Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read online

  “It’s an old Southern expression,” I said. “Actually, I never saw a picture of such a hat until the other day. Listed in some catalogue, maybe Bean’s.”

  “Veiled, those hats are,” Katie said, laughing. “No, we never had them, even in Richmond. But I saw them down home, once.” She sent me another glance—enlisting me to help her sustain that memory of Shirley of which, though I could never share it, I had heard. “We’d look right funny in your living room, Clay. But maybe I ought to get you one. For that shelf.”

  “Katie keeps us all up to the mark,” Clay said. But there was no venom in it. Rather, he might be showing a preference, for someone who, among these soft widows, seemed more single than spinster, and as spritely as he.

  As we left, three or four intimates were chatting over their prearranged system of alerts, in case of emergency.

  “That must be reassuring,” I said to Katie as we walked on to the synagogue. She gave me a quizzical look. When had she ever needed to be reassured? The hat she had put on to go to evening service sat straight on her head, just schoolmarmish enough to be without era. Her gray hair, pinned up as she had always worn it, still had fairish streaks out of no bottle but Time’s, and her skin was still fine-pored. “Nita loved it here,” she said.

  The services were held in a big, bright room walled with very new, yellowish wood, much like a room in a parish house.

  “They just did it over,” Katie murmured. When she looked dissatisfied her face drooped. Indeed, except for its pulpit, the place didn’t look in any way blessed.

  “So glad you could come to temple,” one of the lady greeters said to us—and Katie’s look held. Disappointment was more the word for it. I knew she did not approve of the term “temple,” as being a poor substitute for the austerely traditional “synagogue.” Her petulance rather resembled my father’s higher-keyed irritability—in the family called “flying off the handle, Joe is,” and always excused as being directed toward high concerns. Yet I could see how this relaxed looking, very Floridian congregation might view her—as one of those elderly women who cling to all congregations, and are always looking back. “Miss Pyle is one of our stalwarts,” the young rabbi said.

  During the service, several women came up to the pulpit at intervals, to read the lesson or read the responses. We had hit the monthly night when this innovation was now routine. Katie seemed amused. One woman’s disquisition had been longer, learned, and delivered in piercingly nasal rabbinical style. This woman was indeed a real scholar, Katie said. “The others? Well—you know why they want to.” Had she ever been requested to take part in the service? “Me? They know right well I wouldn’t.”

  I thought of Brother, and of how far the women briefly up there on the pulpit were really allowed to go. Into the dogma of the Talmud if they had a taste for it. How far beyond? Could they serve in the early-morning assembling of the daily minyan, for instance—the sum of men required to be present for the start of a service? Might a woman be counted in there?

  In the social hour afterwards, those who came up to be introduced, men and women both, nearly always told us where they had come from “before,” exactly like émigrés. Although, unlike those who had streamed into my father’s house, they were not refugees, they too seemed to be similarly divided, into those who by retiring “here” had risen in their own estimation and in actual class, and those who knew they had suffered a decline in their society and their tastes. When home-baked cookies were offered, Katie refused them, and indeed though they were soft enough to the gum they were not very good.

  That night she apologized again for the meal she however had insisted on cooking, with assistance refused. I tried to measure whether her refusal was merely part of that hospitality, so familiar to me, which liked to declare to a guest, “Y’all stay right where you are!” Or did it come from an older person’s ever-present fear that autonomy itself was draining away? I decided it was both—and ended up confronting how much my upbringing had taught me about the old.

  “Rachel became a great cook after Mahma died,” she said, serving us. “People fell over themselves to come here. But you’ll have to make do with me.”

  Again I had a strong sense of her as a nurse, dealing year after year with situations where there was no time for vanity. Or for flattery? Over the years before she became a supervisor, Katie had now and then been persuaded to take on a case as night nurse, often of someone she knew personally, often terminal. What had it been like to sit alone night after night with the sense of your own inner credit only, and to see that credit vanish each time you shut the door on death?

  “’Cept Rachel always cooked too much,” she said, with a reminiscent smile. “She was never happier than when the leftovers were spilling out the back door. I can’t tell you how many second-night dinners we had to ask people back to, those last years. But she loved it.”

  “We didn’t come here for your cooking, Katie.” And even to her, home must be better than the restaurants, where the waitresses were as coy as social workers in their special recognitions of the old folks, and at the salad table one could have seconds of watery greens and macaroni and cottage cottage cottage cheese.

  “I know.”

  “And ‘home is always preferable.’”

  We exchanged smiles at this phrase of my father’s, that belle époque gourmet who, after marriage, had settled into home fare like one of those great chefs who in their prime verge ever closer to the simples learned at mother’s knee.

  At least the china closet was here. For Katie, that is. Why, in this mean little house, should I be thinking of Shirley? Was it wrong then, after all, for age to be boss of itself and us—or only for age to be separate?

  The chicken was a great-boned fowl cut into pieces, porridge-colored from steam. In effect I knew who had cooked it, even though I had seen Katie buy the pinkish packet at the supermarket. Beck had caught one of their two hens once and slaughtered it, the only time I had ever seen that done. Muttering, as she singed it and let me pick off the last pinfeathers from the wing tip with a tweezer, that it had ought to be hung, but that there was nothing else “handy” in the house. And Sol was coming home.

  I was hazy about just when Beck had died, years after my own parents, at any rate, and probably during the 1950s, when I was at times out of the country, or far from the Eastern seaboard.

  “Had Beck ever planned to come to Florida with you?”

  “Mahma? She’d have cut her throat if she had known we were ever to sell Po-ut.”

  I’d forgotten Southern exaggeration, whereby you would “strangle your own mother” or “as soon put your sister down a well” before you would—what? Ruin good eggnog with cinnamon. Or drink Scotch, with or without ginger ale. Or wear an unmanly wristwatch—among the older men called “one of those.” Or not wear a watch. It struck me now how many of these outsize statements had been couched in terms of family mayhem. Again I saw that hen whose neck Beck’s hands had wrung and then severed—“a wrung chicken tastes better, dollin’”—running across the garden without its head. And I thought that Aunt Beck would have gone anywhere in the world Katie asked her to.

  “No—but what Mahma loved was travelin’. And visitin’—my! After I bought a car you know how we did. If Nita’d ever learned to drive we could have done more.”

  Yes, I knew how they did. In the days when we and our children, returned Eastward, were also living “on the shore”—of the Hudson River, not the Sound—and so by car only some sixty miles each way, the Pyles had come to visit us for the day. I had explained to the children that it would literally be for the day, and how it would probably be.

  They would no doubt arrive for lunch—the three Pyles. “Three ladies,” I’d said. I had lightly described them, keeping back what bias I could—but love will out, and no doubt it had. “It’ll be a real sit-down lunch, with a lot of talk. And many stories,” I’d said, as a lure.

  Because of all the elderly deaths, my children had missed out on my si
de of the family altogether, and because of distance hadn’t had enough natural flow from the other side. To my mind they had never been properly nested down in a clan. We and our friends, some of them writers, all of them vocal, had done what we could about stories, to which our younger boy and older girl were a permitted audience, whose comments, both sharp and entranced as only children can manage, were manna to their mother. The stories they heard had not been as genealogical as I could wish. Now I would be doing memory’s job. I would be helping them to part of what I thought should be their place in life.

  “And you two will have to be in attendance the whole day,”

  I was proud of that phrase; it gave exactly the tone. They had groaned at the prospect; with the whole river-and-village summer day open to them—why?

  “For the honor of the family,” I’d said, knowing that would intrigue them. “And because that is the way I was brought up,” I’d added, grinning—on that subject I knew I was already the family bore.

  “Yes, you know about my upbringing,” I’d said, as severely as my always insecure adulthood could manage—because it was always placing itself on the side of the child. “But you’ve never experienced it.”

  The Pyles would certainly expect to be asked to dinner as well, before their long trek back, I said, and would take it kindly that the whole family would be there. If we wanted to be extra hospitable—I thought of Nita—we would also offer a light afternoon snack. “For which you two could opt out.”

  “Ice cream and cake?” They grinned back. Maybe they’d stay.

  But why did I want it so much, one of them said, and the other answered: “To show us off.”

  That was true, and I duly blushed for it—now that I had children, blushes came easier. But since becoming a storyteller myself, I had learned that truth always intrigues. And although I had never fished since that once in Port, was maybe the best bait.

  “Yes, I do enjoy that, more than you like. I promise to keep it down. But there’s another reason I want you to be around.”

  Their pre-teen faces had been still apple-cheeked but already lengthening with pre-knowledge; could I burden those? “Because when we older ones”—should I say “go,” or “die”? As a child I hated the euphemisms dealt me—only learning much later that drawing room comedy could be made of them. But that style of comedy is not deep enough for children.

  “Because when we elders die, you will be our keepers,” I said.

  And all that livelong day the Pyles and we had the single, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple satisfactions that can crisscross a family, even if composed only of six dubiously related people and one like-minded, family-clogged father and spouse. I saw how the Pyles recognized even burgeoning memory-manners when they saw them, how touchingly they stretched their stories to provision this—and how thirstily they had needed this for themselves. I saw my children sink deep and gratefully into the genealogical texture. Alone in the kitchen, which, after giving them a look-see at my own husbandry I had forbidden the Pyles, I could hear only a satisfying family hum.

  It can be pleasant to cook to the tune of that, and to provender it with old linen and spoons, maybe recognizable, too. At one moment, when the past became too poignant to be borne in company, I went into the bathroom and cried.

  After the Pyles had gone, we all agreed that such a day was worth it, but almost too much.

  The second time the Pyles had come to Grandview, that next summer, they hadn’t telephoned, arriving unexpectedly on a midday that was to become notable in village lore—the day a zebra had blundered into a garden on the left bank of the Hudson, our garden. Later I had incorporated that incident into a story, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra,” that dealt with quite different people, among them a half-French heroine, Arietta Fay. But one sentence, after a description of the catching of the beast by the cops and the Hudson River Cowboy Association, had detailed as follows:

  At the height of it—children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the … striped, the incredible … Arietta’s eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Washington, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. “Oh, Cousine Beck,” she’d stammered in French, she never knew why—“you find us a little en déshabille, we have us un zebre.” And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted “Arietta, you are dependable. Just bring me a chair.”

  I had taken liberties. They were “unheralded” only that second time, which we couldn’t know would be the last. And I wasn’t Arietta. What I actually had said was: “Oh, Aunt Beck, you find us a little upset. We have a zebra in the garden.” Beck may not have been quite eighty-five. The elders looked older in those days, often making almost a profession of it. But what she said in life and in the story were the same. She did not change.

  “Yes, she did, didn’t she. Love visiting,” I said now. “Remember the day you all came to Grandview?” I am remembering that first time. How my daughter, long since dead, had said guiltily that she didn’t like Nita. But liked the other two, in fact “loved” Aunt Beck—and why didn’t we have more visiting days? How my son of eight, now a bearded man with his own daughters, had asked—where were the Pyle men?

  What Katie remembers, chuckling, is the zebra day. “You got Mahma down to the life. And how she loved reading that story.”

  So, Beck had still been alive when I wrote it. Older people tend to disappear during one’s absence. If the interval has been long, one accepts that, chary about asking the details, and guilty, too. It struck me that there was a lot I hadn’t asked, about Beck. But age had its privileges—some grudgingly acceded to.

  “Katie—was Beck’s death sudden? I never knew.”

  “Naw, you didden.” That tone, admonishing me from a central standard where manners were ethic, too—I have had it from her only once before: What the devil did you think I went out to shoot? Almost at once, though, her face quirks in its ever-jesting need to wish to be fair, to underscore the teasing we all get from life. “But by rights if you’d asked at the time I wouldn’t have told you, hon’.” A face that has quirked too much—when it is agonized, it can I look like a frog’s. “She just wore out. One day—she just wore out. And I was away on a case.”

  She reached for one of the hot compresses at her side, pressed her face in and then slung the towel around her neck. “When you live with it you don’t see it. But I should have. I’m a nurse.”

  I am not a nurse. But I am seeing it. In this sorry little room I am learning more than I want to know about the gossip of the old. When they pry the air thisaway, thataway like turkey gobblers following their beaks, they are weighing the long gossip to come—of themselves. I am feeling what it means when a person is beginning to disappear, carrying her history slung around her neck, and bearing that great box, the household that no one after her will so rightly know. Katie wants to hand hers over to me, in such proportion as she sees. But I have to help. I have to suck from her throat what she cannot expel herself.

  “Katie. Was it your choice to come down here?”

  For a swollen moment we are neither of us seeing these crackerbox walls that no china closet can turn into a real house loaded with time. Nor the roadways out there, chatty with advices on death. Nor those mountains of handicraft which, if carefully swapped with a neighbor, will keep both of you anchored to the sliding Florida earth. A nurse knows better, at least most of the time. And I have had a household from which the habitués have slid one by one.

  “No. C’ose not. Sista chose it.”

  I have the distinct sensation that I have lanced a boil. Though I have had no medical training of any kind.

  But now she is pleading with me. “Hon’—Rachel never had much.”

  So that’s why I disliked her. As the rich dislike the poor.

  “You were the
elder, weren’t you, Katie?”

  “Nita was, by three years. But after a while, people didn’t think so.”

  She says this equably, as an observed fact. I want to scoop up and tally the resentment she should have had.

  “Because she was—so dependent on you. Didn’t she have a typing agency once?”

  “She went into debt over it. Mahma kept paying for it and didn’t tell me. I’d just been made supervisor and couldn’t get home much. My own head supervisor was a battle-axe.” She made the kind of impish face that kids make behind the gym teacher’s back. “Taught me how to be … And then I did get home, and found out. Mahma didn’t have any more money. She’d been giving Ayron, too—he was just starting out. And she’d simply come to the end of what they had … But all that was later, hon’.”

  “I remember! There was talk about it in the family. That was when you took on special cases—Sundays and holidays. And everybody except Daddy said you were too ambitious.”

  She chuckled. “So I was. To them.”

  “And that you would ruin your health.”

  “I ’most did. But then, you know, I’d been in the awmy, where health wasn’t exactly”—she gave me a look, tender but critical. “Your family—I have to say it, dollin’. The whole lot of them on your father’s side. Beck and I often said it. They were the healthiest hypochondriacs we ever saw.”

  And suddenly we begin to laugh and laugh. I can hear our joint cackle almost separate from my half of it. Oh, what a release—and yes, a joining—for aren’t I creeping up now, almost Katie’s contemporary?

  “It was just that they were always so interested,” I gasped. “In what life could do to them.”