Kissing Cousins: A Memory Page 8

  Otherwise, I knew what I wanted of her. I wanted us to stay together, in the pristine time.

  Now is she warning me that our wading time in the ever perfectible past is finally over? We have been like two longhaired girls hitching up our skirts in order to dip to the knee in what old verses used to call a laughing brook. Now are we to plunge into the present, in all our clothes?

  We two can do that only through the past. That is our cousinship. What she wants of me now is to help her fill in the last corners of that concentric world we all leave behind us.

  Where we might be now is at the rim of one of those ledged pools where, from whatever side you approach and descend into the central deep, the edges seem the same. Once you are in, up to the neck or even treading, the waters seal is perfect around you. Then, since you must, you can submerge. With grace.

  As long as somebody knows it all?

  “When you came out of the army …”

  I see her in France in her uniform and army cap, under which hair bunned in the old-fashioned manner might add a feminine elegance beyond any of the then new curly bobs. There would have been men of all tastes over there, some of them veterans all too aware that in the well-run brothel, or behind those showcase windows where the prostitutes sit in Amsterdam or other knowledgeable cities, there is often a “military” type. The attraction of breasts behind sharp tailoring is a basic one—ask any office girl. Even we women ourselves feel it when so clothed, flattening our curves enticingly behind the buttons that hold, or flicking out sex at the point of a horsewoman’s whip.

  Add then the army, whose tailoring, on some missions not denied even to women, is always superb. And then, the idea behind “a nurse.” To the coarse, any nurse is already partner to all the workings of the flesh. And that particular war was one in which even the rank and file could spell blond as blonde—hinkey dinkey parlez-vous.

  On the other hand, there would have been all these romantic young marksmen from home—straight as flagpoles—whom war recruits for romance. For whom death would have been love’s porn.

  And to Katie? To that young nurse on the wards, clipped in her mock uniform, what would the wounded all around her be?

  Not hypochondriacs.

  “When you came out of the army, I recall the family saying you didn’t look well.”

  How the aged manage to accumulate shadow around themselves—is it a talent of fading flesh? The room is actually no darker. Outside is the steady, almost boring Florida light, glaring with late-in-the-day optimism. We eat early here.

  “Guess I didn’t.”

  “Were you sick?”

  “Guess I was.”

  “Like—dysentery, or something? Or one of those amoebic infections? That Americans only get when they go abroad?” I gave her a smile. Medical lingo always got her started.

  A snort. “Nothing the awmy would increase my pension for.”

  Not for wounds they couldn’t see. Yet Katie is proud of her military pension, received to this day. Is this why she feels no need to stand forth at the synagogue?

  “Oh, I know they sent you with Mother because they trusted you.” Did I? On tape, that sounded false.

  Silence. The business with the compresses has stopped. There are silences like that between attendant nurse and patient, as I have been in hospitals enough myself to know. Late night sea silences with the bed becalmed, and patient telling nurse what the doctor doesn’t know. When the illness is serious enough.

  “Naw they didden!” She chokes on it. “Oh, maybe they trusted me to keep quiet on why she was going—but no more. When Clarence was dying I offered to look in on him for free; his bedsores were a sight. But Flora wouldn’t give in.”

  Give in—He wouldn’t … She won’t … I hear the phrase the family used when we any of us were stuck in an attitude and nobody could find the scripture that would help us to get out.

  “Tell you why they sent me.” She’s using that frail but stern midnight voice—the one that pauses only for truth. “Your mother trusted me. I was the only way they got her to go.”

  My mother could not bear to spend an hour in a house where there was an unpaid bill. She had the émigré’s terrible need—and pride—not to owe. Some turn spendthrift for the same reason. But not she. What had Katie given her that had broken down her German chill? What did she owe? I see the two of them in their corner, and their across-the-room glances.

  “Because you had told her your troubles? In exchange for hers?”

  Waiting for the patient, I listen to the humming of the refrigerator. We are in home care.

  “I was young!” The voice is cracked.

  And wounded? Where no one could see? Everyone saw my mother’s wounds. But her main audience was against her.

  “And desperate?”

  I don’t expect an answer. It’s not something our cousin can admit. But misty as this room is, this dim semitropic for old bones, Katie of the brimming eyes is somewhere alive in it. So is cousinship. Cousins may kiss. Cousins may question. This has been my role, as cousin-child. Now the roles reverse. Now I am nurse as well.

  When I was a kid I looked up the word diphtheria many times. All the dictionaries say the same thing. The membrane formed is tough. And what they call “false.”

  Many in my age group were among the first to be taught mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for the drowning. These days the rescue of the choking is by law a pinup in every city restaurant, though often hidden. The maneuver I perform requires the dark of family knowledge. I feel my mouth salivate with memory.

  In the corner is that small, shrinking jaw, as ajar as a sick child’s.

  Bend deep, Hot-tense. Deeper than a kiss.

  “They sent you down there to recover, too, didn’t they, Katie? To the sea. I remember now.”

  I remember the waves at the windows. Constantly arriving, on a stretch of beach that seemed to me not far enough away for safety’s sake. I knew that safety was somewhere involved. I remember the crashing of the sea in one’s dreams, and the bunched sound of late-night crying when it is made by two people.

  In the daytime the routine was morning pony rides for me and afternoon rides for all three of us in the rattan sedan-chairs that an attendant to each would wheel, my chair on the inside. Warmer there, and away from the conversation of the other two. But the wind mewling from under the boardwalk brings me their words, sifted with the blown sand under the pilings, and each day forgotten again, except for the name always centered in them, reappearing like a pebble does on the beach foam.

  It was a slim Christian name, of the sort that would have slipped past one by the dozens in the good private schools of the time, eeling then into Wall Street—into banking more likely than into stocks—or else into one of the law firms whose names would be a string of its own kind. After which it would normally marry in a top church, acquire the appropriate affiliations and summer haunts—water being favored rather than mountains—and settle down to producing little candidates for good schools.

  I didn’t know any of this then. But even at seven I know the name as somehow different from ours, even from the Anglicized surnames like Clarence’s, which was Winstock, or even my own. More important, I hear how when my mother pronounces it she does so with the same sugary lilt with which she alludes to certain New York families in “society,” whose activities are reported in the newspapers, or whose members in one small way or another have touched her own circle—maybe met at a benefit performance at a Fifth Avenue townhouse, or sharing—before her marriage—the same modiste.

  Vaguely I know that these people are all Christians, and of a special sort. My Aunt Jo—widow of my father’s elder brother and middle-class Irish—was not included, nor were those male friends of my father’s sporting days who still sometimes invited him to clubs like the New York Athletic Club, though he seldom accepted. Of certain other men whom I would hear of in my adolescence—judges and lawyers with names like Choate and Depew, whom he met at The Hundred Years Association, a cl
ub whose members either owned businesses or had other long-term connections with American commerce—I suspect she knew nothing. My father, who in Richmond had mingled with Christians since he was born, and whose sisters had gone to the convent, treated all this as ordinary. A Jew as proud as he could afford to condescend—and could not be condescended to. The only time I ever heard him guffaw at my mother was when she had suggested, if timidly, that we refer to ourselves as Hebrew, rather than Jew. Later seeing him rub the permanently inflamed spots his pince-nez left to either side of the bridge of his nose—always a sign of his irritation, along with his almost inaudible “Harrumph.”

  And on that occasion I had heard one of my sardonic paternal aunts say to the other, not too under her breath, “Hattie wishes she had angels’ blood.”

  So, rolling alongside sedately in my third chair, as the name, a man’s, always said in full by Katie, came to rest with that certain relish on my mother’s tongue—I at once took it to be the name of someone who must have had just such blood. Why else, when we were about halfway down the boardwalk and after some mournful interchange, would two people be weeping in unison and blowing their noses—except for one of those? I’d have been embarrassed in front of the attendants who wheeled us, except that from day to day the men who wheeled us were always new.

  I am the attendant now. Katie’s chair is stationary. Yet something is wheeling us both from behind; I hear its breath. Or is it Katie’s, short and parched?

  “Beck came to town to ask Daddy Joe. She hadn’t been to the city in—not since I got my cap. My father had another woman there, Hot-tense. So Beck never went. Her life was in Port. And that’s where I was—

  “Yes?” Sometimes that’s all a nurse has to say. But may have to repeat it. “Yes?”

  “Lying … low.” It came up like two bits of phlegm.

  “So Beck asked Father?”

  See how I am saying Father, she Daddy Joe. We used to do that indiscriminately. He was father to so many. In the days when relationship was rightly one’s role.

  “She told him: ‘My daughter’s in mortal woe. So is your wife. Send them to cure together.’”

  “And he arranged it.”

  “Never even asked her why.” She is whispering now.

  Yes, that would be his measure.

  “Back at Port, Beck said to me: ‘That man is worth his weight in gold, dollin’. But I didn’t tell him your trouble. His women would have got it out of him.’”

  Childhood’s sensations are flooding me, mouth-to-mouth. I see my father as I used to see him, padding the corridors of his household like a peddler traversing his beat. One where the super-salesman of downtown is being sold something by somebody every hour of the day.

  “So be it,” he would say to me now. “Bend to your task, daughter. It is not necessary to know Hebrew.”

  “Your trouble. Want to tell me it, Katie?”

  By one of those efforts that exceed the flesh, her face is reassembling, jaw closing evenly, fever gleam glossing the eyes. I see Katie when young. But not as I had ever seen her then. The hair an aureole, blown by the winds of France. The slim neck undamaged. The compress on her knees is a white cap—doffed.

  She is as I would wish the women who were rifling my mother’s bureau drawers to see her. No one is here to rifle her own memory-box except me.

  “I always thought you a woman who would have been loved by a man. That you must have had you—your love affair.”

  I hear only her breath, raucous with the past. Halfway across the room from her I can see the rise and fall of her old chest, and hear its soughing. But I have the power to see her as she was—and she knows it.

  “There was a man’s name. You and Mother used to bandy it between you. Riding by the ocean. It’s on the edge of my—ear.”

  It mingles with the sea, and with all the surreal in any family. The letters dog-eared by one person’s forefinger and thumb, and burned by another’s. The names filtering on the wind outside the house, and not allowed in. The stories that no debtor can come to collect in exchange for cash.

  “Down in Atlantic City you used to say the whole name, every time. Like Beck used to say ‘Solly Pyle.’ But not like it was the name of anybody that did you dirt.”

  That does it.

  Is the sound she makes a chuckle, grounded way down—at me? Or the suck of a throat opening?

  “Hon’—” I say. “Hon’”

  The name comes up like a gout of freed air.

  And that night the name, always said in full, first name and surname together, sometimes fluttered on her tongue like in a young girl’s account of a date, sometimes marched through the bare facts like a theme worthy of two grown women crying over it in unison.

  Why can’t I remember it? Dick—Richard—Atwater? Or did Howard—or Howell—come in somewhere? The surname certainly had two syllables, maybe began with H. The first name sometimes shortened familiarly, but always with the second name following. I can hear the lilt. Or do I now compound it of beach voices and mild winter air just right for recovery? Plus what she told me as part of her plain but not meager sequel—that his family’s money came from that first radio company of note, Atwater Kent?

  In the few years left to her the name echoed once or twice between us; I could have repeated it to myself at any time. I never thought of writing it down. Now that she is dead, I find I have forgotten it, no matter how I try. Perhaps that is loyalty?

  Or merely how the rescued child survives, yes, but only to tell imperfect tales?

  I remember everything else.

  “Beck knew,” she’s saying. “I couldn’t trust a letter. But once during my service I came home on leave. And told her we were engaged.”

  “Nita know?”

  “Naw.” All her estimate of Nita is in that drawn-out syllable.

  “Ayron?”

  “You kidding?”

  “But Mahma knew.” Even now, she takes comfort from that. “He was a doctor, with the army. But not Jewish.” She can smile now, when she says that. “He wanted me to go see his family, while I was on leave. So I went. One of those big townhouses, on Fifth.”

  “He wanted them to see you!”

  She inclines her head, a little painfully, at my partisanship. “So he did, I guess. And they couldn’t have been nicer.”

  “Southerners?”

  “New England. But in New York a long time.”

  I see the house, see her there, that uniform, those eyes that offer their depth. How can they not approve their son’s choice?

  “They’d invited Beck to come, too, acourse, but she couldn’t make herself—extend things that faw. I told them why. Solly Pyle would never … They couldn’t have been—more understanding.”

  “So then what? Did Ayron find out?”

  I could see him, the brotherly nemesis with the hook, throwing back the unwanted fish. Twice.

  “Naw. Not that he could have done anything by then. Except create a fuss.”

  Not with the woman she had come to be—Katherine S. Pyle, as later her documents were always signed. I could see that now.

  “Solly?”

  Her head always lowered when she spoke of him. “I don’t know what was hardest on Beck. That she couldn’t tell him. Or that he wasn’t there to tell.” In the twist of her lip I see hard-soft old Beck saying that. “She said that after I went back overseas she spent more time on her knees than any Catholic.”

  “In synagogue?” I don’t recall that we Jews spent much time on our knees there.

  “Uh-uh. No—at home. She had to be careful not to show anything extra there. Sister and Brother thought it was because of Sol.”

  And her fiancés family? Were they Catholics?

  “Protestant. Congregationalists.”

  “Oh, those are some of the best,” I hear myself say, encouraging her to marry, sixty years too late. “Daddy always said they were rather like the best of us.” Rather like us, was what he had actually said. “Stern without orthodoxy. An
d just wishy-washy enough not to want to shed blood over it.”

  “Not over that,” she said. “No.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” I burst out. “You and he? Ever?”

  The minute one says “ever,” one knows why.

  “He was keeled.” She says it so quietly that for a minute the accent misleads me. I see a bright sail, keeling over and under. In gray weather.

  He was killed shortly before the Armistice. Some doctors saw as much action as any officers, she said. Often without the same protections.

  “He could have taken leave same time I did. But with what was going on out there, he couldn’t bear to. He said, though, that I must do it for him. He wanted the family to know.”

  He was that kind, then. I was glad to know it. And sorry.

  And she was that kind. They could have made a life.

  “I didn’t break down until the Armistice. Then they had to send me home. But a lot of us were being sent back normally. So no one but Beck knew the real reason for it.”

  “So you came down there, with Mother and me.”

  “And the sight of you cured me. Your mother mostly, of course. But you, too. Such an imp, you’d been. And turned so solemn, pore little puss.”

  “Our woes? Cured one like yours?”

  She shook her head at me. “Uh-uh. I just remembered I was a nurse.”

  So, good-bye, doctor. Hathaway. Howard. I have recalled you. But there is no longer any need.

  “Did you ever see them again? His family?”

  “Oh, yes. His mother wanted to adopt me.”

  “Adopt you? A grown woman? What a—To be their—relic?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. He was their only son. She wanted me to have his estate. ‘If you’d had a chance to marry,’ she said, ‘you’d have had it. He’d want me to take care of you. And I want to.’”

  She sat back. The coffee was cold but she sipped it. I saw the two of them, at tea.

  “She was a lovely woman. And it was a fine house. Beautiful—but good, too. You know how it is, hon’, when the people are good?” She lets that hang, a statement more than a question. Outside the ranch house, whose poreless, sheet-rock walls resist even ownership, that other household we had known together looms out of the night, an ark lifted on the hydrogen of memory—and sails on.