Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online

little monkey. Wherever’d you pick that up, up here?”
    “Oh—” We always had help in the house. The Pyles didn’t. I didn’t like to say but didn’t know how to get out of it—a state in which I spent much of my time. “From die Schwarze, I guess.”
    “Hmmph.” I could tell she didn’t like that expression either. But she pressed me to her chest anyhow, a surface ample but hard, capaciously breathing. I had never felt a chest like it—always receiving, squared off down to the bone. “Pore little monkey.” No tape could spell the way she said “poor.” The minute she said it, I saw myself in the pail. All of us.

I LEFT COLLEGE, degree in hand. Left home to work and have my own apartment. Left work to marry, to have a family, and to live in many “out-of-town” places, none of them speaking in any of my accents, my own speech floundering unreliably along the way. I did not know myself, so I was what I heard, if with a core of obstinacy below the larynx. One day this stubbornness would move my writing arm to bypass my tongue and connect with my head, and ultimately with my life, but it hadn’t happened yet. During those same pre-years, the household of my childhood, up to then numbering only four at the center but vastly accommodating, had swelled for a final time with the increments of war.
    As my father went bond for as many refugees from Hitler as he could afford to sponsor, most of them tenuously related to my mother through the half-brother, Sigmund, who until then had scarcely paid his émigré sister any mind, our dining room filled with their tales of former grandeur and with their pudding handshakes. We heard of Onkel Sigmund’s house in Berlin, where the dining salon had been walled in red tapestry, of his son’s ski hut in the Dolomites, and of how Onkel himself, former head of General Motors for Germany and owner of a car the twin of Von Hindenburg’s, had got used to being mistaken for the old Minister, sometimes even opening its window and graciously accepting the plaudits of the crowd. We heard from his son the skier, whose exact cousinship confounded me—what would the son of a step-uncle be to me?—that our party manners were low here; in their drawing rooms, each time a guest entered, the whole company turned and acknowledged him.
    I was too young to give them full credit for the trauma they had suffered even though their skins were safe, but watched entranced as they collided with my Southern family and each side gradually became aware that it was being condescended to.
    Who knows what this forced alliance might have brought about, if the economy had not intervened? Bitterly disappointed that my father could not establish them in businesses suited to their station—for we were still feeling the effects of the Depression, and although when young he had rebounded from an ancient war, he was too old now to profiteer from this one—the new “Germans” took what he could offer and bowed themselves out. Leaving me with the lesson one balks at learning—that people as people are often distinct from the tragedies or injustices that they may suffer, and not always in tune with them.
    One thing our household had been in harmony with—time. Indeed, by virtue of our double heritage we seemed to live under a double dose of it. As Jews, we possessed the biblical sense of time according to the Old Testament, that confused bag of endlessly instructive verses telling us there was a time to do this, a time to do that, from sybarite hours in the gardens of the Song of Solomon to Ecclesiastes’ final message of worn teeth and broken bowls. As Southerners, we were bound together by long, genealogical afternoons in which one had only to kiss to be cousins, and by the anecdotes that rose like hashish smoke from these long-burning histories. No wonder then that death, natural and unnatural, always took us by surprise.
    My family went down like the Lusitania. What precipitated it was the death of