have ever been.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Who’s Who on the Farrell Family Tree

The Beginnings: Meet the Farrells of 37 Cedar Drive

The McCartins of Daley Street

Cherub and Jack Put Down Roots

When Motherhood Found Cherub

Around the Neighborhood

Appalachia across the Hedge

Loaves and Fishes on Daley Street

The Backyard Frontier

Dining Like Royalty

The Bee in the Jar

A World of Our Own

The Christmas Doll

The Summer of Auntie Ei

If Only I Had a Mother

Camp Marydale

Of Christmas Trees and Manger Scenes

Yuletide Surprise - The Dancing Lady Tree

A Drive-By, Interrupted

From Beer to Eternity

Miracles and Misadventures at Lake St. Jude

Hey, Hey…They Were The Monkees

The Martini Carpet

To the Poorhouse in Style

Fourth of July

Growing Pains

Grandma Lily Slips Away

The Arizona Cousins and Adventures out West

The Wedding Dress

Grandma’s Prayer Book

Back to Long Island in the Summer of 1996

The Mysterious Boxes

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Mary’s question rattled me. It came out of the blue one day, a dozen or more years ago and instantly transported me to another time.

The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to my cousin Mary, and a million years ago as children we lived next door to each other. Nowadays we live nearly 2000 miles apart – she in New York, me in Colorado – but we keep in touch through cards, emails, and the occasional family gathering. On this day she and her husband were on Long Island for a child’s sports competition and found themselves in the north shore town of Great Neck.

Hi Eil!, came her cheery voice. We’re on Cedar Drive, she reported. What’s the house number where our mothers once lived? Mary, a nurse, and Billy, her firefighter husband, were tooling around the leafy neighborhood where our mothers grew up as part of the Farrell family that lived in the area from 1920 until 1949.

Thirty Seven, I answered immediately, amazed that this crucial nugget of ancestral history wasn’t as firmly cemented in her memory as it was in mine.

She giggled merrily. Oh, I thought it was Ten! No wonder the people acted so crazy when I knocked on the door! She told me she remembered how I had once gone to the old place to knock on the door of the fabled Farrell home and had a soul-altering experience as I encountered the place of my mother’s past. Now Mary was doing some exploring of her own and was a little lost.

We chatted a bit and agreed you can’t blame the occupants of the house for not greeting her more warmly. People are antsy nowadays and reluctant to open their doors to strangers. It probably didn’t help that she was curious about long-deceased relatives who may or may not have lived at that address in the early part of the last century.

When I got off the phone I sat with my thoughts. Mary’s call activated things in my mind and heart, and soon I was wading ankle deep in the ever-changing stream of memory.

Memories are mercurial things, aren’t they? They are full of fanciful stories, cultural and family lore, bits of truth embellished over time, no doubt tainted by episodes of subjective interpretation and selective amnesia. They are the products of our flawed faculty for reconstructing events exactly as they happened, usually joined by a persistent and unshakeable belief in their accuracy. Edward DeBono, psychologist and author, puts it best, I think, with his quote: A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. This makes the most sense to me. In my case, not only has the stuff of the past never unhappened, it only gets more real with the passage of time.

I grew up in Long Island many years ago, before it became domesticated with strip malls and strangulated by zoning ordinances and snarled traffic. I remember undeveloped land and an idyllic patch of woods called Ridder’s Pond when it was a place to ice skate on cold winter afternoons, when fathers made fires in barrels and children ventured out onto the uneven ice in hand-me-down skates. Later it was developed, with a manufactured rock wall that harnessed its former wildness, and the woods were tamed, replaced with a walking path and high-priced houses that advertised pond views.

I remember when the neighborhoods were dotted with vestiges from another era – remnants of farms which had been sold off to developers to make 1950s subdivisions filled with lookalike houses. My parents bought theirs for $10,990. As the new developments sprang up, the original farmhouses and outbuildings were the last to go. For years they would remain standing in all their dilapidated glory, refusing to give up their last handful of history.

On a corner a mile or two from Ridder’s Pond was such a place. It had a watering hole of some kind surrounded by grass, and a white house with black shutters, and a few daylilies in front. It was no longer a working farm, and hadn’t been one in ages, but it still had that old-time flavor, and the owners had constructed a farm stand where they sold produce in late summer. One of my first memories is making the supreme effort to hike up the hill to get there with my parents on either side holding onto my hands and playfully hoisting me by the arms.

Years later, the house was gone and the vegetable stand had ceased to exist and one day, when I was 10 or 12 or so, I was riding my bike past that hill and scarcely recognized it as the obstacle I wrestled with as a child. I pulled my bike over to stare at how time had diminished the gigantic hill. Now there was just the smallest embankment rising from the sidewalk to the lawn above. I could clear it in one step. The event never unhappened, but the way I recalled it shifted. This proves, I suppose, that a memory’s footprint is commensurate with the size of the rememberer.

They say the sense of smell is a powerful catalyst for evoking memories. Think Christmas trees, the corner bakery, burning leaves on an autumn day, book bags and pencils and crisply bound textbooks on the first day of school.

In our early childhood Mother took Daddy’s shirts to a Chinese laundry that was run by a mysterious semi-silent Asian man with a long moustache that draped the sides of his serious mouth. He wore a round silk cap on his head, and down his back stretched a long black braid with threads of gray. When we entered his shop he would come out from behind a curtain and step to the counter and take the tickee from our mother’s hand and work up the price on an abacus. His fingers would fly across the beads, moving them swiftly across the rungs, and then he’d pronounce the total in heavily accented English. He was courteous but never smiled.

After she paid, the Chinaman handed my mother a thin box containing a stack of clean-as-new shirts meticulously folded, and each one encircled by a pale blue paper band. Daddy’s shirt wardrobe was ready for another work week on the sales floor of the furniture store.

What I remember most about that antiquated place is the smell. Clean. So clean. No perfumey aromas or breezy April freshness, just clean. When I looked at the pages of geography books in grade school and we learned about the city of Peking and the Yangtze River and the China Sea crowded with junques and other marine vessels with funny names, I smelled the Chinese laundry. It is such a distinctive smell I have trouble attaching words to it other than clean. I suppose thrown into the olfactory bouquet was some kind of starch, perhaps a scent associated with the hissing steam coming from the industrial irons. Once in my adulthood, out of nowhere, a whiff of some foreign scent hit me and I mentioned to no one in particular, It smells like a Chinese laundry in here. One of my boys was within earshot and wondered where that odd reference came from. Actually, my children got used to me now and then – on no notice whatsoever – stepping outside of reality to visit another dimension, much the way other parents might step outside for a smoke. Just for a moment I was back on Hillside Avenue, in the strangely foreign storefront surrounded by a cloud of steamy cleanness.

Sometimes, when my mind wanders to these other times and places, I talk to myself about them. Yes. I admit it. I talk to myself. It’s my way of thinking. I process my thoughts by arranging them into stories and tell them to imaginary audiences who are always interested and never unavailable. So when I say I talk to myself, it’s not me per se I am directing my whispered chatter toward, but an imaginary person (or several) I suppose to be nearby.

My mother always supported this quirky behavior and reassured me by saying she did the same thing. Well, sort of. She would talk to herself when it came to list making, for instance. Now I’ll do this, then I’ll do that. That’s talking to yourself. But that’s not what I do. I talk to an audience, some members of which are known to me, others invented.

I never thought of this as strange, but it did take me by surprise one day when a teacher abruptly kicked me out of class for talking to my neighbor. In chemistry class junior year Mr. O’Conner finally blew up and threw me and my best friend Ann Marie out of class for non-stop whispering and cackling. Out the door we went, sentenced to roam the hallways in disgrace, as Ann Marie ranted about this latest injustice. Half in disbelief she complained bitterly, What’s that senile old fart talking about?! I wasn’t saying anything!! Then it dawned on her.

It was you!! She turned on me and pointed her finger in my face. You were talking to yourself and he thought you were talking to me! At that point, she couldn’t stop herself from laughing at the sheer insanity of it, but she was still mad. Of course, she was familiar with my strange habit and was often amused by it. But when it claimed her as a victim, she lashed out, You got us both in trouble. In response, I could do nothing but smile and shrug, as if to suggest playfully: Well, you wanted to be friends with me back in seventh grade. I could’ve told you it wouldn’t be a picnic, after which she demanded, What are you constantly talking about?!

Good question. For as long as I can remember I was always talking and storytelling. As early as second grade Sister Mary Harold promised the class that if our work was done on time Eileen would tell us a story. When the last paper was turned in I happily skipped to the front of the room, facing my classmates, swaying in front of the chalkboard ledge, spinning yarns that came to me out of thin air. In those stream-of-consciousness reveries, a cast of characters and adventures emerged that might include anything and anyone: eccentric neighbors, assorted relatives, lines from popular songs. Even saints and angels might turn up.

But just as often I repeated the stories my mother told me of growing up on Cedar Drive. She often visited her girlhood memories, and if I had the good fortune to be close by when such a mood overtook her she might begin to speak aloud and I’d take in the stories which then became part of my own being. She would recount the old days, the names of friends, the nuns at St. Aloysius School, the stories of her crippled grandmother struggling to raise the houseful of children after their mother’s tragic death. She would describe the fine house they lived in, her five high-spirited and mischievous siblings. She would recall with poignant clarity the rollicking fun times and the achingly sad times.

And I would listen. Like a wallflower at a junior high dance, I watched and listened and took it all in. In my mind’s eye I saw the stories from long ago being played out as if on a stage. I wasn’t part of them exactly, but they captivated me and I engaged as thoroughly as any onlooker might. Through these oral reenactments, it was clear that Mother had a powerful, almost mystical attachment to her girlhood home, and her mysterious connection to the place and the individuals associated with it was passed on to me. Curious, isn’t it, how episodes from the past take up residence in our souls and shape the persons we become. It was true of my mother and certainly true of me and I suppose just about everyone.

The past never really unhappens. That’s why when Mary called me that day, I immediately found myself being carried by a powerful tide that swept me up and deposited me on the island of long ago, recalling a distant time and place, far away but always accessible.

What you are about to read is not an autobiography, exactly, which would be a chronological account of an entire life. Rather, it is a memoir, which is a selective remembering of a particular dimension of one’s life. This memoir, at its heart, is a story of two lives intertwined, those of a mother and daughter. As the daughter in this story, I lived under the canopy of my mother’s lively memories from another time and place. Swirling around the two of us are the other players – the many relatives, friends, neighbors, and passers-by. It is a recollection of certain pivotal events in my life interwoven with scenes from hers. I decided to write the memoir as if creating a blanket on a loom. I would start with the threads of my own life and weave Mother’s into the fabric. Or was hers the main story with my threads woven in?

I will leave it to the reader to decide.

Who’s Who on the Farrell Family Tree

Lily A. Moore Farrell – aka Grandma Lily – (1856-1938).

Married Bartholomew J. (Bat) Farrell, 1881.

William B. Farrell, Sr. – aka Bill – (1885-1948). Son of Lily and Bartholomew; patriarch of the Farrell family of 37 Cedar Drive;

husband of Agnes.

Agnes Farrell (1894-1925). Wife of Bill and mother of their six children. (Author is one of their 19 grandchildren.) Agnes’s maiden and married names are the same. Agnes Farrell’s family was from Brooklyn, N.Y. They were no relation to the Lily and Bartholomew Farrell family from Manhattan, N.Y.

Agnes’s Parents were James Farrell (d. 1931) and Mary Seiler Farrell (d.1926) of 58 Jerome Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. They had six other children in addition to Agnes, among them:

James Farrell, Jr. (1883-1933; not mentioned in book).

Eileen Farrell – aka Auntie Ei – (1886-1960).

Grace Farrell Clare (1888-1972).

John Farrell (d. 1934; not mentioned in book).

Peter Farrell (d. 1933).

Kathleen Farrell McCook – aka Aunt Kay – (1893-1977).

The six children born to William B. Farrell, Sr. and Agnes Farrell:

Maureen (Mary Alicia) Farrell Melczer (1916-2002).

Married Joe Melczer, 1947.

Children: Mary Jane, Joe, Patti

Kay (Kathleen) Farrell Dennin (1917-1998).

Married Burke Dennin, 1940.

Children: Joe, Kathy, Mary, Barbara

Cherub (Agnes) Farrell McCartin (1920-1989). Married John (Jack) McCartin, 1949.

Children: John, Billy, Maggie, Eileen (book’s author), Tom

Bill – officially William B. Farrell Jr. – (1922 - 2010).

Married Rose Siccardi Farrell, 1961.

Children: Bill, Tim

Eileen Farrell Karb (1923-2006). Married Christopher Win Karb, 1947.

Children: Christopher, Dorrie, Peter, Mary, Jennifer

Dee (Grace Angela) Farrell Dardis (1925-2008). Married James Dardis, 1986. During Dee’s growing-up years she lived with relatives Uncle Joe and Aunt Kay McCook and their three boys, Thomas, James, and Joseph. She often visited her siblings at 37 Cedar Drive.

Chapter 1

The Beginnings: Meet the Farrells of 37 Cedar Drive

37 Cedar Drive, Great Neck, NY, circa 1923

It was in mid-summer 1996 that I marshaled my resources for an invasion of 37 Cedar Drive. It was all coming to a head: the memories fueled a desire to be in that space that was so strong and pronounced it could no longer be denied. This was my mother’s childhood home and I grew up steeped in the romantic history of the place, and listening to Mother’s stories about those years. There is no minute of my life untouched by the events that unfolded over the years that this was the family home.

I had to stand in the house where my grandmother died in childbirth in 1925. I had to see the dining room in which the birthday parties were held – where the cake was brought in on its crystal pedestal plate through the elegant velvet portieres. I wanted to encounter the upstairs room where a young Aunt Maureen, one of the motherless girls who grew up in that house, had mourned the news of her husband’s death in World War II until she finally descended the staircase days later and told her siblings they would talk of it no more.

Thirty Seven Cedar Drive. If we had an ancestral home this was it – the gracious house with the stucco exterior, red hollow tile roof, and double doors in front. It was a perfect family home – inviting and picturesque, covered in thick ivy that encircled the entryway and crept up beyond the second story toward the small third floor windows that looked out onto the pleasant street. Photos of the house during that era show some white wicker furnishings outside, looking onto the property which is surrounded by magnificent trees that lean and hover protectively over the home.

The house was built in 1920 in Great Neck, New York, a leafy enclave on the north shore of Long Island, only twenty miles or so from Manhattan. The area was not so densely occupied back then, at least by today’s standards. There was in abundance that commodity that has become so desirable these days – breathing space. Houses sat on sprawling treed lots that had once been rich, rolling farmland, and the neighborhoods cropping up now were dotted with parks and duck ponds and there were schools, churches, a synagogue, and a library within easy walking distance.

Great Neck was – and still is – comprised of nine separate, but similar villages with quaint names like King’s Point, Russell Gardens, and Great Neck Estates. It is situated on a peninsula with Little Neck Bay to the west and Manhasset Bay to the east. From there it is a short breezy boat ride north into Long Island Sound within sight of the shoreline of southern Connecticut.

Middle Neck Road in the early twentieth century was Great Neck’s bustling main street. It was lined with Tudor style storefronts and the railroad station was in the heart of the downtown area, making for an easy commute into New York City. In fact, the Great Neck of the 1920s was populated by many famous entertainers, artists, and businessmen who left the city when they found the lure of Long Island irresistible. Walter Chrysler, the automobile baron, made his home there, as did the famous composer Oscar Hammerstein. A couple of the Marx Brothers lived here too for a short time before moving to Hollywood. (Mother was friends during that time with Maxine Marx, the daughter of Chico – they were back door neighbors. A popular joke that went around had to do with a country club’s refusal to let Groucho Marx become a member. Supposedly the comedian retorted, as he gestured in the direction of the beach: My son’s half Jewish. Can he go into the water up to his knees?) Broadway icon George M. Cohan was a resident too, as was playwright Eugene O’Neil. And if you followed Cedar Drive up the street and around the corner – a short walk really – you’d arrive at 6 Gateway Drive, the rented home of F. Scott Fitzgerald from 1920 to 1923, and reputed to be the place where he began work on The Great Gatsby. This was before he and Zelda moved to Paris where he finished his famous novel. It is said that the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg were modeled on the towns of Great Neck and its charming rival, Port Washington.

Thirty Seven Cedar Drive was the storied home that was the anchor for the Farrell family from 1920 until 1949, when it was sold after their patriarch’s death; the place that took up more than its share of real estate in my mother’s heart and soul over the course of her life. I imagine it was much the same for her siblings.

In total, there were six Farrell children.

There was Maureen, born in August of 1916, a year and a half after her parents, Bill and Agnes Farrell, returned from a month-long honeymoon in Havana, Cuba. Maureen was the most independent of the group: blonde, adventurous, and brave;

Kathleen, called Kay, born in 1917, the sensible, dark-haired beauty and outdoorsy beach lover, who as a teenager rode horses through wide swaths of countryside on the Great Neck shores and was forever the go-to girl, the sure and steady rock for the others;

Agnes, my mother, born in 1920 and named for her mother, Agnes Farrell, but called by the name Cherub from infancy; she was the painfully sensitive five-year-old girl who stood by the kitchen icebox and wept to learn of her mother’s death, and became the silent bearer of so much of the family’s sorrows and the barometer for their collective moods;

Billy, born in 1922, the spunky, good-natured brother who loved books and practical jokes; who went to Lehigh University and built a successful career on Wall Street after serving in World War II. He returned from Paris with bottles of French perfume for his sisters and an affinity for the music of Edith Piaf;

Eileen, born in 1923, the perennially optimistic girl who as a young mother displayed her upbeat nature best when, loading the family car for a vacation, she met a fierce downpour by grabbing the shower curtain from the bathroom, covering the tweed suitcases piled atop the car, and merrily yelling out: Anyone can have fun when it’s sunny!;

Grace Angela, born in 1925, the baby who was delivered just before her 33-year-old mother gave into the pneumonia that would end her life after uttering what would be her last words: I love little girls. Baby Grace, called Dearest, and later, just Dee, was placed into the waiting arms of her mother’s sister and was raised in a loving home by relatives with the understanding it was just for a brief time until Daddy got his bearings. The arrangement became permanent but Dee spent lots of time on Cedar Drive too, enjoying a kind of dual citizenship, standing with a foot firmly planted in each household.

I had grown up hearing snippets of the tales that seemingly could not be kept hidden; they seeped up from an unseen yet bottomless well like some mysterious, endlessly deep aquifer that ran just under the surface, carrying the history of this family’s past and shaping its present.

How I remember my mother and her sisters as grown ladies sitting on the porches of one or another’s home, smoking cigarettes and drinking iced coffee, and it wouldn’t be long before one of them would reference 37 Cedar Drive, as in, Oh, that was back on Thirty Seven, don’t you remember how we laughed!?

Even the sight of a field mouse scampering along the outskirts of the garage brought a memory: Oh wasn’t it funny the time Daddy caught the mouse in the pantry at Thirty Seven? He stepped on it lightly in his slippers, waiting for help to come!? Don’t you remember?! Peals of laughter.

Maureen couldn’t get there fast enough with the newspaper to smack it! laughed Eileen.

No! Billy used ammonia-soaked rags to smother it! Cherub corrected.

Puff. Puff. A long drag on the Chesterfield before blowing the smoke heavenward and watching as it swirled then disappeared. Sip of coffee from the tumbler with the cold droplets dribbling onto the cement stoop. A sip. A smile. A random thought suddenly occurring: So much crime in the news these days, isn’t there? Remember how we never had to lock the doors on Cedar Drive? one of the sisters would reminisce. Nodding all around.

True, the Farrells had suffered terrible loss in childhood, but they learned to count their blessings which were many, and they retained their humor and appreciated their shared history. They were close to their father, Bill, professionally known as William Bartholomew Farrell, Sr., a successful New York probate attorney, who did double duty on the parenting front, supporting the children in fine style while leaving much of the day-to-day decisions to Grandma and the aunts. The visible effort he made at keeping his beloved wife’s memory alive was the mahogany table set in the main entryway where on its polished surface was kept a photo of Agnes, and every week a fresh bouquet of flowers was delivered to the home and placed beside her image. Dee told me once that Cherub was known for kissing her hand and touching it to her mother’s picture as she came and went from the house. Over time each child learned to make an uneasy peace with the loss of the mother they barely knew and never stopped loving. They channeled that love to their father, grandmothers, aunties, cousins, and later, to their spouses and their own children.

Among the girls, they had lots of abilities but they were best at being sisters. In one instance when they were grown, their mother’s wedding ring fell into the hands of one of the sisters who received it from a relative’s estate. She called the girls together to announce that she had this sentimental jewel of their mother’s treasured past and shouldn’t they decide now who would like it? Without hesitating, Cherub jumped up and grabbed it saying, I’ll take it. It’ll fit me!

They relinquished it immediately. The next day Cherub called her sisters to apologize for the way she made a grab for the thing they all wanted. She declared she was more than willing to let her sisters choose a fairer way to decide who would get it. Naturally each sister would have wanted the sacred relic, but they were happy to give it to the one who seemed most desperate for it. All agreed that it should be Cherub’s and that settled the matter.

The mythology of Cedar Drive lived in my DNA. The memories – not mine exactly, but borrowed from my mother and curated in my being from an early age – were so lucid and lingering that I was sure I couldn’t rest without at least once setting foot in the marvelous 1920’s house. I wanted to surround myself with the memories I was sure still hung in the air like cooking aromas from favorite recipes. I wanted to listen for the echoes of another time, whispered confidences shared in upstairs rooms among the siblings, the high pitched laughter of the aunties over afternoon tea.

I wanted to tiptoe upstairs and peek in on the third floor hide-away where the three Irish girls lived. Not quite family but more than maids, they lived in a