Kissing Cousins: A Memory

by Hortense Calisher

  As the laughter ebbs, she, too, leans back, released, and I think to myself, we could founder here; we could stay on memory’s cute side, on the pawky side of the folklore, the kind that people love to buy—and why not? After all, hon’—you didn’t die of that diphtheria.

  But hadn’t I been taught—only realizing now that my fond, fussy hypochondriacs had been the ones to teach me—that my early rescue gave me an extra obligation to life, to report on life?

  We had forgotten the other chair. That’s what a chair can do—look immanent. What a family of chairs we had been, each demanding that its history be kept up!

  “‘Later,’ you said, Katie. Later than what?”

  “Oh—for Sista, I meant.”

  It comes slowly—why?

  “She was a right pretty little thing, to start. Chubby always, but also—you know—fat oriented.” There was a professional tinge to Katie’s words now; after a period of mourning, those facts become memory, too. “How I tried to keep after her about the fat, but you knew Sista. Even those last months when the fat was around the heart like a—I saw the report, I made them show me it—but Rachel would say, ‘I just cain’t eat without butter to my bread.’”

  I could hear the plaint, the intonation.

  “I tried to restrain her—but it was all she had.”

  What about—men? I find I can’t say it. We reserve a certain priggishness for our elders, for their own silly sake—even with a woman who can label her own skeleton. Or because where there is a Sista, there is the other sister—whose history is also lurking here?

  “Rachel bore the brunt of our move North, you know. She was just that much older. Three years make a difference when you’re a child. She stayed close to home. And Mahma made Port as much like down home as she could.”

  “So that was its charm for me. I never yet figured that.”

  Katie smiled almost condescendingly—as one does to a child.

  “But she was attractive then? That should have helped.

  Weren’t there ever any—?”

  “Men?” Katie said comfortably, shifting the compress on her neck.

  Why that gesture, so straightforward, should compel me to see her in another spectrum—I know full well. My generation had been schooled to measure what we do with the body as at once explanation of what we were or were not, and panacea for it. By era, Katie belonged to those women before me who mostly had not even exercised, much less carried their bodies in open and conscious demand. Now I was not so sure she belonged with them.

  “That was when she wanted us to call her Nita.” Katie stops short with that conciliatory shrug one gives when one is about to abuse someone else’s confidence. “There was a young man—Hot-tense.” Her voice drops into that soft rhythm in which we in the family told special stories, often about ourselves. “He was paying her attention. More than just a beau. Likely it would have come to a point. Then something happened. Mahma knew what it was and said it was nothing serious. Mahma had town connections; she said she had investigated—and Mahma never lied. She couldn’t; that was her trouble. But Ayron took against the young man. And nobody could control my brother when he had a mind to be the man of the family.”

  Surely she had mourned him that summer she visited us—or mourned death—but the words are dry.

  “The young man wanted to see Nita again, but Brother wouldn’t have it. I was away then, too, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because Mahma knuckled under. She crah’d when she told me of it. She had to let Brother be a man, she said. And Ayron had forbidden the other young man the house.”

  I could see Beck going the rounds of the town, maybe even to those not too well known to her, but doing what was done down home, where one’s connections made gossip the best mediator. Staunchly setting out in the dress that could go anywhere. Waiting for Katie to come home, so she could cry. Waiting for Aaron to bring home the fish for dinner.

  Then, quite without thinking on it, I made my connections—as any child of our long, female afternoons would—and clapped my hand to my mouth.

  “What, hon’?” Katie has the rueful smile one wears when one has “told.” “Something bit you?”

  That, too, was what we had said among us, to sudden revelation.

  “Nothing. Oh—Aaron and I went fishing once. At the club. And I disgraced myself. He ever say?” No need to mention it at home, he’d said.

  “Hon’. You pee in your pants?”

  “Good God, no. I was ten years old. I ruined a visiting girl’s dress.”

  When I told her how come, she laughed again, of course, not noticing that this time I held back.

  “They were a rich-looking young couple,” I say, describing the dress. I didn’t describe what the girl’s companion wore, though I still remembered him perfectly—white flannel legs, blue blazer sharp-edged in the sun, brass buttons with anchors on them.

  “Were those medals?” I’d asked Aaron as we walked home our catch. “No,” he’d said, exploding again. “Far too many of them.” Aaron himself had been wearing whatever fishermen wore, neat but unmemorable. Or what they had worn in Richmond maybe. When serious again his face was more rigid than Katie’s, but his eyes had her blue. Walking along, jogging the pail, he’d dug me in the ribs again with his other hand, maybe too sharply. “Keep it dark about those two—remember? You and I just caught ourselves some fish.” He saw my expression. “You caught them,” he said.

  “Wonder was that couple anyone from Port?” Katie said. To be from that Port was still an accolade.

  Should I say? Death saves memory a lot of trouble.

  “I had the impression that they were just down for the day.”

  So I left him in the archives, that young man, with his cousin Myra Manheimer, whom maybe he kissed, maybe he didn’t. He came from the North, sure enough—this, and those buttons, were all Aaron really had against him. But why resurrect him now? There was no longer any call for him.

  Note, though, how my cousin Katie and I both accepted without question the impressions of a ten-year-old child, half a century gone. In memory, all a family’s children are smart.

  “I was always making people laugh, those days,” I said. “But you were all so good about those fish of mine. So small they should have been thrown back. But you ate them all, every one. I was so proud.”

  “Why, I remember that day.” Katie sat up, the compress dripping in her hand, her mouth pursed in the peculiarly Southern mnemoniac way, the words so chewed one would be hard put to spell them: Waa-aah r’mimba would be accurate. “When you-all came home Ayron had words in the kitchen with Nita because she had makeup on, and her Sunday clothes. And me just off the train with my salary check, but Sunday, no way to cash. That’s how I found out Mahma had come to the end of her savings. Here—give me that compress.” She wound it around her neck with a savage flip she would never have used on a patient. “We ate those minnows of yours, hon’, because Beck had nothing else in the house.”

  “That’s a shock.” I am only half joking. Childhood’s triumphs are hard won—or mine were. And long cherished. “The thought of them warmed my pride for weeks.”

  Memory is a fish. A flashy something or nothing that can circle a pail twice. Or on and on. Memory is a bargaining—with what it has missed.

  And something large, white, and shifty is missing here.

  A courtly man with a cane, in a white pongee suit. This is no time to be polite about that, with death breathing in our ears.

  “And Sol—Beck said Sol might be coming home?”

  She has finished with the compresses and dried her hands. Shapely at the nails but gaunt, they still move with a nurses abstract competence, even toward a candy box. “Here. Have some nonpareils.”

  I’ve never known how to pronounce that word American-style and feel oddly grateful, though few may even know the term now.

  “What was Uncle Solly’s business? I never knew.” I take one of the quarter-size chocolate rounds sprinkled with white. She mun
ches on one. No, the teeth don’t fit. One can see the animal taking over the human. That can be painful to watch.

  “When Solly Pyle married Rebecca Boettigheimer he was a traveler, or supposed to be. Those days, men still had to travel in order to sell. Unless you owned a store.”

  I knew that picture. My grandfather had had such a store in Richmond; then came the War between the States. And later, a war between little commerce and big, as often happens after. “Between magnolias and merchandising” was the way my father said it; he’d wanted to be a poet, and alliteration was common in our house.

  “Some of the men stayed on, and became department stores. And some of the men came North, like your father and mine.” She’s saying “min” now for “men.” It’s an old story.

  We both lean forward. Those are the stories that have brought us to where we are.

  “Beck only found out because of her wedding furniture, that Sol claimed was too heavy to move North yet, until we were sure of a big enough house. She’d thought it was going into storage. But Daddy had sold it to pay his debts down there. And the buyer-man came to our door.”

  Opposite us, the china closet has survived. Even Florida light can’t always superannuate—one of our home words, too. I once asked Uncle Clarence what it meant, on one of our walks. “Being out of date,” he said. “A condition common among people who come North.” But, according to family estimate of a chap who worked in his brother-in-law’s office, Clarence was not a successful man.

  “Solly Pyle was a gambler,” the teeth say with a click. “Let’s have coffee now.”

  So we do. We both know when a story has ended—for the night. Whatever those teeth say, the eyes above have accepted it.

  We are both quiet, maybe thinking about gamblers. Small businesses like my fathers are gambles, but with a whole clan participating in the daily risk, and dependent on the kitty, the petty cash, the inventory—they become honorable.

  “When my niece Joan was married I gave her the oldest family possession we had left over. Old blue china, eighteenth century, some of it. I understand she has it all over her house—but I never, never hear from her. Never. So I suppose she’s all right. Doesn’t need anything more. From me.

  After a bit Katie leans forward. There’s a certain formality in her manner. “Hon’—how about you? Are you all right?”

  She means for money. Am I to be left something, in her disposals? These matters are not for sentiment. It is up to me to say.

  I, too, lean forward. Whether we are talking about money or not—and I know we are, only the same words she has used will somehow express the intangible that I feel she will be leaving me.

  “Yes, Katie. I’m all right.”

  On the way to bed she points to a small chest in the cubbyhole that is her dressing room. “Want you to have that anyway. Please take it when you go.”

  Little Dresden china plaques on it, lords and ladies playing shepherd and shepherdess. Cabriole stilt-legs—a chest a bride would love, or a child. Or an old woman. Not a trinket for men—and we already have too many of these in my house. I think of my granddaughters, still young enough so that when they’re brides I may be gone. But something maybe should be left over, even from that far back. “It belongs in your room. I’ll love to have it, someday. But I don’t want to denude you now.”

  I was wrong. She wanted to be denuded. They know when. When it is time.

  THE NIGHT AFTER that we ate at the big mall, where I also bought an intricately cut parchment hat, tan colored, but made like those expandable paper Christmas bells, and in silhouette much like the charming “mushrooms” now being worn in all the British television series of the 1920s to 1940s, though I was not likely to wear it up home. “Keep it on awhile,” Katie said, during coffee at home afterward. “You remind me of your mother in it.”

  Tonight I had been allowed to make the coffee; we were settling in. Though I would have to leave soon. The way younger people always do. We never really catch up.

  “Wish I’d seen you in your nurse’s hat.”

  “Cap, hon’. Yes, the Mt. Sinai cap—never will forget the day I earned it. Nothing like the dabs they wear today.”

  “Didn’t know you trained at Mt. Sinai.”

  “Only way the family would let me train was if I was admitted there. I thought it was because they never expected me to qualify, the standards were so high. Hattie—your mother—told me the real reason years later—your mother loved a pun, you know. She said: ‘They actually took counsel on you, Katie. They decided that if ever you set your cap at some doctor, it had better be a Jewish one.’”

  I came to tally my mother’s puns only after her death. Only recognizing then how complete and effective her tussle with our language had been—had had to be. Southerners are linguists by nature. People who drink “bourbon and branchwater” do so half listening to the lilt. She must have made up her mind that if English was to be our language supreme, with even her own child consigned to that view of it, then English was what she would conquer. My mother, too, had a tape in her head.

  “You and Mother were close, weren’t you.”

  “I had Beck, hon’—she had no one. Her own mother died when she was born. A stepmother—’til she came here. No women in your fathers family she could be close to, even in age. You know all that. You wrote about it.”

  “Yet I never asked you about her—I don’t know why.”

  “We have to figure these things out on our own.”

  How good it felt, it always felt, to find someone else brought up to do that. To find that these monastic cells we make for ourselves have a common wall.

  “We got close when I came out of the awmy,” Katie said. “Hattie and I.”

  When those stern hands of hers fisted, as they did now, they were like two quarters of chicken, each a breast-half with a second-joint thumb.

  “Li’l old chickem bones, baby chickem bones,” my father, who couldn’t sing, used to croon to me in my crib. “Chickens are Jewish, aren’t they,” I said one day to the Sunday table, rocking those gathered round the yellow fricassee. “She means our beaks,” an aunt who didn’t have one said. And maybe I did. But what I meant most was our almost daily pore-to-pore sympathies with those fowl and their bone-heaps. When the Holocaust came, I would think again of them and us together, we staining the soup with our yellow armbands, and jerking toward death without our heads.

  “She was a German here, you know, all during the waw. That took its toll.”

  “I know the neighbor women made it hard for her because she knitted the German way.”

  In the American style, the incoming wool, held in the right hand while that needle dives in for the next stitch, is then looped around the point of that needle and drawn through in a movement each time involving the entire wrist, or even the arm. In the more economical German method, the new wool, held to the left and close to the chest, can be nudged in and out by the right-hand needle in a mildly continuous motion that barely shifts either hand.

  I used to think that such economies were merely part of the obsessive lore of women, along with how you boiled the said bones for stock. How surprised the Kaffee-Klatsch must have been to find that their small, homely arts could be politics. Or that calling sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” was a not quite sufficient response.

  “She had a stepbrother fighting on the German side. She hadn’t seen him since she came here at sixteen. But everybody knew. And do you know, when your father brought over him and his family during Hitler, they produced his picture in uniform, proud as proud?”

  “Oh, even when I was a kid she asked me not to speak German anymore to our maid. When I was about six.”

  “Uh-huh. And do you know that you went to your father and said: ‘So then can I go to Hebrew School like you did, instead?’”

  “No! How extraordinary. That I don’t remember that at all.” I’d thought I knew all my language kinks.

  “Your father didn’t like to tell you—that girls didn�
�t go. So he said he’d teach you. But your mother put the kibosh on it.

  I smiled at the old word, never in the mouths of any I knew, except back then. Katie in her dark corner, wan under her pale hair, I in my paper hat—lightly, lightly in the small seagoing boat that is memory we’re skimming toward youth.

  “She must have been appalled. She didn’t want to be Jewish.”

  That bitterness came back to me: how she had sneered at the name of a high school friend I had brought home, whose head of blond fuzz she had termed “kike hair.” How when I went uncombed or unkempt I was accused of having the same.

  “I know. You wrote about it.”

  Katie and I had never really talked much about my writing. As with many another writer’s family, she seemed pleased that a member had gotten into print but felt no particular urge to engage with the books except for those that might chronicle the family itself—and this was fine with me. A friend had sent her the early stories, during the years when Katie and I were apart. Later, when we met again, those “family” tales had elicited a few chuckles on her side, but both of us were—I see now—uncharacteristically shy with one another there. I had been unable to write of my parents, or indeed of any of the others, until they were dead. She did not merely approve of this; she took it for granted in the old style—as the deference paid to one’s elders. To her I’d been the “cute” little cousin—in the old sense of “acute”—who had sat on the bottom step of family conclaves and had “sure got everybody’s number”—and she may not have been that wrong.

  Now and then she would sometimes ask if I was “on a new one,” in which case I must be “sure to send,” but until the Collected Stories came out I never had—and not since. Because I truly felt she was not much of a reader, and because I had gone so far afield of those. Often her friend Pearl Schulman clipped a review from the New York papers and sent it to her, and Katie would then carefully forward it to me. My husband’s relatives did the same for him, as “their writer.” Family solidarity was being expressed, not readership—and between Katie and me that was enough. Enough to know that she approved of what I had done with my life.