This is the third part of a multi-part story. The first five parts are the initial book. I am adding parts as things develop with these characters. This part begins the day after part 2 ends. There is zero sex in this part, which deals with a mother's struggle to accept her daughter.
Kathleen Nelson: A Mother's Struggle
Sunday, 1 p.m.
Early on the afternoon on the day after Eileen Neally was engaged and Mary Nelson and Betty Elliot had their pre-wedding party, the three women sat in Mary and Betty's living room in Yonkers to discuss a topic each often thought about but did not speak about. Eileen brought it up in a call that morning to Mary, and Mary agreed with her that the time was ripe for talking.
The issue was Suzanne and Suzanne's mother and specifically Suzanne's estrangement from her parents. Mary, Suzanne's father's older sister, was long separated from her brother and sister-in-law. It went way back, when Suzanne's father, William, was in high school and Mary a sophomore at Berkeley. Mary was exiled when she was in college and her mother stumbled on her nearly naked with a woman who was not her roommate. Her connection with her parents was terminated at the earliest possible moment, and she moved to New York, alone, and built her life there thirty years ago. She was marrying Betty in six days.
Before Suzanne moved to New York some twenty months earlier, she saw Mary just twice, once at a cold Thanksgiving dinner with her family and once at a warm lunch she had alone with her Aunt the next day. Suzanne was in high school and they spoke and wrote to one another frequently in the ensuing years.
Mary was always careful to tell Suzanne not to abandon her parents, that what they did to her they did because they believed their faith required them to, as her late parents' faith, they thought, required them to as well. But she could not control Suzanne's emotional turmoil. Suzanne knew she was gay well before she came out to anyone, and she had an almost visceral revulsion about how her parents treated her Aunt and how they would treat her when, or if, they learned.
And when the three women sat in the living room, Suzanne had had little contact with her parents. It was only six months earlier that Suzanne re-opened communications with her younger brother, Eric, a senior in high school in Mill Valley, attending Yale in September.
So the question long avoided had to be answered. If Suzanne was ever to resume contact with her parents, it probably had to be now. Which raised the hard question of how and the even harder question of what to say to Suzanne about it, if anything.
Suzanne was a woman who could take care of herself and make her own decisions. Yet. Suzanne had suffered at the long estrangement of her Aunt Mary and seemed to have moved on. Her parents might become important to her, but right now the three women were afraid to open old wounds. They agreed that thrusting Suzanne into it directly would do far more harm than good, perhaps making the separation permanent. It would be best, they decided, to approach her mother initially to see if there was a chance at rapprochement and take it one-step-at-a-time before dropping the bomb on Suzanne. Which, of course, meant that Kerry could not know either. To the question of what would happen if Suzanne found out they decided to address that when they got to it.
Betty raised two final objections. First, if she knew, would Suzanne's mother do anything to disrupt things? After Mary said she thought it unlikely they agreed it was a risk worth taking.
More important, they would be outing Suzanne to her mother, and likely her father. Wrong as that was, though, they decided to sacrifice it to what they thought and hoped would be the greater good.
And it was agreed. Eileen would call Suzanne's mother. Betty was too far away. Mary was too close. Eileen was Kerry's mother and it was all about convincing Suzanne's mother how important she was to Suzanne. Mary found her brother's information and with some work they were able to get a number for Kathleen Nelson in Mill Valley, California.
As she drove back to Chappaqua where she'd make the call, Eileen thought-and-thought yet was never satisfied that she knew what to say.
Sunday, 4 p.m.
"Hello?"
"Is this Kathleen Nelson?
"Yes, it's Kate. And with whom am I speaking?"
"Kathleen...Kate, you do not know me. My name is Eileen Neally and I'm calling from New York." Pause. "I'm calling about Suzanne."
"Suzanne? Is something wrong? Is she alright?" A myriad of possibilities, each worse than the other, immediately raced through Kate's brain.
"Kate, Suzanne is fine. My daughter is a friend of hers, they met in law school."
"Why are you calling? I haven't heard from Suzanne in over a year. I just get bits and pieces from her brother. Why—"
"Kate, my daughter is more than Suzanne's friend...My daughter, Kerry, is engaged to marry Suzanne." Pause.
"That's a lie. You know nothing about my dau—"
"Mrs. Nelson, please just listen. I'm trying to help."
"This is about Mary, isn't it? I told William that was a mistake. If Suzanne wants to speak to me—"
"Suzanne doesn't know I'm calling—"
"I don't know why you and Mary are doing it but it is not going to work."
And with that, the line went dead.
In her kitchen, Kate stared at her phone. This was insane. Why was this stranger taunting her? Suzanne would never have allowed this to happen, for someone to call her out of the blue. Suzanne would have called or emailed or used Eric as a messenger. It just made no sense. Unless...
She never should have allowed William to invite his sister to the house on Thanksgiving those years ago, allowed that creature to meet and seduce her niece, entice her to New York, and whomever this woman was—she did not get the name—Mary was mixed up in it.
Her heart skipped a beat. What if it were true? Of course, it was not. But what if it were true? Sitting in the kitchen where she took the call, Kate flung her nearly-empty cup against the wall and glared as it scattered into a million pieces. She was glad her husband was playing golf. And then she did something that she had often done in the last two years. She cried and cried.
Eric was in his room when he heard the crash. He raced to the kitchen, where his mother sat weeping and he saw the scattered remains of a coffee cup on the floor and traces of coffee on the wall. He often heard his mother cry in her bedroom and caught her doing so in the kitchen once or twice. She was almost always in control of her emotions. He knew this was about his sister.
Since reconnecting with Suzanne last Thanksgiving, he spoke to her frequently. She was thrilled when he told of getting early-admissioned into Yale and she'd sent enthusiastic comments, always laced with pointed, but accurate, "observations" when he posted performance videos of some of his piano gigs on YouTube. Sometimes they use Skype, and Kerry often dropped into the conversations now and then. Eric thought she was kind of hot, which he would never dream of telling Suzanne, and Kerry thought he was kind of handsome, which she made a point of telling Suzanne ("just in case, you know, I get traded back to the other team").
Eric's calls with his sister were in the privacy of his room. His parents knew they regularly spoke, but everyone observed a strict don't-ask/don't-tell policy. Beyond that, Eric and Suzanne often talked about what he could or should tell their parents. Angry as she was about how her parents treated their Aunt Mary, and aware that Aunt Mary always insisted that Suzanne not permanently cut her parents off, Suzanne thought it best to keep the information that Eric passed on as generic as possible. That information did not include the fact that she was engaged to Kerry.
That
was something that she treasured. Eric assured her that he only told them that she and Kerry were "the best of friends" and to queries about Suzanne's love life he told them that Suzanne never spoke to him about that, which was pretty true, to Eric's relief.
Something had changed.
"Mother?" Eric carefully asked as he approached her.
