The Neallys

Suze: Meeting Mary

Suze: Meeting MaryKerry and I found three other first-years to join our study group. Mike and Bill went to Penn together, and Marie was a Vassar grad. We met them chatting in the hall after Legal Method on Thursday and agreed to an every-other-week schedule to start, alternating between Mike’s and Marie’s dorm rooms after class on Wednesdays. We all had the same course load and schedule and figured we could up the frequency as we got deeper into the term.

The two of us 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 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. For her part, 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 often walked or took the bus to school—about a mile-and-a-half—together.

We both knew, though, that we were changing. It was not just that I had thrown 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 Mary, my Aunt. Kerry knew about Aunt Mary because she knew that that’s where I parked my car. She and my father were my paternal grandparents’ only children. My grandpa was a lawyer too and my grandma 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. There was a lot of empty space in that house. My father’s parents died in a car accident shortly after I was born, and that old, big house was sold. Growing up, my father sometimes took a detour to drive past it, slowing a bit without saying anything. When he spoke about them at all, it was to say, “They are in a better place.”

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 had 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 am 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, which turned into the most wonderful meal I ever had, for a few years at least. 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.

I saw that she did not wear a wedding band and when she noticed she told me that she was gay and had been living with her Betty for nearly ten years. Betty, 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 Betty 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 lunch that there was a gay woman in my own family, I felt like I had known Aunt Mary forever. She was very 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 did not 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. I would never quite be alone, and that helped with my nervousness.

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. Now I could see her every few weeks when Annie and I took the subway and then the train to Bronxville, the stop less than a mile from her home.