Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

modest husbandry—curds draining in their cheesecloth sock, biscuit-cutter and beach plum jelly waiting on the counter-side—then add a darkish hall where the china closet resides with its hoard of gilt-on-white wedding service or early blue willow ware, go past the dining and living rooms, each with a mood and a time-set like a pub’s, then up to the bedroom cubicles with their counterpanes, there perhaps to flop belly down and muse almost atop a tree, while the screen door skreeks, in the cellar the mousetraps snap, and all through the house conversation ripples its common rill—and you could be anywhere, anytime, in one of the forty-eight states of the past.
    Aunt Beck always dressed as if she knew this. Her short-sleeved, faintly patterned or white garment, neither a housedress nor quite a tailored shirtdress, was neutral enough for anywhere, either in town or in her own house, as well as at the shore. I hadn’t yet seen her counterparts in Back Bay, Boston, or old California in places where the movies hadn’t taken over, or even New York’s supposedly long-gone Murray Hill—though I would have recognized them. But once, in the big central outdoor plaza of a childhood haunt of mine, the Museum of the American Indian up at 155th Street and Broadway, there had been an exhibition devoted to statues of the American pioneer woman, big white marble effigies with whose bearing I felt quite at home. They all had Beck’s same squared-off stance, firm jaw, and air of fortitude. Obviously marble couldn’t twinkle with humor or pick up its skirts to wade after mussels. Otherwise, except for a couple of winged and helmeted sculptures who couldn’t possibly have been addressed as Awnt, I would have been pleased to visit any one of them in her mythical house.
    There the husbands, big and impressively mannered like Solly Pyle, and with the same large geniality even to persons of my age, would have been as infrequently at home as he. So was my father often away on business, but he had an actual office and factory to be away from, and brothers at the corners of each, to weigh them down. Solly Pyle’s affairs appeared to float; he was “in jewelry at one time”; was he what my father and his friends called—at the very best—a “representative”? From their confabs I knew quite accurately what each of these men dealt in, but I never knew the nature of Solly’s “merchandising,” as they would have called it. Whatever he did deal in, I had the impression it was “from time to time,” a phrase that in our house did not indicate durability. To our urban clan neither did choosing “the country” to live in all year round. My mother, for sure, had once hinted that Pyle was “a big blow,” but then she wasn’t trustworthy on the subject of a Southern male expansiveness that perhaps no longer charmed her (as it still magicked me) now that she lived with it. Anyway, unlike his daughter Katie, Solomon Pyle, whose family had been as close as close to ours in Richmond, was never an intimate of our house. I must have seen him there, though, in a long-ago summer, for I remember the hat, the pongee suit, and the flirt of his cane.
    In Port that second visit of mine, it was summer, too, and he was in once or twice—and out again. Although dressed less grandee, he was as courtly as I’d thought he would be, oddly so even to his children, and to his wife, who addressed him frontally as “Solly Pyle,” calling him that in his absence as well. Whenever home he was treated as absolute god, because to Beck that was what husbands were. He was never heavy about it but seemed to expect that treatment and enjoy it, if briefly. I was already used to men who gave the appearance of taking the most excellent wifely cuisine and solicitude as homely cures for more sophisticated routines outside, but though I tried I could never imagine what his routines were, and somehow never called him Uncle, as I had been trained to address all other