We are selling the ancestral Mahoney estate. The house that my family has lived in for four generations will soon be on the market now that the Queens County Surrogate's Court has named me executor for all of my dead relatives. (Mom died first, in 2018, followed by Dad in 2019, and my brother Paddy in 2022.) Which left me to sort out the entanglements of their various estates, which includes a rather large, rather rundown house. NB: If anyone's interested in owning a fixer-upper Victorian in Bayside that's currently home to a growing scurry of squirrels, hit me up. No charge for the squirrels. And no charge for educating you on what a large group of squirrels is called either.
When my brother Paddy died last June, leaving the house empty for the first time since my grandmother bought the place in the late '40s, my siblings and I did the dead-relative thing. First: the requisite period of mourning and lamentation and, of course, the Irish wake. You're not really dead in my family until the surviving members are belly up to the bar in some place named Bridie's or The Minstrel Boy, drinking pints of Guinness in black suits and waiting for someone to break into a weepy rendition of "The Wild Rover."
Then, with much help from loved ones and friends, we tackled the house. We threw away the food in the fridge, and the freezer, and the basement freezer (decade-old Stouffer's French bread pizza, anyone?); organized my brother's papers as best we could—Paddy's paper trail was mostly digital and password-protected; started to sort through the nearly century's worth of family stuff in every nook and cranny across four floors (including my brother's collection of Brickmania military models—don't ask—which fills a small bedroom) before we despaired and decided to just leave it until we were legally able to sell off the family heirlooms we didn't want. We drained the pipes, turned off the heat, and locked the door behind us. (The squirrels must have picked the lock.)
When I started sifting through the filing cabinet full of papers back at home, I discovered a folder of ephemera from my high school days: The booklet they gave out at the commencement ceremony; some old writing (if anyone wants to read my incisive essay comparing and contrasting the views of urban life found in Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, let me know); some old report cards documenting my inability to measure up to my more-driven peers at Archbishop Molloy High School—I mean, who gets a 78 in Health?; and a letter of recommendation from my AP English teacher, Mr. Vardy.
As my classmates and I were putting together our college application packets, we were advised by school officials that we should seek out recommendation letters from faculty members. Said faculty members—employees of the school that our parents were funding for the main purpose of getting us into college—would then be tasked with writing pithy encomiums that exaggerated our qualifications and accomplishments ever so slightly without resorting to dishonesty or insincerity.
As I had alienated most of the teachers over my four-year tenure at Molloy—mostly through my genius for sotto voce wisecracks—I had little choice but to approach my new English teacher, Mr. Vardy, who had liked my Janowitz/McInerney essay. While he was a little surprised at being asked to write on my behalf, he gamely obliged. I reproduce it here in full.
30 November 1987
To whom it may concern:
It is my pleasure to write this letter of recommendation for Brian Mahoney. Brian is presently a student in my Advanced Placement English class, and though I had not met him before this September, I was immediately impressed by him.
Of the 59 students I teach in Advanced Placement, Brian is perhaps the most original and sophisticated thinker I know. He is very popular and gets along well with his peers, but there is something about him that sets him apart—an intellectual awareness, a social maturity, a wit and intelligence that make him unique. Brian's range of interests is incredibly broad—from school yearbook to referee's association, from playing soccer to playing piano—and he approaches all these activities with the same lively curiosity he approaches academic pursuits.
Where other students are afraid to venture from the suburb in which our school is located into nearby New York City, Brian knows the city well and seems to thrive on its variety and energy. Where other students are reluctant to express original thoughts or original ideas on paper, Brian can be counted on for a unique perspective and for a truly insightful comment that gets to the heart of the matter being discussed. In short, Brian seems to have balanced a sense of personal freedom that most adolescents strive for with a sense of personal responsibility. He is confident, comfortable with himself both academically and socially, yet he is by no means arrogant or conceited. On the contrary, he is unfailingly personable, friendly, genuine, sincere.
Brian will be an asset to any school he chooses to attend; already he has the social and intellectual maturity of a college student, and I am confident he will continue to use his many talents wisely and well. I am proud to give Brian my highest recommendation, and I invite you to contact me if there is anything more I can do on his behalf.
Sincerely,
Declan B. Vardy
Department of English
While I didn't get into my first- or second-choice college, Mr. Vardy is hardly to blame. (And besides, I enjoyed all eight years I spent at SUNY New Paltz, my fall-back to the fall-back. Go Hawks!) Mr. Vardy clearly tried to help me, though why the "most original and sophisticated thinker" he knows needed his help is an open question. This letter would in fact mark the high point of my relationship with Mr. Vardy, a nice, decent man—who, if I'm being honest, overused the word unique, which one shouldn't use at all—who would have to suffer the barbs of my surging confidence and dipping maturity.
I gave Mr. Vardy a jar of my mother's bread-and-butter pickles that year for Christmas as a sort of thank you gift for his recommendation letter. In fact, I believe there are still some of the 1987 vintage left in the basement. I'll throw them in with the house for any potential buyers.
