Marie C Conniff

From Kathleen Capolongo (niece):

George (Marie's brother) had a real sense of duty and fulfilled it without any fanfare. Now that I think of it, he did the same with his sisters. Once my father married he stayed away from them as much as he could but George hung in there and took care of them. He got Elizabeth a job on Wall Street and probably got Marie out of more trouble than any of us know about. I know of her frequent trips to the police station on Montgomery/Bolan Street to report that the people in the apartment above them had drilled a hole in the upstairs floor and the girls' ceiling so they could spy on them in their bedroom. And to report that the priests in the rectory at St. Aedan's had telescopes trained on their apartment, which was across the street on Bergen Avenue, to spy on them and see them in various stages of undress. She of course did not go to report the time she stood up at the altar rail where she had positioned herself for Communion and instead cold cocked the priest and accused him of the aforementioned spying. Someone else must have reported that. George had his hands full because when the police called my father, and they did, he would get George involved since he alone seemed able to talk to Marie and exert some kind of control. Now that I think of it, he bore a terrible burden.

Richard Conniff (great nephew-ish?): I wonder what made Marie such a sexual hysteric, if that's the term. It's hard to believe that it was simply a matter of being brought up Irish Catholic. Cold-cocking a priest at the communion rail is pretty spectacular behavior.

Kathleen Capolongo: She didn't have that internal monitor that stops us from doing and saying inappropriate things. So, I suppose, punching a priest in the face during Mass wouldn't have presented a problem for her. I remember once walking along Bergen Avenue with my mother just before she went into the hospital to have a medically necessary hysterectomy and being rushed along by her because Marie was on the other side of the street screaming, "Sinner" over and over again at my mother. Somehow, someone had leaked this info to her and in the fifties this kind of information was considered very private. And I think there was some kind of dark, possibly sinful, aura attached to anything connected with body parts and reproduction. You may remember that women were not welcomed back to participation at Mass until a blessing or cleansing ritual conducted 6 weeks after they gave birth. That is why you don't see any pictures of mothers at the Baptisms of thei r babies pre Vatican II, if the kids were baptized before they were 6 weeks old, their mothers wouldn't have been in church.

Soooooo, I can only imagine the effect of church teachings about the inherent evils of sex on a girl in the very early years of the last century, raised by a woman who had been born into the church of the previous century and the Irish culture of that time. Mix in a tendency to be emotionally unstable and you get the adult, never married, isolated, suspicious, angry, impulsive Marie. And I can only imagine the internal conflict that may have existed if, God forbid, she had any sexual urges. She probably would have engaged in a lot of projection. She would have to have seen herself as the pure, virginal victim of the prurient interests of others. She can't have enjoyed life very much. But she compensated by making everyone around her miserable. She made my father so uncomfortable that it took him days to recover after being in her presence. As I grew to adulthood I disliked her more and more and put aside the empathy I us ually have for difficult people who are, for whatever reasons, incapable of better behavior. She just pissed me off.

Those are my theories, however imperfect and unscientific.