The Cousins Read Free

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