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

lineup. “How could she keep it up? For one thing, she lives away. And what would she be doing it faw!”
    “It’s the Pyle girl,” I hear a spinstery voice say from among the female heads bent over the opened bureaus and cupboards in exact pecking order, the aunts in control of those upper drawers, which always seem to hold a woman’s costumery for above the neck—here the combs and jewelry not good enough to be kept at the bank. Lesser cousins of the blood, like Martha, are prowling in the chest that still holds my mother’s “materials,” from dress-goods to bolts of damask never yet cut into napkins, to that ragbag of torn sparkle-stuffs from the 1920s, which had been glamour to me when I was at the age for dress-ups, and one day would be again. Some of the storage places I had never been allowed to pry to the back of, and I see how the death of a woman domestically—that is, aside from the trials of the body—is in the sight of all her panoply, open and awry.
    Whosever the grayish second voice had been, I hear its hostility freshly also, now that I am of an age to understand the animus of the home women against those who venture out into the world, and I see how the men are absent from this part of death, how they never have to do what we are doing here.
    “Yes—it’s the Pyle girl,” Katie says, smiling at me over their heads, for if she is still a girl, what am I? “Been on a case, hon’. Couldn’t come before.”
    Over the intervening years I always knew how she was faring, and she of me and mine, but I had been living from city to city and in New York only intermittently, and she busy in her orbit, so we had not met.
    She was forty-five by then and not much changed, merely no longer twice my age. Indeed we were nearer.
    She in turn was now almost the age my mother would have been on the opening night of this account. While my mother, down her long trail from the smocked tot in the photo brought from Germany to her terminus at fifty-eight, can be any age memory chooses. And I am grown. Or had been, after the ship went down, until this moment. For after this, although we meet no more frequently, perhaps every other year, and at one period lose track of each other altogether, Katie will keep me in my childhood until the end of her life.
    And I will grasp at the chance, as if I am sinking in a quagmire and pulling my savior toward me. Which is the true and everlasting stance of the mnemoniac.
    Mneme is the Greek word for memory. There should be a word for extreme devotion to memory. As there are insomniacs, kleptomaniacs, so should there also be—mnemoniacs.
    A word that we are coining between us here, she and I.

I T IS OCTOBER 1981. She and I and my husband are in Port. Not Port Washington but Port Charlotte, Florida, where she and Nita went to live after Katie retired and they had finally sold the Long Island house. Or rather, Katie had sold it. For although this has never been expressed until today, I have somehow long known that after Solly died so many years ago, whatever the date—for Katie is over eighty now—the girl with the teacup eyes became the sole support of their house.
    The house where we are now is after three days no longer a shock to me. Katie, the girl who shot over the acres of Shirley, the young woman who poulticed a war, and the slender old woman whose spirited elegance is her sole adornment—what is she doing in this yellow ranch box, model dwelling for the too safely retired, midway in a varicolored but all too similar row of the same? How has she come to it?
    I am beginning to know. These few days I am being told everything. Not in extreme haste, but to a pattern. We are in the drama of the last dwelling place, where it seems to me the Chinese property men always present in our lives are bringing out the furnishings one by one.
    “You look just the same,” we say to each other with passion, on meeting. I don’t know how I look and for once don’t care. Here is the