The Cousins

1

ON A CLEAR, bitingly cold New York winter morning, Olivia Okrent hurried through the noisy, littered streets, ready to start her real day and looking forward to it. She was a beautiful woman, both slender and voluptuous, tall, and with a style of her own. She was forty-five but looked younger, with brown hair that this year was a warm red, a toned body she had dragged unwillingly to the gym for twenty years, large hazel eyes that in some lights were almost topaz—and that too often betrayed her by giving away her thoughts—and a child’s grin men had told her lit up the room. She was wearing a big fluffy fake-fur coat, pale green with Mickey Mouse stenciled all over it. When people asked her what it was made of she always said: Bathmat.

As soon as she entered the house she lived in with Roger Hawkwood, the outside world disappeared. They had been together for ten years. She loved that house and her life in it. It was a town house they owned together in the East Seventies, with their clinic downstairs. She and Roger also did surgery there, if the patients didn’t have to have it done in a regular hospital, and after an often frantic day it was wonderful to climb the stairs of her house and enter her sanctuary. Upstairs were pale cream walls, oriental rugs, good paintings, books, music, fresh flowers and tranquillity. There was a state-of-the-art kitchen where she could really cook on weekends, when she had time. There was a sand-colored marble bathroom with a tub big enough for two, with a Jacuzzi. The bedroom had a king-sized bed with a television set in front of it that was as big as the footboard and was hooked up to their stereo sound system and a VCR, where they could watch a rented movie on a Saturday night like an old married couple, their dogs cuddled beside them.

She smiled at the receptionist. Where’s Dr. Hawkwood?

Examining a patient.

Okay, I’m going to surgery now.

Olivia scrubbed and got dressed in her surgical greens. The familiar ritual always calmed her, made her feel the most like herself. She went into the clean, glistening operating room like a goddess: Carrie already asleep and ready for her, her assistant, Terry, close at hand. She worked swiftly and efficiently. She liked to talk to the patients while she was operating on them, because she was sure they heard her, even though the anesthetic made them forget everything.

Don’t you worry, Carrie, Olivia said. "You’re young, and you have a wonderful life ahead of you. When I get finished with this you can go out and have a good time. She smiled and looked down at the beautiful face of the peacefully sleeping German shepherd. Spaying is a piece of cake, kiddo."

She tied the last stitches and left Terry to finish up. Tonight Carrie would sleep in a cage in the downstairs recovery room, and tomorrow she would walk in the garden, and the day after that she would go home.

The family thought her career was just one more too unconventional thing about Olivia. They called her cousin Kenny the heart surgeon the doctor, and Olivia the vet. At first she had thought this was the old guard’s attitude toward women, but after she went into practice with Roger they called him the vet too. Never was either of them referred to as a doctor. Their chosen profession was one step too close to the barnyard for the fastidious Miller clan.

When she was a child her mother had said animals were filthy and refused to let her have a pet. Olivia had always adored animals—they were so unquestioningly loving, so forgiving, and they couldn’t really tell you what hurt. For years she had brought home every waif and stray that seemed to need her, and her mother had tossed all of them out. There had never been a veterinarian in the family.

You keep the clinic in the house? her aunt Myra had said, looking squeamish. Don’t they bark, and uh . . . go to the bathroom?

The same as anybody’s pets, Olivia said cheerfully. And some of them miaow.

Three more surgeries, and that was over. She passed Roger in the hall and they winked at each other and grinned. She looked at her watch. Now there would be patients to see, for hours, because people had to come after work, too. Their days were as long and crowded as if they had been taking care of humans instead of animals, except there was less money in it. But then if there were no emergencies she and Roger would have the end of the evening together. She rolled her shoulders, working the stiffness out of them, and thought about their Jacuzzi . . . the two of them in it, maybe making love, maybe sending out for Chinese food later. She was so lucky.

On her third try for a lasting relationship with a man, she’d finally gotten it right. She’d met her first husband, Howard, in college, and they’d gotten married right after graduation, at Mandelay, the family summer estate—the long white gown, the chuppah, the happy family, the works. If they had stayed together, as they’d expected they would, they would be looking at their twenty-fifth anniversary now! She couldn’t even imagine it. They had been lovers and best friends, but after two years they both knew they were careening in different directions and they didn’t know what to do to stop it. It was fortunate they hadn’t had a baby.

It was the late sixties, people were trying to find themselves. She knew she wanted to go to vet school, she’d wanted that since she was a little girl. Howard decided he wanted to travel through America and maybe Europe and be a photojournalist. The world was changing so fast and he wanted to be a part of it. His parents had thought he was going to go to law school. So had hers. Their parents were more upset at the failure of their marriage than they were. She and Howard, although they were very sad, also felt it was inevitable, that they were being realistic and mature, that they had escaped a great mistake.

After the divorce they saw each other from time to time, talked all night and smoked grass and drank a little wine, and then made love as if each of them had met an amazingly compatible stranger. There always seemed something forbidden and exciting about this, but after a few more years they stopped seeing each other, then he stopped sending postcards, and then she didn’t even know where he was. She supposed they could have found each other if they’d really wanted to. She had always kept her maiden name and stayed in New York. It was so strange to know there was a man out there to whom she’d once been married and that they would probably never see each other again for the rest of their lives.

She met husband number two, Stuart, the respectable lawyer her parents were so delighted to have in the family, when he came to her in tears, carrying his dog who had been hit by a cab. The fact that it had happened outside her office seemed to be kismet. The dog died of internal injuries. Afterward he asked her to have dinner with him. It was the first and last time she went out with a client.

The marriage lasted three years, but it should have been over right after the honeymoon when he started seeing other women. They were always models, always foreign. She pictured him standing at the airport waiting for planes that would bring those skinny insecure French girls into his life, panting to whisk them away and be their first romance in New York. But of course it wasn’t that way; he met them on blind dates when Olivia was working. She wondered when he ever worked. Apparently he gave them the impression he was waiting for his divorce.

And he told her. He admitted nothing had ever lasted for him, that he was unable to make a connection. He said he liked her very much, but he didn’t really love her, that if he did get to love her he would be able to have sex with her again, but as things were it was just easier to have it with women he didn’t much like or respect. It was the freewheeling seventies, and for a while Olivia didn’t realize how crazy he actually was. She didn’t want another failed marriage; she wondered if there was something she wasn’t doing right. In her loneliness and pain she became anorexic trying to look like those models, but she couldn’t get him to change, and finally one night when she looked at herself in the mirror it was for the first time with horror; and a week later she started the proceedings that would make her twice divorced by the age of thirty.

What a record. Her family didn’t discuss it in front of her, but she knew they were appalled, and that they did talk about it behind her back.

By the time she met Roger she had decided exactly what she wanted in a man. She wanted a comfort level, something like what she’d had with Howard, but she wanted him already to be what he was going to be so she would have no bad surprises. Attractive, of course, and there had to be strong chemistry, but she also wanted a best friend. Roger was warm and cute and cuddly and affectionate, with dark auburn hair, hazel eyes like hers that were sometimes topaz, and a wonderful smile. They could almost be taken for brother and sister. He was three years older than she was. The fact that he was also a veterinarian was the sheerest good luck.

They met in a movie line, at an art theater that was showing a revival of Two for the Road. They had each gone alone. They left together. She told her parents they had met on a blind date.

He didn’t mind that she didn’t want children. He did ask her why not, and she admitted that she had always been secretly afraid she would be a bad mother. He said he was sure she would be a wonderful mother, but children were not really a priority for him at that moment. He didn’t even mind that she didn’t want to risk getting married again. He seemed relieved. He’d survived a bad marriage and he said they could always change their minds later.

The senior members of the family from time to time made it known that it would be more acceptable if she married him. He wasn’t Jewish, but at this point in her life none of them cared anymore. But after she and Roger had bought the building together and moved in together and merged their practices, they seemed to themselves as wedded as anyone could be. Once in a while, after a particularly romantic evening, one of them would turn to the other and say, What do you think? Should we get married? And the other would invariably answer, I thought we already were.

* * *

When they finally closed the clinic for the night and she had gone in to check on Carrie and the other patients who were staying over, Olivia’s afternoon thoughts of potential sex were only a memory. She was so exhausted she knew she and Roger would have their Chinese food in the Jacuzzi and be lucky to stay awake.

Roger rubbed her shoulders in the hot, bubbling water, and she leaned against him with a sigh. She had lighted some jasmine-scented candles, and the white takeout cartons of Special Chicken Fried Rice and Buddha’s Delight were lined up next to them on the Jacuzzi’s rim. Their two dogs were lying on the cool tile floor: Wozzle, hers, and Buster, his. Wozzle was the product of a chance encounter between two free spirits—Olivia thought one had been a giant schnauzer—and her black hair stuck out all over the top of her head as if she was surprised. Buster was a pedigreed golden retriever. The Modern Jazz Quartet was playing on the stereo, softly, peacefully.

I wish you’d change your mind and come with me to Aunt Julia’s funeral tomorrow, she said.

But one of us has to attend to the patients.

It’s just for two hours!

I can’t cancel everyone at the last minute. You know that. She didn’t answer. It’s not that I didn’t like your aunt, he said. I neglect my own relatives, too.

Well, it would be better if you were there. I always have the feeling my aunts and uncles are looking to see what’s wrong with me.

You’ll be able to see your cousins, he offered gently. He knew she always looked forward to that. They had grown up together in a large, close-knit family, and now they were scattered all over with lives of their own.

Yes, she said. That will be nice.

You won’t even notice I’m not there.

I will, and so will they. Then she decided to let the issue drop. She was too tired to get into an argument about it now, and besides, it was useless.

I do love you, Roger said, massaging her back.

I know. There was really so little about Roger that she could complain about. I love you, too, she said. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.

You won’t have to, he said.

She relaxed into his touch, his presence. Safety, she thought, was the most important thing in life. Once you had it you could do anything else. She had never understood why people looked for danger.

* * *

The funeral was at Frank E. Campbell’s on Madison Avenue, elegant, impeccable, nonsectarian. Years ago Grandpa and Grandma Miller had their funerals at Riverside, the traditional Jewish choice, but eventually they had all gravitated to Campbell’s and were used to going there. The first thing Olivia did when she entered was rush to the ladies room to comb her hair. Then she slipped into the room where the service was to be held. It was small, with rows of folding chairs; not a chapel, just a room. When she saw the coffin she started to cry. Whenever people die it’s like a whole chunk of my life goes away with them, she thought.

Julia Miller Silverstone had been the oldest member of the family, in her mid-eighties, and very ill for a long time. Her grandchildren, Grady and Taylor, here from California, had been the ones to plan the funeral, because not only had she outlived her husband, but, much worse, she had outlived her only child, her son Stan. That was tragic, not normal, but neither had his death been normal. The old guard, who thought Grady and Taylor were a little strange because they weren’t Jewish, were waiting with mild curiosity to see what the service would be like.

The flowers Grady and Taylor had chosen were blue, Aunt Julia’s favorite color, and the music playing softly over the loudspeaker was a Charleston. There were none of Julia’s contemporaries here at all; they were either dead, or too fragile, or gone to live in a warmer climate. Poor thing, I should have gone to see her more, Olivia thought guiltily. But she never complained about me. I hope I don’t have to be like that, old and alone, having to pay somebody to stay with me and push my wheelchair, who probably doesn’t even like me.

She looked around. Right in front of her was Uncle Seymour, the silver-haired patriarch of the Miller family, who still ran the store even though he was eighty-one; and his wife, Aunt Iris, who had been a great beauty. Their son Charlie the Perfect ran the store with him, and he was not here today because he was in Europe on business, but their daughter Anna the Perfect was, in her tight little suit and her neat little haircut just like her mother’s. How the other girl cousins had resented, growing up, hearing from their mothers how perfect Anna was!

Anna is taking dancing lessons, Olivia’s mother Lila had said in that smug voice she saved for comments about the family, "and she’s such a beautiful dancer they asked her to teach."

Mother, Olivia said, it’s aerobics.

Never mind—it was Lila’s family and it was Swan Lake.

Uncle Seymour turned to look at Olivia and gave a little nod, glancing around for Roger. Of course his daughter Anna the Perfect’s husband was there, a dutiful family member, even though he and Olivia had gone through entire parties without exchanging a word, and sometimes she thought he didn’t recognize her.

From the next row of chairs Kenny the chubby heart surgeon, here from Santa Barbara, turned and smiled at her, although his eyes were grave. Olivia smiled back. Looking at Kenny was like looking at an age-progression drawing someone had superimposed on his baby face—it was unreal, imaginary. He would always seem the same to her. He had lost some hair, his nose was bigger, and there were lines, but she still saw the sweet and slightly fey kid she had played with during the long country summers of their childhood.

She remembered how at her mother’s funeral he had hugged her and then unexpectedly said, You’re my sister. She had been touched because they were both only children and she hadn’t known he felt that close to her. Now they met only at events of family significance, and occasionally he would call her from California, but she also knew he had been to New York many times to theaters and museums with different girlfriends and never called to say he was in town. Maybe that still meant he was like a brother, maybe that was how some brothers behaved. He did, however, always stop by to pay his respects to Uncle Seymour, which was how she had found out he was there.

Down in the front row she recognized, with a rush of love, her cousin Jenny’s dark curly mop of hair, like a berserk chrysanthemum. When she was young and conflicted about whether or not she ever wanted a child, she used to carry Jenny’s baby picture in her wallet and pretend Jenny was hers. But Jenny was too close in age to be her child—she was more like a little sister. Like Olivia and Kenny, she had no siblings. Their family bred late and infrequently, but Jenny was making up for it, with five children under the age of twelve. Jenny Cooper was the only cousin who had a full-time career and children too; she wouldn’t have it any other way. She and her husband Paul, a professor, were here from Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the day with their oldest two.

The music had changed to something very soft and classical, and then faded away. The small room was full. Their cousin Grady, Aunt Julia’s grandson, got up to deliver the eulogy. Olivia had known him and his younger sister Taylor since they were babies, sent back East from California every year to spend those crowded family summers at Mandelay, when everyone was still alive.

Grady Silverstone was thirty-four, a stuntman, as his father Stan had been; handsome, well built, broad-shouldered, strong and wiry. But there the resemblance ended. Stan had looked like a cowboy, but Grady looked like a Marine. Perhaps Stan would be different today, if he had lived, but it was the way she remembered him. Grady had the posture of someone who had gone to military school, and even though he was a superb athlete there was always something held back and rigid about him. His curly little smile held secrets.

When Julia was a little girl, he said, her mother would dress her up in a beautiful clean dress, with a big bow in her hair, and Julia would disappear. Where she wandered on her adventures no one knew, but every day she came home bedraggled and dirty, no matter how she was scolded. She felt there was so much in the world to do and see. When she was older she was a flapper. She liked to sing and dance, and her dearest ambition, although it was never fulfilled, was to be an actress. All her life she was so alive, until her long illness. Her mind was always there; it was only her body that betrayed her. But now her lively spirit can at last fly free. Fly, Julia. Fly and be happy. Grady sat down. Olivia was crying.

In front of Olivia, Uncle Seymour turned in confusion to Aunt Iris and whispered, What is he, some kind of life-after-deather?

Taylor got up and went to the front of the room. She had been deaf since she was seven, and over the years her speech had deteriorated into the nasal tones they were now all used to. She was terribly pretty, and as golden as Grady was dark. Sometimes strangers took her for a Scandinavian person speaking in some foreign accent. Most deaf people Olivia had seen had very expressive faces to enhance their communication, but Taylor always had a look of forced calm, except when she was talking to Grady. She had learned to wear a mask—they both had.

I love you, Grandma, Taylor said. You took care of us, you were always there. I will miss you very much. I love you. She sat down. Her husband, Tim, leaned over and touched his cheek to hers.

It was over. Short and simple. Outside, the cousins hugged hard.

On the way to find the limousines Olivia saw a woman who looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember who she was. She was a large woman with gray-streaked fair hair and a face wrinkled and puffy from years of obvious dissipation. There were faint signs that she had once been very pretty, and Olivia tried to picture her as she had been in the past; it was annoying not to know, some memory nagged at her. The woman was hanging back diffidently, being ignored. It was as if she knew no one liked her, that they were annoyed that she was there.

Then suddenly she knew. It was Earlene—Big Earl, as Grady called her behind her back, Grady and Taylor’s mother. Stan’s widow. Aunt Julia’s daughter-in-law. Olivia had heard that she was living in Santa Fe now, but no one ever saw her but Grady and Taylor, and they as infrequently as possible. Olivia didn’t know why Earlene had made the long trip, since she didn’t seem to even much like Julia.

When they all finished piling into the limousines to go to the cemetery, Earlene had disappeared.

* * *

Olivia had not been to the family’s cemetery in years, in fact none of them had, except when they had to bury somebody. It was so far away, in Queens. The family paid for Perpetual Care. When Julia’s coffin had been lowered, Olivia wandered around, looking at the weathered gravestones that belonged to their clan. She supposed there was a space for her somewhere if she wanted it. She turned around to see that her cousin Melissa had detached herself from the others and was now walking with her.

In every family there is the Pretty One—in theirs it had been Olivia, and later Melissa. When Melissa was growing up she looked uncannily like Olivia, but now that she was grown they looked quite different, although Melissa was still a beauty. She was very thin, nervous, intense; she never ate. She was now Melissa Ardon, a well-dressed suburban Houston, Texas, wife and mother of three young children; she was very sweet, and she would never be caught in a bathmat coat with Mickey Mouse on it.

How do you feel having your parents buried in two separate cemeteries? Melissa asked sympathetically. It must be strange.

It’s awful, Olivia said. She remembered how she had hated leaving her father in that big empty plot all by himself. But it was what Grace wanted. She said since it was a second marriage for both of them, neither of them could be buried with their first spouse; they had to get a new place. She said it was a religious law.

What law?

I don’t know. I can’t decide if I want to be buried with my mother or my father, so I’d rather be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the ocean.

Maybe you’ll get married again.

I doubt it.

Well, Melissa said cheerfully, you’ve been with Roger longer than with either of your husbands.

Longer than the total of the two of them, Olivia said. I think that was the point of our arrangement.

They walked on in companionable silence. Her mother had died of cancer when her father was already quite old, and when he had remarried people were at first surprised. Her mother had spent the final years of her illness teaching her father how to make his own meals, and it had never occurred to her that when she was gone he would prefer to find a younger woman to dine out in restaurants with him. Grace immediately got rid of all the furniture Olivia’s parents had had for over forty years, and tried to throw out all the family photographs. You’ll never look at them, she had snapped as Olivia adamantly carried them away.

How could anyone be so heartless as to destroy a family’s history? How could she not want to keep the childhood picture of her mother Lila with her ruffled dress and solemn face, of Aunt Julia with the big bow in her hair . . . Olivia remembered reading about how some Holocaust survivors had kept pictures of their parents hidden inside the soles of their shoes through all the horrible years