Kissing Cousins: A Memory (2 page)

It went like this: Jehovah, in whom I no longer believed or perhaps had never quite believed, had nevertheless planted His ethical standard inside me. Since I doubted that He would bother to lean down from on high to pass judgment, say, on those two poor creatures who were ashamed of what He was to them, I would have to do it for Him.

I had no idea that this high-mindedness was an essential of the Jewish style. Or that this, too, had its variations, running a gamut from my father’s thundering condemnation of what to him sinned equally against his pride in Jewish history and his pride in himself, to those high-coiffed ladies, now perched by preference on our more fragile love seats, who merely thought it tacky of Cousin Gertrude to have changed her name to Pat. But I already felt the sweet tribal comfort to be got from such action, though I wasn’t quite sure of my perch. “Tacky,” like “gemütlich,” was one of the untranslatables that so much affected the attitudes of our household—and perhaps because of this, words and their possible exactitudes were where I was beginning to put my trust.

I slipped closer to Katie on her chair, even leaning against her, though just short of twining myself on her, as someone of our steady flow of visitors from Virginia might have done. We had many other kissing cousins among Richmond families as anciently close to us as the Pyles were, but most of them still lived down there, sending us a stream of their famous cupcakes, and when they came up North, forming a sugary oasis in our living room with their fond if shallow ways. Twining was one of these. I yearned after this fondness and saw what it could do for one, but my mother, who had trouble being fond, saw it as “They’re always all over you,” and forbade me it.

“Gertrude’s changed her name to Pat,” I said. “Katie, that’s tacky, isn’t it?” When she didn’t answer right off, I said, “Maybe she doesn’t know there are German girls named Trudy.” I knew lots of girls who didn’t like their names just as names, and I was one of them, thinking mine pretentious because it was French and I wasn’t—and in English either syllable emphasized sounded wrong. So I wanted to be fair—another cheeseparing burden of the verbal.

Katie knew all this, as well as perhaps why I had chosen her to know—as I did not. But I could hear the synagogue, if not Sunday School in her voice, intentionally soft. “Hon’, in Gertrude’s case it’s mo’ than tacky.” Then she patted my knee, as two new contingents entered. Martin Freeman, my father’s accountant, and the nice lady he lived with (his wife being in the looney bin), who on my father’s insistence, counter to the ladies, had finally become persona grata here. After him, a stranger?—no, it was “Uncle” Louis Arnstein, a courtesy uncle from Philadelphia, in whose widower household I and my father had once stayed. Following him was Erna, an oily-skinned German girl sent us as an emigrant after the war, and maybe even a cousin, but so sweaty lower-class and so groaningly stupid that my mother, refusing to admit cousinship, had made a maid of her, until Erna found a man, again in a way my mother could not approve. Well, here was Erna with him in tow—and on the wrong day.

Yes, we had our orbits, although clearly my mother, now crimping her lips from across the room at Katie, also her favorite, didn’t think of them as heavenly. Sometimes, looking out at her domain here of an evening, or in the quiescence at table when the cloth was finally being crumbed, she had a phrase she breathed, ostensibly not for anyone to hear. “And so forth,” she would say under her breath. “And … so-o forth.”

It was not the same as
und so writer,
I thought, on the translating tape in my head. She was now an American.

Katie winked back at her. She was an intimate of both of us—a neat accomplishment, though she wouldn’t have considered it so. As with so many Southern women I saw, cronydom came naturally to her, and age was no barrier. Her allegiance to me had begun when she had wheeled me in my baby carriage, she at the age I was now. “Gone ten minutes and your pah-puh came steaming around the block. Thought I’d lost you, hon’.” I hear the cadence:
lost
you—
hon.
Affection was never better stated in a pause. As for me, my cleaving to Katie predated memory, and perhaps even that overstuffed carriage, of which a picture of me in it the first time I was allowed out survived, as well as the legend that my father, in order to show off his belated firstborn in her open-air debut, had donned a three-button cutaway and top hat and had paraded me down Fifth Avenue.

Since although his office was there we lived nowhere near that avenue, I had long since taken this story under advisement, for further consideration during one of those pauses for truth. It seemed to me that Southerners, like Jews, had a special talent for telling stories but, unlike Northerners, knew very well when not to believe in them. Northerners of any persuasion seemed to me altogether awash when it came to anecdote. Or to family myth—if they had any, which was doubtful as far as I could tell. They seemed to learn even their jokes logically, in order to save them up for a later day. Had they no ragbag of old faithfuls, such as the genealogical oddities that snaked out onto our dinner table from behind the starched napkins? Or the chronicles of sickness that crept out into the sewing circle while some members stayed overlong in the bathroom? Or, best of all, those whoppers that spewed up, lusty and outrageous, in the hollering. If Northerners, as evinced by my school friends or our New York visitors, did have any free-flowing intimacy like ours, they must keep it dark or, again, save up for it. Anyway, even if they did have planetary systems in their own households, I felt sure that, by contrast, we were the planets who sang.

As for my Jewishness, that was satisfyingly in all of me, no more to be questioned than the body I walked around in. And Katie Pyle was the same only more so, for the three Pyle women—Katie, her mother (my Aunt Beck), and her sister, Rachel (self-styled Nita)—went much to the consolations of the synagogue, why so I wouldn’t know fully until Katie was old. But I knew that in the eyes of my mother, who never went there at all, although she could well have used consolations, Katie, already seemingly so removed from the marital by her vocation, was in danger of becoming one of those single women who went too much to God.

Meanwhile, I could see for myself how Katie’s Southernness overlay her Jewishness yet united with it, as evinced in her looks. I wouldn’t see until years later that her face much resembled Bette Davis’s in its lively responses as well as its features, not barring the slightly pulled bit of nose between the nostrils.

It could indeed be a Christian face unless you looked carefully. Its ancestry was Dutch and German, her mother having been a Rebecca Boettigheimer, and its coloring blond. Jews more used to the Sephardic strains and brunette complexion I bore might not recognize her as Jewish at all. But unlike my mother, whose chestnut Teuton beauty could blush with pleasure at a “Why, I wouldn’t have known you
were,
” Katie never spoke of her own looks in any Jewish-Christian context and, I knew for sure, would have been angered by any such compliment.

Of course I never really saw her more than gently angry until she was eighty. But she was the epitome of what in the days of the Gibson Girl era slightly before her was called “spunk.” Indeed, the special link between us came of that quality, and the story of how this happened seemed to me as grisly cute as some of the folklore sent my father each month by a Hebrew subscription society—and equally as Jewish as a tale could be.

One night, when I was a tot, I had a fever, as tots in those less inoculated days seemed more to do, either surviving by their own dower of resistance or not. “Katie, thank God,”—this is my father speaking—“was student-nursing just then, and happened to be there.”

Hanging on the tale, which was never to be dribbled at too slow a pace for me, I knew just how that would be. Tired after her exhausting hours of day service, or else facing the prospect of a long hospital night, Katie would have come by to this place that was hers in all but blood, drawn in less by the abundance of food than by the hectic glow of the company, even whose quarreling amused her. Of course she would be fed, and expected to be. But not in the way of other droppers-in, who, as many times as they came, had to be invited and pressed to stay several times over of an evening in a number of variations suited to the circumstances of each, had in fact to be confirmed of their welcome all the harder because frequently they knew damn well they weren’t.

“Oh, come, I made a jellied salad,” my mother might say too winningly to an aunt who hated it and might well criticize our excellent cuisine—in which such salad was not normal—as tartly as if she had paid for it. Or, “Now, Martha,” my father might say carefully to the poorest cousin from Newark. “Take something, before that ride.” And mincingly or haughtily, or even hungrily, their protestations would subside.

Katie never protested, but not only because she was honestly welcome. She took as her right the expansive Southern hospitality she had been reared in—if we were ever to be at her house she and hers would be sure to make return in kind. I saw also how she returned our hospitality in the same moment it was extended, by the grace with which she accepted, honoring the food with a light, sincere aside—“Hattie, this is exceptional”—to my mother, whose awkward bridal efforts were family lore, but whose mature day-to-day efforts, taken for granted now by all, went unpraised. Or I would hear Katie joining in the talk with a modest sliver of a laugh, not too lyrically shaped.

I supposed that France had given her poise—“Gay Paree” being all I knew of it other than a rosy-ruffled bisque doll, presented me when I was thought to be too young for it, that danced on its platform, inclining its pink mobcap, and then disappeared into a cupboard forever in what I assumed was the French style. But when I once dared to ask Katie about her French experience—during and after World War I it would have been, with the wounded—tears started in her eyes and were held there while the eyes widened, a phenomenon I had never seen before; maybe this was Southern, too?

I wouldn’t have my answer until I was in graduate school and dined one night in Harlem at a black schoolmates home table, where I might observe in my schoolmate’s mother the same hospitality, the same soft shoots of laughter—and when she spoke of her first experience here up North, as one of the just-arrived girls who in the early morning had stood in street-corner slave markets in the Bronx, to be picked off as slavies for the day by the local Jewish housewives—that same brimming of the eyes.

I was old enough by then to know that it couldn’t be Southern exclusively, to hold back tears in that way, not letting them drop. Or to save up memory, as with our household’s every closet and chair. Yet I was still young enough to note what my elders at home, my father, my courtly uncles and their retinue of women, all of them cosseting our household help with the usual “We know how to treat them decently,” had never admitted to themselves or maybe never even seen—that in the curious way the
droit de seigneur
redounds even on the kind master who will not exercise it, they had learned some of their soft manners from the Blacks.

“You not too Northern, Girl, seemlike,” my friend’s mother said, settling back from emotion into her own amplitude and regally dishing out. On my first visit she hadn’t called me Girl; now she had grown more daring. I knew that after rising to the status of full-time maid she had married an accountant with his own agency on 125th Street. On one corner of that famous cross street, my father had once pointed out to me, as we were driven by, a big gray apartment house shaped like the Flatiron Building and new when he came to New York, into which he as the youngest son, who though still in his twenties had done well in the North, had brought my grandparents and family and all their worldly goods—including the massive bed on which I still slept.

“Wait to hear how she tell a story, Mahma,” my schoolmate said. “Slow as molasses in the mawning.” She was writing her Master’s thesis in the Speech Department at Teacher’s College. At home her style of talk reverted, although never all the way.

Katie, addressing her own mother, said “Mahma” in just that deferent, drawn-out way. My Cousin Lee, still living in Richmond and even closer to the heritage, said “Mah Daydee and Mumma,” just like their own maid. Though of course their grammar was not affected.

“Oh, do I?” I said too loud. Did the twinge of guilt I felt come from the North—and the ache underlying it from the South? “It’s memory that’s slow.” Why did I feel that they here would understand this better than anybody else—except us?

“You wrap a story plumb round a spool,” my friend said. Looking down the table at her silent father and brothers, she hooted, maybe a little too loud also. “Zackly like us.”

“Like you and Mother,” the elder boy said.

I smiled too hard, because the tape in my head was still running on. Even in fun, we none of us would ever have said “plumb.”

“Uh-huh
—” her mother said, in emphasis. “That the case?”

If, on the other hand, mild denial were intended, she and we would have let loose an
“uh-uh,”
in a lowercase, casual voice, modestly inserted. I heard, too, now how at home our affirmatives had always been much stronger than our negatives.

“Ah-hah?” her mother said now. It was as soft as a question could be. “But I’ll never believe, uh-uh, not on the saddest day, that you is a Jew.”

What would Katie have said, in the gentle voice used maybe to patients she had to chide—“Now, y’all!”?

My friend saw my face. “Finish about your cousin,” she said in her crispest Teacher’s College voice.

“Well, like I said,” I said. “She was the cousin visited Shirley when she was a girl.”

Shirley was the great plantation along the James River on which my friend’s mother had been born—this was why I had been brought here. Mahma would crave to know anybody who even knew what the name Shirley meant down there, my friend had said.

“She was invited there just before they came North,” I said. “Some ole Miz Somebody who lived there invited her. That was where she learned to fish, and to ride.” And to shoot, though I wasn’t sure I should say it. The fishing was unladylike enough. “She stayed three months.”