And then, as it was late, the bride and the groom rose to leave, the bouquet was tossed (caught by we-will-not-say), and with kisses and hugs and fond farewells, the happy couple were off to the airport for a honeymoon in Paris, and those left behind gathered their belongings and went home. Except for Eric and Lynn, who could not resist the chance to play on and sing along with the Steinway until being told by the club manager that the lights were about to be turned off. And except for Kerry and Suzanne, who had waited into the night to take care of Suzanne’s baby brother and someone who had all the hallmarks of being the love of his life and who, this being Kerry and Suzanne, did not waste the extra time, spending it in an alcove off the ballroom until hearing the final notes of Eric’s playing and Lynn’s singing.
Kate. She was also there, sitting off to the side where she could watch and hear her son and his own love and happier than she had ever been.
As the five—Eric, Lynn, and Kate squeezed in the back, Kerry and Suzanne in the front—drove from the reception, Suzanne thought that as Tolstoy never said but Austen probably thought, all weddings are the same but all happy couples are happy in their own way.
Kerry: August 2, 2019
Today may be the last day of my life in which I am off and my wife is not so I figure I would write up what’s happened to me, and us, since our story ended with us heading home from my Mom’s wedding to Tom Doyle last November.
Last Wednesday and Thursday I took the New York State Bar Exam, which I have to pass to become a New York lawyer. It is a two-day ordeal consisting of a combination of multi-state questions, including multiple-choices much like in any other standardized test, and essays and questions about New York law. I took it at the Javits Center, a cavernous convention-center along the Hudson in midtown. A big room with rows and rows of desks with rows and rows of aspiring lawyers. It will take months to find out if I passed.
If I do, I formally apply for admission, which is largely a formality. Then, assuming all goes well, I get admitted to practice law in the State of New York. I get a nice certificate. Being admitted in New York, though, does not let me practice in another state. While some states allow for reciprocity—you let my lawyers practice/I let yours—New York is not one of them.
My job at Sullivan & Wilson starts after a week off, and Suze and I will be taking it together. From then on, I expect my days off and my vacations will correspond with my wife’s days off and my wife’s vacations till we retire in forty or fifty years.
I wish I could say that everything went happily-ever-after from where this story began. It did for some—ME!!—but not all. Mom and Tom are going strong and Tom’s son James has set the date for getting married to his long-time girlfriend Jennie. They live in Brooklyn so I do not see them as often as I would like but I am quite fond of her and the scuttlebutt is that she’s just about ready to get pregnant.
On that. While Suze and I have spoken about it for us, we’re waiting at least until I worked for a couple of years before taking that step. We keep going back and forth as to who will carry. For now, though, and notwithstanding Mom’s and Kate’s albeit subtle pressure, it is still down the road for us. Kate, of course, being Suze’s Mother.
Suze’s brother Eric decided to take a break from Yale after his freshman year and is living in Kate’s extra room off Riverside Drive in the City while he shifts for gigs in the City on the piano. He’s good, but it is tough. He still plays with Lynn Billings from time to time, but their relationship entered a cooling phase after Christmas. Kate’s a little concerned about him. She comes up every couple of weeks for dinner at our house, and Mom usually drives down to join us, and Mary and Betty often come over too. Mary, by the way, has written her own little memoir, “Mary Elizabeth Nelson.” Until I read it, I did not appreciate some of the shit she had to go through and I did not understand how hard it was to be separated from Betty for twenty years and how important it was to both of them to get together again.
One additional point. Kate Nelson became a single woman yesterday. Her divorce in California became official. Suze and I took her out to dinner at a nice place on the Upper West Side to celebrate. She laughed at the button we got her saying
NEWLY SINGLE!
Ask Me Out!
She declined to put it on. Her failure, frankly, is not helpful to the task that lies ahead of Suze and I: Finding her a suitable man. Or woman. I am testament to the fact that you-never-know.
I should get out of the way that my never-met/never-spoken-to father-in-law is apparently “friendly with” a young widow he met at his church. This bit of intel came from Suze’s Aunt Liz, the only member (with her own family) of Kate’s family who still speaks to her. Kate’s parents, the Pughs, did not even call her at Christmas or on her birthday. Fucking hypocrites.
There’s an old joke, told to me by a nun in grammar school. St. Peter is showing a newcomer around Heaven. They encounter a wall. “That’s,” Peter says, “for all the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones up here.” That is where they will be. If they make it to heaven. That is the last I will say of him or them. Suze is an optimist and always thinks there can be a reconciliation. As there was with her Mother. I am a realist. I do not see it, and Kate never mentions him and immediately shuts down any attempt to bring him up. So she is ecstatic in being free of him.