The Neallys

Kerry: Suze’s Aunt

Kerry: Suze’s AuntHoly f**k. Was my Mom flirting with my best friend?

A couple of things to unpack there.

First, yeah, Suze was my best friend. But I wasn’t hers. She had tons of other friends, including Annie, who I liked, and others she knew from California. I did not care. We sat together in class and went to our study group together. Between classes, and because neither of us had a dorm room to head to, we’d sit silently next to one another in the library or on a bench on Morningside Drive preparing for our next class. (Morningside Drive runs along the eastern edge of Columbia—the Hudson is its western border—and there is a sharp drop, almost a cliff, to get to Harlem itself. Hence the area’s name, Morningside Heights.) It wasn’t like we did everything together. I mean, she went out for a run on her own three or four times a week and I always took the train home before seven. But we did speak almost every night.

She was smart, of course, and she did not have a mean bone in her body. She had, as Jane Austen observed of Anne Elliot, “elegance of mind and sweetness of character.” While some assholes would view a professor grilling a student the way a Roman viewed a lion approaching a Christian, hoping for the latter’s painful demise, you could sense Suze cringing and quietly giving a sigh of relief when the student survived or a frown when she did not. Doing, thinking, anything else simply would not occur to her.

I sometimes embarrassed myself when I was not as sympathetic or empathetic as she expected me to be. I soon realized that she was uncomfortable when I sprinkled obscenities in my sentences, and I tried to cut down on it because it made her uncomfortable, as it did my Mom. I took all of this as a sign that she had great expectations for me and I got angry with myself when I felt I disappointed her. And next to my Mom she was suddenly the last person I could ever want to disappoint.

When Suze came by my house, she was not dressed as I was used to, trading in her T-shirt, jeans, and trainers for loose black-slacks with a white belt, a red blouse buttoned to the collar, a light blazer, and pumps with two-inch heels. Annie, who I had never met, was similarly dressed and, as I said, I liked her. The two of them oozed having spent a fun girls-day-out.

Which brings me back to my Mom and her flirting. She had been alone and lonely for so long that I know her wordplay was unintentional. She NEVER said anything to anyone, as far as I knew, that had the slightest tinge of want or attraction. I would notice. So with Suze, it was something that flowed naturally from her, without conscious thought or ulterior intent. It somehow made her more human to me, more womanly. But Suze was my best friend. It was something I would watch, but would, could, do nothing about.

When Suze called her Aunt to say she was bringing the car over, her Aunt invited us all, my Mom included, to her place. Suze and Annie hopped in the Camry and after we cleaned up a bit my Mom and I drove over in our Outback. And Aunt Mary—who insisted that I call her “Mary,” which I easily did—gave me a huge hug when we arrived. “Finally, I get to meet the beautiful, brilliant Kerry.” I blushed and shot a glare at Suze, then Mary gave my Mom a hug saying, “and I see where she got it from,” and now my Mom was blushing. At which point Mary’s partner Betty gave Mary a slap and my still-smiling Mom a brief hug.

They ordered pizza and wine—my Mom discretely sticking with water—and it was an easy, relaxed girls-night-in. Too quickly we saw that it was dark and we did not realize it was late until Annie suggested it was time to go. We said our goodbyes, dropped Suze and Annie at the station, and headed home.

“That was nice,” my Mom said when she sat down with me before I headed back down to the Cave. “I can see why you, er, like Suze so much. She’s like the sweet daughter I never had.” I hit her with a towel, “MOM!” She laughed, “You know I love you honey, but sweetness has never been your strong suit.” “True” was my lame comeback.

She paused. “Mary invited me to stop by her place. Do you think I should? She’s so near and she could be the saucy sister I never had.”

“She is saucy, and I liked her. But I have to tell you some things about her. You can’t tell Suze that I told this to you and you can’t tell anyone else what I’m going to say, but I should give you some background.”

She promised to keep it to herself.

“Suze says her father, who she always refers to as ‘my father’ and she always calls her mom her ‘mother,’ sometimes acts as if he were an only child. When she grew up, there were no pictures of Mary on the mantel although there were of her father and her grandparents. Only when she was in her teens did she learn that her father had, has, a sister and that she has an aunt. Suze’s folks are hard-core Catholics. They also grew up outside of San Francisco and from what I can piece together from what Suze told me, at some point Mary was spending lots of time in the City. She was a good student and went to Berkeley. She insisted that she wanted to live on campus, and her folks were doing well and they had no problem paying her tuition and room-and-board.

“Unfortunately—and Suze is vague on the details—her grandmother showed up at Mary’s dorm room when Mary was not alone. And not with her assigned roommate. Mary was just in a robe when she opened the door. It took a moment for Mary’s mother to figure out what was happening, seeing a strange woman in a robe trying to disappear into the background, but as soon as she did, she turned and walked away. According to Suze, Mary’s mother never saw her again.

“It was the fall semester of Mary’s sophomore year, and when she got back from class the next day there was a hand-delivered letter, more a notice really, under her door. Mary was advised that ‘your father’—the f*****g thing, sorry, was written in the third-person—was exercising his right to cease providing financial support to ‘his daughter,’ that because tuition, etc. had been paid for the balance of the fall semester she could continue going to classes and taking her exams and residing in the dorm but that effective with the final day of the fall semester all financial obligations would be hers and hers alone.

“She never saw her father again. Both of those grandparents died in a car crash when Suze was little.”

My Mom reached over to touch my hand as my eyes were beginning to water.

“Suze’s father was still in high school when all of this happened. Mary did not think he knew any of what was going on, at least at the time. Their parents would never breathe a word of it to anyone. She had a few thousand dollars in a bank account, money she’d earned over the prior Summer. She’d managed to avoid spending too much of it when school began. In December she bought one of those Amtrak excursion tickets, and after she finished her finals and had to move out of her dorm, she packed what she could into a suitcase, went to Union Station or whatever it’s called in San Francisco, and took a train that got her to New York via Chicago. Right before Christmas.

“She didn’t know anyone in New York. But the girl she was with when her mother stopped by, who was just a one-day fling that changed Mary’s life in an unexpected way, had a cousin who lived in the Village. The cousin, a guy, spoke to Mary before she left and told her that she could stay with him for a few nights and that he could probably hook her up with a job at a bar or restaurant around NYU and perhaps with someone who had some space she could rent.”

My Mom’s eyes were starting to water a bit too.

“So, Mary took the train to New York and to the Village and to NYU. I don’t know the details, and perhaps she’ll share them with you, but yada yada yada she ended up meeting someone, a woman, at NYU. That would be Betty, who you just met. They had a bit of a thing for a few months but Betty ended up marrying a guy, Gerry, she knew from home on the Island and they had a couple of boys before Betty realized that she was gay, that her marriage was loveless, and that no one made her feel complete the way Mary had years before.”

I took a breath.

“Betty tracked Mary down, hoped she was still available and interested and, yada yada yada, after a divorce Mary, Betty, and the two kids moved to Yonkers and, as I understand it from Suze, they’re vaguely talking about getting married one of these days.”

I stopped.

“And the kids?”

“She said that one works in DC and the other is a student up in Boston, I think a junior at Boston College.”

My Mom took a breath. “What about Suzanne’s father, Mary’s brother?”

“Oh, I skipped over that. It’s actually really important. According to Suze, and I think she only recently got this from her Aunt, after she came to New York Mary tried to get what information she could about her brother, who was still in high school outside of San Francisco. Remember, this was the pre-f*******: era so that was pretty tough. But she figured that he probably followed their father to Stanford. When her brother would have been a sophomore she wrote him a letter simply addressed to him care of Stanford University, etc. A week or two later she received a large envelope without a return address. Inside was her letter—she had put her name and return address on the envelope. It was unopened and written across the back of the envelope, in all caps, was ‘DO NOT CONTACT THIS PERSON AGAIN.’

“And that was it. She sent a letter to her brother’s law firm about a decade later but never heard back. I guess Catholics can be just as f****d up as Evangelicals.” My Mom did not approve of that language and gave me a hint of a glare. “Sorry.”

“There was one attempt at reconciliation. Mary was invited to Suze’s house for Thanksgiving six or seven years ago. That’s when she met Mary. Suze overheard her parents making it clear that a future invitation would never be extended, but she and her Aunt had lunch the next day alone and immediately connected with one other. They’ve been communicating, largely behind her parents’ back, ever since and it was Mary who got Suze her Apartment.”

And with that, I exhausted my knowledge of Mary’s history and felt that my Mom knew enough to decide, or at least start to decide, how far a friendship with Suze’s Aunt might go.