Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  We also had gamblers on the periphery of the family, skeptically admired but also held at arm’s length by their more bourgeois siblings and cousins. In an age when, out of courtesy, we called all familiar adults “Aunt” and “Uncle” whether they were related or not, Uncle Will and Aunt Grace stood out. They moved around, a lot, not by their own choice. Will and Grace left Philadelphia under a cloud and resettled in Miami Beach in the early 1950s, there to open a bridge and poker club and escort the local widows on gambling cruises to Havana and St. Thomas. The sound of Grace’s manicured fingers on the ivory mahjong tiles at poolside (“Three bam!” “Four crack!” delivered in her whiskey baritone voice) possessed an inexplicable sonic splendor, still memorable decades later. Grace, always smoking her unfiltered Camels, spent an hour a day putting on her makeup. She lasted well into her nineties, still wobbling on her high heels to make an entrance at the country club or even the delicatessen. A couple of more distant louche relatives, equally sketchy, played the numbers in Atlantic City. Some got run in for tax evasion. Every family needs a handful of dubious characters to add some romance to suburban reality.

  Even more than names, bodies, and smells, I remember sounds. I remember language. Everyone talked about everything—except their inner lives, that is. The family directed all talk outward, to and about the world. Like all lucky children, I must have heard the same family tales and legends—no one really knew or cared if they were true—countless times. “Tell me again,” I remember asking my grandmother, “about how your father hid the five younger sisters in the back room after the family scandal.” The scandal: Lena, the second daughter, married before Rae, the eldest. Only when Uncle Sam, fresh off the boat, took Rae for his wife did the family feel unashamed enough to let the other girls out into the light. Eudora Welty reminisced about sitting under the piano in Mississippi, listening to the grown-ups talk. She attributed her own storytelling successes to early story listening. I can still hear, through the years, my family chattering: assertively, ironically, simultaneously. Language was the best way to make one’s mark. I hardly knew it at the time, but language became my life’s leitmotif.

  Call it phonophilia: love of sounds, at least certain ones. Phonophobia is its opposite. Whenever I read or hear accounts of life in the traditional WASP, Scandinavian, Calvinist, or similarly repressed household, a family with silence as well as secrets, I sigh with wonder and some envy. All families have secrets, some well hidden, but not all maintain silence as the default mode with regard to everything. There was no silence in my house, or locked doors for that matter, nor was there any in the homes of my grandparents, with whom we bunked—my father, mother, and I—before we got a house of our own. My father had left the army in 1946, when I was less than two years old. For the next two years, we divided our time between his parents’ light-filled house near the northern end of Philadelphia’s Broad Street and my mother’s widowed mother’s gloomy tenth-story apartment some blocks away. Whatever temperamental and social differences between the two sides of the family, one thing remained constant: Silence was suspect. It went with sleep.

  My father’s sister, a young naval bride in 1944, wrote to her parents about the eye- and ear-opening events at a Sunday dinner at the Officers’ Club on the base where she and her husband were stationed. My uncle, a tall, handsome lieutenant, sat at one end of the table, to the right of the admiral’s wife. My aunt sat at the other end, to the right of the admiral himself, who must have been delighted with this leggy, blond, talented, and vivacious Veronica Lake look-alike. Liveried military servants ladled out the soup, then served salad, then the traditional roasted haunch of animal accompanied by the overcooked vegetables that decades later Julia Child taught Americans to forgo. Sherry preceded the meal, and strawberry shortcake followed it. The servants poured coffee from a silver service. Then the gentlemen retired to one room, the ladies to another.

  My aunt had only recently escaped from Philadelphia. What most impressed her about the event was not the food. She reported her amazement to her parents: “We had Sunday dinner at the Admiral’s table. Only one person spoke at a time.” She had left behind not only bagels and lox but also high-pitched, raucous Jewish excitement. At home, the men and women might have engaged in separate conversations, but they never occupied different rooms before or after dinner. The family had, for starters, fewer rooms. Compared with what Aunt Wilma knew from home, this dinner with the officers was like Babette’s Feast, the 1987 movie based on Isak Dinesen’s story about the collision of repression and exuberance, self-denial and hedonistic delight.

  No one in our family had ever heard, or even imagined, such a thing: “Only one person spoke at a time?” Doesn’t nature abhor a vacuum? The only way that one person alone would be speaking would be if everyone else—against all mathematical probability—had a mouth full of food. At home, the custom of the single speaker never took hold. “Politesse” did not come easily.

  Does simultaneous, as opposed to consecutive, speech indicate vulgarity or exuberance? Despair or joie de vivre? A lack of attention or an excess of it? Unresponsiveness to others or heightened concern? If you interrupt someone mid-sentence, do you force him to raise the volume and the speed of his delivery? Neurologists who have tested the brain waves of people listening to music, in concert halls or at home, conclude that it is not the music itself but the pauses within the music that prime the brain for further activity. The silence, not the sound, constitutes the real neurological event. In conversation without pause, there is no event. The conversation becomes a nonstop easy-listening station: all babble, all the time.

  In families like mine it was easy to confuse nervous anxiety with genial enthusiasm. Sometimes it was hard to tell one from the other. A raised voice could mean affirmation, love, enthusiastic greeting, or just as likely a warning about tripping and breaking your neck. If danger lurks constantly—where you go, or with whom, what you eat, what you wear, what the weather looks like—then prescriptions and proscriptions have to be delivered in stentorian tones. Hollering signaled love. “Watch out, or you might die” was the essential message. This style of vocalizing had charm when you saw it represented in movies or television. I think of Gertrude Berg’s alter ego, the affable Yiddish yenta Molly Goldberg, who “yoo-hoo’ed” her way across the tenement air shaft from her window to her neighbor’s. In reality, it made my ears tremble and my flesh creep.

  Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan,” a nostalgic lullaby to old New York, describes the clamor of peddlers on the Lower East Side as “sweet pushcarts gently gliding by.” We glamorize the past, smoothing over its difficulties, making the noxious delectable. The desperate need of rag merchants, clothing salesmen, knife grinders, and fruit vendors to eke out a living becomes the stuff of melodious sentimentality.

  Spoken language, even more than writing, brings us together and sometimes pulls us apart. The majority of all the people who have ever lived have been illiterate. But barring physiological or psychological infirmity, or elected vows of silence, everyone has talked. And talk means more than necessary communication, expressions of needs and desires, affirmations and denials, commands and compliance. I’ll go so far as to deem conversation the essential human art. Even the origin of the word signifies its status as a marker of civilized life: from Latin, via medieval French, an act of living or keeping company, of turning about with other people. The “con” prefix joins us together; the “verse” signifies our turnings. Recently, standard black English has created a contemporary linguistic back-formation—a verb from a noun from a verb—to “conversate,” suggesting a more engaged, active form of communication. I imagine that conversating qualifies as a more animated form of conversing.

  Language came early to me. First words, then sentences. I was like a pony out of the starting gate. As a firstborn, prodded by and responsive to the attention of an extended family, I performed with ease. I knew polysyllabic words from an early age. A now ninety-year-old relative (another “aunt”) has reminded
me that when I was three, I looked at my six-month-old second cousin and called her a “Technicolor baby.” I had just seen my first Walt Disney cartoons. I came upon the dictionary and the almanac at the same time. I memorized words and facts with equal greed. Exposure to the wittily packed librettos of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas came shortly afterward. “I answer hard acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for paradox, / I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus”: The Major General’s patter song from The Pirates of Penzance won me over at the age of nine both by its jaunty melody and, even more, by those mouth-filling words. I had as little an idea of acrostics and elegiacs as I did of Heliogabalus, but I made it my business to find out who and what they were.

  Not knowing the meanings of certain words, names, or sounds has almost as much power as learning them, of mastering a language. Curiosity impels us. Such arcane researches had no practical or even social benefit, but they gave pleasure, not just the pleasure of showing off by performing, but something deeper, a combination of the physical and the imaginative. I learned that words have sound and meaning. Although I didn’t know this at the time, I was also discovering the essential charms of poetry itself, with its combination of the semantic and the non-semantic. Rhythm, rhyme, and music: melody enhances the meanings of words and the power of communication.

  How do we converse, or conversate, with one another? Like clothing and names, speech is style. Cultures as well as individuals have different standards of talking, making sense, going back and forth. Conversation, too, is a kind of performance, subtler and not hewing to a script. And it has a history. It has changed over time and in different places. It may be intimate—between lovers or close acquaintances—or it may be something more public. Here are some adjectives that do not apply to the best conversation: “one-sided,” “monopolizing,” “condescending,” “preachy,” “abrasive,” “hectoring,” “loud,” and “rude.” However many people it involves, conversation is, like chamber music, an exercise in intimacy, of give-and-take, of what Plato, who recorded the talk of one of history’s first and finest talkers, called “dialectic,” a word etymologically related to “dialogue.” Conversation moves forward, or back and forth in starts and stops, like drama itself. That philosophy, democracy, and drama all began in fifth-century Athens says a great deal about the far from incidental relations among them.

  Many of the great talkers—Oscar Wilde and Samuel Johnson at their most clever—would not qualify as masters of conversation. They were performers, delivering bons mots, aphorisms, put-downs, and clever witticisms de haut en bas. The person who excels in conversation has mastered the art of listening as well as speaking. Monologuists and epigram makers belong to a different species. Speechifiers are linguistic bullies. Talkers, on the other hand, relish the game itself. Someone serves, and another person responds. The volleys can engage more than a pair of participants. Pronouncements tend to put an end to conversation rather than enliven it.

  One can trace the outlines of the history of conversation from Plato’s Symposium, the original feast of drinking, talking, philosophizing, and flirting, to Trimalchio’s stupendous banquet in Petronius’s Satyricon, then through the salon culture of prerevolutionary France and the coffeehouse culture of eighteenth-century England, to the late-night talk show apparatus of American television, and from there to Internet chat rooms, where virtual people have replaced live ones and where cloaked anonymity often substitutes for honest openness. Animals communicate with one another for practical purposes—mating, protection, aggression—but only human beings talk for the sheer pleasure of it.

  Stephen Miller’s 2006 Conversation: A History of a Declining Art takes an amiable stroll through “talk” from ancient Greece to the present American moment. Miller sounds like a modern Jeremiah, lamenting the fact that the latest technology—beginning with television and moving through the newest avatars of computer devices—has severely undone the conditions of, and the prospects for, “civilized” discourse. Like any person given to nostalgia, Miller looks back to golden ages of conversation, to Enlightenment France and Britain above all, and finds in today’s world an absence of the charms that permeated earlier cultures. Such regret is probably misplaced. Not only have witty banter, sharp riposte, and cordial disagreement always been in short supply, but everyone with an ounce of politeness, tolerance, and fellow feeling can attest to conversations he has had that have challenged, amused, and satisfied him in equal measure. Everyone has known great and amusing talkers even if everyone is not a great talker himself. Listening makes its own demands and has its own satisfactions.

  Henry Fielding called conversation “this great business of our lives.” I would go further: conversation is the cornerstone of democracy and of commerce. We conduct business through conversation. I have been assured by friends who have international dealings that the Japanese and other Asian peoples are adjusting slowly to, or even resisting, a culture in which Skype and other kinds of teleconferencing have come to replace face-to-face personal interchanges. Traditionally, in a one-hour business meeting in Japan, the first fifty-nine minutes consist of pleasantries and cordial compliments, and the actual sealing of the deal occurs only at the end. Can we dispense with the niceties and cut to the chase? Apparently not: you need those first fifty-nine minutes to ensure the last one.

  We conduct business through talk, but we also derive infinite impractical pleasure from chatting. It binds us to one another. Not the screaming we see on television, nor the banal bantering with stars and starlets we see daily—and nightly—but the ordinary give-and-take we have with neighbors; friends and relatives; strangers encountered on airplanes, on trains, and in bars and pubs; and, through the miracle of serendipity, people we run into on the street. Good humor and surprise, the willingness to be pleased or to change one’s mind about matters large and small, signify a cheerful, sanguine disposition. Flexibility of temperament, combined with the ability to listen as well as to speak one’s mind, without harassing one’s mates, ensures civil decency. It’s not only good fences but also good talking that makes good neighbors.

  Dancing, that most useless of human activities, teaches both grace and manners. People of a certain age were trained in the drill of the ballroom. It is everyone’s obligation to invite everyone else to the floor. “May I have this dance?” begins the game, and the gentleman leads the lady (in the new age, gender reversal is legitimate) for a four-minute excursion, after which he says “Thank you” and escorts her back. Conversation will perform much the same function, helping us with grace and manners, but only if mutual respect matches the courtesy of the back-and-forth ritual. Growing up, we were told that politeness forbids a frank discussion of certain topics—money, politics, religion, and sex, above all—but those are the topics most people want to talk about. They are certainly the ones that everyone has knowledge or at least opinions about. When Lytton Strachey uttered the word “Semen?”—as question or challenge—to Vanessa Bell after he had noticed a stain on her dress, her sister, Virginia Woolf, said, “We burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us.” Bloomsbury conversation had entered a new era. The modern age had begun. Camp came out of the closet. More than a century later, sex is no longer hors de combat at the dinner table, or anywhere.

  Other prohibitions remain. At some genteel men’s clubs in London, New York, and wherever Anglophilia retains its grip, certain quaint customs and modest restrictions still prevail. I have witnessed them. One does not conduct business of any sort at lunch. Even waiting for your host at table, you are not permitted to take out a pen and begin writing. Writing is work. Reading is permitted, but note taking, like using a cell phone, is forbidden. And if you are a club member who arrives for lunch unaccompanied, you sit at the “long table” with other solo members, some of whom you may know but others not. Introductions are frowned upon. You are men of the world and are expected to keep up your end of a conversation wit
hout injecting unnecessary trivial personal information, like your name. And you don’t ask questions; no “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?” Better to begin with the weather and proceed to the news, always mindful not to trample on your neighbors and their points of view. In some cultures—traditional Japan comes again to mind—the very asking of a question is considered the height of rudeness. One works through indirection, teasing out someone’s preferences and responses, rather than asking for them directly, succinctly.

  Keeping matters light can also keep them trivial and mindless. Good talk maintains a rhythm, like a piece of music, a ground between highs and lows, the serious and the amusing, the philosophical and the personal. A thread must weave itself logically through the conversation with the appearance of natural inevitability. And there must also be surprises, turnings away, changes of pace and tone that enliven and lead unpredictably to new matters.

  At a smart dinner party in Dallas some years ago, a group of ten took to a tastefully appointed table. As servers came in with a first course, our hostess disapprovingly announced, “Oh, I told Susie I wanted the green china, not the red, this evening.” Without missing a beat, I observed unpremeditatedly, “Those people in Bosnia don’t know the meaning of hardship.” The hostess blushed and then laughed. Disaster averted, the meal proceeded smoothly. The red china disturbed neither the soup nor our enjoyment of it. All of us could tell the difference between real trouble and what we might call First World problems. Laughter punctuates the best conversations, always. Social communication thrives on unexpected improvisation.

  A laissez-faire approach to talk—allowing it to flow aimlessly but seamlessly—has much to recommend it. Like a stream of consciousness, the stream of talk goes in its own unpredictable way. An alternative conversational gambit looks more like state planning. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the so-called autocrat of the breakfast table, was not the only convener or autocratic choreographer of talk. Some hosts or, more likely, hostesses enjoy orchestrating a conversation. Many times I have sat in numbed attendance waiting my turn to be called on by Monsieur or Madame Professor Host or Hostess. This is the Dinner Party as Command Performance. One doyenne of Dallas society calls this Jeffersonian conversation in honor of the master of Monticello, and she insists upon a single conversation, which means that the table, regardless of the number of participants, has become a graduate seminar, with the hostess making inquiries of everyone on whatever subject she has deemed worthy of attention. This modern version of a Socratic dialogue (along the lines of peremptorily declaring “Let’s talk about beauty”; “What is the ideal city?”; or “What defines a good life?”) has much to recommend it, at least in theory. In practice, the frequent slowness of response, not to mention the potential awkwardness of the diners’ opinions, makes for the conversational equivalent of pulling teeth. As does the fact that people speak in turn, with no volleying between them. What we get instead is a series of little monologues, not a Socratic dialectic—thesis-antithesis-synthesis—with its constantly refining, contradicting, revising, slow unsteady movement. Sit-and-deliver performances tend to sobriety rather than sparkle. One welcomes modest fireworks at the dinner table.