Author's Note: This story has grown into a family saga but parts 1 through 5 make up the essential story. I am updating since that event, but you needn't read all of the later parts.
You will be introduced early on to Mary Elizabeth Nelson. Because her story begins long before this story, I have published a separate, first-person story for her. It is entitled "Mary Elizabeth Nelson" and is in "Lesbian Stories."
Special thanks to CareyThomas, who kindly reviewed drafts of this. Her two New York-centric stories, "A Ghost of a Chance" and "Could You Be Mine?," are among my favorites and warrant multiple readings; there are a number of Easter-egg references to those stories in this, with (slightly) different names, all intended in appreciation for the originals. All character are fictitious. Your comments are invaluable and all, good, bad, and indifferent, are appreciated.
Suzanne: Meeting Kerry
My introduction to New York was a burst of hot, humid air on Manhattan's Upper West Side late on a Thursday morning in August 2016. My best friend--that would be Annie Baxter--and I completed our three-day drive from the Bay Area to New York. I had just double-parked on West 87th Street, which is where we would live for the foreseeable future, and rushed to greet the woman who had our keys.
That was my aunt Mary Nelson. She was my father's estranged sister, from him and from their parents before they died, because she was gay. She lived in New York and arranged for Annie and me to get the apartment. It was only a mile-and-a-half from Columbia, where I was going to the law school and Annie to the business school. I'd only met Aunt Mary twice in my life, both times at Thanksgiving weekend nearly seven years before. My seeing her and talking to her regularly since then were things I didn't dare tell my parents about.
That's for later. Right then, I was hugging her on the sidewalk and then she was helping us with our things, assuring us that the car wouldn't be towed if we put the flashers on and hurried back.
She stocked the fridge with a few things, and Annie and I each took water before I left her to tidy while I drove Mary up to Yonkers, just north of the city, where I'd be keeping my hand-me-down Camry.
Me? I'm Suzanne Nelson. Of average height with long dark-brown hair and a bit on the thin side. Were you to ask me to tell you something particular about myself it would be that I was a good runner. Good enough to run on Stanford's women's cross-country and track teams.
My father, William, Jr., was a lawyer. So was his father. While they went to Stanford Law, I wanted to get away, which is why I was going to Columbia. It was crazy to have the car, but we could use it for weekend drives.
Just over a week after we were moved in, I sat in the back row of a large classroom at Columbia Law. While I was paying attention to the professor, I found myself paying too much attention on the nape of neck of the woman in the row ahead of mine. It was my third day of school and a thought occurred to me. One wants to regularly sit with four or five other students to go through material. I didn't know anyone and there was something about this woman so I thought I might ask if we could be in the same study group together. She didn't seem to know anyone either.
When class ended, I mustered my courage and reached to tap her on the shoulder. She turned, surprised.
"Can I have a word?" It didn't quite pop out as I hoped, but it worked and we stood in the noisy hallway while I made my suggestion. She confirmed she was not in any group and said she'd be happy to be with me, though she warned that she didn't live on campus.
"I don't live on campus though."
"I'm Suzanne Nelson, I'm from California, and I don't live on campus either."
"Kerry Neally. Looks like we're in the same classes. But when I said off-campus, I mean I live at home in the suburbs with my Mom and take the train to school each morning."
She seemed embarrassed. I thought it sweet, and we agreed to see if we could find a few others to join us, though not before having lunch together.
Kerry: Meeting Suzanne
I noticed her at orientation and now I sat across from her having a burger and fries a few blocks north of school. She had a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake, which was strange because she looked like she never ate anything but salad.
Over lunch, she told me about going to Stanford undergrad and running and deciding to come east for law school. How her father was disappointed she didn't go to Stanford as apparently was a family tradition.
I gave her my mini-bio. Grew up just north of the city and still live in my Mom's house. My Dad died when I was sixteen, and my Mom never remarried. I'm the only child. Fordham University, where I did well enough to get into Columbia Law. No boyfriend since I broke up with Steven when I was a senior at Fordham; he was a junior who returned to a high-school friend over the Christmas break. And not many boyfriends before that. I said I planned to take the train in every morning since it took less than an hour and I could stay with my Mom and save a ton of money.
Much as I felt comfortable with her that first day, I was not comfortable enough, or brave enough, to fill in many of the details. Those details, which she'd come to learn over time, were as follows. My parents met in Brooklyn before it was "Brooklyn" and moved to the suburbs when they married. Both were alcoholics. Booze killed my Dad in 2010. I was a junior in high school. He simply wasted away and then was gone. My Mom never recovered. She was still young and very pretty but I don't think she once went out for dinner with another man nor did she develop relationships with other women, never even going out shopping or to dinner. Instead, she devoted herself to me, her only child, to keeping off the booze, and to her job at a small bank in White Plains, the business center about 30 miles north of midtown. Her last drink was a gin-and-tonic she nursed in the hours after everyone but I had gone on the day of her husband's funeral. She just stopped.
My Dad, Michael, worked for an insurance company in the city. My parents did well enough that we had a four-bedroom colonial on a hill just above the train station. I walked to my Catholic grammar school in my uniform and took the train each day to my Catholic high school in the Bronx, also in my uniform. I was one of the top three or four students in high school. I did well enough at Fordham to get into Columbia Law.
On the romance front, not much to report either. In college, I went out with a few guys and I met my first steady boyfriend early in senior year. But Steven blew up after he confessed to going to bed with a friend from high school when he was home over Christmas and he was the one and only true (in some respects) boyfriends I had.
All that was behind me. The day I sat with Suzanne, August 31, was the third day in which I took the train and the bus--only half-an-hour--to school.
Suzanne: Meeting Mary
Kerry and I found three other first-years--Mike, Bill, and Marie--to join our study group. We all had the same course load and schedule and figured we could up the frequency as we got deeper into the term.
Kerry and I took to having our brown-bag lunches together each day and we sat next to one another in each of our classes. Between classes, we quietly prepared for the next one in the library or outside on a campus bench. After each day's final class, I'd head down to my apartment on 87th, usually taking the bus but walking when the weather was nice, and she'd hop the bus to 125th Street for her twenty-minute train ride home.
At the same time, Annie and I tried to get the car every two or three weeks, and we'd head up north through farmland surprisingly close to the city and reminiscent of drives back home. Annie was loving business school, not least because classmates seemed to find her California disposition and blondeness alluring. More importantly, she was challenged yet comfortable with the class material.
We both knew, though, that we were changing. It was not just that I threw myself into my work. More, it was that I was throwing myself into my friendship with Kerry. Annie knew more about me in some respects than I think I knew myself and never then and never since did she give me a hint of jealousy that Kerry was replacing her as my best friend and I don't think Annie ever felt the slightest tinge of jealousy, which was another reason I loved her so much.
By mid-October, I felt comfortable enough with Kerry to talk a bit more about my Aunt Mary. She and my father were my paternal grandparents' only children. Grandfather Nelson was a lawyer too and Grandmother Nelson was a housewife. They also lived in Mill Valley, in a large house. It was far too big for the four of them, but my father's birth had been difficult, and my grandma never got the big family she wanted. My father's parents died in a car accident shortly after I was born, and that old, big house was sold.
When my father was in high school, so I was told when I was in high school, my Aunt moved to New York. I didn't know my father had a sister until then. She was, again I was told, a "free spirit" who turned that spirit into paying jobs as a journalist and short-story writer, with bylines in Time and other magazines and several short stories in The New Yorker.
So, I knew of her existence but I'm ashamed to say that I made no effort to contact her. Here was my father's only sibling, the only living member of his family, and for all intents and purposes he was an only child. And I never thought to ask about her or to find out what her phone number was. Or anything.
Then I met her at Thanksgiving in 2010, a couple of years after I learned of her, and had my first talk with her at lunch in town the next day. And when I told her how horrible I felt for how I treated her--or didn't treat her--she waved it off, saying, "Think of it as having suddenly discovered a long-lost relative. Living in New York." And I laughed with her. "I don't have loads of money, though, so don't expect to suddenly learn that you've inherited a boatload of cash. Plus, I have two boys."
That stopped me cold. I have cousins on my father's side? There were plenty on my mother's since she had two brothers and two sisters and they were all married and had kids and we'd see them at Christmas and on birthdays and we always had fun together. But, as I said, my father was like an only child. We were the poster family for a happy Catholic extended family in Marin County. And my Aunt Mary was the black sheep, hidden away in New York.
When she told me about her two boys, I saw no wedding band and when she noticed she said she was gay and had been living with her partner for nearly ten years. Helen, a psychologist, was married--in those days, a woman could only marry a man--and had two boys before her amicable divorce. The kids had been largely raised by Helen and my Aunt with, as I say, amicable visits from their dad, Gerard.
All of this is background of course. Once I got over the initial shock of learning at the post-Thanksgiving lunch that there was a gay woman in my own family, I felt like I had known Aunt Mary forever. She was careful to avoid any suggestion that anything that my mother or father did to her or to me was wrong, dismissing it as "That's just who they are." She added, "sometimes my brother, your father, has his head up his ass. The only regret I have is that I'm only meeting you now."
From that point on we spoke regularly. My folks didn't like it, but they tolerated it. I soon was in college for god's sake. When I decided to go to New York for law school, it was in part with the guidance of Aunt Mary.
And there she was as I pulled up outside my new home on 87th Street. This was only the third time I had seen this woman, but I had long since felt that I had always known her.
Kerry: School Days
