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

my mother, at fifty-eight—not that young, but so long thought of as twenty-two or more years younger than the generation she had married into, and as wife to a man who at seventy had still had a mother, that her death seemed as untimely as if she were still a girl.
    Within the year my father, until then a healthy eighty-two-year-old who had looked sixty, dropped in her wake. Then only did it become clear to their left-behind retinue what had happened.
    Not since my own childhood, during which my father had lost his two elder brothers and my grandmother her sons, had “anybody” died, until at ninety-seven, she had. After that only the brother-in-law, Uncle Clarence, had been lost, exiting as modestly as he had lived. For fifteen years or so the planetary arrangements of our little universe had gone on, as if its original cause, their matriarch, were still among them. As everybody, down to the last little subway-riding cousin, had expected it to. My father, holding up under the burden like a five-foot-eight Atlas, had never thought of absconding; my mother, cured of her breakdowns by the challenge of being her own mistress, no longer rebelled.
    Only we young had defected, partly from circumstances (I at a distance and my brother in the service) and, as was intimated by the elders any time we could get there, also from the notorious unfaithfulness of youth. How could they know that even to the neglectful, the parent house is always there to be gravitated to, in the mind? Even the real cousins, those unreliables, now and then gave evidence of that—Grace, Flora and Clarence’s daughter, steaming in from her unsuccessful marriage in Syracuse to its proper home audience, or even one of Belles reprobate girls, Gertrude-Pat, who, bumping into me from behind the dresses in a department store, both of us women now, said hungrily from whatever new fastness of creed, “Uncle Joe’s? Is it still there?”
    But now there was no meeting place, come sewing-circle time, or of a weekday evening, or for Sunday’s chicken fricassee. With perhaps the promise, for some, of a little cash thrust in the palm, or at least a bottle of scent from the family factory. There was no place to go. Simple as that. A whole entourage had died.
    “You couldn’t keep it up, maybe, could you?” old Cousin Martha Jacoby from Newark, the little old seamstress with the tic, said wistfully, thrusting her whole inexperienced and needy life at me so pitiably that, arrived though I had from six hundred miles away, two small-fry to care for and not much money, I thought for a moment that I could do so—that I must.
    Behind me all the old familiar faces, as the song said, were massed up at me as if they, too, half believed I could, although we were in the bedroom now, not the living room—with all the secretive dresser drawers and crammed closets open at last to the curious, and not one of my childhood’s viewing corners left.
    “They here for the pickin’s,” my father’s black maid had said, as they all filtered in the week after his funeral. After my mother’s death he had gone back to black servants. She was a recent one; she scarcely knew us. But she knew the picture, die Schwarze, as from the Bronx on they always had, she even alerting me that the Germans, keeping up our divisions even in condolence—and in a memento seeking of drawers guaranteed to have been, as they virtuously said, my mother’s only—had come in advance, the day before.
    Those present no longer looked like a planetary arrangement, these calico-on-a-stick aunties and Punchinellos of the dining table who had chirped me toward adulthood and chucked my school days under the chin. Taken together, they looked to me like one of those threatening Italian pictures without perspective, in which all the flat faces are ranged toward the one—whose gaze they will hold for life.
    “Cose, she cain’t,” a soft but strong voice said from the door, a voice that would never be in such a