Ma Tante Laura — Positively Filipino
Myles A. Garcia
A nephew recalls a scandalous and wayward aunt.
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Positively Filipino | Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora
When the doorman at the Eldorado allowed me to proceed to Weld’s apartment, it was Tuesday herself who answered the door. She looked frazzled and quite stressed.

“I’m here for Laura,” I said. “I’m her nephew.”

“Here comes Laura.”

A few seconds later, Laura appeared looking peaked and with a big bump above one brow. She looked really forlorn and, as they say, like a wet chicken. She got the bump from slipping while getting up from a high bed that Weld provided for her and hitting her forehead on the night stand.

There was almost a look of relief on Weld’s face when Laura stepped out of the threshold. I got the feeling that she was both glad to be rid of Laura and apprehensive if any legal issues would arise out of Laura’s accident while in her employ.

Weld’s door shut quickly. I then took Aunt Laura by cab to the nearest hospital with emergency services, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, at Columbus Avenue and West 58th St. to have her checked out. Somehow, I had the uneasy feeling at that point that Laura was doing everything to mentally document the events of the evening and plot some legal compensation maneuver in the aftermath.

I thought to myself that was my Aunt Laura true to form.

Our “Auntie Mame”

Because of her flamboyant, wacky style, her often very grand tales—and, to put it nicely, her over-flowing generosity and way with gifts—we also got to calling her our “Auntie Mame,” after the Patrick Dennis heroine of swanky Sutton Place, who had a slightly larcenous side. More on that later.

Laura cut a wide swath in life, not only in her Manila days, but also in her expat life in New York. She was a first cousin of my mother. She had been a successful lawyer in Manila with a booming legal practice fixing the immigration status of many Chinese clients. But attorney Laura was also a bit showy and flamboyant.

One time, I heard that she showed up at Immigration Court in Manila in a cowgirl outfit! I believe the judge admonished her. She was mighty proud of the legend she was becoming, but at the same time it was starting to rub people the wrong way. There was a lot of greasing palms at the time in that lucrative trade—and this was a few years after Ferdinand Marcos himself operated in the same racket, except that he had moved on to the Senate by the time Laura was doing well.

The Peripatetic Barrister

Every other year, Laura would travel abroad, taking whoever her girlfriend was at the time for company.

Although I didn’t give it much thought then, it didn’t seem out of place seeing Aunt Laura show up with her GF-companions. I didn’t even have to call the other lady “tita.” So, it was farthest from my thought that being a tomboy, having “girl friends” (i.e., liking one’s own gender) was all that out of place.

So, yes, my Tita Laura, as it became more apparent to me in later years, was one of “them”—the other kind of “lady” before “lesbian” became part of accepted parlance.

Anyway, Laura was making good money at the time she would travel around the world every other year with the GF du jour. On one such trip in 1962, the second year of the Diosdado Macapagal administration, a piqued adversary in Manila squealed on her, and the next thing we knew, the NBI (the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation) raided her law offices in downtown Manila. Her enemies in the government filed charges and indicted her in absentia. She became a wanted woman and a fugitive.

(My mother, a practicing GP in San Juan, even got subpoenaed to court because Mom’s “signature” appeared in some of the medical certificates of Laura’s clients. My mother, of course, denied signing them, so forgery was added to the charges leveled against Laura. It was a long time before Mom eventually forgave her cousin for that transgression.)

As a young person, I didn’t really know the intricacies of the law or the extent of the malfeasance Laura was charged with, but I believe her large, new residence on Kamuning Road in Quezon City was seized by the government as part of the penalties. Sic transit gloria mundi.

A Woman of Other Talents

Suddenly stranded in the U.S. by the rash circumstances, Laura was forced to survive by her wits and, luckily, she was a woman of other talents. She was self-taught in playing the piano and guitar, which served her well. When she first got stranded in the U.S., she supported herself by being a supper club singer in Minneapolis, with the stage name “Mei-Ling.”

As this was around the time that the film version of Flower Drum Song was released, her chosen stage name of Mei-Ling was surely a tribute to the demure and virginal “Mei-Li” character played by Miyoshi Umeki. (This was the same role Lea Salonga would eventually play in the film’s revival in 2004). In reality, with a little alcohol, Laura’s personality was more like the other bawdy female lead in the musical, the brassy nightclub entertainer, Linda Low. But, oh, details.

Once, after not having seen her for a couple of years, she picked up the guitar and plunked out Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man from Show Boat; she sang her heart out and it got me right in the old thumper, despite the irony of the song’s subject vis-à-vis her gender preference. Oh, details.

Our New York Years

As we got to know each other more when I moved to New York in 1972, I found her taste in music quite expansive. It would range from the popular (Neil Diamond and Song Sung Blue) to bourgeoisie middle-class (Broadway musicals) to high-brow (Renata Tebaldi was a big favorite). Aunt Laura would catch Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera whenever she could. I got invited once or twice, but I declined since opera is not, to use a pun, my cuppa tea. I suspect that her love for operatic music was nurtured by one of her early GFs, a voice-music teacher.

But I’d like to best remember Laura as a “Broadway Baby,” per Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Like me, she would spend her last dollar on a Broadway show. When my family visited with her for ten days in 1968, Laura bought tickets for everyone to four Broadway shows (Fiddler on the Roof, Golden Rainbow, Man of La Mancha and, most appropriately, (Auntie) Mame, of course, costing her nearly $450, which was a significant amount even at the time. In addition, I treated myself to two other shows, knowing then that I would not be returning to New York until four years later. I was in hog heaven.

More Adventures Under the Radar

We lost touch, or purposely kept our distance from each other, for some years. She could not bring herself to accept the fact that most of her nieces and nephews had become adults and wanted to make our own grown-up decisions. Nonetheless, I heard about some of her “adventures.”

Once, like some secret “strategic” diplomatic mission, Laura took a quick, secret trip to Manila, knowing that charges against her were still outstanding there and that her enemies were still around. She got it in her head that despite the risks to her own safety, she was going home to confront an old GF who worked in the Foreign Service and who, it seems, laid claim to the title of a property in the Blue Ridge subdivision they had “shared.” Some 30 years later, Laura wanted that property back.

That risky trip didn’t get anywhere, but somehow she high-tailed it back to the States unscathed. At least the old GF didn’t vengefully turn in her old partner to the Philippine authorities when she had the chance to do so.

Close Shave Escape in Paradise

Another time, she took an unplanned trip back to Manila, and it was probably the hairiest episode of all. As in Manila, Laura had also crossed a number of people in New York. So, again, someone who knew her real situation squealed to INS/ICE. So, ICE got wise (sounds like a song right there) to her and picked her up. Her record in Manila had literally caught up with her.

After a quick arraignment, Immigration Court decreed that she should be returned to the Philippines ASAP. So, she was put on a plane back to Manila in handcuffs, with an INS marshal. She knew she was almost at the end of her rope. However, at the Honolulu International layover, she used one last trick up her sleeve.

She said that she had to use the WC. So, of course, the agent, being male, had to uncuff her and could only wait outside the Ladies WC door.

Once out of his sight, Laura somehow managed to escape through those little WC windows, no small feat for her as she was on the heavy-set side.

Of course, once she returned to her ‘hood on the East Coast, the episode became the stuff of legend in the family and she earned herself a new nickname in intimate circles, Slippery Laura.

Almost Getting a Concorde Treat!

Laura was given to, shall we say, gross inaccuracies.

One time she said that she had gotten a job to sell insurance to servicemen in a U.S. base in Europe. Hmmm, I wondered: how long that would last? She would have paid-for housing outside the base, but the biggest perk of all, according to her: she would get an-all expenses-paid flight on the . . . “Concorde.”

Wait a second, I thought, an insurance sales job in Europe with a fully paid fare on the supersonic Concorde? How did she snag such a lucrative gig? One-way fares across the Pond from JFK to London or Paris cost about $850 each way in the 1980s—about the cost of a Business Class seat on the subsonic jets. I was in the wrong line of business, I thought.

About a month and a half passed. Then I got a call from her. She was back home in New Jersey. The insurance gig was over—sooner than anticipated—and she wanted to tell me all about her new adventure. I put on my skeptical listening cap. Long story short, the job turned out to be a bust.

“How was the ride on the Concorde?” I asked. Long, deep silence. Then she ‘fessed up that it wasn’t the Concorde at all but Condor Air, a charter airline! Scrabble fans, take note—C-o-n-d-o-r Airways, not C-o-n-c-o-r-d-e! Oy. Typical, vintage Laura.