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…