Free Kissing Cousins: A Memory by Hortense Calisher Page A

and no doubt it had. “It’ll be a real sit-down lunch, with a lot of talk. And many stories,” I’d said, as a lure.
    Because of all the elderly deaths, my children had missed out on my side of the family altogether, and because of distance hadn’t had enough natural flow from the other side. To my mind they had never been properly nested down in a clan. We and our friends, some of them writers, all of them vocal, had done what we could about stories, to which our younger boy and older girl were a permitted audience, whose comments, both sharp and entranced as only children can manage, were manna to their mother. The stories they heard had not been as genealogical as I could wish. Now I would be doing memory’s job. I would be helping them to part of what I thought should be their place in life.
    “And you two will have to be in attendance the whole day,”
    I was proud of that phrase; it gave exactly the tone. They had groaned at the prospect; with the whole river-and-village summer day open to them—why?
    “For the honor of the family,” I’d said, knowing that would intrigue them. “And because that is the way I was brought up,” I’d added, grinning—on that subject I knew I was already the family bore.
    “Yes, you know about my upbringing,” I’d said, as severely as my always insecure adulthood could manage—because it was always placing itself on the side of the child. “But you’ve never experienced it.”
    The Pyles would certainly expect to be asked to dinner as well, before their long trek back, I said, and would take it kindly that the whole family would be there. If we wanted to be extra hospitable—I thought of Nita—we would also offer a light afternoon snack. “For which you two could opt out.”
    “Ice cream and cake?” They grinned back. Maybe they’d stay.
    But why did I want it so much, one of them said, and the other answered: “To show us off.”
    That was true, and I duly blushed for it—now that I had children, blushes came easier. But since becoming a storyteller myself, I had learned that truth always intrigues. And although I had never fished since that once in Port, was maybe the best bait.
    “Yes, I do enjoy that, more than you like. I promise to keep it down. But there’s another reason I want you to be around.”
    Their pre-teen faces had been still apple-cheeked but already lengthening with pre-knowledge; could I burden those? “Because when we older ones”—should I say “go,” or “die”? As a child I hated the euphemisms dealt me—only learning much later that drawing room comedy could be made of them. But that style of comedy is not deep enough for children.
    “Because when we elders die, you will be our keepers,” I said.
    And all that livelong day the Pyles and we had the single, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple satisfactions that can crisscross a family, even if composed only of six dubiously related people and one like-minded, family-clogged father and spouse. I saw how the Pyles recognized even burgeoning memory-manners when they saw them, how touchingly they stretched their stories to provision this—and how thirstily they had needed this for themselves. I saw my children sink deep and gratefully into the genealogical texture. Alone in the kitchen, which, after giving them a look-see at my own husbandry I had forbidden the Pyles, I could hear only a satisfying family hum.
    It can be pleasant to cook to the tune of that, and to provender it with old linen and spoons, maybe recognizable, too. At one moment, when the past became too poignant to be borne in company, I went into the bathroom and cried.
    After the Pyles had gone, we all agreed that such a day was worth it, but almost too much.
    The second time the Pyles had come to Grandview, that next summer, they hadn’t telephoned, arriving unexpectedly on a midday that was to become notable in village lore—the day a zebra had blundered into a garden on the left bank of the