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
