Kissing Cousins: A Memory (3 page)

Then her father, “old Solly Pyle” as my father called him, had come to get her. I could see him as I myself had later, a handsome, white-crested man with a fine bearing, dressed in the same summer pongees and Panama hat my father wore—though of course Solomon Pyle would have been younger then. “She says visits were longer in those days. Took a time to get there.”

But Pahpa,
she’d said,
he was worried I might have fallen for some boy down there.
I heard Katie’s laugh, one stave above a chuckle—
Warn’t inny me-en at Shirley inny moah. Jus some ole leftover ladies Mahma’d met in Richmond.
Who were
open to a little young company. Mahma said it would be a precious experience for me. She only let me go because we were already set to move
—

I bet you were the prettiest theng,
I’d said stoutly. You
still are.
For I knew my mother and aunts thought now that she would never marry. She’d pursed her lips at them, over there in their corner; she knew that, too.
Not too bad,
she’d said. And was it then it began to sift to me that she must already have had her romance?

“Sure would like to know the name that ole Miz,” my friend’s mother said. “Course, there was a heap of houses on Shirley. My granddaddy was head inside servant up at the main one.”

Down the table her husband cracked a hard roll in his fist and set it on his butter plate. I hadn’t seen one of those plates recently; we seldom brought them out even for company. I saw that the two younger boys, who were looking at their father apprehensively, hadn’t known to set their butter knives at the edge.

“Tell Mahma how that cousin saved your life as a baby,” my friend said. “And only a kissing cousin.”

One of the boys snickered. “Kissing cousins. What the heck is that?”

His mother heaved up her bosom, a word I hadn’t thought of since an aunt had noted I was getting one. “It mean close in all but blood. Times I think you not even that to this house, boy.” She lifted her chin at her husband, queenly. “Tell your story, Girl.”

Southerners tell a story over and over without shame.

So I told how Katie, coming into the nursery, had looked down at the hot child. “You were burning up,” my father had said. “I’d already called Kozak.” Doctors were known by their last names only in our house, in a kind of ownership.

“I could smell the fever before I saw you,” Katie’d said, chiming in. “You must have had over a hundred and five. I knew what it was at once—seen it in the wards. Children don’t have it anymore.”

“Diphtheria,” my father had said. “My heart sank in my shoes.” Then he would smile at Katie, saying to the rest of us, “And even then, that girl never raised her voice.” It was his specific for women—mostly an unsatisfied one. “And then—” he would say.

But Katie always made an excuse to leave the room at this point, saying, “Hush, hush, Uncle Joe, haow you drahmatize”—after which he would whistle, and fall still. And maybe tell us later, maybe not, depending.

“She always claimed the doctor did it when he came,” my father would whisper, looking over his shoulder. “What had to be done, to save you.” She was only a student nurse, and she didn’t want her parents to know. They might have taken her out of nursing school. She’d had an awful fight to go.

“It forms a false membrane in the throat,” I told my friends table, who were all listening now, even the boys. “You have to suck it out, mouth to mouth. You have to take it in your own throat. And that’s what she did.”

When I myself put it to her, the first time I heard it, she’d said, “Oh, hush, child. I never catch a thing.”

“Sure like to swap talk with that lady from Shirley,” my friend’s mother said when I was saying good-bye. Their hallway had a comfy, musty smell like ours used to, maybe from the same kind of leather davenport—another word and object I had now left behind me, when after my grandmother’s death we had moved to the smaller apartment where my mother was at last free of the clan dinners, and maybe missed the regularity, the grandeur.

“Oh, Mother, her cousin is not
from
Shirley,” my friend said. I could have made that correction myself, but knew better. Although I’d never been South I knew that region’s grandiosity, white or black, in which in one evening’s hearsay a grandfather might slip from being a “boy” somewhere on the “ess-state” to being a butler in the mansion house.

“She’s a superintendent of nurses now,” I said proudly. “But I bet she’d come. She’d be interested to. And I do thank you for that lovely meal. It was like home.” Or like home when we went to Flora’s, where my father took his hankering for okra, creamed corn off the cob, and oyster dishes Germans had never heard of. I looked around for the father and the boys, but they were gone. “Thank you kindly,” I said. It twanged in my ear like a requiem.

“I wanted Arnella to train for a nurse,” her mother said. “It stays with you. But col-lege—” She said it with that delicate double “1.” Shaking her head at Arnella and me—at what going there had made of us. “Well, come again,” she said. “You talk more Southern than my own chile.”

Outside on East 110th Street I figured out that Arnella lived at about the same distance from Columbia as I did on Riverside Drive.

“I’ll walk you,” she said. “Gotta late class.”

As we parted on Broadway she said nervously: “Hope you don’t mind what she said about Jews. She had a hard time.”

I said I didn’t—and I didn’t.

“I sometimes feel worse about being a Northerner. Or even a Southerner. But in the Jew department? Nothing can touch me there.”

Next time Katie dropped in at home I did ask her if she would go. She was regarding our new living room absently. The apartment was decent enough, but there was no grandmother wing, and in the family there had been other decimations. At four o’clock, the former coffee hour, light from the river fell askance on two barrel-shaped chairs that curved forward, empty-armed. The furniture came at us to be noticed now; it had always been subsidiary.

“Good grief, y’all are in reduced circumstances as regards relations, aren’t you?” she said. “But the view is nice. Sure, hon’—where did you say?”

When she understood clearly she gave me a long look. Her eyes were still big enough in her face to be called “teacup eyes,” as I had once said of them when small, the aunts shrilling behind me, “Saucer eyes, the child means. You mean saucer!” I arguing—“No! Teacup!”—and they teasing on until I cried, and Katie, squeezing her eyes shut to settle the matter, had taken me on her lap to be consoled.

“Hon’, you sure do get into things,” she said now. Then she chuckled. “Sure I’ll go. Sure.” Then we hugged.

“Whoosh, I’m tired,” she said then. Her face had always been wan, with an even delicacy that as she aged I came to know as the ultimate health, but by now her mouth drooped some at the sides. “Been doing some night duty in the mental ward.”

She had never wholly given up nursing, and this was her specialty, her interest dating, she had not long before told me, from the time my own mother, released from a sanatorium after a breakdown following my brother’s birth, had been ordered by the doctors to “rest cure” at Atlantic City, with seven-year-old me along to cheer her, and Katie to oversee. “We were there for three months,” she’d said at the time, “—don’t you recall?”

What I recalled was that I hadn’t cheered. My mother, exhorted to the beach, stood fixedly at the hotel window, I behind her, at her waist but ignored. “Come away from that window, child,” I’d heard Katie’s voice back then say—had she said the final
d
on “child” or not? Even at seven I’d known that her anxiety about the high window was for my mother, not for me. “No,” I’d said carefully, when reminded of that time, “I only remember the pony rides.”

Now Katie said musingly, “Shirley. How you hold on to things. Forgot I told you ’bout that.”

I heard how she got more Southern when she talked of the South, just as my own accent came back on me when I talked to anybody from down there. “I could tell you about your whole visit. Except”—I hesitated—“what did you shoot?”

“Rabbit,” she said dreamily. “And once a woodchuck the field hands cooked and I had a taste of. Ugh. Was it fat! ‘Supposed to taste like shoat,’ I told Mahma when I got home, ‘but it don’t,’ and Mahma laughed ’til she crah’ed. ‘Don’t ever tell your poppa you ever tasted shoat,’ she said. Alright to tell him you shot one, though, ‘case you did.’ And then she laughed some mo’.”

Katie had rosied, the way she always did with stories, and looked younger, as always when she spoke of her adored mother. She drank deep of the coffee I had brought her.

“What’s a shoat?”

Civil War Richmond, when my father was born, had been not too many steps above a country town. He had left it early and, so far as I knew, had never shot anything; his sports as a young man were going to cockfights and to boxing matches in the days of brass knuckles, and, until he had married my mother when in his fifties—women.

“Pigling.” Katie’s mouth quirked. “Tastes right good, way the dawkies at Shirley cooked it.” She had spent nearly as much time with them, she’d once said, as she had with the ladies.

At home we had observed no dietary laws. Until I was grown I hadn’t even known that the shellfish we consumed in such quantities was forbidden the orthodox—until an acquaintance happened to allude to it. Yet my father, who had eaten everything in his time, professed to disdain pork more as lower class than as a religious sin, and we had never had it.

Now she sighed—the remembering sigh that purled like an undercurrent from all the elders in my father’s family, and that I sometimes thought of as the voice of the deserted South speaking through them. Katie, I thought, had learned it too young.

“Those black people were practically keeping the place together for the old ladies. Better nigras I’ve never seen.”

I held very still. I found myself holding my breath. In the new living room there was now a big transformer attached to our radio-record-player, to convert our electricity from direct current to alternating. The apartment house, owned by Columbia University, was among the last in the city still to have DC. I felt like that transformer, my two currents interchanging.

“Arnella—she has a degree.” My voice cracked. “She talks like you and me. I mean—like N’Yawk.” I heard the tape. When I was with Arnella I talked like she did: I said Noo Yaw-uk.

I felt myself turn red. I did this so seldom that when it happened the whole family rushed to see.

Katie stopped dead. Like a brook stopping. This was another thing I learned—at that instant. Real Southerners ran on, yes, like a brook, detouring round a bad moment like water round a pebble, filling in the chinks of confrontation with a babble, murmuring to a pause. Hollering was a different thing entirely; it was like healthful exercise. It was only Northerners who stopped dead, ominously, like teachers, or like the couples one sometimes saw on the tough streets around grade schools, squaring off like cats and dogs before a fight, the women arching their backs, the men splatting their feet.

Not Katie. When she came to a stop she seemed merely to grow more like herself, on what you might call an “on hold” basis, those eyes dilating at me the way a movie brings you a close-up.

“Whah—yew,” she said, in that chiding, half-amused drawl Southern mothers use to remonstrate with a child. “Whah
yew,
” Then her face came back to still. I could see what a student nurse might suddenly find there if a procedure went wrong. My easy father, who hated scolding anybody, would take to quoting Robbie Burns: “Something gone agley, darlin’?”—leaving you uncertain of anything except his love. But Katie meant business.

“Now you hearken, my little cousin,” she said. “I
trained
up here with my black sisters. Nights on double duty I slept in the same bey-ud. My schoolmate Marnine Tooker writes me from Atlanta every year. My head caw-diac nurse right now, I would trust her with my life. And she me.”

I did hearken. I heard the “my.”

She cupped my face in her hands. Just so she had done when we and my mother had had to leave Atlantic City sooner than planned.
Your mother has to go inside for a while again, dawlin. And your daddy still has to be away awhile, on business. You’re coming down to us, at Port.
Now she chuckled, not releasing me. “Why you dirty li’l ole No’therner. At Shirley—what the dickens were you thinking I went out to shoot?”

B
UT KATIE AND I
never did visit Arnella’s, though we had had the invitation, a large greeting card with red, blue, and gold flowerets, in the middle of which a good round hand, surely her mothers, had inscribed the date and the hour, Six O’clock Supper, and both our names. Four days before, I got a note through Student Mail to meet Arnella at Friedgen’s, the Teacher’s College haunt. Over their famous brownies she said, “Have to take back that invite. I’m sorry. My parents had a big fight over it. Shall I level with you why?”

What a girl Arnella was, a leveler shooting straight for the whites of one’s eyes. And if I may say with the immodest pride we take in our youth once we are mortally separate from it, what a girl was I, humbly brooding on what I was with all the arrogance of the beginner who believes in change.

Sometimes I think of memory as a Sistine Chapel. Down there on the sunny floor are all the early figures of life’s morning, still as busy as ever they were at that time; up here on the ceiling are the swollen, over-muscled shapes we have become; ceiling and floor are powerless to meet. Which is the ultimate viewer? Which the most alive?

Anyway, good prospects as we two were—for what? The worlds grace?—we muffed it.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s because I’m Jewish. Your mother had second thoughts. It doesn’t matter.”

I was too cool about that, I’ve thought since. Maybe I should have made like it did matter. The worst of race relations is for either side to be impervious.

“No, it was my father,” Arnella said. I would have said her voice was too high-tone, if I hadn’t known from home how hysteria closets itself in the too polite. “My father married down, or thought he did. My mother, as you saw, is not educated. But she’s light. He’s dark. And what it comes to is—” She made a face. “Neither’n can get the best of t’other. So—he hates Shirley. It’s what made her light-skinned. So he’s laid down the law to her. In our house, which is his house, she can’t have anybody white.”