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.
Kerry: School Days
It’s funny. Columbia is very competitive. But I never feel that I am competing with anyone but myself. We are all in a super-intense environment but we are all in it together. People, strangers, started coming to me after class and asking questions. I had no idea why. I had gotten through being called on—professors used the seating chart to select an unsuspecting student for a question about a case, the damn Socratic method long used to make us “think like a lawyer”—and once that happened you did not have to worry about it again for the rest of the term. I was doing the prescribed reading of fifteen pages of our casebooks—each chiefly containing court opinions—a night. It was far different from college lectures. We read a case and the professor asks about the principle it articulated, drawing out our answers so that we understood, we hoped, the point.
Then the exams. This too is different. Most are open book. You can bring whatever you wanted to. Books, notes, rosary beads. Which sounds great until you realize that everyone else can bring their own things in. Because we aren’t being tested on facts like when was the Battle of Gettysburg or what was the meaning of a passage from “Pride and Prejudice.” You get a fact pattern and need to explore all of the relevant legal issues that arise. There are rarely the right answers. It’s all on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand stuff.
Putting all of this together meant that preparation was crucial, and that was the point of the study group. Work together on course outlines and go over the principles again and again. Sure, there were pre-packaged outlines built around a particular casebook. But I did not trust them or myself. I had to do my own outline. And so I did and I shared it with the others in the group, as they shared what they had done.