I LEFT COLLEGE, degree in hand. Left home to work and have my own apartment. Left work to marry, to have a family, and to live in many “out-of-town” places, none of them speaking in any of my accents, my own speech floundering unreliably along the way. I did not know myself, so I was what I heard, if with a core of obstinacy below the larynx. One day this stubbornness would move my writing arm to bypass my tongue and connect with my head, and ultimately with my life, but it hadn’t happened yet. During those same pre-years, the household of my childhood, up to then numbering only four at the center but vastly accommodating, had swelled for a final time with the increments of war.

As my father went bond for as many refugees from Hitler as he could afford to sponsor, most of them tenuously related to my mother through the half-brother, Sigmund, who until then had scarcely paid his émigré sister any mind, our dining room filled with their tales of former grandeur and with their pudding handshakes. We heard of Onkel Sigmund’s house in Berlin, where the dining salon had been walled in red tapestry, of his son’s ski hut in the Dolomites, and of how Onkel himself, former head of General Motors for Germany and owner of a car the twin of Von Hindenburg’s, had got used to being mistaken for the old Minister, sometimes even opening its window and graciously accepting the plaudits of the crowd. We heard from his son the skier, whose exact cousinship confounded me—what would the son of a step-uncle be to me?—that our party manners were low here; in their drawing rooms, each time a guest entered, the whole company turned and acknowledged him.

I was too young to give them full credit for the trauma they had suffered even though their skins were safe, but watched entranced as they collided with my Southern family and each side gradually became aware that it was being condescended to.

Who knows what this forced alliance might have brought about, if the economy had not intervened? Bitterly disappointed that my father could not establish them in businesses suited to their station—for we were still feeling the effects of the Depression, and although when young he had rebounded from an ancient war, he was too old now to profiteer from this one—the new “Germans” took what he could offer and bowed themselves out. Leaving me with the lesson one balks at learning—that people as people are often distinct from the tragedies or injustices that they may suffer, and not always in tune with them.

One thing our household had been in harmony with—time. Indeed, by virtue of our double heritage we seemed to live under a double dose of it. As Jews, we possessed the biblical sense of time according to the Old Testament, that confused bag of endlessly instructive verses telling us there was a time to do this, a time to do that, from sybarite hours in the gardens of the Song of Solomon to Ecclesiastes’ final message of worn teeth and broken bowls. As Southerners, we were bound together by long, genealogical afternoons in which one had only to kiss to be cousins, and by the anecdotes that rose like hashish smoke from these long-burning histories. No wonder then that death, natural and unnatural, always took us by surprise.

My family went down like the Lusitania. What precipitated it was the death of my mother, at fifty-eight—not that young, but so long thought of as twenty-two or more years younger than the generation she had married into, and as wife to a man who at seventy had still had a mother, that her death seemed as untimely as if she were still a girl.

Within the year my father, until then a healthy eighty-two-year-old who had looked sixty, dropped in her wake. Then only did it become clear to their left-behind retinue what had happened.

Not since my own childhood, during which my father had lost his two elder brothers and my grandmother her sons, had “anybody” died, until at ninety-seven, she had. After that only the brother-in-law, Uncle Clarence, had been lost, exiting as modestly as he had lived. For fifteen years or so the planetary arrangements of our little universe had gone on, as if its original cause, their matriarch, were still among them. As everybody, down to the last little subway-riding cousin, had expected it to. My father, holding up under the burden like a five-foot-eight Atlas, had never thought of absconding; my mother, cured of her breakdowns by the challenge of being her own mistress, no longer rebelled.

Only we young had defected, partly from circumstances (I at a distance and my brother in the service) and, as was intimated by the elders any time we could get there, also from the notorious unfaithfulness of youth. How could they know that even to the neglectful, the parent house is always there to be gravitated to, in the mind? Even the real cousins, those unreliables, now and then gave evidence of that—Grace, Flora and Clarence’s daughter, steaming in from her unsuccessful marriage in Syracuse to its proper home audience, or even one of Belles reprobate girls, Gertrude-Pat, who, bumping into me from behind the dresses in a department store, both of us women now, said hungrily from whatever new fastness of creed, “Uncle Joe’s? Is it still there?”

But now there was no meeting place, come sewing-circle time, or of a weekday evening, or for Sunday’s chicken fricassee. With perhaps the promise, for some, of a little cash thrust in the palm, or at least a bottle of scent from the family factory. There was no place to go. Simple as that. A whole entourage had died.

“You couldn’t keep it up, maybe, could you?” old Cousin Martha Jacoby from Newark, the little old seamstress with the tic, said wistfully, thrusting her whole inexperienced and needy life at me so pitiably that, arrived though I had from six hundred miles away, two small-fry to care for and not much money, I thought for a moment that I could do so—that I must.

Behind me all the old familiar faces, as the song said, were massed up at me as if they, too, half believed I could, although we were in the bedroom now, not the living room—with all the secretive dresser drawers and crammed closets open at last to the curious, and not one of my childhood’s viewing corners left.

“They here for the pickin’s,” my father’s black maid had said, as they all filtered in the week after his funeral. After my mother’s death he had gone back to black servants. She was a recent one; she scarcely knew us. But she knew the picture, die Schwarze, as from the Bronx on they always had, she even alerting me that the Germans, keeping up our divisions even in condolence—and in a memento seeking of drawers guaranteed to have been, as they virtuously said, my mother’s only—had come in advance, the day before.

Those present no longer looked like a planetary arrangement, these calico-on-a-stick aunties and Punchinellos of the dining table who had chirped me toward adulthood and chucked my school days under the chin. Taken together, they looked to me like one of those threatening Italian pictures without perspective, in which all the flat faces are ranged toward the one—whose gaze they will hold for life.

“Cose, she cain’t,” a soft but strong voice said from the door, a voice that would never be in such a lineup. “How could she keep it up? For one thing, she lives away. And what would she be doing it faw!”

“It’s the Pyle girl,” I hear a spinstery voice say from among the female heads bent over the opened bureaus and cupboards in exact pecking order, the aunts in control of those upper drawers, which always seem to hold a woman’s costumery for above the neck—here the combs and jewelry not good enough to be kept at the bank. Lesser cousins of the blood, like Martha, are prowling in the chest that still holds my mother’s “materials,” from dress-goods to bolts of damask never yet cut into napkins, to that ragbag of torn sparkle-stuffs from the 1920s, which had been glamour to me when I was at the age for dress-ups, and one day would be again. Some of the storage places I had never been allowed to pry to the back of, and I see how the death of a woman domestically—that is, aside from the trials of the body—is in the sight of all her panoply, open and awry.

Whosever the grayish second voice had been, I hear its hostility freshly also, now that I am of an age to understand the animus of the home women against those who venture out into the world, and I see how the men are absent from this part of death, how they never have to do what we are doing here.

“Yes—it’s the Pyle girl,” Katie says, smiling at me over their heads, for if she is still a girl, what am I? “Been on a case, hon’. Couldn’t come before.”

Over the intervening years I always knew how she was faring, and she of me and mine, but I had been living from city to city and in New York only intermittently, and she busy in her orbit, so we had not met.

She was forty-five by then and not much changed, merely no longer twice my age. Indeed we were nearer.

She in turn was now almost the age my mother would have been on the opening night of this account. While my mother, down her long trail from the smocked tot in the photo brought from Germany to her terminus at fifty-eight, can be any age memory chooses. And I am grown. Or had been, after the ship went down, until this moment. For after this, although we meet no more frequently, perhaps every other year, and at one period lose track of each other altogether, Katie will keep me in my childhood until the end of her life.

And I will grasp at the chance, as if I am sinking in a quagmire and pulling my savior toward me. Which is the true and everlasting stance of the mnemoniac.

Mneme is the Greek word for memory. There should be a word for extreme devotion to memory. As there are insomniacs, kleptomaniacs, so should there also be—mnemoniacs.

A word that we are coining between us here, she and I.