Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free

I said. “She was the cousin visited Shirley when she was a girl.”
    Shirley was the great plantation along the James River on which my friend’s mother had been born—this was why I had been brought here. Mahma would crave to know anybody who even knew what the name Shirley meant down there, my friend had said.
    “She was invited there just before they came North,” I said. “Some ole Miz Somebody who lived there invited her. That was where she learned to fish, and to ride.” And to shoot, though I wasn’t sure I should say it. The fishing was unladylike enough. “She stayed three months.”
    Then her father, “old Solly Pyle” as my father called him, had come to get her. I could see him as I myself had later, a handsome, white-crested man with a fine bearing, dressed in the same summer pongees and Panama hat my father wore—though of course Solomon Pyle would have been younger then. “She says visits were longer in those days. Took a time to get there.”
    But Pahpa, she’d said, he was worried I might have fallen for some boy down there. I heard Katie’s laugh, one stave above a chuckle— Warn’t inny me-en at Shirley inny moah. Jus some ole leftover ladies Mahma’d met in Richmond. Who were open to a little young company. Mahma said it would be a precious experience for me. She only let me go because we were already set to move —
    I bet you were the prettiest theng, I’d said stoutly. You still are. For I knew my mother and aunts thought now that she would never marry. She’d pursed her lips at them, over there in their corner; she knew that, too. Not too bad, she’d said. And was it then it began to sift to me that she must already have had her romance?
    “Sure would like to know the name that ole Miz,” my friend’s mother said. “Course, there was a heap of houses on Shirley. My granddaddy was head inside servant up at the main one.”
    Down the table her husband cracked a hard roll in his fist and set it on his butter plate. I hadn’t seen one of those plates recently; we seldom brought them out even for company. I saw that the two younger boys, who were looking at their father apprehensively, hadn’t known to set their butter knives at the edge.
    “Tell Mahma how that cousin saved your life as a baby,” my friend said. “And only a kissing cousin.”
    One of the boys snickered. “Kissing cousins. What the heck is that?”
    His mother heaved up her bosom, a word I hadn’t thought of since an aunt had noted I was getting one. “It mean close in all but blood. Times I think you not even that to this house, boy.” She lifted her chin at her husband, queenly. “Tell your story, Girl.”
    Southerners tell a story over and over without shame.
    So I told how Katie, coming into the nursery, had looked down at the hot child. “You were burning up,” my father had said. “I’d already called Kozak.” Doctors were known by their last names only in our house, in a kind of ownership.
    “I could smell the fever before I saw you,” Katie’d said, chiming in. “You must have had over a hundred and five. I knew what it was at once—seen it in the wards. Children don’t have it anymore.”
    “Diphtheria,” my father had said. “My heart sank in my shoes.” Then he would smile at Katie, saying to the rest of us, “And even then, that girl never raised her voice.” It was his specific for women—mostly an unsatisfied one. “And then—” he would say.
    But Katie always made an excuse to leave the room at this point, saying, “Hush, hush, Uncle Joe, haow you drahmatize”—after which he would whistle, and fall still. And maybe tell us later, maybe not, depending.
    “She always claimed the doctor did it when he came,” my father would whisper, looking over his shoulder. “What had to be done, to save you.” She was only a student nurse, and she didn’t want her parents to know. They might have taken her out of nursing school. She’d had an awful fight to go.
    “It forms a