Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read online

  Although I increasingly kept in touch with her by phone now, we hadn’t seen each other since three years before, when I had persuaded her to come North to visit us in Saratoga, the summer after Aaron had died. Nita, her remaining lifelong companion since the death of their mother, had died a couple of years before Aaron, nursed faithfully by Katie through a long siege of heart trouble. Aaron and his family, a wife and grown daughter, she and Nita had seen rarely, in their visits North to see doctors or for Katie’s class reunions. From hints chastely dropped and quickly withdrawn, I could hear that there had been a “situation” about money lent Aaron long ago and never retrieved from his widow when Aaron’s house was sold, while her niece, his daughter, once Katie’s cherished “Joanie,” now married and living in California, was never heard from.

  Through this screen I might also hear too suggestively how to them Katie might have become, respectively, the elder sister, sister-in-law, and aunt who was still trying to hold on to Aaron in the name of Beck, and to impose on his women standards of conduct from an unshared past that they would have found both dowdy and severe. I had had aunts like that. Although Katie would surely have been far less unbending than they, I could see how to any young niece growing up in Great Neck, only a few miles from old Port but an eon away, and farther still from Virginia, Katie would have seemed both too rigorous and no model to imitate. As for critic sisters-in-law, my mother, alas, had had those.

  After Nita’s death I had had no qualms about Katie’s ability to live alone; she and her sister had quite apparently become as ingrained in the life of the second Port as they had been in the original. Katie, besides, had a network of telephone correspondents who rang her as regularly as I, who in her and my conversations were referred to like a cast of listeners-in, to whom I in turn was almost strenuously united across the air channels: Dr. Forrester, the woman doctor she had worked with and so revered; Dr. Siletsky of Great Neck—“almost like a son”—whose name I privately recorded in event of any problem that the Florida doctors, a sad lot by her report, should not handle; her friend Pearl, met once, to whom I sent yearly bulletins on the progress in our garden of her gift slip of bergamot. I had no doubt that I was a staple in their conversations with Katie as well. None were from the South, but Katie, with a dulcet expropriation whose style I surely recognized, was cousining us all close. Meanwhile, when I phoned on holidays I would hear the sounds of company and her offhand “They know they can’t expect Nita’s cooking, but they come anyhow”—or else a mention of to whose house she was bespoke.

  But when Aaron died, I pleaded with her to come North for a visit. He had been “Brother.” Now she was lone as well as alone; she was the last, and that was different. I was beginning to know how that would be. My own younger brother was very much alive, but he had come almost too late for the crowded firmament I had been born into, and as the first male heir in the family since my father, he had been in his own orbit from the start. Remembrance of a family who, except for my father, he had deemed negligible seemed to bother him—although, taken young into my father’s business world of the greats in the perfume industry, he could be elegiac enough there. Jessica, for years an aging recluse, had become more or less my charge, managed from a distance as I could. I was the last for her, from our mutual world. Katie would be mine.

  During the week she was with us up North I had coddled her as if she was indeed an artifact, heaping her bed with the best old patchwork, bringing her breakfast on a tray. Her wanness on arrival had warranted it; now she blushed with attention. “You’re babying me, hon’,” she said one morning that I recall with the gratitude one has for having been able to pay out love in time. She was lying happily whelmed under the best embroidered sheets, and though the coverlet, twined with blue morning glories infinitesimally worked by members of my husband’s family, had nothing to do with her except to match the durable blue of her eyes, she understood the tribute. In the world we had shared on my mother’s side, embroidery was heraldry, too.

  “Nobody’s babied you for years. I mean to try.”

  The eyes widened, but held back in the old way. I knew she was thinking of Beck, and I marveled at how old women could dream of their mothers.

  A spa summer can seem too shallow for the tragic virtues but is prime for entertaining in the old-fashioned way. Between Saratoga’s horses, waters, galas, and the peculiarities of the institutional estate my husband ran and at the far end of which we ourselves lived—gardens on and on behind the huge trees, woodchucks who plodded the landscape as slowly as tamed cub bears, in the distance a mansion house, and even, scattered over the fields, hired hands who from afar might not be perceived to be mostly white—we might qualify to be Shirley, almost.

  I hadn’t mentioned this until Virgil Thomson came up to be our other houseguest. I had been sure he and Katie would get on, and so they had. Born in Missouri, he had still other qualifications. In spite of his vaster abilities, they had the same manner, the same Southern love of gatherings, and the same humorous zest. So, one eve, when through the glass wall of the sitting room we saw Woodchuck, the huge one who lived under my studio across the lawn, actually come out on its stone step and survey his domain, I said, “Katie, get your gun”—and from then on Virgil and she swapped stories, for he, too, had known the likes of Shirley.

  One evening he said to me, out of her hearing, “I adore your cousin.”

  I think of her response when I told her this as more Southern than I could ever approach. The twinkle she said it with bridged all gaps—and was meant to.

  “He’s home folks.”

  But in the succeeding summers, though well enough except for abiding cervical pain, she had not come, saying that she was no longer of an age to stir from home. So that fall, we came to see her.

  Always slight, she had become one of those gaunt old women in whom, as approaching death refines, one can see both the girl they were and their genealogy. Her bones and jawline were nothing like Beck’s, yet as she plucked a big lemon from the tree in her front yard and gave it to us, or her hands knuckled over the chicken stew she insisted on making or plashed at the kitchen drainboard, I could feel her mother behind her and relearn the lesson the years keep trying to teach me—that the in-and-out flirt of the genes in family-descended flesh is elusive and wonderful.

  “I must smell like a chicken,” she said, laughing. “I eat so much of it. The skeleton shrinks with age, you know, and my bridge no longer fits the jawbone.”

  As always when she referred to medical facts her tone was professional; a skeleton was “the” even when it was hers.

  The laugh was still silvery. “But at eighty-three, why bother?” She had become slightly prideful of her years, as old people do. But her doing this only reminded me how long it had taken her to become unoriginal. “Besides, I don’t approve of the dentistry down here.”

  Her face darkened, as I noted it had now and then begun to do, as if age was permitting her to release certain shadows she had hitherto kept back.

  Her gaze scanned the tiny living room, a box as conformist as Florida could show and barely able to contain even the further reduced detritus of the Pyles. In a corner one could not call far, the china closet. On the only full-length wall, a combination breakfront, bookcase, sideboard, and general repository, which every Virginia household of us had once had. Walnut looks dingy in Florida, and mahogany sweats. The television, once located in front of the big straight-backed armchair that Katie sat in nightly, her neck swathed in hot compresses, was now pushed aside; except for the news and the weather, she said, she was no devotee of the tube. A matching armchair was pushed to the wall, beside it. Her glance now settled there. “Nita loved chicken,” she said.

  After Nita’s death, Katie had sent North to me Nita’s silver-backed dresser set, its comb, brush, and mirror initialed RAP in the gracefully intertwined scrolling of the late teens of this century. So, Anita would have been her middle name. I never asked for sure, although I had thanked Katie with warm
th, for I knew what had prompted the gesture—that I was worthy of a relic of Sister, of Katie’s own honored dead. When Katie had come to Saratoga, the dresser set had been displayed, otherwise not.

  I had never liked Nita, because of the sense of not being used enough that was always about her, or for her fondant plumpness, as from too much sweet cuisine and sex unsatisfied, and above all for the dreadful craftwork that flowed from her like the issue of all this, both a coy assertion of femininity all too Southern and a contradiction to the good plain living and linen at Port. Once, on a visit to us in New York, she had presented me with a crocheted cover for toilet paper, scabbed with pink wool roses and shaped to the roll of paper already inside. “For that extra roll to keep in the bathroom, hon’,” Katie had said, her mouth quirking, when she saw I didn’t know what it was.

  Above all—I knew now—I had disliked Nita for her dependency on Katie. Altogether, Rachel Anita had been too gracefully entwined. Yet I also knew I must now mention her. I followed Katie’s glance, to the television set.

  “Must have been a siege,” I said.

  “It was.” I saw her relief—in that my manners had proven what they should be. This could only mean that my feelings on Sister had been known to her all along. “Two and a half years. In and out of oxygen. I kept her here; she hated the hospital. I cared for Sister myself. She couldn’t tolerate anybody else.” Was there a trace in her voice of that elegiac we use when we appropriate the dead for our own sore needs? “She died in my awms, Hot-tense.”

  Was there a trace, too, of self-satisfaction at one’s own virtue, which I had never heard from Katie Pyle before? Yes, there was. But didn’t one need that—was I, too, beginning to feel?—in order to round out things to the seemly, an adjective, or was it adverb, well describing what Katie and I had been brought up to be?

  I had seen such lifted chins elsewhere, on platforms, where people are awarded their just deserts. But it can happen privately, where there is family to watch.

  “And me?” I said. “I more or less began in those arms, didn’t I?”

  “When you were born? Aw, no. Your daddy wouldn’t let anybody with a germ within yards, ’cept the doctor and the nurse.” She giggled. The chuckle had reverted to her own age back then. “But I wasn’t far. Hattie—your mother—had us all to luncheon that very day. The whole shebang. You were late in coming, and she said that if anything could help bring on her pains it would be that.”

  My mother had had humor. But as with her cookery, her audience had never given her credit for it. Nor had I, until after her death.

  “They all came like a shot,” Katie said. “You know your mothers meals, when she made up her mind to them. Your aunts Mamie and Flora, the sisters-in-law even, which wasn’t usual. No men except Uncle Clarence. Anyway, when her pains did begin, your father should have sent them all home, but he was so upset he didn’t. Hattie was furious when she heard about it later. ‘Can’t I even give birth in privacy?’ she said. But your father was half out of his mind. Later on I had my fill of expectant fathers. But I never in my life saw one take on so as Uncle Joe. Your aunts did suggest he go in and sit with his mother—but he had the sense to refuse that.”

  I burst out laughing. “What nasties they could be. We forget, you know, that he was their younger brother.”

  I had meanwhile made what I had thought to be a final peace with my mother’s difficult personality nearly forty years before, in almost the first story I wrote, but this even more belated sense of her outrage made it complete. I felt the peace not of justice rendered merely, but of an intimacy I had never felt before. After all, I had been there.

  “Even the sisters-in-law were there, eh? Even Belle?” That most romantic of my “aunts”—that white-haired but young looking and stylish lovely who had once, when I was perhaps nine, taken me to lunch in a chic restaurant with a balcony, where other women like her were smoking cigarettes. The same aunt who, once a widow, would turn her girls into Christians and disappear into a feud.

  “No, not Belle. She was never around for any fuss. Whatever made you remember her?”

  I heard that jealous severity, now more marked, but in truth long since taken for granted by me as what even a person as gentle and fair as Katie might not escape—the judgmental austerity of women who went much to synagogue. On their own. Often in place of their brothers, or of the women their brothers tended to marry. Often even as surrogates, in a small way, for their fathers. Women who find in these devotions that ethic, almost more male than male, of women who could have been—who could never be—rabbis. I knew a writer like that, who was almost more religious than God, and certainly more severe. Sometimes, though I didn’t go to synagogue except in nostalgia, I heard that ethic in myself.

  “But I was there,” Katie said now, sunny and natural again. “The other cousins did leave, but I stayed on. I was fifteen and already wanting hard to be a nurse. So, you know what I did? You’ll never guess.”

  “How can I?” It’s not every grandmother who can hear for the first time a firsthand account of her own natal day, and one that sounds gratifyingly close to a royal accouchement.

  “I made your father a mint julep.”

  “One of Ayron’s?” When Aaron was in his eighties and still going briskly to business on the train from Great Neck, my husband and I had visited him and his wife, Leona, there and had been served one of those. It wasn’t the frost on the silver cup or even the mint that made the real julep, Aaron told us. Or even the crushed ice. All that, he implied, was just Southern sweet talk—even Southern fakery—without the one and only secret ingredient. Many people had pleaded for the recipe, he said. I had pleaded: “Oh, Ayron, give it me.” By his blink I knew I had swallowed the bait. “Double the bourbon,” he’d said.

  Katie blinked now. “Except for those old Midol pills for menstrual cramp, it was the only prescription I knew.”

  After we’d howled over that I said, “Well, you saved me, later.”

  And finally she admitted it.

  “I’ve never been sorry.”

  THE TOWN OF Port Charlotte is a senior citizens’ precinct, and a good or bad dream, according to your lights. The Senior Citizens Center, one of the largest in Florida and in the nation, has room after room replete with the stately activity of “the golden years” and with what one begins to think of as their scrollwork: all the collections, some in memory of their owners, of china, shells, and dolls gathered on cruise travel, as well as the handicrafts of the living—woollies and watercolors and objects for uses oddly peripheral to honest day-to-day hours, and of an obsessively miniature deftness that sadly shows up the poor materials, the latter, yes, much flecked or woven or sealing-waxed with gold.

  In Port Charlotte and its environs, medical advertisements—for doctors, clinics, hospitals, insurances—are everywhere on the roads and posters, and in the handout literature. The town is a billboard for age. Even in the supermarkets, where large sections cater to the sugarless and the salt-free, but most clearly in the favored restaurants, where the dining hour is early and the menus are easy on the dentures, this Port knows who is boss here. If in Hollywood the skin lesions made by time are to be hidden like one’s crimes, here the liver spot is worn like a medal. Nor does age here go about in black cerements. Absolved from wool, old age in the Sunbelt walks in pastel: lime green and dusty rose or blinding white, topped with the sporting cap or straw skimmer or floppy picture-hat, all underwritten by running shoes. There are blondes among the old women here, but not like those in Miami; the decent rinses here sometimes even fade toward an acknowledged gray. No children appeared on the streets of houses anywhere near Katie’s, but in the following days I would see some in the elaborately fancified mall one got to over a drawbridge not too many miles away.

  Katie’s neighbors were known to her within a radius of several blocks.

  “Well, you always made friends,” I said.

  “Ye-es,” she said. “But hon’, you know my friends phone in from ever
ywhere.” I saw that although we were not to talk about it further, I was meant to understand the emphasis.

  Twice we did go out to a neighbor’s for dinner. The first time we went to the house of an elderly couple who though unmarried were living together in the man’s house. “They’re not marrying because of their respective children,” Katie said offhandedly.

  “We’re a long way from Martin Freeman, aren’t we?” I said, recalling Martin’s mistress, whose status in our house, even when accepted, had been hushed.

  “Down here we’re just practical,” Katie said, which seemed to be the general attitude of the company. The second time, we went to an early pre-Friday night service casserole dinner, the donors all women, in a house larger than most and comfortably masculine. The host, a spritely widower named Clayton, and lovingly called “Clay,” clearly functioned in all propriety as group husband, if solely in the matters of advice on cars, income-tax, house repairs—and perhaps walks. Indeed, as he accepted an extra gift of two straw mats the donor had that morning braided, and in spite of the giver’s remark—“I saw you had a white spot on Millie’s nice table”—placed them on a shelf with other wild-angled, pumpkin-colored contributions, he appeared to be a kind of communal Uncle Clarence. He told my husband with a twinkle that he cleared off that shelf once a month. “In favor of my own hobby.”

  And what was that?

  “Space.”

  Katie, watching me sharply as I took in all this sociology, said: “When Clay flies his airplane models around the room, I reach for my beekeeper’s hat.”

  “Oh, do you keep bees?” a woman said.

  From across the room Katie glinted at me. Only the room had changed. In that long ago family room across which Southern locutions had whizzed like those tiny, bunched firecrackers even children were allowed to ignite, she wouldn’t have been challenged—although there had been some phrases I had accepted without ever knowing their root meaning, and many now would sound antiquated anywhere.