Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  To kiss in the sunlight

  And say to the sky:

  Behold and believe what you see!

  Behold how my lover loves me!

  Seeing it, singing it, emerges in this scene as a convincing act of love. I found their songs, despite the tragic outcome of their story, to be almost unbearably stimulating.

  When Anna sings “Hello, Young Lovers,” giving Tuptim and Lun Tha her blessing, the mixture of longing and desire and passion for a connection that isn’t available to her always stirs me. In many ways, the central lines of her song shaped my expectations for love: “I know how it feels to have wings on your heels, / And to fly down the street in a trance.” I remain, at sixty-five, a wings-on-your-heels, fly-down-the-street romantic, as Beverly can attest. Someone moved to tears by the combination of song and physicality that made “Shall We Dance?” sexy, even when sung by a polka-spinning Mildred and Blanche in the synagogue auditorium.

  For me, the love songs held out hope, and affirmed that it was okay to imagine and want the sort of romantic love given life in the musical. They provided me with notions—however skewed—of what might be possible beyond what I’d witnessed or experienced in my life. My parents’ way wasn’t the only way. I think the songs helped me form an ideal of love that involved tenderness, reciprocity, responsiveness, expressiveness, a meeting of mutually open and honest selves. Love in sharp contrast to all the deception, secrecy, posturing, and pretension in and around The King and I.

  In addition to the music, there were also the love stories embodied in the play. As Meryle Secrest says, “The King and I is really a celebration of love in all its guises, from the love of Anna for her dead husband; the love of the King’s official wife, Lady Thiang, for a man she knows is flawed and also unfaithful; the desperation of forbidden love; and a love that is barely recognized and can never be acted upon.” Love was all around, almost all of it hidden, thwarted, subverted.

  A bright cloud of music

  My mother contributed more than her acting and singing talent. She also helped with costumes, designing elaborate crowns for the King and Prince and a rhinestone-studded sash for Lady Thiang to wear while singing “Something Wonderful.” She made a crown for herself as well, worn only around the house to help her perfect Lady Thiang’s regal character and bearing. She fabricated lavish ornaments to be used on the royal table during the big dinner scene. A few nights, she substituted for the regular pianist during rehearsals. After the play closed, my mother occasionally spoke in her character’s pidgin English, unable to let go fully of her royal experience. The hauteur, the aristocratic bearing and expectation, the authority appealed to her sense of who she really was and how the world should see her.

  And within eighteen months, she would—like Lady Thiang at the play’s end—need to inhabit the role of widow. My father died suddenly at fifty-three, in a hotel swimming pool, during a Veterans Day vacation with my mother. Not long afterward, and with the score of The King and I still stuck in my head, I remember walking on the beach and hearing snatches of its songs as though they were carried on the breakers. One line in particular kept coming back, rolling over itself like a wave: On a bright cloud of music shall we fly? Walking home again, I also remembered a line that Anna speaks to her son during the play’s finale ultimo as the King lies dying. Louis asks her if she and the King are friends again and Anna replies, “I suppose so, Louis. We can’t hurt each other anymore.” This seemed so apropos of my parents that it brought a kind of release for me, a glimpse of other ways to think about loss. Clearly, I was having a hard time letting go of The King and I too.

  Jacqueline was my girlfriend at the time of my father’s death. She wore the ring I’d been given to celebrate my bar mitzvah, which had taken place at the same synagogue where The King and I was performed. For months before I gave her the ring, we’d meet after school and walk home rather than ride the school bus. We talked, and I discovered that she was so pale and tired looking because she had a problem in her heart, and that she wanted to live in a big city rather than on an island, and that she wanted to be a kind of doctor I hadn’t heard about, one who listens to people talk about their problems. She was the first person I ever told about the way my parents behaved inside our home, the rages, the violence. One afternoon, having walked her home and then started toward my own, closer to the beach, I saw sunlight wink off the water and stopped, thinking that I really felt comfortable being myself with Jacqueline, and that I needed a moment to become the guarded, watchful person I was at home. And I began to whistle a tune from The King and I.

  Shortly after my father’s funeral, during the seven-day period of mourning known as sitting shivah, I remember a visit from Mildred Levine. She came to our house along with her husband, Vance, and my friend Richard, dressed in black, wearing her crimson lipstick and her blonde hair piled on top of her head, looking glamorous. Our living room was like a stage set, with hard benches for the immediate family to sit on throughout the week, all the mirrors covered in cloth, none of the men in the family shaving, each of us wearing torn black ribbons on our chests. Near the fireplace a table loaded with food looked like the table in the play’s banquet scene. After expressing her condolences and sharing a few memories of my father, Mildred told us that she and her family were moving to California. She was going to try her luck in Hollywood. It took a while, but six years later, now known as Millie Levin, she appeared on television in two episodes of Bewitched, playing a secretary. A female secretary.

  2

  * * *

  SENIOR SPEECH

  I usta tawk like dis. Worse, really. Woise. Because I was born in Brooklyn, then moved at age ten to Long Beach, a small barrier island off the south shore of Long Island. Lawn Guylin. So I grew up speaking with a New Yorky hybrid of two heavy, distinctive, widely ridiculed American accents: Brooklynese, which is spoken through the gut, and Lawn Guylinese, which is spoken through the nose. Yeah, no less an authority than the BBC says Americans judge these particular accents to be “the most unpleasant and most incorrect” in the entire United States. What’s more, even those who speak them “don’t really like their accents either.” And according to the linguistics scholar William Labov, in his book The Social Stratification of English in New York City, “as far as language is concerned, New York City may be characterized as a sink of negative prestige.” Dat hoits!

  It’s culturally tainted speech. Not just pronunciation, but the entire delivery system—tone, cadence, rhythm, inflection, attitude, speed, articulation—is implicated. People hear the accent, hear you say I p’fuh Wawluss Shtevens’s oily voice when you mean you prefer Wallace Stevens’s early verse, and they make negative judgments about your intelligence, character, class. About your level of couth, even if you can recite the first lines of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” by heart, saying Kimplaysunzees udda pinwah, an late / Cawfee n’arnjizz inna sunny cheahr instead of “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.”

  The Wall Street Journal reports that if you “exhibit an abrasive Brooklyn accent, you risk derailing your career because you appear unpolished.” Actors with staunch New York accents end up playing gangsters, hard hats, punch-drunk boxers, cops, bartenders. It’s a hard, grimy, pounded sound, a street-sound that in 1946 led Edmund Wilson, in Memoirs of Hecate County, to express his disdain by calling it “an accent worn down on the lips of the crowd as the long Brooklyn pavements had been by their feet.” Mashed, raggedy, tattered, low. In the 1993 movie Life with Mikey, a character mocked for calling Sunburst cookies Sunboist cookies responds by saying, “Hey, I’m from Brooklyn, you’re lucky I can speak English.”

  C’mon, fuggedaboutit!

  My father, a chicken butcher born and raised in Brooklyn, called the toilet duh terlet. He usually called me Flerd instead of Floyd and said that the infielder Billy Cox of the Dodgers played toid rather than third. When our food was cooked in olive earl, it was good enough to serve to the Dook uv Oil. That phonetic re
versal of oy and er—the upgliding central diphthong that turns curl to coil and coil to curl—invites derision, as William Labov notes: its “use in any context is now heavily stigmatized.” Labov also says that “on radio and television, stereotypes of middle-class and working-class New York City speech have traditionally been used for comic effects.” No wonder he found that “the term ‘linguistic self-hatred’ is not too extreme to apply to the situation.”

  A serious teenaged boy, desperate to be considered suave and polished and well read, I didn’t need to provoke mirth on the basis of my accent. But I sounded coarse. My father (and then I) had the full array of stigmatized quirks in addition to the upgliding central diphthong. We had the dropped h and r, the dropped t and g, that made people like us say I tawt you wuh goin wit me, young fella. We had the trifecta of dem, deez, and doze; substituted aks for ask; turned pork into pawk. If my father didn’t like the way I looked, he’d ask whut’s amattah witchoo? To which I would reply nuttin. Fed up, he’d say, ahhh, g’wahn or yuh faddah’s moostash, and flick his hand at me. I’m tellinya duh troot heeah.

  These were all regular elements of our household speech, along with the intensity, emphasis, volume, and gesture that made it seem as if we were always arguing, always jabbing our fingers in people’s faces. Pugnacious, edgy, volatile. My parents were, in fact, pugnacious, edgy, volatile. Between themselves, and with their two sons, they were brutally explosive, filled with fury, and because of their accents they sounded dangerous even when they weren’t. There was this consistency between my parents’ action and manner of expression that has long darkened my sense of New York speech and still makes me tense when I hear it anywhere.

  It wasn’t my father’s fault that he sounded the way he did. He came by his accent almost as naturally as he’d come by his lack of height and hair, or the butcher’s trade his parents and older brother also shared. His father, who left the village of Volozhin in Russia’s Pale of Settlement at the age of twelve, in 1892, had died a decade before I was born, so I never heard him speak except in the voices of his six children. They all sounded like my father, even the sisters who married wealthy, upper-class men. And as I remember, my father’s mother, from Bialystok in eastern Poland, often didn’t use words at all. She spoke with eloquent sighs and grunts and moans, all of which had accents. The depth of her dismay was easily determined by the duration and pitch of her oyyyyyych, her hmmmmmmm, her phphphphphhhhh. It was speech reduced to pure inflection, and I would sometimes hear sounds like hers in certain kosher delicatessens or in my father’s poultry market. Though he’d finished high school, gone on to own a live poultry market, was considered a sharp and savvy guy, my father retained the accent of his kin and clan, and his boyhood was no breeding ground for the proper enunciation of Standard American English.

  But of course there was more than my Brooklyn father and neighborhood influences contributing to my accent. My mother, who left school after the ninth grade, was the daughter of more expressive, more outgoing eastern European Jewish immigrants. They were furriers with an uptown clientele, and their densely accented English, seasoned with Yiddish and topped with Polish, seemed chewed rather than spoken. They talked animatedly, waving their hands, my grandfather struggling to keep his false teeth from popping out as he carried on conversation. He would hear horns honking on the New York City street below his apartment window and say I kin told difference from boss and tsixie-kep jist fum de sound horn when he meant that he can tell the difference between a bus and taxicab just from hearing the sounds of their horns. He would order me to dill de cotts instead of deal the cards when we played chin rommy. My grandmother would call me Floit as she zoived de zoop which she admitted was vundafel and my grandfather said was werry gutt.

  They sounded like the speech-challenged adult students preparing for naturalization exams, the source of so much humor in Leo Rosten’s 1937 novel, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, in which the title character speaks of George Washington “fightink for Friddom, against the Kink of Ingland, Kink Jawdge Number Tree, dat tarrible autocrap.”

  My mother grew up amid these accents while living in the Bronx and then Manhattan. She aspired to stardom as a singer-actress on stage and radio, aspired to aristocracy in marriage, and eventually claimed both stardom and aristocracy when they were denied her. To support this claim, she concocted a wildly theatrical accent that combined those of movie stars she considered royalty, such as Zsa Zsa Gabor or Marlene Dietrich, with those of French chanteuses, Russian ballerinas, and imaginary Romanian countesses, adding occasional Britishisms adopted from her cousin-by-marriage, Jean Alfus. All shot through with New York and Yiddish overtones. I can still remember her gasping when she saw a dirty vase in our living room, putting a hand over her bosom, and saying oy dahlink, that goooorjus vaaaahze is so doidy.

  I didn’t stand a phonetic chance. According to British linguist David Crystal in By Hook or by Crook, accents “get established very early in life. Children have them by the age of three.” Ay muddah, I gotta go to duh bat’trum. And though it may be true, as psychologist Steven Pinker says in The Language Instinct, that “children of immigrants always grow up with the accents of their peers, not those of their parents,” my mother and father had heavily accented peers in their New York backgrounds. So did I. Where we came from, and who we hung out with, remained essentially working-class Jewish people. Our way of talking didn’t really move toward conformity with middle-class norms of speech because we were seldom among people who spoke it. This was true during our Brooklyn years, when we lived in a large apartment building and socialized primarily with family, neighbors in the building, and a few people from the local synagogue or my father’s world of butchers, bakers, longshoremen. It was also true during our Long Beach years, both before and after my father’s death in 1961, when most of our friends and neighbors were themselves recent working-class transplants from Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, or Manhattan.

  Once we relocated, my speech added some Long Islandisms to the already bizarre blend: the doubled vowel that turns hat into hay-at, the drawling aw that turns a mall into a two-syllable mawull or wash into warsh, the added h that turns Skloot into Shkloot, the gulped er that turns her into huh. Right, the dapper young man warshed up, den waugh a hayut to meet huh at de mawull.

  This all made for a presentation of my teenage self that was raw rather than refined, much rougher than the smooth guy I hoped to project. I was Archie Bunker. I was Ralph Kramden with a little bit of Joey Buttafuoco thrown in. I was freakin’ Bugs Bunny, the Jewish version. Yet I wanted so earnestly to separate myself from the environment in which I was raised. I wanted to assert my difference from parents who screamed and fought, angry all the time, who hit their children, never read books, traveled no farther from New York than Connecticut. I was obsessed with being unlike them, being my own self, growing more sophisticated and worldly, getting away from my family. But I sure sounded like I belonged right there with them.

  George Bernard Shaw’s 1914 play, Pygmalion, is about the London phonetician Henry Higgins, who teaches a tattered flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle to lose her Cockney accent, thereby calling forth her inner Lady, transforming her character and life. Transformed itself into the 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, where “The Rain in Spain” turns an elocution lesson into a memorable song, Pygmalion focuses on the liberating power of accent-free, standardized speech. Also of manners and dress, but the main point is that proper speech is the key to overcoming socioeconomic, class, or cultural obstacles to success and self-realization. Without her Cockney accent and ways, Eliza is able to pass as a duchess at a high-society ball. Change speech and you not only change destiny, open up opportunities, but you change something vital inside as well. Metamorphosis through correct diction.

  In the play’s preface, Shaw writes, “For the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impos
sible nor uncommon.” But, he warns, “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first.”

  When I was seventeen, it was Mrs. Selma Sherman who did the thing scientifically to me and to about two dozen other members of the Long Beach High School senior speech class in 1964–65. I’d been hearing about senior speech and Mrs. Sherman for two years, since moving up from junior high, though I’d never met her in person. She was voted “Favorite Teacher” every year. According to Echo, the high school yearbook, senior speech was “one of the most popular courses” and “an important pre-college preparation.” It was also supposed to be easy, at least in terms of workload, just a few speeches to prepare and deliver. All good reasons to sign up, but my attention was really caught by the course description: “It is vital to speak well for what you believe. On this basis, Mrs. Sherman guides her senior classes toward a mode of speech that will gain respect for them in the future.” Speaking well, gaining respect; my main motivation for enrolling was an increasing sense of urgency about sounding different, sounding right.