Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free PDF

other tables right here. Compared to our confections at home, fragrant with hazelnut, orange water and kirsch, and deeper liqueurs, and a subtler bitter chocolate, the brownie did seem to me simpleminded, naive. A Christian cake.
    “Oh, Arnella.” I leaned forward, loose-breasted in my dance class leotard, scattering the crumbs on my plate. Under her schoolgirl’s collar she was flat-chested, and, though older, somehow more callow than me. Yet she had an intensity, stiff as it was, that I might never catch up with. “Oh, Arnella—you’re divided. Just like me.”
    I invited her home to see for herself. And maybe to test my own family’s rectitude. After all, we now had German maids only. My father, who still said “colored” when referring to domestics but “nee-gro” otherwise, would simply stand fast on his good manners, on which I knew I could depend. My mother, who had called each of our former maids die Schwarze, as if they had no separate being, would be wroth at me for my foolish social ardors, but only behind the scenes.
    But Arnella never came. She had more sense.
    And though Katie, like many Southerners, belonged to such a visiting family, she never further inquired of me why we didn’t get to go.

I REMEMBER NOTHING of that first emergency visit to Port.
    On my second visit, three years later when I was ten, of which I remember everything, Nita, Katie’s slightly younger sister, who in the family gossip was “some pretty” but too plump to keep it going, and rather sly, said: “When Katie brought you here from Atlantic City, you were such a solemn little thing. Wanted to tell us right off why you were here.”
    “Rachel—” my Aunt Beck said. She never called her younger daughter by anything but her first given name. I heard the warning, and remembered it, but like so much in that seemingly bland and to me delightful household, the explanation of Nita’s sidelong remark, as well as a final account of much else, wasn’t to be given to me until a generation later, when I would visit Katie in her eighty-third year, she by then long since retired to a second Port—Port Charlotte, Florida—and we two survivors of households would sort it all out. “Whatever did I say, the first time I came, that Nita wanted to tell?” Nita was dead by then and I would cede her any name she wanted. “I nagged you to tell me, but you always sheared off’—and Katie had laughed, saying, “We were expert at that in the old days, weren’t we.”
    Then her face had solemned, just as it had when I had attended the Florida synagogue with her the day before. “You know, hon’, your mother was suicidal? She had taken something once, at home. Doctors said she had to be away from home, from that whole household. Pore Uncle Joe—your father—he never could understand why. That was part of the trouble. But of course he adored her. So I was deeded to take her down there. And then, when I was about to bring her back, looked like she was about to try again. I don’t know how you knew. Nothing was on the surface. But when you entered our door at Port you looked up at Aunt Beck with that li’l old face of yours and said: ‘We had to leave that hotel. Its windows were too wide.
    The Port of those days, a small, high white house with porch steps to be sat on, was probably quite close to its next-door neighbors, but with all the bushy Long Island summer to expand in, and the “shore” close by. Deep within, and pervading all just as if Aunt Beck had not had to leave her massive wedding furniture behind her, was the very core and day-to-day persistence of a not quite smalltown or small-time Southern and Jewish household in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, circa 1891—the date inside Beck’s broad wedding band deeded to me by Katie, which I sometimes now wear.
    Such houses are tenacious, era to era. A palace destroyed can be hard to resurrect—too cumbersome, or perhaps too original. But take a kitchen full of