Nephew in New York

Phyllis, my mother’s sister, lived in New York so I messaged her with details of my return visit, a stopover this time. Unlike my mother and the rest of their family, she was a rebel who joined the Women’s Air Force in England, discovering the difference of living overseas, its liberation, when she was stationed. Avoiding the humdrum future beckoning after demobilisation, she reinvented herself to find work in great demand as an English nanny in America’s most populated city.

In my narrow room at the Y I was exhausted after catching a glimpse of the Chrysler Building silhouetted against that night sky, bussing in from Newark past midnight, flooding having diverted my flight from Kennedy. Beginning another adventure, the freedom of the road that could make my heart beat faster, leaving naysayers behind, selfish now, I had wasted enough time. I woke, groggy, still drained, to her message announcing her arrival soon in my lobby. When she wasn’t living-in with families she stayed at a women’s hostel in Manhattan.

Coming inside from fine soaking rain, a modern Mary Poppins, she looked small and vulnerable wearing a belted raincoat and furling her umbrella. I recognised her immediately though we had only met once as adults. This was how my mother looked sixteen years earlier at Phyllis’s age. We found a Burger King, the cacophonous city finally hushed. While rain washed and cooled the streets I ate breakfast. She fiddled with her food going cold and talked and talked.

As if relieved after a long lone wait for a confidante to arrive, Phyllis threw open a window on her life so far, including some residual bitterness of her (our?) family’s disapproval, their quotidian meanness, the constant resentful envy. I admired her sexual frankness and felt she and I were allies, even more so when she endorsed the pursuit of artistic interests preferably when unencumbered. She also admitted to loneliness now she was older and less attractive, but said her decision to avoid marriage and her own children had been worthwhile because of N.Y.’s art scene alone. She had had her loves – outraging my prudish father – her adventures. Non, Je ne regrette rien.

We talked about nonconformists who strain to leave their families’ control only to find they never really break clear, perhaps because of subconscious unwillingness. Freedom, and being left out, alone, could be faces of the same coin we agreed, kinds of sanctuaries, and spoke of how families harshly judged some misfit members. She said she would have loved a son like me if she’d had children, my scars and past sins piffle to her, unlike my mother whose derision of my mistakes is now a noxious smog of memory. Who doesn’t crave approval? I said nothing of what her close kin thought of her.

Earlier, when I had caught up with our relatives in England over Sunday roast dinners they sounded shamed, even victimized, by Phyllis’s rule breaking, sharing my parents’ dim view of her. Jealousy came to mind, as well as sexual stagnation, and hand-me-down conformity’s cage. And what about happiness? They also suggested only depraved souls would contemplate living in New York although their acquiescence to servitude meant they had never been there. This contrasted starkly later with Phyllis’s description of wonderful free concerts in Central Park. Asked about my life before traveling from Australia, I edited the parental ghosts I had fled. I remembered reading Travels with My Aunt. Could I have been born to the wrong sister? Nah, that’s only a story.

When she re-entered America after her regular trips home- yes, despite everything she still went back – worry shrouded her because of not having a green card. I never learned how she got back in but she always did. A resourceful woman was my Aunt Phyllis. After talking for hours over our one order we left for Grand Central where she finally farewelled me and my large backpack of wanderlust beneath a pizzicato of pigeon wings. I thought of Elizabeth Smart, my senses prickling. Phyllis blinked away tears and pressed money into my pocket. I never saw her again after that day but sometimes a postcard arrived with a succinct message in her exaggerated scrawl.

Her last postcard was of King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building. I can’t tell which actress squirms helplessly under his hairy arm. Outdated war planes attack, bullets ripping chunks out of him. KK says in a balloon caption: ‘I just love this town!’ His defiant grin is perfect. Phyllis had written on the back; ‘Don’t forget to duck, kid!’

 

Ian C Smith’s work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.