Mary Higgins Clark On Leading the St. Patrick’s Parade

‘My father came here with five pounds in his pocket’

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Because there’s going to be a guilty party, a murderer or somebody who’s committed a major crime. Well who’s the why? Four people might’ve done it. One was psychotic enough, angry enough, vengeful enough to go over the line and commit that crime, take that life. So of the four who might have done it, only one would have done it. So I’ve been doing that ever since.”

Stowaway, the short story she wrote about a stewardess who finds a stowaway from Czechoslovakia, received 40 rejection slips. “It went out 40 times before it sold six years later,” she recalls.

She also remembers that at one time she  had 11 short stories in the mail and received 11 rejection slips. In one of them the editor from Redbook had written “Ms. Clark, your stories are light, slight and trite.”

“I thought, I’ll get you, baby. I will get you. Later on when Redbook requested a story I said to my agent, ‘Make them pay.’”
 
These days Mary is counting her blessings, and rejection slips are long a thing of the past. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1996, her daughter Patty introduced her to John J. Conheeney, the retired CEO of Merrill Lynch Futures, who was a widower. They married the following Thanksgiving.

“I was blessed in my marriage to Warren Clark at the beginning of my adult years and now I am blessed in my marriage to John Conheeney in my golden years.  Having a prince in the beginning and a prince at the end is pretty wonderful,” she says.

Family is everything to her.  “ I have five children and six grandchildren. John has four children and eleven grandchildren.  We see the children and grandchildren all the time. Most of them live within a few miles, none more than forty-five minutes away. But on the big holidays, we’re all collected in our home in Saddle River, New Jersey, along with nieces and nephews. We doubled the size of the kitchen/family room so we can set tables for forty with room to spare.”

And this St. Patrick’s Day, she will especially be thinking of her parents and what her Irish heritage means to her. In a freshly updated epilogue to Kitchen Privileges, she writes: “I cannot close without saying how much my Catholic faith has been the raison d’etre of my existence, the core of all that I am. I have tried to live its precepts fully and to always remember that much is expected of those to whom much has been given.

HAPPY ST.  PATRICK’S DAY to one and all.”

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