Kissing Cousins: A Memory Page 3

  “Pigling.” Katie’s mouth quirked. “Tastes right good, way the dawkies at Shirley cooked it.” She had spent nearly as much time with them, she’d once said, as she had with the ladies.

  At home we had observed no dietary laws. Until I was grown I hadn’t even known that the shellfish we consumed in such quantities was forbidden the orthodox—until an acquaintance happened to allude to it. Yet my father, who had eaten everything in his time, professed to disdain pork more as lower class than as a religious sin, and we had never had it.

  Now she sighed—the remembering sigh that purled like an undercurrent from all the elders in my father’s family, and that I sometimes thought of as the voice of the deserted South speaking through them. Katie, I thought, had learned it too young.

  “Those black people were practically keeping the place together for the old ladies. Better nigras I’ve never seen.”

  I held very still. I found myself holding my breath. In the new living room there was now a big transformer attached to our radio-record-player, to convert our electricity from direct current to alternating. The apartment house, owned by Columbia University, was among the last in the city still to have DC. I felt like that transformer, my two currents interchanging.

  “Arnella—she has a degree.” My voice cracked. “She talks like you and me. I mean—like N’Yawk.” I heard the tape. When I was with Arnella I talked like she did: I said Noo Yaw-uk.

  I felt myself turn red. I did this so seldom that when it happened the whole family rushed to see.

  Katie stopped dead. Like a brook stopping. This was another thing I learned—at that instant. Real Southerners ran on, yes, like a brook, detouring round a bad moment like water round a pebble, filling in the chinks of confrontation with a babble, murmuring to a pause. Hollering was a different thing entirely; it was like healthful exercise. It was only Northerners who stopped dead, ominously, like teachers, or like the couples one sometimes saw on the tough streets around grade schools, squaring off like cats and dogs before a fight, the women arching their backs, the men splatting their feet.

  Not Katie. When she came to a stop she seemed merely to grow more like herself, on what you might call an “on hold” basis, those eyes dilating at me the way a movie brings you a close-up.

  “Whah—yew,” she said, in that chiding, half-amused drawl Southern mothers use to remonstrate with a child. “Whah yew,” Then her face came back to still. I could see what a student nurse might suddenly find there if a procedure went wrong. My easy father, who hated scolding anybody, would take to quoting Robbie Burns: “Something gone agley, darlin’?”—leaving you uncertain of anything except his love. But Katie meant business.

  “Now you hearken, my little cousin,” she said. “I trained up here with my black sisters. Nights on double duty I slept in the same bey-ud. My schoolmate Marnine Tooker writes me from Atlanta every year. My head caw-diac nurse right now, I would trust her with my life. And she me.”

  I did hearken. I heard the “my.”

  She cupped my face in her hands. Just so she had done when we and my mother had had to leave Atlantic City sooner than planned. Your mother has to go inside for a while again, dawlin. And your daddy still has to be away awhile, on business. You’re coming down to us, at Port. Now she chuckled, not releasing me. “Why you dirty li’l ole No’therner. At Shirley—what the dickens were you thinking I went out to shoot?”

  BUT KATIE AND I never did visit Arnella’s, though we had had the invitation, a large greeting card with red, blue, and gold flowerets, in the middle of which a good round hand, surely her mothers, had inscribed the date and the hour, Six O’clock Supper, and both our names. Four days before, I got a note through Student Mail to meet Arnella at Friedgen’s, the Teacher’s College haunt. Over their famous brownies she said, “Have to take back that invite. I’m sorry. My parents had a big fight over it. Shall I level with you why?”

  What a girl Arnella was, a leveler shooting straight for the whites of one’s eyes. And if I may say with the immodest pride we take in our youth once we are mortally separate from it, what a girl was I, humbly brooding on what I was with all the arrogance of the beginner who believes in change.

  Sometimes I think of memory as a Sistine Chapel. Down there on the sunny floor are all the early figures of life’s morning, still as busy as ever they were at that time; up here on the ceiling are the swollen, over-muscled shapes we have become; ceiling and floor are powerless to meet. Which is the ultimate viewer? Which the most alive?

  Anyway, good prospects as we two were—for what? The worlds grace?—we muffed it.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s because I’m Jewish. Your mother had second thoughts. It doesn’t matter.”

  I was too cool about that, I’ve thought since. Maybe I should have made like it did matter. The worst of race relations is for either side to be impervious.

  “No, it was my father,” Arnella said. I would have said her voice was too high-tone, if I hadn’t known from home how hysteria closets itself in the too polite. “My father married down, or thought he did. My mother, as you saw, is not educated. But she’s light. He’s dark. And what it comes to is—” She made a face. “Neither’n can get the best of t’other. So—he hates Shirley. It’s what made her light-skinned. So he’s laid down the law to her. In our house, which is his house, she can’t have anybody white.”

  The brownies were double chocolate, the darkest ever. I chewed down the rest of mine. My European mother laughed at such sweets—gingerbread, angel food cake, any of that American stuff—the way she did at men drinking malteds, as Columbia College students were doing at other tables right here. Compared to our confections at home, fragrant with hazelnut, orange water and kirsch, and deeper liqueurs, and a subtler bitter chocolate, the brownie did seem to me simpleminded, naive. A Christian cake.

  “Oh, Arnella.” I leaned forward, loose-breasted in my dance class leotard, scattering the crumbs on my plate. Under her schoolgirl’s collar she was flat-chested, and, though older, somehow more callow than me. Yet she had an intensity, stiff as it was, that I might never catch up with. “Oh, Arnella—you’re divided. Just like me.”

  I invited her home to see for herself. And maybe to test my own family’s rectitude. After all, we now had German maids only. My father, who still said “colored” when referring to domestics but “nee-gro” otherwise, would simply stand fast on his good manners, on which I knew I could depend. My mother, who had called each of our former maids die Schwarze, as if they had no separate being, would be wroth at me for my foolish social ardors, but only behind the scenes.

  But Arnella never came. She had more sense.

  And though Katie, like many Southerners, belonged to such a visiting family, she never further inquired of me why we didn’t get to go.

  I REMEMBER NOTHING of that first emergency visit to Port.

  On my second visit, three years later when I was ten, of which I remember everything, Nita, Katie’s slightly younger sister, who in the family gossip was “some pretty” but too plump to keep it going, and rather sly, said: “When Katie brought you here from Atlantic City, you were such a solemn little thing. Wanted to tell us right off why you were here.”

  “Rachel—” my Aunt Beck said. She never called her younger daughter by anything but her first given name. I heard the warning, and remembered it, but like so much in that seemingly bland and to me delightful household, the explanation of Nita’s sidelong remark, as well as a final account of much else, wasn’t to be given to me until a generation later, when I would visit Katie in her eighty-third year, she by then long since retired to a second Port—Port Charlotte, Florida—and we two survivors of households would sort it all out. “Whatever did I say, the first time I came, that Nita wanted to tell?” Nita was dead by then and I would cede her any name she wanted. “I nagged you to tell me, but you always sheared off’—and Katie had laughed, saying, “We were expert at that in the old days, weren’t we.”

  Then
her face had solemned, just as it had when I had attended the Florida synagogue with her the day before. “You know, hon’, your mother was suicidal? She had taken something once, at home. Doctors said she had to be away from home, from that whole household. Pore Uncle Joe—your father—he never could understand why. That was part of the trouble. But of course he adored her. So I was deeded to take her down there. And then, when I was about to bring her back, looked like she was about to try again. I don’t know how you knew. Nothing was on the surface. But when you entered our door at Port you looked up at Aunt Beck with that li’l old face of yours and said: ‘We had to leave that hotel. Its windows were too wide.

  The Port of those days, a small, high white house with porch steps to be sat on, was probably quite close to its next-door neighbors, but with all the bushy Long Island summer to expand in, and the “shore” close by. Deep within, and pervading all just as if Aunt Beck had not had to leave her massive wedding furniture behind her, was the very core and day-to-day persistence of a not quite smalltown or small-time Southern and Jewish household in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, circa 1891—the date inside Beck’s broad wedding band deeded to me by Katie, which I sometimes now wear.

  Such houses are tenacious, era to era. A palace destroyed can be hard to resurrect—too cumbersome, or perhaps too original. But take a kitchen full of modest husbandry—curds draining in their cheesecloth sock, biscuit-cutter and beach plum jelly waiting on the counter-side—then add a darkish hall where the china closet resides with its hoard of gilt-on-white wedding service or early blue willow ware, go past the dining and living rooms, each with a mood and a time-set like a pub’s, then up to the bedroom cubicles with their counterpanes, there perhaps to flop belly down and muse almost atop a tree, while the screen door skreeks, in the cellar the mousetraps snap, and all through the house conversation ripples its common rill—and you could be anywhere, anytime, in one of the forty-eight states of the past.

  Aunt Beck always dressed as if she knew this. Her short-sleeved, faintly patterned or white garment, neither a housedress nor quite a tailored shirtdress, was neutral enough for anywhere, either in town or in her own house, as well as at the shore. I hadn’t yet seen her counterparts in Back Bay, Boston, or old California in places where the movies hadn’t taken over, or even New York’s supposedly long-gone Murray Hill—though I would have recognized them. But once, in the big central outdoor plaza of a childhood haunt of mine, the Museum of the American Indian up at 155th Street and Broadway, there had been an exhibition devoted to statues of the American pioneer woman, big white marble effigies with whose bearing I felt quite at home. They all had Beck’s same squared-off stance, firm jaw, and air of fortitude. Obviously marble couldn’t twinkle with humor or pick up its skirts to wade after mussels. Otherwise, except for a couple of winged and helmeted sculptures who couldn’t possibly have been addressed as Awnt, I would have been pleased to visit any one of them in her mythical house.

  There the husbands, big and impressively mannered like Solly Pyle, and with the same large geniality even to persons of my age, would have been as infrequently at home as he. So was my father often away on business, but he had an actual office and factory to be away from, and brothers at the corners of each, to weigh them down. Solly Pyle’s affairs appeared to float; he was “in jewelry at one time”; was he what my father and his friends called—at the very best—a “representative”? From their confabs I knew quite accurately what each of these men dealt in, but I never knew the nature of Solly’s “merchandising,” as they would have called it. Whatever he did deal in, I had the impression it was “from time to time,” a phrase that in our house did not indicate durability. To our urban clan neither did choosing “the country” to live in all year round. My mother, for sure, had once hinted that Pyle was “a big blow,” but then she wasn’t trustworthy on the subject of a Southern male expansiveness that perhaps no longer charmed her (as it still magicked me) now that she lived with it. Anyway, unlike his daughter Katie, Solomon Pyle, whose family had been as close as close to ours in Richmond, was never an intimate of our house. I must have seen him there, though, in a long-ago summer, for I remember the hat, the pongee suit, and the flirt of his cane.

  In Port that second visit of mine, it was summer, too, and he was in once or twice—and out again. Although dressed less grandee, he was as courtly as I’d thought he would be, oddly so even to his children, and to his wife, who addressed him frontally as “Solly Pyle,” calling him that in his absence as well. Whenever home he was treated as absolute god, because to Beck that was what husbands were. He was never heavy about it but seemed to expect that treatment and enjoy it, if briefly. I was already used to men who gave the appearance of taking the most excellent wifely cuisine and solicitude as homely cures for more sophisticated routines outside, but though I tried I could never imagine what his routines were, and somehow never called him Uncle, as I had been trained to address all other male familiars of his age. Whenever he left us at Port, always saying that he’d be “looking in again shortly”—just as at home the Fuller Brush Man did—his son Aaron (“Ayron”), addressed by his sisters as “Brother,” became substitute god.

  From Brother I learned more about women in such a household than I wanted to. I had been lucky, as the first and cherished child of a man past middle age, who saw no reason why she should not be “brainy” as well, perhaps because his own mother, daughter of a rabbi and sister of a philosopher, had been the same. When a son and heir finally arrived, I was “Sister” for a while, but in that half-breed household this soon fizzled out.

  The sisters Pyle were sisters to the nth. Clearly, at the synagogue they were first of all audience and working “Sisterhood”—the actual name of the Jewish women’s auxiliary, to which even at ten I privately vowed I would never belong because of what that did to you. Elsewhere at the synagogue, the Pyle women were always faithfully attendant in every category where they were allowed to fit in; they kept the vestal light. Aaron somehow functioned there whether he attended services regularly or not—exactly like the Lord Adonai himself.

  Meanwhile, Brother had very real functions at home. It was his home in the special sense that everything done there was in a way pointed at him. It was the three women’s house to manage entirely; where the money ran short they had to make up for it by better managing. From certain little colloquies that passed over my head there were surely problems of supply, and here Aunt Beck was queen, with the sisters coming up ever more staunchly in their roles. Plump, passive Nita, greedy Nita, was a first-class cook, if on the sweetish side. Back in Virginia she might not have worked; here she made abortive efforts to run a typing agency—by certain family signs unprofitably.

  Nor had Katie’s job propelled her altogether out of the home. By what commuting struggles I never knew, she arrived at odd hours, whey-faced but true—and I had seen her give Beck money. Even so—and though Beck tried to baby her: “Put up your feet, dollin’”—she helped before mealtime and collaborated on Nita’s pretty table settings, which appeared like artwork three times a day. Brother was merely called to table. What then did Aaron do—and quite successfully?

  In his father’s absence he kept up the tribal conformation of the house and the family, a complicated matter that I understood instinctively, both by home example and because I was female. At home (where my grandmother, married in 1852 to a man old enough to have been recorded “elder” of the earliest Richmond synagogue in 1832, would at her death be already a widow of some forty to fifty years’ duration), we were much more of a matriarchy, if one in decline. There my father was the good provider and never prodigal youngest son except perhaps in his forays with women, though these had always been effected at a distance from his mother’s house and were abandoned without a doubt at the time of his late marriage to my mother. Meanwhile, on the domestic side, he was overwhelmed by dependent women—or would have been, had not the amenities tendered him as boss Lord been as strictly kept there as these w
ere at the Pyles’.

  Aaron, then a slight, pleasant young man in his twenties, must have had some piffling job that would lead to the small printing business he would commute to the city to until his death in harness—on the Manhattan subway—in his hardy eighties. That summer at Port he could not yet have been the provider, but there was hope. In the meantime—which was where he gave the appearance of being—he was served first and with his favorite foods, and had no household responsibilities as far as I could see, even to the gardening, which belonged to Beck. All evenings and weekends, and some afternoons, he was at leisure, no doubt for girls, but also, as I saw more at firsthand, for hunting and fishing. Although Long Island was more rural then, my guess is that the rabbits Aaron sometimes brought home came from local hutches. But what of the quail—did that come from some acquaintance living on land the Northern equivalent of a Shirley? Possibly, for though we were city people now, I was used to hearing of the social semblances, tricks, and even sly thefts that came of living nearer the land. Of say, hearing my father, who up North couldn’t hang a picture or string a bootlace, tell with glee of how he poached gardens when a boy: “So there was this melon hanging on the vine, prizewinner, ready for the fair—and half a dozen starlings, ready to peck. So what could I do but take out my pocketknife?”

  Anyway, whether or not Brother always shot the game, he supplied it. And he took me fishing once, like a somewhat younger uncle taking me for a walk.

  We fished for young blues—stripers, did they call them?—and in milksop fashion, on a Sunday afternoon, off the club dock. Yet I was feeling more Southern than I had in a long time. School had long since doused my diphthongs in the taut New York whine, but here in Port I had half got them back.