Dead Languages (2 page)

Then Father found something offensive about one of the articles, and the moon dissolved. He read aloud the first paragraph of the story, which was written by an Englishman for Reuters:

“‘Affluent audience,’” Father said. “‘Potential soldiers.’ ‘Ethnic elite.’ You call this objective reporting?”

Reuters, who was tapping the ashes of a sophisticated cigarette into his empty mousse dish, said, “For godsakes, chap, cheer up, will you? We call it ‘in-depth analysis.’ ”

On the few occasions Father became furious, I always had the sense thirty years were receding before my eyes, and this time was no exception: the voice a vibrato; the face, quite literally, crimson; those thin legs very suddenly tight and mighty. Father stood, spilling his mousse.

“Teddy, sit down,” Mother said.

Teddy—Father—sat down, then said, “In-depth analysis? What, are you kidding? This is slander.”

“I found it—as a lead paragraph—wonderfully terse, wonderfully, really quite wonderfully, to the point,” someone said.

“It’s a nice mixture, Taylor, of reportage and local color,” Mother said. “It really is.”

“Annette, how can you say that?” Father pleaded, tugging on the tablecloth. “It’s subtly, or not so subtly, anti-Semitic. I demand an apology.”

And then, amid all the West Coast correspondents, Father put his napkin down on the table and just started weeping. Huge convulsive heaves of the shoulders and slobbering gasps for breath. While the discussion returned to more civilized concerns (international politics and pay raises and that kind of thing), Father got up and left, taking his mousse and a bent metal spoon with him into the bedroom. I’d like to say I went with him, helped him eat his mousse, held his hand, and told him I thought they were wrong, all wrong, but Mother stared at me to sit perfectly still, so I stayed. The control she had over people was really rather extraordinary. Maybe Father was bored silly with the conversation and just wanted an excuse to leave the table so he could sit up in bed, scoop pudding, and read some more about Sing Sing, but I imagine he squeezed a pillow tightly and cried the night away. He used to be such an emotional man.

And yet I don’t see how he could have been expecting anything terribly much more from Mother, as it was just not her way to rush to Father’s defense. She didn’t do that sort of thing. Father was so helpless he would have needed the Russian Army as a defense and, although Mother was the Russian Army, she was never especially prone to eliminating the enemy for him. Or, rather, she
was
the enemy for him. Why was she always so sweet to strangers and so tough on Father? I wish I knew. The more helpless he became the more unhelpful she became and then, when she finally needed some attention, Father was nowhere to be found.

I don’t mean to imply the sheer agony of watching Mother and Father argue was the sole cause of my curse. Sometimes, though, when I’m playing tennis I’ll know I can’t quite reach the ball if I hit it with a backhand, so I’ll shift the racquet and return the ball lefty—a maneuver I didn’t so much learn from Father as inherit from him—or when hurriedly filling out a form I’ll realize my “Z,” with its wicked horizontal slash, might just as well have been written by Mother. It’s times like these when I acknowledge that if my parents affected my tennis game and my penmanship they must have had some influence upon my mouth as well. I recently learned that Mother wasn’t the first person ever to say: “The past is but prologue to the present,” although probably no one ever said it as often as she did. It’s a very nice if somewhat too alliterative axiom, and it might serve well as my emblem throughout these episodes. The past is but prologue. I suppose I should begin at the beginning.

CONTEMPORARY
pathological theory—Sandra tells me—has it that “the stuttering problem begins in early childhood and develops as a negative reaction by the child to disfluencies while speaking.” Right around age three, children find language for the first time. In their eagerness and anxiety to master the communicative process by morning, almost all little ones encounter considerable difficulty at one time or another with their diction. Every day they add dozens of new words to their vocabularies and, impatient for progress, they trip over this
t
, fumble with that
f.
If just about every child babbles occasionally from age three to age five, only a very select one half of one percent go on to make a nasty adult habit out of it.

Why do some “develop a negative reaction to disfluencies” while others do not? Why is every stutterer I have ever met a man? And why are his eyes always rimmed with fear? The reason ninety percent of all impeded speakers are male is, according to Sandra, that little boys feel more pressure than little girls to perform verbal magic. In some ways it’s an attractive theory, but I have my doubts. Beth claims she was already reading Nancy Drew mysteries when she was four, whereas I’d never pretend that at such an early age I was doing anything more ambitious than attempting to master the alphabet, that terrible catalogue of unspeakable sounds.

Still, I did always feel a certain subtle pressure to produce perfect speech, and for that I suppose I should blame Mother and Father, since Sandra is so convinced the origin of all stuttering is a scene in which one of the parents calls the child’s attention to and scolds him for what is normal, everyday disfluency. The example Sandra uses is always the same: a boy and his mother lean out the second-floor window of a burning house, waiting for the boy’s father to line up the ladder with the ledge of the window. The boy turns to his mother and says, “I-I-I’m afraid, Mommy.” Sandra is certain that if the mother in such a situation says, “Don’t worry, Melvin, Daddy will have us out of here in no time,” Melvin will turn out all right, but if the mother says, “Don’t say, ‘I-I-I’m afraid,’ Melvin, just ‘I’m afraid,’” Melvin will try not to stutter on “I” the next time he says it. This, as we all know, is the beginning of the end. He will, as Sandra says, “develop a general orientation toward speech of ‘what can I do not to stutter’ instead of ‘what can I do to talk.’” Poor little Melvin. I’ve always assumed his only hope was for the house to go up fast in flames.

There’s no house on fire in my memory but, when Sandra insists that I must remember the origin of the disorder, I see a Pacific Palisades living room as the scene of the crime. Beth was away at a classical guitar lesson; Father, who had just returned from playing four sets of doubles at Rancho Park, was sprawled on the floor, bouncing a white tennis ball on the red Persian rug; Mother, who had to be in North Hollywood by noon to interview a screenwriter who’d been blacklisted and wanted to talk, was sitting in the Good Chair with her polished shoes on the stool and the puppy in her lap. The dog was named Bruin, in honor of Mother’s alma mater, but it should have been called CIA, since it looked like nothing so much as the black-coated specter in
Mad’
s “Spy vs. Spy.” This would have been an appropriate appellation, too, as its only desires in the world were to claw your bare ruined legs, curl up in Mother’s soul, and look at you lugubriously. It was wounded half a dozen years later when I got upset one afternoon about my inability to talk, even to a dog, and neglected to latch the back gate. Bruin ran right into the grillwork of a Mustang convertible.

At the origin of the disorder, in the living room on Saturday morning, Bruin was still healthy and dreaming in Mother’s lap. Mother was sitting in the Good Chair, Father was bouncing a tennis ball on the Persian rug, and I was lying down on the couch. Yes, lying down on the couch, and I suspect the symbolism was intentional, since Mother said I should put a pillow behind my head and my arms at my side, just relax, close my eyes, and talk very slowly. I tried to do what Mother said, I honestly tried, but I was five years old, it was the month of May, and all that morning sun waxed the bay window with quasi-religious light, with reasons to live. It was obvious to me that outside the window was what is known as life, and inside the window was what is commonly referred to as death. I wanted very much to be outside and got up to go, but Father stood, guarding the front door, playing the patrolman for probably the first and last time in his life. Mother said if she could be a little late for her interview, “well, then, you can come right back here and lie down on the couch and listen to me for a few minutes, Buster.” My name wasn’t Buster. The dog’s name was Bruin or, to free-associating friends of Beth’s borrowing our house between marches throughout the sixties, Brewin’. The dog leapt off Mother’s lap, pranced across the Persian rug, and Father opened the door to let her go outside. Beth was strumming Segovia transcriptions and eating fancy cookies at a nice Italian lady’s house in Bel-Air.

“Are you comfortable over there on the couch?” Mother asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

Surely she meant this as an inquiry into the general state of my spiritual life—what sort of reconciliation I’d arrived at between death and desire. Father sat upright and Mother raised her eyebrows when I said, “No, I’m not happy.” She thought she was onto something. She thought I was going to tell her what she wanted to hear.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I’d rather be outside, playing,” I said.

“Oh, right,” she said, nodding. She slumped back in the Good Chair. Father returned to his prone position on the floor.

This wasn’t working out the way she wanted. She wasn’t establishing the empathy she was famous for establishing between herself and her subject. I guess I wasn’t giving a very good interview. Mother went into the den to call the screenwriter and say she’d be a little late, while Father went to take a shower because in twenty minutes he was supposed to pick up Beth at the nice Italian lady’s house in the hills. As he was walking out of the room he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Just relax, Jeremy. Don’t worry about what Mom is saying.” So then, of course, waiting for Mother to get off the phone, lying face down on the scratchy couch, I couldn’t do anything except worry. Mother had just given me a new watch to teach me responsibility and make me acutely aware of my own mortality. Studying its blue face, its white dial, I admired the ease with which the silver second hand made its rounds, the way it couldn’t stop moving if it wanted to.

When Mother returned from the den, she pulled the stool next to the couch, pushed the hair off my forehead, and blew smoke in my face. She said this very softly and sympathetically, she said it while massaging my skull, but what she said was: “Do you realize, Jeremy, that sometimes you talk too fast? Sometimes you’re in just such a hurry to say something the words trip you up. Have you ever noticed that, honey? Sometimes you’ll want to say a word so fast you won’t be able to say it at all or you’ll say the first sound of the word over and over. I don’t want this to become a habit for you. There’s no need to be quite so anxious. People will wait to hear what you have to say.”

“I don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Talk too fast.”

“Sometimes you do,” Mother said. “Not a lot or even often, but now and then you try to rush your words and you’ll stumble over one of them. Daddy has noticed it, I’ve noticed it, and Beth said she’s noticed it.”

“Beth said that?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“She said yesterday the two of you were looking at the map of the United States in the World Book and, when you were racing to see who could name all the capital cities first, you had some difficulty saying ‘Philadelphia.’ ”

“I didn’t,” I said. “She’s a liar.” Beth was a liar, but she was also the winner of the map game when Harrisburg, of all places, rather than Philadelphia, proved to be the capital of Pennsylvania.

I listened to the shower running, to the expansion of the pipes. I watched Bruin press her black little nose to the window and beg to be let back in. I studied the threads in the couch. I computed the fantastic rate at which Mother was removing cigarettes from her pack. I did anything I could to miss what Mother was saying because the main theme of her monologue was: “I just want to show you how easily you can say ‘Philadelphia’ if you’ll concentrate on saying it very slowly and carefully. Come on now, Jeremy, say it with me: Fill-a-dell-fee-a. You can do it. I know you can. Show me you can do it. Say ‘Philadelphia’ for me, honey.”

I tried. God knows I tried. But “Philadelphia” lay like dead weight on my chest, like helium in my head, neither light nor heavy, and yet with definite gravity to it: with downward pull. Sandra says the only way to lose a fear of certain words is to treat them as utterly random and insignificant collocations of sounds; this has the added advantage of echoing a lot of fancy Frog philosophy about how everything, being language, is babble. I tried to visualize “Philadelphia” as “Fill-a-dell-fee-a,” but all I could think was Philadelphia was too far away. It was clear across the country, the country was very wide, and I was too small, too weak, too afraid to make the trip. I was in the Palisades and Philadelphia was in Philadelphia. It was too far. It was definitely out of the question. It isn’t even the capital of Pennsylvania, I kept telling myself, trying to weaken the enemy, but Philadelphia was Constitution City, Locus of Brotherly Love, Metropolis for men who had large yellow farms and long white wigs. Teeth on lips forever, and all I could come up with was an infinitely extended, infinitely painful
Fffffffff.
That’s all. Only that.
Fffffffff.
Nothing more.