Kissing Cousins: A Memory (4 page)

The brownies were double chocolate, the darkest ever. I chewed down the rest of mine. My European mother laughed at such sweets—gingerbread, angel food cake, any of that American stuff—the way she did at men drinking malteds, as Columbia College students were doing at other tables right here. Compared to our confections at home, fragrant with hazelnut, orange water and kirsch, and deeper liqueurs, and a subtler bitter chocolate, the brownie did seem to me simpleminded, naive. A Christian cake.

“Oh, Arnella.” I leaned forward, loose-breasted in my dance class leotard, scattering the crumbs on my plate. Under her schoolgirl’s collar she was flat-chested, and, though older, somehow more callow than me. Yet she had an intensity, stiff as it was, that I might never catch up with. “Oh, Arnella—you’re divided. Just like me.”

I invited her home to see for herself. And maybe to test my own family’s rectitude. After all, we now had German maids only. My father, who still said “colored” when referring to domestics but “nee-gro” otherwise, would simply stand fast on his good manners, on which I knew I could depend. My mother, who had called each of our former maids
die Schwarze,
as if they had no separate being, would be wroth at me for my foolish social ardors, but only behind the scenes.

But Arnella never came. She had more sense.

And though Katie, like many Southerners, belonged to such a visiting family, she never further inquired of me why we didn’t get to go.

I
REMEMBER NOTHING
of that first emergency visit to Port.

On my second visit, three years later when I was ten, of which I remember everything, Nita, Katie’s slightly younger sister, who in the family gossip was “some pretty” but too plump to keep it going, and rather sly, said: “When Katie brought you here from Atlantic City, you were such a solemn little thing. Wanted to tell us right off why you were here.”

“Rachel—” my Aunt Beck said. She never called her younger daughter by anything but her first given name. I heard the warning, and remembered it, but like so much in that seemingly bland and to me delightful household, the explanation of Nita’s sidelong remark, as well as a final account of much else, wasn’t to be given to me until a generation later, when I would visit Katie in her eighty-third year, she by then long since retired to a second Port—Port Charlotte, Florida—and we two survivors of households would sort it all out. “Whatever did I say, the first time I came, that Nita wanted to tell?” Nita was dead by then and I would cede her any name she wanted. “I nagged you to tell me, but you always sheared off’—and Katie had laughed, saying, “We were expert at that in the old days, weren’t we.”

Then her face had solemned, just as it had when I had attended the Florida synagogue with her the day before. “You know, hon’, your mother was suicidal? She had taken something once, at home. Doctors said she had to be away from home, from that whole household. Pore Uncle Joe—your father—he never could understand why. That was part of the trouble. But of course he adored her. So I was deeded to take her down there. And then, when I was about to bring her back, looked like she was about to try again. I don’t know how you knew. Nothing was on the surface. But when you entered our door at Port you looked up at Aunt Beck with that li’l old face of yours and said: ‘We had to leave that hotel. Its windows were too wide.

The Port of those days, a small, high white house with porch steps to be sat on, was probably quite close to its next-door neighbors, but with all the bushy Long Island summer to expand in, and the “shore” close by. Deep within, and pervading all just as if Aunt Beck had not had to leave her massive wedding furniture behind her, was the very core and day-to-day persistence of a not quite smalltown or small-time Southern and Jewish household in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, circa 1891—the date inside Beck’s broad wedding band deeded to me by Katie, which I sometimes now wear.

Such houses are tenacious, era to era. A palace destroyed can be hard to resurrect—too cumbersome, or perhaps too original. But take a kitchen full of modest husbandry—curds draining in their cheesecloth sock, biscuit-cutter and beach plum jelly waiting on the counter-side—then add a darkish hall where the china closet resides with its hoard of gilt-on-white wedding service or early blue willow ware, go past the dining and living rooms, each with a mood and a time-set like a pub’s, then up to the bedroom cubicles with their counterpanes, there perhaps to flop belly down and muse almost atop a tree, while the screen door skreeks, in the cellar the mousetraps snap, and all through the house conversation ripples its common rill—and you could be anywhere, anytime, in one of the forty-eight states of the past.

Aunt Beck always dressed as if she knew this. Her short-sleeved, faintly patterned or white garment, neither a housedress nor quite a tailored shirtdress, was neutral enough for anywhere, either in town or in her own house, as well as at the shore. I hadn’t yet seen her counterparts in Back Bay, Boston, or old California in places where the movies hadn’t taken over, or even New York’s supposedly long-gone Murray Hill—though I would have recognized them. But once, in the big central outdoor plaza of a childhood haunt of mine, the Museum of the American Indian up at 155th Street and Broadway, there had been an exhibition devoted to statues of the American pioneer woman, big white marble effigies with whose bearing I felt quite at home. They all had Beck’s same squared-off stance, firm jaw, and air of fortitude. Obviously marble couldn’t twinkle with humor or pick up its skirts to wade after mussels. Otherwise, except for a couple of winged and helmeted sculptures who couldn’t possibly have been addressed as Awnt, I would have been pleased to visit any one of them in her mythical house.

There the husbands, big and impressively mannered like Solly Pyle, and with the same large geniality even to persons of my age, would have been as infrequently at home as he. So was my father often away on business, but he had an actual office and factory to be away from, and brothers at the corners of each, to weigh them down. Solly Pyle’s affairs appeared to float; he was “in jewelry at one time”; was he what my father and his friends called—at the very best—a “representative”? From their confabs I knew quite accurately what each of these men dealt in, but I never knew the nature of Solly’s “merchandising,” as they would have called it. Whatever he did deal in, I had the impression it was “from time to time,” a phrase that in our house did not indicate durability. To our urban clan neither did choosing “the country” to live in all year round. My mother, for sure, had once hinted that Pyle was “a big blow,” but then she wasn’t trustworthy on the subject of a Southern male expansiveness that perhaps no longer charmed her (as it still magicked me) now that she lived with it. Anyway, unlike his daughter Katie, Solomon Pyle, whose family had been as close as close to ours in Richmond, was never an intimate of our house. I must have seen him there, though, in a long-ago summer, for I remember the hat, the pongee suit, and the flirt of his cane.

In Port that second visit of mine, it was summer, too, and he was in once or twice—and out again. Although dressed less grandee, he was as courtly as I’d thought he would be, oddly so even to his children, and to his wife, who addressed him frontally as “Solly Pyle,” calling him that in his absence as well. Whenever home he was treated as absolute god, because to Beck that was what husbands were. He was never heavy about it but seemed to expect that treatment and enjoy it, if briefly. I was already used to men who gave the appearance of taking the most excellent wifely cuisine and solicitude as homely cures for more sophisticated routines outside, but though I tried I could never imagine what his routines were, and somehow never called him Uncle, as I had been trained to address all other male familiars of his age. Whenever he left us at Port, always saying that he’d be “looking in again shortly”—just as at home the Fuller Brush Man did—his son Aaron (“Ayron”), addressed by his sisters as “Brother,” became substitute god.

From Brother I learned more about women in such a household than I wanted to. I had been lucky, as the first and cherished child of a man past middle age, who saw no reason why she should not be “brainy” as well, perhaps because his own mother, daughter of a rabbi and sister of a philosopher, had been the same. When a son and heir finally arrived, I was “Sister” for a while, but in that half-breed household this soon fizzled out.

The sisters Pyle were sisters to the nth. Clearly, at the synagogue they were first of all audience and working “Sisterhood”—the actual name of the Jewish women’s auxiliary, to which even at ten I privately vowed I would never belong because of what that did to you. Elsewhere at the synagogue, the Pyle women were always faithfully attendant in every category where they were allowed to fit in; they kept the vestal light. Aaron somehow functioned there whether he attended services regularly or not—exactly like the Lord Adonai himself.

Meanwhile, Brother had very real functions at home. It was his home in the special sense that everything done there was in a way pointed at him. It was the three women’s house to manage entirely; where the money ran short they had to make up for it by better managing. From certain little colloquies that passed over my head there were surely problems of supply, and here Aunt Beck was queen, with the sisters coming up ever more staunchly in their roles. Plump, passive Nita, greedy Nita, was a first-class cook, if on the sweetish side. Back in Virginia she might not have worked; here she made abortive efforts to run a typing agency—by certain family signs unprofitably.

Nor had Katie’s job propelled her altogether out of the home. By what commuting struggles I never knew, she arrived at odd hours, whey-faced but true—and I had seen her give Beck money. Even so—and though Beck tried to baby her: “Put up your feet, dollin’”—she helped before mealtime and collaborated on Nita’s pretty table settings, which appeared like artwork three times a day. Brother was merely called to table. What then did Aaron do—and quite successfully?

In his father’s absence he kept up the tribal conformation of the house and the family, a complicated matter that I understood instinctively, both by home example and because I was female. At home (where my grandmother, married in 1852 to a man old enough to have been recorded “elder” of the earliest Richmond synagogue in 1832, would at her death be already a widow of some forty to fifty years’ duration), we were much more of a matriarchy, if one in decline. There my father was the good provider and never prodigal youngest son except perhaps in his forays with women, though these had always been effected at a distance from his mother’s house and were abandoned without a doubt at the time of his late marriage to my mother. Meanwhile, on the domestic side, he was overwhelmed by dependent women—or would have been, had not the amenities tendered him as boss Lord been as strictly kept there as these were at the Pyles’.

Aaron, then a slight, pleasant young man in his twenties, must have had some piffling job that would lead to the small printing business he would commute to the city to until his death in harness—on the Manhattan subway—in his hardy eighties. That summer at Port he could not yet have been the provider, but there was hope. In the meantime—which was where he gave the appearance of being—he was served first and with his favorite foods, and had no household responsibilities as far as I could see, even to the gardening, which belonged to Beck. All evenings and weekends, and some afternoons, he was at leisure, no doubt for girls, but also, as I saw more at firsthand, for hunting and fishing. Although Long Island was more rural then, my guess is that the rabbits Aaron sometimes brought home came from local hutches. But what of the quail—did that come from some acquaintance living on land the Northern equivalent of a Shirley? Possibly, for though we were city people now, I was used to hearing of the social semblances, tricks, and even sly thefts that came of living nearer the land. Of say, hearing my father, who up North couldn’t hang a picture or string a bootlace, tell with glee of how he poached gardens when a boy: “So there was this melon hanging on the vine, prizewinner, ready for the fair—and half a dozen starlings, ready to peck. So what could I do but take out my pocketknife?”

Anyway, whether or not Brother always shot the game, he supplied it. And he took me fishing once, like a somewhat younger uncle taking me for a walk.

We fished for young blues—stripers, did they call them?—and in milksop fashion, on a Sunday afternoon, off the club dock. Yet I was feeling more Southern than I had in a long time. School had long since doused my diphthongs in the taut New York whine, but here in Port I had half got them back.

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.