So, that young doctor who stayed with the wounded, and now himself a skull, is scrabbled for maybe the last time—by two strangers to him and to each other, on the phone from New York to Baltimore. I think of how an individual life winds down to less and less mention—toward the last. These are the mnemoniac scraps. Our world rains with them, invisible but everywhere. I myself cannot linger much longer here—even for Katie Pyle.
And was it all preamble, this? In the course of writing this, I have sometimes stopped myself, saying: It’s all preamble; when does the story begin? The answer is in the verb: it began. And daily begins. Memory is the marching companion of the consciousness; it pulses in our fingertips as we live and breathe and cram our mouths and twist in the sexual bed—and fade. That’s why some people believe in heaven. Surely this preamble life, so vigorous, so organized even to its goose-step wars, or so wandering the fields of family voice, must point, surely points somewhere? To the final burst of bloom that is the simple soul’s Eden come round again? To the honey-ooze of all our molecules into—a status quo? Uh-uh. No Sunday School certifies a heaven for the Jews. We believe in a Messiah. That gets us off the hook.
So, Katie, let us sum up. For it is us, isn’t it? There were two cousins here all along. The younger cousin had her elder cousin keep on later in the day than a child born to that crowd—even if to a younger mother—could have hoped. Having such an elder stretches the time span. The elder cousin had a quondam daughter, almost. Each of them without obligation. Yet there are people who cannot die until we do. I have a host of those now. You may not be the last. Wearing Beck’s broad wedding band, as I often do, brings that vivid host before me, most of them as unknown to her as she to them. Wearing it tells me who I am.
Katie, I hear the word “give” in all its uses. Give; give in; never give up. I see us prying for safety in all the corners behind our army of chairs. And what was safety, for us? A place in which you played for time in which to weave stories. How can we hold anyone safe in our arms except there?
What are family stories except exorcism? Answer: celebration. We celebrate the future of what was. So it is best to dedicate this story to a relative, preferably young, and of the blood. In this case a Katy of a different spelling, a girl with brown teacup eyes.
“You don’t sound Southern at all,” she said once, hearing some of our history.
I could have answered her the way I do in England, where I am said not to sound American: Oh, I’m a parrot. I talk like whoever’s on the bus. Or I could turn granny coy and say: I’ve a tape in my head that pulls me this way, that.
What I want most to do is to expatiate, prevaricate, take her on my knee and squeeze her to me and back into her own history, while I enunciate a list of words that are strange ones to make the eyes brim: kibosh, costumer, davenport. But it is hard to weasel out when facing one’s own eyes in duplicate. So I widen mine—which action seems to hold back departed words quite satisfactorily. “I only spoke Southern for a time.”
Long or short—that expresses it. Katie is dead now. And I am from the North.
HAVE I CAUGHT all the fish then, Katie—and tossed them back?
Katie—are you all right?
FINIS
About the Author
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Hortense Calisher
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-3903-0
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY HORTENSE CALISHER
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Kissing Cousins: A Memory Page 10
