Author of worldwide bestselling suspense novels
(1929– )
People just don’t get it. I simply say that there are only three places that have a “the” in front of their name: the Vatican, the Hague, and the Bronx, and that so much talent has come out of the Bronx. It’s also so beautiful. Not only is Fordham University there, but there’s also Mosholu Parkway, Pelham Parkway, and the Botanical Garden, for heaven’s sake.
There were also people in my own neighborhood who became well known. There was Jake LaMotta—the “Raging Bull”—the prizefighter, who lived down the block from me. I didn’t know it then, but Judith Rossner, who wrote Looking for Mr. Goodbar, also lived four blocks from me. And then there was a major counterfeiter who lived down the street from us. We always wondered why his son had such a snappy roadster. We found out he was on the “Ten Most Wanted” list.
When we first moved to our neighborhood, in the Pelham Parkway section, it was rural more than suburban. There was Angelina’s farm on Williamsbridge Road. She would come by and say, “God bless your momma. God bless your poppa. We got lotsa fresh vegetables today.”
We lived in what they call a semidivided house with a wall down the middle of two houses so it looked like one big Tudor house. I was in the neighborhood recently and I tell you our block is still lovely. These were city lots, twenty-five feet by a hundred feet, so you had a front yard and a long backyard.
When we were kids, the cars were parked in the back, so we all played in the streets. There were hardly any cars in the streets then and there were always kids on the block to play with. Every house had kids. You knew you could play stickball or jump rope in the streets, or the game where you say, “Move one step forward.” I think it was called Red Light. When there was snow, we would walk four blocks over to what we called suicide hill. It was all a field then. The Jacobi Medical Center and the Einstein College of Medicine are there now. Our mother used to say, “Watch out for Johnny”—my younger brother—“and be home before dark.” And we would run to be home before dark. We had lots of freedom and independence. And we explored. The neighborhoods were safe. Once you were of school age you were allowed to go out and play with the other kids.
My father died of a heart attack when I was eleven. The circumstances were shocking. He’d never been sick. Never. I was a daddy’s girl. We were very, very close. The only time he came home early from work—he owned a pub, a bar and grill—was the night that he died. He would usually rush back to work after a five o’clock dinner. Since he was the owner, he had to be there. He wasn’t feeling well that one night so he went upstairs. He must’ve been having a heart attack then, but we didn’t know it. He died in his sleep, and I’ve missed him all my life.
I tell you, my poor mother lost our house for lack of just a few hundred dollars. After my father died, she hung on to it for almost four years, renting the rooms, but that didn’t bring in enough money. She couldn’t hold on to the house anymore. People said to take Joseph—the oldest of the three children—out of school and let him work. My mother said, “Education is more important than any house.” After we moved, my mother would go to visit good friends still living on the block. She’d come back with her eyes glistening, saying how beautifully the roses had grown.
When my husband Warren died, I was so sorry to realize that my young daughters were going to experience the same kind of loss. I took the two littlest girls to the funeral parlor because I thought that’s the only way I could get them to understand that their daddy wasn’t coming back. He had been in and out of the hospital and I knew that Patty, who was five at the time, would be standing at the window waiting for him. I thought, I can’t have this. I knew that they were just too young to cope. At the casket I explained that Daddy was now in Heaven and that he wasn’t coming back. Two weeks later while in bed with me, Patty said, “When Daddy was home, he was in his pajamas. When did he change into his clothes?”
My aunt was working at the Shelton Hotel in Manhattan when I was fifteen. I got a part-time job from four to seven p.m. afternoons and weekends. It was one of those switchboards, “Hotel Shelton, good afternoon.” And then you would connect the person who was asked for in room 502, for instance. I loved it because I loved to listen in. There was a Ginger Bates, a permanent resident of the hotel who was also the “lady of the house.” She got a lot of phone calls from her many admirers. It was never salacious. It was more like, “I wonder if you’d be free on such-and-such a date.” One time she said to the caller, “Don’t say another word. That damned operator is listening in.” And I said, into the phone, “I am not!” Then I just disconnected her. A minute later the chief operator asked, “Who had Ginger Bates on the phone?” I managed not to get caught.
The Irish have a gift of storytelling. Nobody ever came back from the store with milk without having a story to tell. Then there’s the gift of laughter, the sense of humor, and of course I’ve always loved that quotation from Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I have that framed on my desk. I absolutely love it.
My mother encouraged my writing from the time I was little. She said that I was going to be a successful writer one day. The funny part is that when I had my first short story sale for fifteen hundred dollars to the Saturday Evening Post, to her that was the epitome of success. “Put it in the bank,” she cautioned. Of course, I already had a list of all the things I was going to do with that same fifteen hundred. Shocked, she said, “But Mary, you’ve used your idea!”