On either side of the porch at the Pyles were, as Aunt Beck teased me, the jelly bushes; in the kitchen the actual syrup might be aboil, much like the talk on the “veranda,” which was what the lowliest sideporch might at any moment turn into. There the “expressions”—my father’s word for idiom—flowed into my ear in a sugar stream that melted like cotton candy, before one could taste or interpret them, and tasks were thrust into a young hand without fuss or stricture: “Here, li’l ole Hot-tenz, he’p pop these lima beans.” I had had a hard time with the limas. “Soft as a baby’s behind, that’s why.”
Beck’s voice was old and granular, although she must then have been still in her fifties. She wore her hair in a knot on top of her head, and makeup had never touched her, nor Katie either. Blondish Nita powdered her nose, and once, in her bedroom, while I was watching her do it and just about to ask her why only the nose, she had said, “Hush. Here comes Ayron.” He would only pass by, and never enter unless invited. In that small house, room etiquette was strictly observed. But the facepowder, if noticed, would not be approved. And he would have his way.
“Katie likes to fish,” I said to him, that day at the dock. “But she seldom gets the chance.” I was beginning to champion her, in my head.
“Don’t know what we’d do without Katie. My older sister is a fine girl.”
He was teaching me to fling up my line in an arc over my head and forward, the hook dropping on a plumb line into the water. If I had a nibble, I was to fling up the line in the same arc, but backward, slamming my catch on the dock behind me. We sat on the edge of the dock, dangling our legs, I in Sunday costume, at which to my surprise Beck had not scolded, as would have happened at home—though if any female there had ever fished, even back in Richmond, it was never recalled.
“Keep your elbow close to those skinny ribs of yours,” Aaron said. Like all the Pyles, he was a tease. “And like shuck your hand, at the wrist. Don’t shuck the whole hand, a course. Couldn’t bring you home to Beck in that pickle. Have to drown you right here, hair bow and all.”
“Hush, yew,” I said.
Freestyle or not, I caught fish after fish. Aaron caught nothing.
—Sometimes I think that people who live by memory as much as I do should be shot. Early. It’s too delaying. Sometimes one brings up a pearl, yet must wait forty, fifty years for it. We won’t hear from Katie on this until she is eighty-three. At which point she will explain everything, except what it is that I most want to know—
Anyway, at that moment, a young man about Aaron’s age came from behind us, strolling down the dock arm in arm with a girl. If we had been fishing hard, with our backs curved toward the water, we wouldn’t have seen them, but Aaron, who had given up his own line in mock despair, was taking my latest catch off the hook, and I was totaling the wriggling blues in the pail. I caught a sidelong flash of the young woman because her dress was maroon, not a summer color. Her hair, dark as mine, was sculptured down her back the way I would want to do, if ever I wanted to hang that way on a man’s arm instead of catching blues.
“Hi, Aaron.”
“Hi, Edward.”
“Who’s your cute partner?”
I kept my eye on my line. I knew I was being used. This Edward was really speaking at his girl. And I knew I wasn’t cute. But at my age people spoke through you and out the other side. Or thought they did. My side at this minute was the fish. And the almost clear water that was sending me gift after gift.
“My young cousin from New York. She’s teaching me to fish.”
“Teaching Aaron Pyle?”
“I haven’t caught a thing. Not since she started.”
“Maybe she could give me some pointers,” the Edward voice said.
“You seem to be doing right well.” Aaron’s speech was always mild but his hand on my elbow was tight. If he didn’t watch out he’d destroy my rhythm. “May I know who your friend is?”
“Miss Myra Manheimer, meet Aaron Pyle, our near neighbor. Myra’s a kind of cousin. We grew up together. At Woodmere High School. Before she moved to the city. And we moved here.”
“Oh, I think Port Washington is lovely.”
If she didn’t know yet not to say the Washington, she hadn’t been here long.
“Just come?” Aaron said.
“Oh, I plan to be here a lot.”
“And welcome,” Aaron said. But his voice was on its high horse, as any Southerner could hear.
“Hope to meet your sisters, Air-on,” the Myra voice said, cool.
As usual the voices above my head were exchanging on some level I wasn’t privy to. But today none of them was privy to what the underwaters were telling me. My arm ached with the weight of it, although if a striper weighs four ounces it is doing well.
“I have a nibble,” I whispered, praying I wouldn’t spook it.
“Hang on to it,” Aaron said. He had released my elbow. I could tell he wasn’t looking down at me. “Or no—maybe let it go.”
I couldn’t. I arc’ed the line. Backward, and over my head.
The fish slapped down the middle of the maroon dress. A short-sleeved square shift, silky with city confidence. We would call it art deco now. A pearl. Maybe it wasn’t ruined forever; maybe the hook hadn’t caught. Many’s the time I’ll see it, but I’ll never know.
Aaron didn’t begin to chuckle until the two of them had vanished toward the clubhouse. “Oh, hon’,” he said when he’d finished a second burst. “Oh, hon’.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said, “Truly. My hand shucked all of itself. I was only thinking of the fish.”
“Keep thinking so, hon’—you’ll do all right. And no need to say anything about it at home.” His face, scooped longer in the chin than Katie’s, said I wasn’t to.
The live fish in the pail made me uneasy, bumping their mouths first on one side then the other, like goldfish did in their bowls. “Let’s throw ’em back, shouldn’t I?”
“You have a real instinct. I’m right proud of you. Ordinarily, yes, they’d be too small to keep. But not tonight. Beck is expecting them.”
Beck fried them up without a word. My heart beat with love for my Southern relatives. If they had been loud in appreciation I would have hated them. They knew the fish were not yet table fish. They simply smacked their lips and smiled. All except Nita, who apparently had spent all the afternoon in the good dress she’d worn to teach Sunday School and kept asking who all had been at the club.
When I left Port, Beck said: “Come back anytime, you rascal.”
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Beck. Thank you kindly.”
Her eyes squinched merrily. “That’s colored talk, you little monkey. Wherever’d you pick that up, up here?”
“Oh—” We always had help in the house. The Pyles didn’t. I didn’t like to say but didn’t know how to get out of it—a state in which I spent much of my time. “From die Schwarze, I guess.”
“Hmmph.” I could tell she didn’t like that expression either. But she pressed me to her chest anyhow, a surface ample but hard, capaciously breathing. I had never felt a chest like it—always receiving, squared off down to the bone. “Pore little monkey.” No tape could spell the way she said “poor.” The minute she said it, I saw myself in the pail. All of us.
I LEFT COLLEGE, degree in hand. Left home to work and have my own apartment. Left work to marry, to have a family, and to live in many “out-of-town” places, none of them speaking in any of my accents, my own speech floundering unreliably along the way. I did not know myself, so I was what I heard, if with a core of obstinacy below the larynx. One day this stubbornness would move my writing arm to bypass my tongue and connect with my head, and ultimately with my life, but it hadn’t happened yet. During those same pre-years, the household of my childhood, up to then numbering only four at the center but vastly accommodating, had swelled for a final time with the increments of war.
As my father went bond for as many refugees from Hitler as he could afford to sponsor, most of
them tenuously related to my mother through the half-brother, Sigmund, who until then had scarcely paid his émigré sister any mind, our dining room filled with their tales of former grandeur and with their pudding handshakes. We heard of Onkel Sigmund’s house in Berlin, where the dining salon had been walled in red tapestry, of his son’s ski hut in the Dolomites, and of how Onkel himself, former head of General Motors for Germany and owner of a car the twin of Von Hindenburg’s, had got used to being mistaken for the old Minister, sometimes even opening its window and graciously accepting the plaudits of the crowd. We heard from his son the skier, whose exact cousinship confounded me—what would the son of a step-uncle be to me?—that our party manners were low here; in their drawing rooms, each time a guest entered, the whole company turned and acknowledged him.
I was too young to give them full credit for the trauma they had suffered even though their skins were safe, but watched entranced as they collided with my Southern family and each side gradually became aware that it was being condescended to.
Who knows what this forced alliance might have brought about, if the economy had not intervened? Bitterly disappointed that my father could not establish them in businesses suited to their station—for we were still feeling the effects of the Depression, and although when young he had rebounded from an ancient war, he was too old now to profiteer from this one—the new “Germans” took what he could offer and bowed themselves out. Leaving me with the lesson one balks at learning—that people as people are often distinct from the tragedies or injustices that they may suffer, and not always in tune with them.
One thing our household had been in harmony with—time. Indeed, by virtue of our double heritage we seemed to live under a double dose of it. As Jews, we possessed the biblical sense of time according to the Old Testament, that confused bag of endlessly instructive verses telling us there was a time to do this, a time to do that, from sybarite hours in the gardens of the Song of Solomon to Ecclesiastes’ final message of worn teeth and broken bowls. As Southerners, we were bound together by long, genealogical afternoons in which one had only to kiss to be cousins, and by the anecdotes that rose like hashish smoke from these long-burning histories. No wonder then that death, natural and unnatural, always took us by surprise.
My family went down like the Lusitania. What precipitated it was the death of my mother, at fifty-eight—not that young, but so long thought of as twenty-two or more years younger than the generation she had married into, and as wife to a man who at seventy had still had a mother, that her death seemed as untimely as if she were still a girl.
Within the year my father, until then a healthy eighty-two-year-old who had looked sixty, dropped in her wake. Then only did it become clear to their left-behind retinue what had happened.
Not since my own childhood, during which my father had lost his two elder brothers and my grandmother her sons, had “anybody” died, until at ninety-seven, she had. After that only the brother-in-law, Uncle Clarence, had been lost, exiting as modestly as he had lived. For fifteen years or so the planetary arrangements of our little universe had gone on, as if its original cause, their matriarch, were still among them. As everybody, down to the last little subway-riding cousin, had expected it to. My father, holding up under the burden like a five-foot-eight Atlas, had never thought of absconding; my mother, cured of her breakdowns by the challenge of being her own mistress, no longer rebelled.
Only we young had defected, partly from circumstances (I at a distance and my brother in the service) and, as was intimated by the elders any time we could get there, also from the notorious unfaithfulness of youth. How could they know that even to the neglectful, the parent house is always there to be gravitated to, in the mind? Even the real cousins, those unreliables, now and then gave evidence of that—Grace, Flora and Clarence’s daughter, steaming in from her unsuccessful marriage in Syracuse to its proper home audience, or even one of Belles reprobate girls, Gertrude-Pat, who, bumping into me from behind the dresses in a department store, both of us women now, said hungrily from whatever new fastness of creed, “Uncle Joe’s? Is it still there?”
But now there was no meeting place, come sewing-circle time, or of a weekday evening, or for Sunday’s chicken fricassee. With perhaps the promise, for some, of a little cash thrust in the palm, or at least a bottle of scent from the family factory. There was no place to go. Simple as that. A whole entourage had died.
“You couldn’t keep it up, maybe, could you?” old Cousin Martha Jacoby from Newark, the little old seamstress with the tic, said wistfully, thrusting her whole inexperienced and needy life at me so pitiably that, arrived though I had from six hundred miles away, two small-fry to care for and not much money, I thought for a moment that I could do so—that I must.
Behind me all the old familiar faces, as the song said, were massed up at me as if they, too, half believed I could, although we were in the bedroom now, not the living room—with all the secretive dresser drawers and crammed closets open at last to the curious, and not one of my childhood’s viewing corners left.
“They here for the pickin’s,” my father’s black maid had said, as they all filtered in the week after his funeral. After my mother’s death he had gone back to black servants. She was a recent one; she scarcely knew us. But she knew the picture, die Schwarze, as from the Bronx on they always had, she even alerting me that the Germans, keeping up our divisions even in condolence—and in a memento seeking of drawers guaranteed to have been, as they virtuously said, my mother’s only—had come in advance, the day before.
Those present no longer looked like a planetary arrangement, these calico-on-a-stick aunties and Punchinellos of the dining table who had chirped me toward adulthood and chucked my school days under the chin. Taken together, they looked to me like one of those threatening Italian pictures without perspective, in which all the flat faces are ranged toward the one—whose gaze they will hold for life.
“Cose, she cain’t,” a soft but strong voice said from the door, a voice that would never be in such a lineup. “How could she keep it up? For one thing, she lives away. And what would she be doing it faw!”
“It’s the Pyle girl,” I hear a spinstery voice say from among the female heads bent over the opened bureaus and cupboards in exact pecking order, the aunts in control of those upper drawers, which always seem to hold a woman’s costumery for above the neck—here the combs and jewelry not good enough to be kept at the bank. Lesser cousins of the blood, like Martha, are prowling in the chest that still holds my mother’s “materials,” from dress-goods to bolts of damask never yet cut into napkins, to that ragbag of torn sparkle-stuffs from the 1920s, which had been glamour to me when I was at the age for dress-ups, and one day would be again. Some of the storage places I had never been allowed to pry to the back of, and I see how the death of a woman domestically—that is, aside from the trials of the body—is in the sight of all her panoply, open and awry.
Whosever the grayish second voice had been, I hear its hostility freshly also, now that I am of an age to understand the animus of the home women against those who venture out into the world, and I see how the men are absent from this part of death, how they never have to do what we are doing here.
“Yes—it’s the Pyle girl,” Katie says, smiling at me over their heads, for if she is still a girl, what am I? “Been on a case, hon’. Couldn’t come before.”
Over the intervening years I always knew how she was faring, and she of me and mine, but I had been living from city to city and in New York only intermittently, and she busy in her orbit, so we had not met.
She was forty-five by then and not much changed, merely no longer twice my age. Indeed we were nearer.
She in turn was now almost the age my mother would have been on the opening night of this account. While my mother, down her long trail from the smocked tot in the photo brought from Germany to her terminus at fifty-eight, can be any age memory chooses. And I am grown. Or had been, after the ship went down, until
this moment. For after this, although we meet no more frequently, perhaps every other year, and at one period lose track of each other altogether, Katie will keep me in my childhood until the end of her life.
And I will grasp at the chance, as if I am sinking in a quagmire and pulling my savior toward me. Which is the true and everlasting stance of the mnemoniac.
Mneme is the Greek word for memory. There should be a word for extreme devotion to memory. As there are insomniacs, kleptomaniacs, so should there also be—mnemoniacs.
A word that we are coining between us here, she and I.
IT IS OCTOBER 1981. She and I and my husband are in Port. Not Port Washington but Port Charlotte, Florida, where she and Nita went to live after Katie retired and they had finally sold the Long Island house. Or rather, Katie had sold it. For although this has never been expressed until today, I have somehow long known that after Solly died so many years ago, whatever the date—for Katie is over eighty now—the girl with the teacup eyes became the sole support of their house.
The house where we are now is after three days no longer a shock to me. Katie, the girl who shot over the acres of Shirley, the young woman who poulticed a war, and the slender old woman whose spirited elegance is her sole adornment—what is she doing in this yellow ranch box, model dwelling for the too safely retired, midway in a varicolored but all too similar row of the same? How has she come to it?
I am beginning to know. These few days I am being told everything. Not in extreme haste, but to a pattern. We are in the drama of the last dwelling place, where it seems to me the Chinese property men always present in our lives are bringing out the furnishings one by one.
“You look just the same,” we say to each other with passion, on meeting. I don’t know how I look and for once don’t care. Here is the person who casts me back, into any one of several distinct yet blending stages I can choose from at will, yet experience all at once. If I came to think of any family gathering of substance both as a kind of ritual bath—in which that day’s bathe echoes all the past ones—and as a kind of memory picnicking, Katie is the sharer to whom I will not have to explain. Here is the mentor, the chuckler, whose ethic helped form me. Here is the person who knows where I came from.
Kissing Cousins: A Memory Page 4