Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher Page A

know. She was just that much older. Three years make a difference when you’re a child. She stayed close to home. And Mahma made Port as much like down home as she could.”
    “So that was its charm for me. I never yet figured that.”
    Katie smiled almost condescendingly—as one does to a child.
    “But she was attractive then? That should have helped.
    Weren’t there ever any—?”
    “Men?” Katie said comfortably, shifting the compress on her neck.
    Why that gesture, so straightforward, should compel me to see her in another spectrum—I know full well. My generation had been schooled to measure what we do with the body as at once explanation of what we were or were not, and panacea for it. By era, Katie belonged to those women before me who mostly had not even exercised, much less carried their bodies in open and conscious demand. Now I was not so sure she belonged with them.
    “That was when she wanted us to call her Nita.” Katie stops short with that conciliatory shrug one gives when one is about to abuse someone else’s confidence. “There was a young man—Hot-tense.” Her voice drops into that soft rhythm in which we in the family told special stories, often about ourselves. “He was paying her attention. More than just a beau. Likely it would have come to a point. Then something happened. Mahma knew what it was and said it was nothing serious. Mahma had town connections; she said she had investigated—and Mahma never lied. She couldn’t; that was her trouble. But Ayron took against the young man. And nobody could control my brother when he had a mind to be the man of the family.”
    Surely she had mourned him that summer she visited us—or mourned death—but the words are dry.
    “The young man wanted to see Nita again, but Brother wouldn’t have it. I was away then, too, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because Mahma knuckled under. She crah’d when she told me of it. She had to let Brother be a man, she said. And Ayron had forbidden the other young man the house.”
    I could see Beck going the rounds of the town, maybe even to those not too well known to her, but doing what was done down home, where one’s connections made gossip the best mediator. Staunchly setting out in the dress that could go anywhere. Waiting for Katie to come home, so she could cry. Waiting for Aaron to bring home the fish for dinner.
    Then, quite without thinking on it, I made my connections—as any child of our long, female afternoons would—and clapped my hand to my mouth.
    “What, hon’?” Katie has the rueful smile one wears when one has “told.” “Something bit you?”
    That, too, was what we had said among us, to sudden revelation.
    “Nothing. Oh—Aaron and I went fishing once. At the club. And I disgraced myself. He ever say?” No need to mention it at home, he’d said.
    “Hon’. You pee in your pants?”
    “Good God, no. I was ten years old. I ruined a visiting girl’s dress.”
    When I told her how come, she laughed again, of course, not noticing that this time I held back.
    “They were a rich-looking young couple,” I say, describing the dress. I didn’t describe what the girl’s companion wore, though I still remembered him perfectly—white flannel legs, blue blazer sharp-edged in the sun, brass buttons with anchors on them.
    “Were those medals?” I’d asked Aaron as we walked home our catch. “No,” he’d said, exploding again. “Far too many of them.” Aaron himself had been wearing whatever fishermen wore, neat but unmemorable. Or what they had worn in Richmond maybe. When serious again his face was more rigid than Katie’s, but his eyes had her blue. Walking along, jogging the pail, he’d dug me in the ribs again with his other hand, maybe too sharply. “Keep it dark about those two—remember? You and I just caught ourselves some fish.” He saw my expression. “You caught them,” he said.
    “Wonder was that couple anyone from Port?” Katie said. To be from