“Hello, father.”
“Hello, Suzanne. I was in New York for a meeting and I thought I would drop by.”
“We can go down to the park to talk,” I said, as I turned to Greg to say I was taking an early lunch and had my phone. We walked silently to Madison Square Park and found an empty bench.
“I’ve come to take you home,” he began. He had illusions. I squashed them.
“Father, I am home. This has been my home for over two years now.”
“Suzanne, please listen—”
“No, father, there is only one thing I need to hear from you. This is binary. It’s the same choice I made Mother make. You need to tell me that you accept me fully and whole-heartedly for who I am, not who you think I am or who you would like me to be. For who I am. I am gay. I love a woman. And I am going to marry that woman.
“It’s a simple as that. You do not have to answer me now. I’ll leave the door open. But you will not walk through until you tell me that, with all your heart and with all your faith, you accept me and you love me for who I am. Not despite who I am. For what I am.”
With that, I stood and headed past the dog run, across Fifth Avenue, across Broadway, and back to my life. I did not look back.
I have not heard from my father since then. But his unexpected and uninvited visit to my office could not put a damper on my wedding.
The Second Wedding
The wedding itself was a small and simple affair. We were married at the Chappaqua Spread, as had my Aunt and Betty. While for the most part we limited the guest list to our “family,” that turned out to be a lot of people. I hope I am not forgetting anyone but we had Mary, Betty, Peter and his girlfriend, Michael and his girlfriend, Eileen and Tom (who had set November 10 as their date, finally), Andi and Jack Olson, M. D. (a Columbia Presbyterian bone doctor who we of course called “Captain Jack” which annoyed Andi to no end but with whom she seemed to have fallen hopelessly in love), James and Jennie, Eric (who, as expected, blew everyone away with his piano playing and was accompanied, as a guest and as a singer, by one Lynn Billings, a fellow Yalie who had a voice like a young Ella), my Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Phil Windsor (my Mother’s sister and brother-in-law and the only ones on her side of the California family (and their children) who stood by her), and, happily, my Mother.
Non-family? Patsy and Abby Alford represented the AC, Carol and Rachel (with their twins, both drafted into duty as ring bearers) represented Sullivan & Wilson, Marc and Bob were there for Trallis, and all three of our other first-term study-group members (and close alphabetical-mates), Mike Norton, Bill Monroe, and Marie Newman, represented the law school. A recently-appointed federal judge who Kerry and I had for contracts presided.
Annie Baxter? Not forgotten. She finished super well at the B-School and after toying with and rejecting job offers from Goldman and Google, among many others, she chose a growing New York-based boutique investment bank that had an outpost in London and was looking to set up a beachhead in Hong Kong. Annie, who had never been to New York when she and I started our drive a bit over two years before, was now chomping at the bit to spend time in those other world cities. She tried to get me to promise I would drive with her on those adventures to those cities, but I told her Kerry would not allow it. I still loved her very much.
Annie was still in the apartment although she had swapped the woman who had taken my spot—it was amicable and they got along quite well—for a gentleman called Martin Foster. She met him—I am checking my scorecard on this—at a Columbia event. He is a Brit working on his Ph. D. in History and teaching joint Barnard/Columbia courses in modern European history and helped me (so far as one can get any help on the subject) on some Brexit issues I have at work. I think Annie fell for him because he was a rower, but that’s just my theory. I am pretty confident on this one though; he was a rower who was in the fourth seat for Cambridge in the Boat Race. (Look it up.) QED.
So add Martin to the guest list.
And Annie? It was unconventional, but Kerry and I agreed that Annie would give me away. She represented my link between California and New York, literally the person who accompanied me every mile of the way. She was the one who tried to ease the pain of the dark months I had without Kerry. She was the best friend, the best of friends, who happily permitted me to transfer that role to Kerry and she, I think, loved me for longer than anyone else had.
It took some convincing from me, from Kerry, from Mary, to get her to take the giving-away gig. More than anything, it took convincing from my Mother, who sat down alone with Annie, sitting, as it happens, on the very sofa in my (former) apartment where I sat when Kerry visited me that cold January day eighteen months before, and said, Annie later told me, that she had not yet earned the right to undertake such a task.
My Mother—who came to New York on an open ticket, had recently found her own apartment and job in Manhattan, and was often seen running in Riverside Park in one of my Stanford or one of Kerry’s Fordham shirts—had, though, earned the right to stand next to me, as Eileen stood next to Kerry, when we exchanged our vows and after I had my first kiss as Ms. Neally, with Ms. Neally, my second kiss was with Mother and Ms. Neally’s was with Mom. September 22, 2018. It is engraved on our wedding bands. It did not take much discussion, among Kerry, Mom, Mother, and me, to decide that this was how we were to be known from that day forth.