Kissing Cousins: A Memory (7 page)

“No, not Belle. She was never around for any fuss. Whatever made you remember her?”

I heard that jealous severity, now more marked, but in truth long since taken for granted by me as what even a person as gentle and fair as Katie might not escape—the judgmental austerity of women who went much to synagogue. On their own. Often in place of their brothers, or of the women their brothers tended to marry. Often even as surrogates, in a small way, for their fathers. Women who find in these devotions that ethic, almost more male than male, of women who could have been—who could never be—rabbis. I knew a writer like that, who was almost more religious than God, and certainly more severe. Sometimes, though I didn’t go to synagogue except in nostalgia, I heard that ethic in myself.

“But I was there,” Katie said now, sunny and natural again. “The other cousins did leave, but I stayed on. I was fifteen and already wanting hard to be a nurse. So, you know what I did? You’ll never guess.”

“How can I?” It’s not every grandmother who can hear for the first time a firsthand account of her own natal day, and one that sounds gratifyingly close to a royal accouchement.

“I made your father a mint julep.”

“One of Ayron’s?” When Aaron was in his eighties and still going briskly to business on the train from Great Neck, my husband and I had visited him and his wife, Leona, there and had been served one of those. It wasn’t the frost on the silver cup or even the mint that made the real julep, Aaron told us. Or even the crushed ice. All that, he implied, was just Southern sweet talk—even Southern fakery—without the one and only secret ingredient. Many people had pleaded for the recipe, he said. I had pleaded: “Oh, Ayron, give it me.” By his blink I knew I had swallowed the bait. “Double the bourbon,” he’d said.

Katie blinked now. “Except for those old Midol pills for menstrual cramp, it was the only prescription I knew.”

After we’d howled over that I said, “Well, you saved me, later.”

And finally she admitted it.

“I’ve never been sorry.”

T
HE TOWN OF
Port Charlotte is a senior citizens’ precinct, and a good or bad dream, according to your lights. The Senior Citizens Center, one of the largest in Florida and in the nation, has room after room replete with the stately activity of “the golden years” and with what one begins to think of as their scrollwork: all the collections, some in memory of their owners, of china, shells, and dolls gathered on cruise travel, as well as the handicrafts of the living—woollies and watercolors and objects for uses oddly peripheral to honest day-to-day hours, and of an obsessively miniature deftness that sadly shows up the poor materials, the latter, yes, much flecked or woven or sealing-waxed with gold.

In Port Charlotte and its environs, medical advertisements—for doctors, clinics, hospitals, insurances—are everywhere on the roads and posters, and in the handout literature. The town is a billboard for age. Even in the supermarkets, where large sections cater to the sugarless and the salt-free, but most clearly in the favored restaurants, where the dining hour is early and the menus are easy on the dentures, this Port knows who is boss here. If in Hollywood the skin lesions made by time are to be hidden like one’s crimes, here the liver spot is worn like a medal. Nor does age here go about in black cerements. Absolved from wool, old age in the Sunbelt walks in pastel: lime green and dusty rose or blinding white, topped with the sporting cap or straw skimmer or floppy picture-hat, all underwritten by running shoes. There are blondes among the old women here, but not like those in Miami; the decent rinses here sometimes even fade toward an acknowledged gray. No children appeared on the streets of houses anywhere near Katie’s, but in the following days I would see some in the elaborately fancified mall one got to over a drawbridge not too many miles away.

Katie’s neighbors were known to her within a radius of several blocks.

“Well, you always made friends,” I said.

“Ye-es,” she said. “But hon’, you know my
friends
phone in from everywhere.” I saw that although we were not to talk about it further, I was meant to understand the emphasis.

Twice we did go out to a neighbor’s for dinner. The first time we went to the house of an elderly couple who though unmarried were living together in the man’s house. “They’re not marrying because of their respective children,” Katie said offhandedly.

“We’re a long way from Martin Freeman, aren’t we?” I said, recalling Martin’s mistress, whose status in our house, even when accepted, had been hushed.

“Down here we’re just practical,” Katie said, which seemed to be the general attitude of the company. The second time, we went to an early pre-Friday night service casserole dinner, the donors all women, in a house larger than most and comfortably masculine. The host, a spritely widower named Clayton, and lovingly called “Clay,” clearly functioned in all propriety as group husband, if solely in the matters of advice on cars, income-tax, house repairs—and perhaps walks. Indeed, as he accepted an extra gift of two straw mats the donor had that morning braided, and in spite of the giver’s remark—“I saw you had a white spot on Millie’s nice table”—placed them on a shelf with other wild-angled, pumpkin-colored contributions, he appeared to be a kind of communal Uncle Clarence. He told my husband with a twinkle that he cleared off that shelf once a month. “In favor of my own hobby.”

And what was that?

“Space.”

Katie, watching me sharply as I took in all this sociology, said: “When Clay flies his airplane models around the room, I reach for my beekeeper’s hat.”

“Oh, do you keep bees?” a woman said.

From across the room Katie glinted at me. Only the room had changed. In that long ago family room across which Southern locutions had whizzed like those tiny, bunched firecrackers even children were allowed to ignite, she wouldn’t have been challenged—although there had been some phrases I had accepted without ever knowing their root meaning, and many now would sound antiquated anywhere.

“It’s an old Southern expression,” I said. “Actually, I never saw a picture of such a hat until the other day. Listed in some catalogue, maybe Bean’s.”

“Veiled, those hats are,” Katie said, laughing. “No, we never had them, even in Richmond. But I saw them down home, once.” She sent me another glance—enlisting me to help her sustain that memory of Shirley of which, though I could never share it, I had heard. “We’d look right funny in your living room, Clay. But maybe I ought to get you one. For that shelf.”

“Katie keeps us all up to the mark,” Clay said. But there was no venom in it. Rather, he might be showing a preference, for someone who, among these soft widows, seemed more single than spinster, and as spritely as he.

As we left, three or four intimates were chatting over their prearranged system of alerts, in case of emergency.

“That must be reassuring,” I said to Katie as we walked on to the synagogue. She gave me a quizzical look. When had she ever needed to be reassured? The hat she had put on to go to evening service sat straight on her head, just schoolmarmish enough to be without era. Her gray hair, pinned up as she had always worn it, still had fairish streaks out of no bottle but Time’s, and her skin was still fine-pored. “Nita loved it here,” she said.

The services were held in a big, bright room walled with very new, yellowish wood, much like a room in a parish house.

“They just did it over,” Katie murmured. When she looked dissatisfied her face drooped. Indeed, except for its pulpit, the place didn’t look in any way blessed.

“So glad you could come to temple,” one of the lady greeters said to us—and Katie’s look held. Disappointment was more the word for it. I knew she did not approve of the term “temple,” as being a poor substitute for the austerely traditional “synagogue.” Her petulance rather resembled my father’s higher-keyed irritability—in the family called “flying off the handle, Joe is,” and always excused as being directed toward high concerns. Yet I could see how this relaxed looking, very Floridian congregation might view her—as one of those elderly women who cling to all congregations, and are always looking back. “Miss Pyle is one of our stalwarts,” the young rabbi said.

During the service, several women came up to the pulpit at intervals, to read the lesson or read the responses. We had hit the monthly night when this innovation was now routine. Katie seemed amused. One woman’s disquisition had been longer, learned, and delivered in piercingly nasal rabbinical style. This woman was indeed a real scholar, Katie said. “The others? Well—you know why they want to.” Had she ever been requested to take part in the service? “Me? They know right well I wouldn’t.”

I thought of Brother, and of how far the women briefly up there on the pulpit were really allowed to go. Into the dogma of the Talmud if they had a taste for it. How far beyond? Could they serve in the early-morning assembling of the daily
minyan,
for instance—the sum of men required to be present for the start of a service? Might a woman be counted in there?

In the social hour afterwards, those who came up to be introduced, men and women both, nearly always told us where they had come from “before,” exactly like émigrés. Although, unlike those who had streamed into my father’s house, they were not refugees, they too seemed to be similarly divided, into those who by retiring “here” had risen in their own estimation and in actual class, and those who knew they had suffered a decline in their society and their tastes. When home-baked cookies were offered, Katie refused them, and indeed though they were soft enough to the gum they were not very good.

That night she apologized again for the meal she however had insisted on cooking, with assistance refused. I tried to measure whether her refusal was merely part of that hospitality, so familiar to me, which liked to declare to a guest, “Y’all stay right where you are!” Or did it come from an older person’s ever-present fear that autonomy itself was draining away? I decided it was both—and ended up confronting how much my upbringing had taught me about the old.

“Rachel became a great cook after Mahma died,” she said, serving us. “People fell over themselves to come here. But you’ll have to make do with me.”

Again I had a strong sense of her as a nurse, dealing year after year with situations where there was no time for vanity. Or for flattery? Over the years before she became a supervisor, Katie had now and then been persuaded to take on a case as night nurse, often of someone she knew personally, often terminal. What had it been like to sit alone night after night with the sense of your own inner credit only, and to see that credit vanish each time you shut the door on death?

“’Cept Rachel always cooked too much,” she said, with a reminiscent smile. “She was never happier than when the leftovers were spilling out the back door. I can’t tell you how many second-night dinners we had to ask people back to, those last years. But she loved it.”

“We didn’t come here for your cooking, Katie.” And even to her, home must be better than the restaurants, where the waitresses were as coy as social workers in their special recognitions of the old folks, and at the salad table one could have seconds of watery greens and macaroni and cottage cottage cottage cheese.

“I know.”

“And ‘home is always preferable.’”

We exchanged smiles at this phrase of my father’s, that belle époque gourmet who, after marriage, had settled into home fare like one of those great chefs who in their prime verge ever closer to the simples learned at mother’s knee.

At least the china closet was here. For Katie, that is. Why, in this mean little house, should I be thinking of Shirley? Was it wrong then, after all, for age to be boss of itself and us—or only for age to be separate?

The chicken was a great-boned fowl cut into pieces, porridge-colored from steam. In effect I knew who had cooked it, even though I had seen Katie buy the pinkish packet at the supermarket. Beck had caught one of their two hens once and slaughtered it, the only time I had ever seen that done. Muttering, as she singed it and let me pick off the last pinfeathers from the wing tip with a tweezer, that it had ought to be hung, but that there was nothing else “handy” in the house. And Sol was coming home.

I was hazy about just when Beck had died, years after my own parents, at any rate, and probably during the 1950s, when I was at times out of the country, or far from the Eastern seaboard.

“Had Beck ever planned to come to Florida with you?”

“Mahma? She’d have cut her throat if she had known we were ever to sell Po-ut.”

I’d forgotten Southern exaggeration, whereby you would “strangle your own mother” or “as soon put your sister down a well” before you would—what? Ruin good eggnog with cinnamon. Or drink Scotch, with or without ginger ale. Or wear an unmanly wristwatch—among the older men called “one of those.” Or not wear a watch. It struck me now how many of these outsize statements had been couched in terms of family mayhem. Again I saw that hen whose neck Beck’s hands had wrung and then severed—“a wrung chicken tastes better, dollin’”—running across the garden without its head. And I thought that Aunt Beck would have gone anywhere in the world Katie asked her to.

“No—but what Mahma loved was travelin’. And visitin’—my! After I bought a car you know how we did. If Nita’d ever learned to drive we could have done more.”

Yes, I knew how they did. In the days when we and our children, returned Eastward, were also living “on the shore”—of the Hudson River, not the Sound—and so by car only some sixty miles each way, the Pyles had come to visit us for the day. I had explained to the children that it would literally be for the day, and how it would probably be.

They would no doubt arrive for lunch—the three Pyles. “Three ladies,” I’d said. I had lightly described them, keeping back what bias I could—but love will out, and no doubt it had. “It’ll be a real sit-down lunch, with a lot of talk. And many stories,” I’d said, as a lure.

Because of all the elderly deaths, my children had missed out on my side of the family altogether, and because of distance hadn’t had enough natural flow from the other side. To my mind they had never been properly nested down in a clan. We and our friends, some of them writers, all of them vocal, had done what we could about stories, to which our younger boy and older girl were a permitted audience, whose comments, both sharp and entranced as only children can manage, were manna to their mother. The stories they heard had not been as genealogical as I could wish. Now I would be doing memory’s job. I would be helping them to part of what I thought should be their place in life.