Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher Page B

that Port was still an accolade.
    Should I say? Death saves memory a lot of trouble.
    “I had the impression that they were just down for the day.”
    So I left him in the archives, that young man, with his cousin Myra Manheimer, whom maybe he kissed, maybe he didn’t. He came from the North, sure enough—this, and those buttons, were all Aaron really had against him. But why resurrect him now? There was no longer any call for him.
    Note, though, how my cousin Katie and I both accepted without question the impressions of a ten-year-old child, half a century gone. In memory, all a family’s children are smart.
    “I was always making people laugh, those days,” I said. “But you were all so good about those fish of mine. So small they should have been thrown back. But you ate them all, every one. I was so proud.”
    “Why, I remember that day.” Katie sat up, the compress dripping in her hand, her mouth pursed in the peculiarly Southern mnemoniac way, the words so chewed one would be hard put to spell them: Waa-aah r’mimba would be accurate. “When you-all came home Ayron had words in the kitchen with Nita because she had makeup on, and her Sunday clothes. And me just off the train with my salary check, but Sunday, no way to cash. That’s how I found out Mahma had come to the end of her savings. Here—give me that compress.” She wound it around her neck with a savage flip she would never have used on a patient. “We ate those minnows of yours, hon’, because Beck had nothing else in the house.”
    “That’s a shock.” I am only half joking. Childhood’s triumphs are hard won—or mine were. And long cherished. “The thought of them warmed my pride for weeks.”
    Memory is a fish. A flashy something or nothing that can circle a pail twice. Or on and on. Memory is a bargaining—with what it has missed.
    And something large, white, and shifty is missing here.
    A courtly man with a cane, in a white pongee suit. This is no time to be polite about that, with death breathing in our ears.
    “And Sol—Beck said Sol might be coming home?”
    She has finished with the compresses and dried her hands. Shapely at the nails but gaunt, they still move with a nurses abstract competence, even toward a candy box. “Here. Have some nonpareils.”
    I’ve never known how to pronounce that word American-style and feel oddly grateful, though few may even know the term now.
    “What was Uncle Solly’s business? I never knew.” I take one of the quarter-size chocolate rounds sprinkled with white. She munches on one. No, the teeth don’t fit. One can see the animal taking over the human. That can be painful to watch.
    “When Solly Pyle married Rebecca Boettigheimer he was a traveler, or supposed to be. Those days, men still had to travel in order to sell. Unless you owned a store.”
    I knew that picture. My grandfather had had such a store in Richmond; then came the War between the States. And later, a war between little commerce and big, as often happens after. “Between magnolias and merchandising” was the way my father said it; he’d wanted to be a poet, and alliteration was common in our house.
    “Some of the men stayed on, and became department stores. And some of the men came North, like your father and mine.” She’s saying “min” now for “men.” It’s an old story.
    We both lean forward. Those are the stories that have brought us to where we are.
    “Beck only found out because of her wedding furniture, that Sol claimed was too heavy to move North yet, until we were sure of a big enough house. She’d thought it was going into storage. But Daddy had sold it to pay his debts down there. And the buyer-man came to our door.”
    Opposite us, the china closet has survived. Even Florida light can’t always superannuate—one of our home words, too. I once asked Uncle Clarence what it meant, on one of our walks. “Being out of date,” he said. “A condition common among people who come North.” But,