Dead Languages (3 page)

“I don’t feel like saying that word right now,” I said.

“What word?” Mother asked.

“That word.”

“What word?”

“You know.”

“Give it a try.”

“No,” I said. “Not now. Maybe later. Not right now.”

Mother shook her head in sadness and disgust. She withdrew to the den to call the screenwriter, canceling the interview, and came back carrying six boxes of flash cards. She waited until Father left to pick up Beth, then kicked off her shoes, cozied up next to me on the couch, and told me to lay my head in her lap. I did what she advised. For what seemed like forever, she flipped flash cards in front of my face. I was supposed to say what each picture depicted, which was a sympathetic gesture on her part since it was a game we’d played before and I’d always enjoyed. She assumed it would restore confidence in my ability to communicate, but one by one the tangible things of the world vanished on me. I couldn’t say a chair was a chair, or an umbrella was an umbrella, or a zebra was a zebra. As Sandra likes to point out, what you can’t identify doesn’t exist; no stutterer can say his own name. Mother must have flipped four hundred flash cards, and not one card could I call. I wanted to do what Mother called “caption the picture,” but my mouth refused to open. The words weren’t there.

Beth and Father returned sooner than I’d expected. When Beth walked in the back door humming the new notes she’d learned, the contrast—Beth the musician, Jeremy the mutation—was so striking I buried my head in Mother’s lap and burst into tears. It was a wonderful feeling to produce such loud and continuous sound after I’d been silent for so long. A truly excellent cry redistributes the bones of the body; with the cessation of sobbing, I felt more completely cleaned out than I’ve ever felt before or since. It’s a difficult emotion to explain, but it was as if the most complete emptiness had suddenly passed into purity. I thought the ugly language living in my soul had finally been killed. The future held in store only flashing phrases; perfect sentences; burning, noble words.

Father was so embarrassed by my behavior he changed back into his tennis clothes and left to go bang a white ball against a green backboard. He was never very good at the game but terribly devoted to it, and I can remember hardly a day when he didn’t come back from the courts with a tin of balls in one hand, his Jack Kramer in the other, a sweaty smile on his face. Always attentive and eager to help, Beth stopped humming, marched straight into her room, closed the door, and played morose ballads for me on her guitar. She played well, though she always played well. She was a very gifted little girl. The dog had scooted inside when Father opened the back door on his way to Rancho Park; it was all over me now, scratching my neck and licking salt from the tears as they streamed down my face.

“You can go outside and play now,” Mother said, sitting on the couch, handing me Kleenex, stroking my arm. “You still have some time to play before dinner, Jeremy. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. You know that, honey. I’m very sorry. Please don’t let anything I said bother you, because you’re going to be just fine. Most of the time you speak beautifully. Give me a smile, Jeremy. Don’t you want to go outside and play?”

This was something of a first for me, to stay put rather than rush outdoors. When frolicking outside, it’s fairly common for most children to experience what might be termed the opposite of the pathetic fallacy: to feel, after a few hours of fun, that the dirt, the grass, the trees, the sun, the sky are simply a part of them, are buried deep inside their bodies. But I’d never felt that way before about a living room. The scratchy couch, the Persian rug, the Good Chair, the unsteady chandelier, all these supposedly inanimate objects suddenly took on a life of their own and started playing house in my heart. For anyone to feel like a living room is a minor disaster, but for a boy-child it’s the worst feeling in the world. The late afternoon sun dissolved into the artificial light of the overhead lamp. No, Mother, I didn’t want to go outside and play. All I really wanted to do was close the curtains, turn off the lights, put my head on a pillow, and ascend. No such luck. “Come help me take out the garbage,” Mother said, “and I’ll make whatever you want for dinner.”

MAYBE I’M
deluding myself when I say this scene was the inception of the problem, since it’s not as if from that time forward the only thing I’ve been aware of has been my disfluency. That’s simply not the case. But, until Mother mentioned it to me, I’d never heard those hesitations that are now habit. Apparently, other people had. It offended them, they felt compelled to tell Mother, and she felt compelled to tell me. Mother didn’t create the catch in my voice. She only heard that something was wrong and, like any good reporter, went straight to the source.

Sandra says I must have become aware of the impropriety of my speech earlier than age four but have chosen not to remember it. She says the “traumatic nexus surrounding disfluency is invariably established no later than three and a half.” Maybe so. I couldn’t say. The tableau in the living room is the earliest trauma I can come up with. Sandra’s eyes light up and she gets giddy all over when I tell her, though, how solid middle class we Zorns were, because a disproportionate percentage of sputterers comes from the ambitious bourgeoisie, the rising gentry who, in the considered opinion of our finest historians, prompted the English Revolution. Mother would like to have covered the beheading of Charles I and Father would like to have fought at Philiphaugh, but I don’t think either one of them realized how unrevolutionary they were, how upwardly mobile, how extremely middle class. The filthy rich are so rich they hire a private tutor to instruct little Theodore in the elusive art of elocution; the filthy poor are so poor they don’t know where little Leroy is, let alone care how he communicates; but the filthy middle class are so middle class they call little Jeremy onto the couch and ask him why he talks so fast.

“Look at the graph,” Sandra will say, pointing to some piece of paper on the wall. “Statistics don’t lie.” I suppose they don’t. They show most stammerers coming from families on the move, families that don’t have a fireplace but are seeking fame and fortune. The new chairs in the breakfast room, the well-swept patio, the maid on Friday, the stuttering son: these, apparently, are the true totems of creeping capitalism. The rich will always be rich, the poor will always be poor, but the middle class is always in motion, is always in a state of suspended transformation, is not necessarily tomorrow what it is today. All that social sliding throws some children into a tizzy and their confusion comes out in strangled articulation.

The last thing I would want to do would be to ascribe this fascinating phenomenon to mere class conflict—titubation as the burden of the bourgeoisie—but I do want to acknowledge the cultural context of my disfluency. A voice from the burning bush commanded Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, but Moses was “slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” When the time came to inform the Israelites of God’s command, Moses’ brother, Aaron, “spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses.” I always imagine Moses standing in the desert, trimming the bush, and pleading: “C-c-come on, Aaron, why d-d-don’t
you
tell them?” From Moses on, Jews have worried about words.

“Don’t you see?” Father would say. “Jews have always been in exile. We have had to be contemplative in order to survive.”

“So they read books and looked for loopholes in the law,” I’d say.

“Don’t be silly. Kafka, Proust, Freud, Marx, Einstein: all Jews in one way or another. You should be proud they are a part of you.”

“I am,” I would say. “I really am.”

But I’m not. I really am not. I’m tired of hearing that you can flee so many times before you start looking for more long-lasting shelter, that if you have been trampled by life you can triumph in language, that the only recourse to everything is to read and write yourself into existence. It’s no longer romantic to me, this Hebraic hunger for words. I hear the ceaseless clickety-clack of Mother’s typewriter at the beach; I see a photograph of Father hiking in the High Sierras with a biography of Alger Hiss sticking out of his hip pocket; I imagine Beth masturbating to the pictures in the middle of
Modern Drama Review.
I see, I hear, I imagine these things, and I’m depressed beyond despair.

SHORTLY AFTER
Mother’s death I happened upon her desultory journal, and perhaps the two most passionately wrought entries concerned her father, whom we called Puppa. The first one was about how he, unlike the rest of us poor fallen fools, had “style.”

I’ve seen a photograph of this automobile at the moment of its debut, with its doors swung wide open like wings. It appears boxlike and beautiful. Still, was it our fault Mother couldn’t maintain a stiff upper lip when it came to housework? Why, when she lost Puppa’s gold watch to an alligator at the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, did she have to behave as if time’s winged automobile had come to a screeching halt forever? Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday because it was Puppa’s favorite holiday. The highest compliment she ever paid me was that my values reminded her of Puppa’s values, whatever they were supposed to be.

He once owned a junk shop on Pico Boulevard. Mother liked to insist he had been a very great man and a model of moral integrity because he never sold anything that, with a little tinkering, wouldn’t work reasonably well, and when the business was sinking he didn’t hesitate to sell the shop to a colored man at a time when it was very unfashionable indeed to do business with a colored man. The only thing she kept in her safety box at the Bank of America, downtown branch, was a ring put together out of Puppa’s tie pins. You would have thought it was sapphire plucked out of the sky by Adlai Stevenson in an excitation of wit.

In Puppa’s presence, of course, I could hardly speak. For my failures of communication he had two principal cures: a cup of coffee with six spoonfuls of sugar because my body was deficient, he thought, in dextrose, and a tumbler of bourbon before dinner because I would stop “yammering,” as he called it, once I acknowledged I was a man and not a little boy. To the coffee I thrilled, but to the bourbon I had headaches. I wasn’t a man; I was a little boy. In the few years I knew Puppa he impressed me as having very unusual habits: when he shook hands he would extend an egregiously strong and prolonged grip, and when he walked down the street he’d stop and stoop over to examine a clod of dirt in a crack in the sidewalk, a discarded math assignment, a forty-five-dollar grocery bill, a trail of red ants, a very used postage stamp. When I heard that he’d died I ran downstairs to my basement bedroom and tried to cry, but all I thought, as Mother comforted me and told me Puppa had loved me most of all, was that I no longer had to shake his hand for half an hour, I no longer had to bend down with him and study candy wrappers, I no longer had to burn my tongue on his bourbon.

Mother’s second journal entry went:

No, you weren’t, Annette, and this qualifies you as an angel of light. I love the notion of “we”—Mother and the dog existing as the most closely knit couple in our family—and my banishment to hell based on feelings ascribed to me by her. It’s unfair to overscrutinize someone’s left-open logbook, but fairness was a doctrine that moved Mother only when she was ensconced in her office at the ACLU. And there it moved her to tears. At home she was always unfavorably comparing my father to her father. It ruined her relations with her husband, it ruined her relations with me, and I’m not so sure it did her any great favors in the workplace either.

When Puppa was still alive we used to have to visit him every Sunday and after brunch he’d always bring out a purple bowl with gold veneer, hold it aloft, hold it there for a moment, tilt it forward, spilling just a few coins at first, then turn it upside down until all the change clanged as it fell to the floor: rare old pennies, dimes with dirt in their rims, buffalo nickels, quarters smooth as table tops. I would take my mountain of money and buy cameras, watches, tape recorders, and he’d say: “Gadgets! You’re buying gadgets, Jeremy. You should buy something you can use, such as a wrench.” Hair had a way of blooming out his ears.

One afternoon, after Puppa had poured his purple bowl of accumulated change over my hands, I brought a white bank bag of the money to my friend, Charles, since he was two years older and could help enumerate nickels. Charles’s parents owned and edited a pottery magazine at a time when pottery was nowhere near the apex of popularity it attained later on and pottery magazines were even less popular than they are now. Catty-corner to a condemned church and up six flights of shaky stairs was the Ellenboegens’ pottery magazine office. Cover the typewriter, clear the desk, put away the proof sheets, and you were in the Ellenboegens’ living room; lift a curtain and you were in the kitchen. I used to dread visiting Charles because there were always earthenware vases lined up on the floor and ceramic necklaces hanging from the doorknobs. Invariably I’d trip over a vase or brush against a necklace. Mrs. Ellenboegen finally decided it was in her best interests to take a minute and escort me through the work space, past the kitchen, and into Charles’s bedroom in back. She knocked on Charles’s door and told him I was here.