Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read online

  As for my Jewishness, that was satisfyingly in all of me, no more to be questioned than the body I walked around in. And Katie Pyle was the same only more so, for the three Pyle women—Katie, her mother (my Aunt Beck), and her sister, Rachel (self-styled Nita)—went much to the consolations of the synagogue, why so I wouldn’t know fully until Katie was old. But I knew that in the eyes of my mother, who never went there at all, although she could well have used consolations, Katie, already seemingly so removed from the marital by her vocation, was in danger of becoming one of those single women who went too much to God.

  Meanwhile, I could see for myself how Katie’s Southernness overlay her Jewishness yet united with it, as evinced in her looks. I wouldn’t see until years later that her face much resembled Bette Davis’s in its lively responses as well as its features, not barring the slightly pulled bit of nose between the nostrils.

  It could indeed be a Christian face unless you looked carefully. Its ancestry was Dutch and German, her mother having been a Rebecca Boettigheimer, and its coloring blond. Jews more used to the Sephardic strains and brunette complexion I bore might not recognize her as Jewish at all. But unlike my mother, whose chestnut Teuton beauty could blush with pleasure at a “Why, I wouldn’t have known you were,” Katie never spoke of her own looks in any Jewish-Christian context and, I knew for sure, would have been angered by any such compliment.

  Of course I never really saw her more than gently angry until she was eighty. But she was the epitome of what in the days of the Gibson Girl era slightly before her was called “spunk.” Indeed, the special link between us came of that quality, and the story of how this happened seemed to me as grisly cute as some of the folklore sent my father each month by a Hebrew subscription society—and equally as Jewish as a tale could be.

  One night, when I was a tot, I had a fever, as tots in those less inoculated days seemed more to do, either surviving by their own dower of resistance or not. “Katie, thank God,”—this is my father speaking—“was student-nursing just then, and happened to be there.”

  Hanging on the tale, which was never to be dribbled at too slow a pace for me, I knew just how that would be. Tired after her exhausting hours of day service, or else facing the prospect of a long hospital night, Katie would have come by to this place that was hers in all but blood, drawn in less by the abundance of food than by the hectic glow of the company, even whose quarreling amused her. Of course she would be fed, and expected to be. But not in the way of other droppers-in, who, as many times as they came, had to be invited and pressed to stay several times over of an evening in a number of variations suited to the circumstances of each, had in fact to be confirmed of their welcome all the harder because frequently they knew damn well they weren’t.

  “Oh, come, I made a jellied salad,” my mother might say too winningly to an aunt who hated it and might well criticize our excellent cuisine—in which such salad was not normal—as tartly as if she had paid for it. Or, “Now, Martha,” my father might say carefully to the poorest cousin from Newark. “Take something, before that ride.” And mincingly or haughtily, or even hungrily, their protestations would subside.

  Katie never protested, but not only because she was honestly welcome. She took as her right the expansive Southern hospitality she had been reared in—if we were ever to be at her house she and hers would be sure to make return in kind. I saw also how she returned our hospitality in the same moment it was extended, by the grace with which she accepted, honoring the food with a light, sincere aside—“Hattie, this is exceptional”—to my mother, whose awkward bridal efforts were family lore, but whose mature day-to-day efforts, taken for granted now by all, went unpraised. Or I would hear Katie joining in the talk with a modest sliver of a laugh, not too lyrically shaped.

  I supposed that France had given her poise—“Gay Paree” being all I knew of it other than a rosy-ruffled bisque doll, presented me when I was thought to be too young for it, that danced on its platform, inclining its pink mobcap, and then disappeared into a cupboard forever in what I assumed was the French style. But when I once dared to ask Katie about her French experience—during and after World War I it would have been, with the wounded—tears started in her eyes and were held there while the eyes widened, a phenomenon I had never seen before; maybe this was Southern, too?

  I wouldn’t have my answer until I was in graduate school and dined one night in Harlem at a black schoolmates home table, where I might observe in my schoolmate’s mother the same hospitality, the same soft shoots of laughter—and when she spoke of her first experience here up North, as one of the just-arrived girls who in the early morning had stood in street-corner slave markets in the Bronx, to be picked off as slavies for the day by the local Jewish housewives—that same brimming of the eyes.

  I was old enough by then to know that it couldn’t be Southern exclusively, to hold back tears in that way, not letting them drop. Or to save up memory, as with our household’s every closet and chair. Yet I was still young enough to note what my elders at home, my father, my courtly uncles and their retinue of women, all of them cosseting our household help with the usual “We know how to treat them decently,” had never admitted to themselves or maybe never even seen—that in the curious way the droit de seigneur redounds even on the kind master who will not exercise it, they had learned some of their soft manners from the Blacks.

  “You not too Northern, Girl, seemlike,” my friend’s mother said, settling back from emotion into her own amplitude and regally dishing out. On my first visit she hadn’t called me Girl; now she had grown more daring. I knew that after rising to the status of full-time maid she had married an accountant with his own agency on 125th Street. On one corner of that famous cross street, my father had once pointed out to me, as we were driven by, a big gray apartment house shaped like the Flatiron Building and new when he came to New York, into which he as the youngest son, who though still in his twenties had done well in the North, had brought my grandparents and family and all their worldly goods—including the massive bed on which I still slept.

  “Wait to hear how she tell a story, Mahma,” my schoolmate said. “Slow as molasses in the mawning.” She was writing her Master’s thesis in the Speech Department at Teacher’s College. At home her style of talk reverted, although never all the way.

  Katie, addressing her own mother, said “Mahma” in just that deferent, drawn-out way. My Cousin Lee, still living in Richmond and even closer to the heritage, said “Mah Daydee and Mumma,” just like their own maid. Though of course their grammar was not affected.

  “Oh, do I?” I said too loud. Did the twinge of guilt I felt come from the North—and the ache underlying it from the South? “It’s memory that’s slow.” Why did I feel that they here would understand this better than anybody else—except us?

  “You wrap a story plumb round a spool,” my friend said. Looking down the table at her silent father and brothers, she hooted, maybe a little too loud also. “Zackly like us.”

  “Like you and Mother,” the elder boy said.

  I smiled too hard, because the tape in my head was still running on. Even in fun, we none of us would ever have said “plumb.”

  “Uh-huh—” her mother said, in emphasis. “That the case?”

  If, on the other hand, mild denial were intended, she and we would have let loose an “uh-uh,” in a lowercase, casual voice, modestly inserted. I heard, too, now how at home our affirmatives had always been much stronger than our negatives.

  “Ah-hah?” her mother said now. It was as soft as a question could be. “But I’ll never believe, uh-uh, not on the saddest day, that you is a Jew.”

  What would Katie have said, in the gentle voice used maybe to patients she had to chide—“Now, y’all!”?

  My friend saw my face. “Finish about your cousin,” she said in her crispest Teacher’s College voice.

  “Well, like I said,” I said. “She was the cousin visited Shirley when she was a girl.”

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p; Shirley was the great plantation along the James River on which my friend’s mother had been born—this was why I had been brought here. Mahma would crave to know anybody who even knew what the name Shirley meant down there, my friend had said.

  “She was invited there just before they came North,” I said. “Some ole Miz Somebody who lived there invited her. That was where she learned to fish, and to ride.” And to shoot, though I wasn’t sure I should say it. The fishing was unladylike enough. “She stayed three months.”

  Then her father, “old Solly Pyle” as my father called him, had come to get her. I could see him as I myself had later, a handsome, white-crested man with a fine bearing, dressed in the same summer pongees and Panama hat my father wore—though of course Solomon Pyle would have been younger then. “She says visits were longer in those days. Took a time to get there.”

  But Pahpa, she’d said, he was worried I might have fallen for some boy down there. I heard Katie’s laugh, one stave above a chuckle—Warn’t inny me-en at Shirley inny moah. Jus some ole leftover ladies Mahma’d met in Richmond. Who were open to a little young company. Mahma said it would be a precious experience for me. She only let me go because we were already set to move—

  I bet you were the prettiest theng, I’d said stoutly. You still are. For I knew my mother and aunts thought now that she would never marry. She’d pursed her lips at them, over there in their corner; she knew that, too. Not too bad, she’d said. And was it then it began to sift to me that she must already have had her romance?

  “Sure would like to know the name that ole Miz,” my friend’s mother said. “Course, there was a heap of houses on Shirley. My granddaddy was head inside servant up at the main one.”

  Down the table her husband cracked a hard roll in his fist and set it on his butter plate. I hadn’t seen one of those plates recently; we seldom brought them out even for company. I saw that the two younger boys, who were looking at their father apprehensively, hadn’t known to set their butter knives at the edge.

  “Tell Mahma how that cousin saved your life as a baby,” my friend said. “And only a kissing cousin.”

  One of the boys snickered. “Kissing cousins. What the heck is that?”

  His mother heaved up her bosom, a word I hadn’t thought of since an aunt had noted I was getting one. “It mean close in all but blood. Times I think you not even that to this house, boy.” She lifted her chin at her husband, queenly. “Tell your story, Girl.”

  Southerners tell a story over and over without shame.

  So I told how Katie, coming into the nursery, had looked down at the hot child. “You were burning up,” my father had said. “I’d already called Kozak.” Doctors were known by their last names only in our house, in a kind of ownership.

  “I could smell the fever before I saw you,” Katie’d said, chiming in. “You must have had over a hundred and five. I knew what it was at once—seen it in the wards. Children don’t have it anymore.”

  “Diphtheria,” my father had said. “My heart sank in my shoes.” Then he would smile at Katie, saying to the rest of us, “And even then, that girl never raised her voice.” It was his specific for women—mostly an unsatisfied one. “And then—” he would say.

  But Katie always made an excuse to leave the room at this point, saying, “Hush, hush, Uncle Joe, haow you drahmatize”—after which he would whistle, and fall still. And maybe tell us later, maybe not, depending.

  “She always claimed the doctor did it when he came,” my father would whisper, looking over his shoulder. “What had to be done, to save you.” She was only a student nurse, and she didn’t want her parents to know. They might have taken her out of nursing school. She’d had an awful fight to go.

  “It forms a false membrane in the throat,” I told my friends table, who were all listening now, even the boys. “You have to suck it out, mouth to mouth. You have to take it in your own throat. And that’s what she did.”

  When I myself put it to her, the first time I heard it, she’d said, “Oh, hush, child. I never catch a thing.”

  “Sure like to swap talk with that lady from Shirley,” my friend’s mother said when I was saying good-bye. Their hallway had a comfy, musty smell like ours used to, maybe from the same kind of leather davenport—another word and object I had now left behind me, when after my grandmother’s death we had moved to the smaller apartment where my mother was at last free of the clan dinners, and maybe missed the regularity, the grandeur.

  “Oh, Mother, her cousin is not from Shirley,” my friend said. I could have made that correction myself, but knew better. Although I’d never been South I knew that region’s grandiosity, white or black, in which in one evening’s hearsay a grandfather might slip from being a “boy” somewhere on the “ess-state” to being a butler in the mansion house.

  “She’s a superintendent of nurses now,” I said proudly. “But I bet she’d come. She’d be interested to. And I do thank you for that lovely meal. It was like home.” Or like home when we went to Flora’s, where my father took his hankering for okra, creamed corn off the cob, and oyster dishes Germans had never heard of. I looked around for the father and the boys, but they were gone. “Thank you kindly,” I said. It twanged in my ear like a requiem.

  “I wanted Arnella to train for a nurse,” her mother said. “It stays with you. But col-lege—” She said it with that delicate double “1.” Shaking her head at Arnella and me—at what going there had made of us. “Well, come again,” she said. “You talk more Southern than my own chile.”

  Outside on East 110th Street I figured out that Arnella lived at about the same distance from Columbia as I did on Riverside Drive.

  “I’ll walk you,” she said. “Gotta late class.”

  As we parted on Broadway she said nervously: “Hope you don’t mind what she said about Jews. She had a hard time.”

  I said I didn’t—and I didn’t.

  “I sometimes feel worse about being a Northerner. Or even a Southerner. But in the Jew department? Nothing can touch me there.”

  Next time Katie dropped in at home I did ask her if she would go. She was regarding our new living room absently. The apartment was decent enough, but there was no grandmother wing, and in the family there had been other decimations. At four o’clock, the former coffee hour, light from the river fell askance on two barrel-shaped chairs that curved forward, empty-armed. The furniture came at us to be noticed now; it had always been subsidiary.

  “Good grief, y’all are in reduced circumstances as regards relations, aren’t you?” she said. “But the view is nice. Sure, hon’—where did you say?”

  When she understood clearly she gave me a long look. Her eyes were still big enough in her face to be called “teacup eyes,” as I had once said of them when small, the aunts shrilling behind me, “Saucer eyes, the child means. You mean saucer!” I arguing—“No! Teacup!”—and they teasing on until I cried, and Katie, squeezing her eyes shut to settle the matter, had taken me on her lap to be consoled.

  “Hon’, you sure do get into things,” she said now. Then she chuckled. “Sure I’ll go. Sure.” Then we hugged.

  “Whoosh, I’m tired,” she said then. Her face had always been wan, with an even delicacy that as she aged I came to know as the ultimate health, but by now her mouth drooped some at the sides. “Been doing some night duty in the mental ward.”

  She had never wholly given up nursing, and this was her specialty, her interest dating, she had not long before told me, from the time my own mother, released from a sanatorium after a breakdown following my brother’s birth, had been ordered by the doctors to “rest cure” at Atlantic City, with seven-year-old me along to cheer her, and Katie to oversee. “We were there for three months,” she’d said at the time, “—don’t you recall?”

  What I recalled was that I hadn’t cheered. My mother, exhorted to the beach, stood fixedly at the hotel window, I behind her, at her waist but ignored. “Come away from that window, child,” I’d heard Katie’s v
oice back then say—had she said the final d on “child” or not? Even at seven I’d known that her anxiety about the high window was for my mother, not for me. “No,” I’d said carefully, when reminded of that time, “I only remember the pony rides.”

  Now Katie said musingly, “Shirley. How you hold on to things. Forgot I told you ’bout that.”

  I heard how she got more Southern when she talked of the South, just as my own accent came back on me when I talked to anybody from down there. “I could tell you about your whole visit. Except”—I hesitated—“what did you shoot?”

  “Rabbit,” she said dreamily. “And once a woodchuck the field hands cooked and I had a taste of. Ugh. Was it fat! ‘Supposed to taste like shoat,’ I told Mahma when I got home, ‘but it don’t,’ and Mahma laughed ’til she crah’ed. ‘Don’t ever tell your poppa you ever tasted shoat,’ she said. Alright to tell him you shot one, though, ‘case you did.’ And then she laughed some mo’.”

  Katie had rosied, the way she always did with stories, and looked younger, as always when she spoke of her adored mother. She drank deep of the coffee I had brought her.

  “What’s a shoat?”

  Civil War Richmond, when my father was born, had been not too many steps above a country town. He had left it early and, so far as I knew, had never shot anything; his sports as a young man were going to cockfights and to boxing matches in the days of brass knuckles, and, until he had married my mother when in his fifties—women.