Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Mr. Kirby got hit by as much as I did, and as he walked me back to my seat he said, “Someday you’re going to learn, Mr. Zorn, that if you ask for trouble, goddamnit, you’re going to get trouble.” I hadn’t asked for trouble. I’d only asked for a chance to say what I wanted to say, and when I said it I was ecstatic and the rank and file were agitated. I crawled underneath the chair and, watching food fall at my feet, listened to Mr. Kirby announce: “Assembly, dismissed; conduct, disgusting.” The teachers took their sweet time suppressing the riot. I don’t think they much liked my speech, either. Out of the crowd, ostensibly on business, with a camera around her neck, a note pad in her hands, and tears in her eyes, came Mother, shouting: “I got it. It’s all on film. You were beautiful, Jeremy. My little Demosthenes—you’re going to be famous!”

  9

  MOTHER’S ARTICLE was rejected. I didn’t become famous. I lost by a landslide. Miss Hewitt got so fat she had to enter a hospital. Miss Gordon received four out of every five votes but was unable to establish the Shasta daisy as the state flower and was defeated in her bid for reelection by a girl from Sausalito who thought Currier should install soft-ice-cream machines in the cafeteria….

  Fame? Virgil stuttered. He wrote and rewrote the Aeneid the entirety of his adult life, averaging one hexameter a day. In his will he told Tibullus to burn the poem because the last eleven lines of Book XII didn’t scan properly. One can’t help but want to go back to the Aeneid with greater patience after hearing that. In his first speech as prime minister, Winston Churchill sometimes paused as long as five seconds before crucial phrases. The House of Commons thought he was employing silence as a rhetorical device. He was trying not to hyperventilate. Later he said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” He adored alliteration. There’s hardly a sentence he wrote that doesn’t swoon in sound. Handsome Loud Blazer, instructor of Psychoanalysis and Literature at London Prep, once said, “In every staccato rhythm, every pinched phrase, every aborted clause, the alert reader can hear echoes of Mr. Maugham’s speech defect.” Which strikes me less as literary interpretation than pedagogical sadism. Demosthenes, of course. Moses, of course, whose Ten Commandments tablet God rived in half to remind him he couldn’t control language. Aristotle. Aesop. Charles I. George VI. Erasmus. Marilyn. All tellers of tales really, in one medium or another, and all people known by only one name, as if they’d contrived a way to contract their tongues’ Tower of Babel to a manageable logo.

  The pressure that underlies stuttering also generates the ambition to succeed—to succeed hysterically and on the same field as the original failure: somewhere within the world of words. Very few stutterers I’ve ever met yearn to become glassblowers. Promptly after losing the presidential nomination, I joined the chorus. Mother didn’t think this was a very good idea, since singing was very low in her cultural hierarchy—vocalization being one of the performing rather than creative arts—while Father, bouncing back nicely from Montbel, thought it was an even worse idea: all the rehearsals were pointing toward a Christmas concert in Ghirardelli Square. I didn’t care that we sang hymns in praise of someone else’s savior. The material didn’t matter. What mattered was coming to school an hour before classes started, donning my red robe, standing on the stage with a hundred other red robes, and being unable to hear my own voice: being part of a long song outside myself.

  What mattered even more was a soprano named Cindy Du Pont de Nemours, who prompted the first real romantic passion in my life since I fled Faith five years before. Cindy Du Pont de Nemours was driven to school in a black limousine, was the only girl at Currier to wear either nylon stockings or high-heeled shoes (which nearly got her expelled but ended up causing a furious new trend in fifth- and sixth-grade fashion), and would get people Gauloises if they asked very nicely, but what I loved about her was that during rehearsal she wore the collar of her robe up. The white collar on her red robe: she wore it up. I never asked if she knew the white collar on her red robe was up. I thought maybe that was the style in Montparnasse or maybe she just liked it that way. With her collar pressed to her cheek, French pastry stuffed during quick breaks into her mouth, and her hair tied in an auburn bun, she looked like a saint.

  She would say, “I like zuh azelete.” She actually talked like that. She added a Z to every word she possibly could, so I took to calling her Z, as in “You looking forward to the Christmas concert, Z?” or “Hey, Z, g-g-got any croissants left?” Her English was nah zo good, but she sang beautifully, without the trace of an accent, and she was our only soloist. Whenever we rehearsed one particular song, whose title I forget but whose theme was quite clearly the beauty of the Christian night, Z would step onto her very own carpeted platform and descant on the beauty of Christian night, then sashay back into the soprano section while the conductor held her hand and said, “Merci, mademoiselle, très bien!”

  The conductor was a voice coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I suspected him of spending the first hour of his morning at Currier for the exclusive purpose of escorting Z back into the soprano section after she sang her solo on the beauty of the Christian night. Everyone else he treated with a contempt bordering on repulsion. He had a wooden leg and would limp up and down the stage, tapping people on the head with his cane when he thought they weren’t giving it their all, clapping his free hand on his good leg to some distant rhythm that only he heard. He also had a gold front tooth; he liked to stand next to one of the floodlights and let that tooth glint into your eyes and say, “I’m sorry, but under no circumstances can I call that singing.”

  He never said that to me. He never told me he didn’t like my singing. I was in a special section of the chorus, way in back. It wasn’t exactly alto, wasn’t exactly tenor. It wasn’t bass. It was a special section for boys whose voices cracked on every eighth note, boys who had no real business being in chorus. To us he’d say, “You’re doing fine. Not so loud, though. A little softer, okay, guys? You’re our muted harmony section, our low melodists in the background. I want you to be singing that close”—he’d hook his cane on his left arm, holding his right thumb and forefinger an inch apart—“to a whisper.” Then he’d hobble up to the front and ask Z what song she wanted to sing next.

  On the night of the Christmas concert Father said he felt like he had his sea legs all the way back but also said he wouldn’t be caught dead listening to the children of the rich sing Christmas carols to white-shoed tourists in Ghirardelli Square, and Mother’s opinion was that the whole ball of wax was too vulgar for words. They both ended up going, of course. Only Beth didn’t come. She was typecast as a frustrated little fat girl in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and couldn’t skip dress rehearsal. What was this aspiration of hers to become an actress? It would have been about as likely as me winning a slot on the six o’clock news. Once she even tried out for cheerleader and came home crying; I served her dinner in her room and tried to come up with reasons to live.

  While Beth was spreading malicious rumors concerning the art teacher and Miss Brodie, I was singing ballads about a virgin birth. Christmas in San Francisco never has anything to do with snow or sleigh bells. The moon hung above us soft and full, the stars were white light on a warm black sky. We sang atop a three-tiered platform to the patrons of a shopping plaza in the Square. The conductor had his own little stand. Some people, when they got a look at his limp, figured us for a needy group and rang quarters at his feet. I’m sure he would have kicked the money back to them if he could have. He seemed a little distracted, but everyone else was happy. All the parents, shoppers, and visitors applauded our performance taking pictures, requesting numbers they used to sing when they were kids. Right below us, a water fountain rose pink and fell blue. Above us, on the terrace, sounds of crystal and silver came from an outdoor café. The boys and I in the muted harmony–low melody section must have gotten carried away by the festive atmosphere because we forgot about our instructions to remain musically anonymous and sang so loud that, even
though we were standing in the last row of the last tier, the conductor came up to me during intermission to say: “I could hear you.”

  I thought the chorus in general and my little coterie in particular was having its best night ever. I assumed he was complimenting me on knowing when to let out all the stops, so I said, “Oh, thanks. You could actually hear us all the way in back, out of all those voices? Great.”

  He was propped against a lamp. With one hand he was twirling his cane, and with the other he was trying to get his gold tooth to refract the light of the lamp and blind me in the left eye. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want to hear you. I thought I told you to be that close”—he let go of his gold tooth, pressed his thumb and forefinger together—“to a whisper.”

  “You did,” I said. “B-b-but I thought, what with all the water f-f-fountains and people and all the applause—”

  “A TV crew is supposed to be here shortly and there’s a chance we’ll get on the eleven o’clock news. On the rest of our songs, I want the five of you to mouth it.”

  “Mouth it?”

  “Yes. Just move your lips. Don’t sing any of the songs, don’t say any of the words. Just mouth it, okay? I don’t want to hear any of you coming through on the news.”

  I looked up. Mother was waving. Father was snapping pictures with his Nikon. They both seemed so much a part of the Christmas spirit that I didn’t want to ruin their night. Somehow I’d been appointed spokesman for the Last Tier Quintet. I said, “Okay, we’ll mouth it.”

  I think the idea of hearing themselves on the eleven o’clock news threw dread fear into the hearts of the other four fellows. They didn’t seem to mind mouthing it and, as a show of solidarity, I went along with them. We opened our mouths wide, gestured meaningfully with our eyes, and shook our arms with baritonic temerity while singing in silence. The finale was Z’s solo on the beauty of the Christian night. She stood in the center of a floodlight, caroling into the camera. The boys and I in the back row, covered in darkness, mouthed the words right along with her. There’s something about overheard harmonies, songs sung over there, that lends them more weight than music played on your own headphones; the rapture of the soul in anguish, etc. Afterward, Z rushed up to me and said Channel 7 promised the concert, or at least part of her solo, would appear, if not tonight, sometime later this week. Then she introduced her parents, who made Mother and Father look like provincial street peddlers by comparison.

  Z said, “Zuh conzert: it wuz—how zoo you zay—a zukzess! Wazn’t it, Jeremy? What iz zuh matter? Why iz zuh azelete zo zilent?”

  I’ve never easily accepted my sweethearts’ successes—surely this is little more than an aversion to Mother’s lofty accomplishment in periodicals—and after that night I never felt the same about Christianity, either. I blamed my humiliating silence upon Christendom in general and Ghirardelli Square Christmas shoppers in particular. Chanukah was in its fifth night. Suddenly I was devout.

  I’D PERENNIALLY LOVED the candled incantation—Baruch atoh Adonai Elohaynu melech ha’olom, asher kid’shawnu b’mitzvosawv v’tzivawnu l’hahdleek nair shel Chanukah—because I didn’t know what it meant and it was pure, tribal sound. Now I wanted to know what it meant, what Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur meant, what was contained in the Talmud and the Torah. Now I had something like patience for Father’s explanation of how this night was different from all other nights; something other than contempt for Beth’s Hebrew Youth Group; something other than cynicism for Mother’s assertion that an aunt of hers on her mother’s side was related to Louis Brandeis. The dripping wax on the menorah, the spinning dreydl on the kitchen floor—these things that I had hated with all my heart I wanted to love. As dinner concluded, I announced that as a demonstration of my faith I was going to fast until the end of Chanukah.

  Father was opening a present. He put down the package and said, “But you don’t fast on Chanukah. Chanukah is a celebration. You fast on Yom Kippur, Jeremy. That was in October.”

  “And you never fast past noon,” Mother said.

  “Yeah, Jeremy, by ten-thirty you’re already filching cookies from the cabinet,” Beth said. Beth would often use words like “filching.”

  “I’m going to fast until the end of Chanukah,” I reiterated.

  Father had opened his present and didn’t know what it was. It looked like a miniature guillotine.

  “Don’t you know what it is?” Mother said, opening her own present and blowing smoke into the sacred air. “It’s a little device I got at Dubon’s that pumps up your balls when they go soft.”

  Beth looked at Mother. Mother looked at Beth. Together they broke into a terrific fit of the giggles. Father held up the guillotine for closer inspection and looked like he was going to cry.

  “Oh, don’t look so put upon, Teddy. Your tennis balls. It’ll pump up your Tretorns for you.”

  Father brightened.

  “Oh, how nice,” Mother said, gripping a little black gadget. “A battery charger for my tape recorder. Beth, did you think of this?”

  Yes, she had. Beth had thought of this. Beth thought of everything. I’d thought of fasting. Friday night until Tuesday morning: it was a long time. I thought I could do it. While my family ripped gift paper and ate halvah, I’d swallow air.

  The impulse of starvation is barely distinguishable from a yearning for death; I understand that now. I see my eleven-year-old self standing before a burning, bright mirror in the bathroom, my absurdly small hands pressed together around my absurdly small waist, my head aching with hunger, my feet stuck with sweat to the blue tile floor, my white crotch impatient for the production of pubic hair. I step into the shower, opening my mouth, letting the cold water gush until I gag, then climb into bed, lying on top of the sheets, shivering, reading and rereading a book called Rabbit, Run because it was about basketball, tearing off the top and bottom of each page and chewing gray paper until morning. Not until I started researching senior thesis possibilities did I realize the author of that book built such ornate syntax to retaliate against his own stutter.

  For three consecutive nights I performed the same ceremony, but famine’s no fun, dying’s too arduous. Monday, on my way home from school, I bought a bag of groceries, snuck in the back entrance to my bedroom, and feasted on Muenster cheese, lean pastrami, pumpernickel bagels, Beer Nuts, no beer but a half-gallon of grapefruit juice, mint chip ice cream, Nilla-Vanilla Wafers, apples, oranges, bananas. A fraction of the food I left in the bag and deposited in a drawer underneath some sweaters, but the large majority of it I inhaled, then I collapsed and slept until Mother came downstairs and asked if I wouldn’t like to break bread with my family on this, the last night of Chanukah.

  The room was dark. Mother stood behind me like some shadowy Eurydice. I rolled away from her and pretended still to sleep, but she turned on a light, pressed a damp rag to my forehead, again invited me upstairs to the banquet. “No,” I said, pushing the rag away from my face. “I’m not breaking my fast until tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s not healthy. You’ll starve yourself to death. You’re skinny enough as it is. Besides, this is the last night of Chanukah and your father got you quite a nice present. Please come up and join us,” Mother said. She stomped one of her feet on the floorboards.

  “No. Tomorrow night I’ll eat with you, but not tonight.”

  “Please, Jeremy. For your father’s sake if not mine. He can’t wait to see the look on your face when you open your present.”

  “He can keep the present. I j-j-just want to stay down here and read Rabbit, Run.”

  “Parts of that book are pure pornography. You shouldn’t be reading it, anyway. You should be upstairs with your family, opening presents, feeding your face, having a good time: being normal.”

  Then something quite abnormal occurred. Mother was a reporter. She was trained to be on the lookout for abnormal occurrences. When a trail of red ants started to make its way up her leg she noticed it instantaneously. S
he let out a shriek. Brushing the ants off her skirt and felling them on the floor with the heel of her boot, she asked me what in the world ants were doing not only in my room but up and down her hose.

  “Oh, you know, the cold. Ants like to come inside when it gets cold.”

  “But red ants and so many of them?” Mother asked, following the ants from her foot to the floor, the floor to the door, the door back to the bureau, and the bureau to the bottom right drawer, in which green ice cream was dripping on gold sweaters, half-eaten apples were turning brown, and the red ants of San Francisco appeared to be holding their semiannual convention.

  Mother was delighted. I swore I’d broken my fast only a few hours earlier, but she refused to believe I hadn’t been gorging myself the entire weekend: her little martyr wasn’t so stoical, after all. She hugged and kissed me, laughed a good deal, and cleaned the drawer. We walked hand-in-hand upstairs to the dining room, where Father sat atop a purple bicycle, pedaling in place. “Happy Chanukah,” he said. “A brand-new Schwinn, just for you. Look, Jeremy: it has three speeds, a bell, a basket in back, two reflectors, an air pump, and a chain lock.”