Free Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher

old.
    “Rachel became a great cook after Mahma died,” she said, serving us. “People fell over themselves to come here. But you’ll have to make do with me.”
    Again I had a strong sense of her as a nurse, dealing year after year with situations where there was no time for vanity. Or for flattery? Over the years before she became a supervisor, Katie had now and then been persuaded to take on a case as night nurse, often of someone she knew personally, often terminal. What had it been like to sit alone night after night with the sense of your own inner credit only, and to see that credit vanish each time you shut the door on death?
    “’Cept Rachel always cooked too much,” she said, with a reminiscent smile. “She was never happier than when the leftovers were spilling out the back door. I can’t tell you how many second-night dinners we had to ask people back to, those last years. But she loved it.”
    “We didn’t come here for your cooking, Katie.” And even to her, home must be better than the restaurants, where the waitresses were as coy as social workers in their special recognitions of the old folks, and at the salad table one could have seconds of watery greens and macaroni and cottage cottage cottage cheese.
    “I know.”
    “And ‘home is always preferable.’”
    We exchanged smiles at this phrase of my father’s, that belle époque gourmet who, after marriage, had settled into home fare like one of those great chefs who in their prime verge ever closer to the simples learned at mother’s knee.
    At least the china closet was here. For Katie, that is. Why, in this mean little house, should I be thinking of Shirley? Was it wrong then, after all, for age to be boss of itself and us—or only for age to be separate?
    The chicken was a great-boned fowl cut into pieces, porridge-colored from steam. In effect I knew who had cooked it, even though I had seen Katie buy the pinkish packet at the supermarket. Beck had caught one of their two hens once and slaughtered it, the only time I had ever seen that done. Muttering, as she singed it and let me pick off the last pinfeathers from the wing tip with a tweezer, that it had ought to be hung, but that there was nothing else “handy” in the house. And Sol was coming home.
    I was hazy about just when Beck had died, years after my own parents, at any rate, and probably during the 1950s, when I was at times out of the country, or far from the Eastern seaboard.
    “Had Beck ever planned to come to Florida with you?”
    “Mahma? She’d have cut her throat if she had known we were ever to sell Po-ut.”
    I’d forgotten Southern exaggeration, whereby you would “strangle your own mother” or “as soon put your sister down a well” before you would—what? Ruin good eggnog with cinnamon. Or drink Scotch, with or without ginger ale. Or wear an unmanly wristwatch—among the older men called “one of those.” Or not wear a watch. It struck me now how many of these outsize statements had been couched in terms of family mayhem. Again I saw that hen whose neck Beck’s hands had wrung and then severed—“a wrung chicken tastes better, dollin’”—running across the garden without its head. And I thought that Aunt Beck would have gone anywhere in the world Katie asked her to.
    “No—but what Mahma loved was travelin’. And visitin’—my! After I bought a car you know how we did. If Nita’d ever learned to drive we could have done more.”
    Yes, I knew how they did. In the days when we and our children, returned Eastward, were also living “on the shore”—of the Hudson River, not the Sound—and so by car only some sixty miles each way, the Pyles had come to visit us for the day. I had explained to the children that it would literally be for the day, and how it would probably be.
    They would no doubt arrive for lunch—the three Pyles. “Three ladies,” I’d said. I had lightly described them, keeping back what bias I could—but love will out,