Chapter 1 The Beginning When Bob Rowe first laid eyes on Mary Savage, he immediately began thinking of ways to improve her. It was 1950, and he was sitting in the cafeteria at St. John's University, in downtown Brooklyn. He watched her bounce across the room, nineteen years old, meeting and greeting like a ward heeler. She wasn't tall, but she moved with a big stride. Good figure, he thought-maybe a little heavy in the hips. He decided the quilted skirt she was wearing was the problem. "That's got to go," he said to himself, and later recorded his thoughts in a journal.
A girl at Bob's table waved Mary over and Bob asked to be introduced. Her blue eyes, so tiny that they almost disappeared when she smiled, held the promise of mischief. As she stood there laughing and talking, he studied her for signs of ambivalence or anxiety but saw only a straightforward appreciation of life. He had decided when he was eleven years old that he was going to move out of the social class to which he'd been born; his father had been an electrician for the Tastee Bread Company. Now he saw a girl who could help him with his plan. It didn't matter when he found out that Mary's family was even poorer than his. She didn't need money to be a good partner for him. "Drive-that's what Mary was," he wrote.
"Pure drive." He wasn't surprised to learn she'd been class president at St. Joseph's Commercial High School. Mary Savage's mother, Laura, didn't want her daughter, her only child, to have anything to do with Bob Rowe. The Savages were so poor that they couldn't afford to fix the ceiling when it started falling in on them, piece by piece. Not many people were below them on the social scale, so Laura Savage used religion as her measuring stick. She looked down her nose at anyone who wasn't Catholic, and Bob was Lutheran. She addressed him, with neither irony nor affection, as "you Protestant bastard.
" Bob and Mary maneuvered around the religion problem by having Jack O'Shaughnessy pick Mary up when she and Bob had a date. It was easy enough. Jack lived near Mary in Bay Ridge, and he would do almost anything for his fraternity brother-and closest friend-at St. John's. Jack would bring Mary to the DeKalb Avenue subway station and hand her off to Bob. Mrs. Savage approved of Jack's Irish Catholicism, which made her approve of him. When Jack and Mary were about to leave, he'd tell a joke.
"If we're not home by Tuesday, Mrs. Savage, call the police." She would laugh appreciatively and tell them to have a nice time. Or she'd shout out a ditty in her thick Irish brogue. Work while it's work time Play while it's play 'Tis the only way to be happy The only way to be gay. Jack thought Mary was an attractive girl-no Miss America, but attractive. That was amazing considering her mother's face. There was no nice way to put it.
Mrs. Savage was homely. "Born in a cave in County Cork," Bob said, and Jack didn't disagree. He described Mary as "bubbly, a girl you could have fun with," when he fondly remembered the night the three of them had spent wandering along the beach at Coney Island. They'd done nothing more than laugh and talk and run on the beach, but staying out all night seemed daring in those days just after World War II. People were trying to settle down, and Irish Catholic girls from "nice" families didn't venture far from home after dark. No matter that home was barely one step up from a shanty-a crucifix on every wall, a roach for every crack in the floor. At dawn it was up to Jack to take Mary back and make peace with Mrs.
Savage. Jack suspected that eventually Bob would have to make peace with Mary's mother. He'd watched a series of girls try to get their hooks into Bob-the nautical metaphor was Jack's-but he figured that Mary was going to be the one to anchor h.