I don’t answer her right away. In the style she and I were brought up in, we don’t have to.
So it’s she who resumes. We were chastised to respect the pace of the story even more than the revelation.
“But I could tell his mother wanted me for more than she knew. And so did he. A fine gentleman, a mite stiff. They dispensed their money, he said, as much as possible phil—what’s the odd word?” She smiled, tired. “As charitably as they could.”
“Philanthropically.”
“That’s it. And they said they thought I could do the same. They knew I’d interned at settlement houses.”
“When people are good—” I said, reaching over to pat her.
“Oh, shoot—I could have fitted in there for right selfish reasons. It was the kind of house—well, I’d seen its like.” She makes the sound I can no longer classify. “No shoats on Fifth Avenue, acourse. But I’d seen it all before. They wanted me for company, too. Would have wanted it, more and more. And I’d have had to deal with that.” She sighs. “I knew places for that do-gooder money they wouldn’t have got to on their own until kingdom come.”
“Then why didn’t you just go ahead and accept?”
“Because I couldn’t do that to Beck.”
“She’d have wanted you to.”
“For sure. And for all the right reasons. So—I didn’t tell her. She’d already asked me shouldn’t she go there, under the circumstances, and pay her respects. ‘That poor woman,’ she said. But by then they were safely gone, to the Orient. She wrote a letter instead.”
People of those days had a melodramatic way of keeping things from one another, grand-opera style. Letters that were somehow never sent—or arrived too late. Meetings that were forestalled; girls that were sent away—just in time. Was it that they wanted to blunt the edge of coincidence before it got to them? And call it fate?
“I’m not too fond of Patient Griseldas,” I said.
Yet, maybe when your lover is killed just a few days before the Armistice, you crave even to counterpart on your own the vicious things that life can randomly do.
“You exaggerate easy,” Katie says. “Y’always did.”
I hear how even to reprove she uses the voice of the family. But how much honor must memory pay to self-sacrifice?
“What if you could have taken Beck with you?” I fling up my hands. “Sorry. One of the wild ideas that people on the sidelines give you gratis.”
“Had it myself, thank you very much. She’d have fitted in like a glove. No one would have appreciated Beck more than them. But—”
“Nita.”
“Nita?” The name conjures her, immovable as an inherited down pillow.
“I could have set Nita up separate. I thought of it. What Nita wanted more than anything was to make a place for herself in Port. She could’ve done a catering shop. She’d have bloomed. My first—philanthropy. I wouldn’t have lived in the Fifth Avenue place—only nearby. Beck and I.” I hear how even a lifetime later the dream can color the voice. “And after that—and I could have set it all up like a three-ring circus, don’t think I couldn’t—what a free nursing station and out-patient clinic Marnine Tooker and I could have run. Harlem Hospital isn’t that far from upper Fifth Avenue.”
She gets to her feet and stirs about in that musing movement which occurs in between the talk but is never pinpointed for the importance it has. Decisions flow then. Murder and fornication are contemplated. Sacrifices are clinched. Stirring about.
Katie, looking about her to ascribe it to something, seizes on the coffee tray, lifting it too smartly for her bent shoulders. I don’t try to take it from her. It’s the old black Tole tray, nearly a yard wide, that used to get sidetracked all over the Port house, whether freshly oiled and on end behind the wildflowers on the sideboard, or on the kitchen counter, steamy behind the jelly bag. She speaks to its center flowers. “Late in the day—for charitable words.”
I hold my breath until she reaches the sideboard with that heavy thing. “Marnine Tooker. Wasn’t that your friend from Atlanta, one you trained with?”
“Ah-huh. Heard from her until she died. Last year.” She has her back to me. Waiting.
“Then, Katie—Katie—why didn’t you do any of it?” That is a terrible thing to ask anyone. The tray, lifted like a weight, sustains her.
“Solly Pyle came home to die.”
She clears the tray. It is returned to the sideboard. In Florida there is no place for it to wander much, no need.
And now, as sure as shinsplints—as we used to say, and whatever did that mean?—there she is hunting us an end-of-story drink.
The Victorian sideboard of that three-compartmented variety in which so many of the South kept their liquor predicts a certain bending to get to a bottle, and a clinking of the brass drawer handles above. I half close my eyes in order not to see—or to see—how Katie’s shadow doubles and blurs into the many I have watched at this task at one time or another. I hear the blunt shove that even when heard from the next room always meant the closing of the sideboards center door. The old word for a liquor supply was “requirements.” One might hear the man of a house use it, in advance of a Sunday evening. “Have we the requirements?” was what was said.
Katie is bringing up the Kahlua—a full gift bottle, untouched—and a bottle of good brandy with a forlorn inch or two in it. “You had a friend—what was her name?—from Harlem.”
I have to think a minute. “Arnella.”
“The names they used to take—my. Those—Blacks.” She sets out the newly furbished tray and turns to squint at me. She has to turn her whole body to do that now. “What happened to her?”
I haven’t a clue. And Katie knows it.
“Okay, you win,” I said. “We graduated. Into the North.”
We each choose the brandy over the Kahlua, which sports a bright streamer citing its comparatively low alcohol content.
“Nothing that won’t hurt you is that good for you,” Katie says.
“Never heard that one.”
“Old, old saw.” She doesn’t—as we used to say—expatiate.
I think: Sol’s old saw.
She sees me think it.
In complete harmony, we drank.
We were eating nonpareils with the brandy when Clay rang—the all-round husband with the gift shelf.
He says he is fibrillating, a word much on the mind down here. Nothing for the ambulance, but for safety’s sake would she come check him out?
“Not that kind of heart trouble old Clay is suffering from,” she says, taking up the black satchel that hangs on the old “costumer” by the door. We say “hatrack” now—if we say it at all. “But I better go. Fact I’m bound to—that’s our agreement.”
I see she is proud of it. “Want company?”
“No, I’ll drive. And I’m goin’ give that lady-killer some homely advice.”
In the doorway she stands, wan but gleeful, all the busted vertebrae aligning at duty’s call. A single lady, but not unattended. What is safety?
“Remember that poster—the Red Cross Nurse?”
It was still in the grammar schools, long after the First World War. You would pay a premium for it now.
She nods, shrugs, grins—signaling some riposte already sweet on her tongue. “Why, honee child—” she drawls. “You still have on that fool hat.”
I LEFT A FAVORITE pair of shoes down there. Over the phone afterward we laughed at that wishful implication and sometimes she would say, “You have to come pick up your shoes.” We both knew I wouldn’t come again. She because she was wise in the way of families, whose members at the crucial moment will often spare themselves pain—even because they do love.
I told myself something even harsher: that the habit of the recorder, once a life is recognized as perfectly rounded, is to bow out.
At times during the next year I would hear of her genealogical tussles with a researcher who had misspelled Boettigheimer or incorrectly placed her grand
father, Daniel Hart Pyle; once I sent her notice of a Dutch reference book, eighteenth century, edited by a Pyle, that I had come across at the Newberry Library. Now and then she repeated her resentments at Aaron’s family—the old debt, the silence of the niece at whose marriage she and Nita had ceded those early family artifacts. And once she sent me some fragments of stories that Nita had written—one in particular on an encounter they had both witnessed when young, between Solly’s other woman and Beck, who had routed her from the house.
But in the main we spoke of her telephone friends, as if they were also mine. Of Dr. Siletsky in “Gret Nick,” who was “like a son” to her. I sensed she was looking forward to her will, where both justice and affection would be meted out. And also felt a satisfaction that her resources, whatever they were, would be enough for such display. She did not ask me again whether I was “all right.”
Death came on via a stroke not as quick as she would have wished, at the veteran’s hospital elsewhere in Florida, to which she had afterward been removed on her own instructions in event of such. A nurse friend, detailed to be in charge, and over the phone during Katie’s last days a little proprietary for being in at the death as I was not, informed me: “No point in coming down. No telling what she understands. She can’t talk.”
I thought of her in bed—choked. And knowing. I thought of myself on such a bed—as one does.
She died.
The small chest of drawers arrived, listed by the appraisers as Viennese, and perhaps it was, stepping out of its multifold wrappings on thin, cabriole legs. With it came a delicate French watch on a chain, its origin not given, and Beck’s broad wedding band, initialed S.A.P to R.B., September 15th, 1891. I felt that sense of kinship, burden, and submission which such objects always gave me. All objects cling to us under threat to dominate our days. I will help them to live, knowing full well that they may outlive me, but under warning that at any minute I may throw them over. I believe that all of us, from the pack rats that most of us are to the true collector, are in the end filled with this delicious vengeance. We are trying to penetrate the mystery of the inanimate, and to take arms against the material presence by owning it. All the while knowing that its tidal wave will pass over us, and on.
Within that unanimous inanimate which one cannot ever really warm into syllable, the inherited object has a viciously tender advantage, and the domestic ones are the worst. A diamond is easy, or a camelback sofa; shut away in a safe, sell. Or find another relative. But what is one to do with one’s mother’s poultry shears, that nine out of ten are better than one could buy today? Keep them, and listen to the sputter of the fricassee.
A will is such an object. It almost always finds its mark—as Katie’s did. Even the freight charge for the little chest had been taken care of, as were all possible costs for us “good” legatees, while a firmly opposite clause hedged off her small company of villains by reason of their indebtedness, and cast them out. It was plain that Katie had tidied and retidied her affairs not only so that all left behind her received their just deserts, but so that the receding landscape of her life could be seen for the last time, stringently clear. I thought of a head nurse’s desk, as I had sometimes seen such a corner when convalescent in hospital and walking down the hall—the glowing lamp, the pencil by the pad, all patients’ record sheets handy and all emergency systems blinking—only the nurse herself not there.
After a will, there is a certain convalescence, too. During that period Katie’s actual cousin Charles, whose name I had met for the first time in that document, wrote to me. A retired civil servant living in Baltimore, he had inherited the Port Charlotte house, which he and his family would use winters, after it was brought up from what he indicated was a bad state of repair. The letter was amply courteous in that exactly mid-Southern style which I have always allotted to the Marylanders. Not as crusty-uppity as we Virginians can be—as if we are suddenly chewing rose hips along with our bent diphthongs. Nor yet as glottally laid back as Georgia or Tennessee. The gentle responsibility that wafts from the letter is healing; though strangers, we have shared an intimate death.
But it is the mannerliness that most rushes me back. Clarence, or any of the men of my father’s circle, could have written such a letter, or even perhaps that poor collage of a man—barber-pole body, toothbrush moustache, and cigarette in two fingers—the untrustworthy bookkeeper. Who, I only now recall, was as nice to me as if he were not a known miscreant, only rather furtively, as if his good qualities, too, were about to be found out. I see the poker table, at which he—I realize now—must not have been allowed to play. Bent at the waist as if still hunched over his doubtful books, dangling his fag in contrast to the players’ Garcia Vegas, present in our family bosom only because of his sister, our sister-in-law Belle, now herself a renegade, he watches hungrily—inscribed in a child’s brain and waiting to tell her his last name: Leeman, Harry B.
But what Charles has to tell me about Katie is the real shocker. Had I ever heard that Katie herself wrote stories? She once told him she had, publishing them under an assumed name. But would never tell him more, except that the income from them had been given to charity. He wished now to enlist my help in finding them in order to set all to rights and pay her memory its proper due.
The shock to me was not so much that she had written. Everyone has memory, fantasy, and a will to record; a handful of us turn professional. Once you are so, you become aware that all the world’s readers are in some sense what you are. Only a lack of your excessive need to exercise that sensibility, or of “talent” as some have the sad grace to say, has kept them amateur. I can never answer them—even the ones who say: “I’d write, but I have to give my time to more important things”—except with a full and grateful throat at my own happenstance, or else a private laugh. I used to tell students that for the many who have the linguistic equipment to be a writer—a serious one—the rest is stamina, and some luck. During my middle years I would have added: and character, not necessarily all good, but there. Now I would add: a willingness to be burdened by the overview—plus an inability to escape it.
Were the few pages shown me as Nita’s by Katie, and still somewhere in my archives, really Katie’s? I think not; she would not have been that deceptive. They were given me as family record. Yet don’t I seem to recall that at one time she did say, really only mention, that she had once written some stories herself, even publishing some? I must have said I’d like to see them; I would surely have said that. But she made so little of it—I think I remember—that I must have backed off, especially so if she told me the money went to charity. There are quasi-publications that do this; perhaps her stories were anecdotes of her nursing life? Or perhaps they were not. The shock is that in my mind I assigned them there, or to some other quasi-place. I listened with the hauteur of the professional.
Do I have regrets over the possible stories themselves? Not much more than for curiosity’s sake. I think Katie herself only wanted us to know—so much. Family knowledge among us was many-layered; much or maybe all was known, but not all was talked about. That, too, contributed to the sense of clan. Briefly I did regret that I hadn’t paid more honor to the fact that she, too, was a recorder—on the page. Then I saw what she must have, that for me to become in any way the mentor or the authority would not have done, was not in her idea of us. Rather, our twosome must preserve what by reason of regional and family habit and my side’s eccentric generational mixups we so happily were—two ponderers, one always up ahead, one just precocious enough to keep in step.
One step more. Do I feel I have here in these pages exposed what she might have kept secret? Not at all. If she was trained by her era not to expose, it was ambivalently, for at the same time there was all that family leeway of ours, by which the covert gossip as to what did happen could go merrily, dramatically on. What Katie has done, before death and even after, is to preempt me to her service, just as she preempted my mother’s. She always had the strictest sense of what w
as owed, by her and to her. She still instructs me as to how love can pay. She was my nurse.
So, this Sunday afternoon I have just telephoned Charles, I am not quite sure why. To be sure of my facts? To let him know I am writing this? Or because the solo flight of the mnemoniac is performed in an Arctic chill extreme?
Charles is the grandson of Aunt Beck’s sister. In our long, random conversation he tells me she was entirely lacking in Beck’s humor. As for the stories: “Katie got involved with a group of young people who were doing such things. The money she received went to an orphanage.” He is disappointed to hear that Aaron’s wife, Leona, to whom I had written at his suggestion, knew nothing of this, although he is interested to hear that she answered me—as she would not have answered him. I scent the acrid, burnt-out smell of old feuding—that air was stimulating once. Feuding families are usually strong families; the warring is in part how they keep themselves vibrant in the world; let the world hear their drum and brassy twang.
Charles, who does not lack humor, wants to talk about Nita, whom I surmise he liked more than I.
Did I know she was a graduate chemist—City College—and that she once was Eddie Cantor’s secretary? Quit, because he wouldn’t give her the Jewish holidays—wouldn’t believe she was a Jew. “Made a fuss about giving his own Social Security back to the government—but wouldn’t give his secretary that.”
A lovely anecdote, but at first hard to reconcile with the Nita I knew—her plump fastness of breasts neatly held in, but down whose crack a crumb now and then disappeared. So she quit, did she?—not much else a woman could maybe do, then. But the harder she quit, the harder Katie coped.
I take another tack to ask about Katie’s fiancé. Yes—“he was killed in the war.” Charles does not recall his name, but his wife might; I hear him call out to her: “Jeanette!” No, at the moment she can’t summon it.
Kissing Cousins: A Memory Page 9
