Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Matusevitch $160 Gogan $95 Stone $155

  Alphabet Soup: “S.” “Alphabet Soup” being a mediocre category in which the only determinant is that the answer will begin with an S, Miriam finds herself retrieved from what she can now recognize had been the onset of a paranoid inkling, in which the quiz show’s topics today would all prejudicially favor Wax Mustache’s strengths: Barbershop Quartets, Innovations of Ogilvy & Mather, Cabinet Members of the McKinley Administration. She decides to will herself to confidence concerning the letter S, an old companion impossible to allow oneself to become alienated from. Irwin Shaw, for instance, or Subsidized Housing, or Students for a Democratic Society. Nina Simone. Jonas Salk. Bobby Seale. Cardinal Francis Spellman. Joseph Stalin. The System. Sex. Schmutz. She bets twenty-five, again on “Who,” this time at even odds. Matusevitch outbids her in this same category and thus by the rules she is denied even a question in the round.

  With Miriam dying on the vine in plain sight between them, Graham Stone, questing for an ancient language of the Middle East, fumbles away the obvious “Sanskrit,” guessing at “Sikh,” while Matusevitch scores easily by completing the name of the gangster known as “Dutch”—“Schultz,” another reply she could have given in her sleep. Is it possible that her strengths and his are precisely the same? Miriam has never in a decade been unfaithful to her husband, but there is a time and place for everything. Can she beckon to Art James for a time-out and lure Matusevitch back to the greenroom? She may have to fuck him to wipe the smug mustache off his face after all.

  Matusevitch $200 Gogan $95 Stone $130

  Cities in Crisis. The announcement of this category falls on Miriam’s ears as a sanctification of her presence here. She feels herself the deep soul-occupant of a city in permanent crisis, a true home beyond regret. If “Cities in Crisis!” had been the name of a quiz show, Miriam Gogan might be its all-time champion, or perhaps its host. On the F train, journeying here, Miriam had seated herself beside a Puerto Rican or Dominican man, somewhere in his late fifties she’d guessed, dressed in the innocuously tragic best suit of someone who’d not purchased a suit in thirty years, a gray ballroom-dancer’s special, the pants with marks where they’d been scorched in the ironing of creases. The man carried a large photograph framed in heavy silver scrollwork, a black-and-white studio shot of a young woman wearing a chunky glistening brooch on a high-necked dress. Dead daughter or dead wife or dead sister—the man and his photograph embodied a shuddering woefulness, transforming his share of the crowded subway car, so that it held some premonitory air of the funeral home of his likely destination.

  The F, though Miriam now employed it to hop from SoHo to Rockefeller Center, wasn’t in any intrinsic sense a phenomenon of Manhattan, no matter what an oblivious Manhattanite might think. The line threaded far quadrants of Queens, Jackson Heights, Kew Gardens, acres only marshland when those workers’ precincts had first been plotted and the stations named. After a bent glance at Delancey, that mire of Jew legend, at the south end of the island the train exited to probe those by-only-the-dead-known wards of Brooklyn, to putter at last to Coney Island, open-air catacomb of leisure, the dirty boardwalk and beach—the F being the vent from Queens to the sea, if you happened to want to reverse the whole immigrant procedure at the last minute. The point being the man with the photograph might have source and terminus at any one of dozens of outposts unimaginable to Art James or to her opponents. He only happened to dwell with Miriam and the others there, in the same passage through the earth two hundred feet below Rockefeller Center, on his way to and from other realms entirely. Had he exited and come to the air with her there at Fiftieth Street he’d have been zapped to dust by the sunlight. As if in that man’s name and on his behalf, Miriam, seeing that “Where” is marked at three-to-one odds, selects it for a bid of the maximum she is allowed, fifty dollars. Cities in Crisis? She might not know the names of each and every station of the dead but she has surely mastered any that would occur to the writers of the questions for The Who, What, or Where Game.

  The accountant Stone has opted for “What” at a lower price and so precedes her. Art James reads a question: “Malvina Reynolds wrote the song ‘Little Boxes,’ describing the standardization of suburbia and its houses, which she calls ‘little boxes.’ According to the song, what are the little boxes made of?” At this, Miriam nearly fidgets out of her pantsuit. Naturally anyone who has ever heard the song, as the accountant plainly has, is capable of doing as he does now and blurting “Ticky tacky!,” but that is not the point. Upon his answer Miriam leans into the accountant’s ear to inform Graham Stone, stage-whispering too for the benefit of Art James and anyone who might care to know, “I’ve met Malvina Reynolds!” It was at a party at Dave Van Ronk’s apartment, ten years ago now. Miriam had paid the aging folkie, an Old Labor type more of her mother’s generation, no attention whatsoever.

  “Have you?” says Art James. “Well, I wonder if you’ve also met the originator of this next quote—that would be fortunate indeed!” Art James has not for nothing reached this station in life. “Let’s find out. English author and social critic J. B. Priestley gave the following description of one American city, and I quote: ‘Babylon piled on Imperial Rome.’ To which city did he allude?”

  “That’s my question?” This, it dawns on Miriam, will be edited out. As will her breach, a moment earlier, of protocol and frame—for, surely, she leaned into Graham Stone’s individual shot. Neither will appear when the program is broadcast. The Who, What, or Where Game, whose daily smooth unfolding affords such fine narcotic to Miriam as a viewer, is a construction, not a document of reality. The liberating realization is that it is possible she can say anything at all.

  Art James’s rictus admits nothing. “That’s your question.”

  What is J. B. Priestley doing in Miriam’s Cities in Crisis? “Los Angeles?” she says. She realizes she has flashed on the obscene and marvelous illicit book her gay friend Davis Storr keeps on his coffee table: Hollywood Babylon, by the unforgettably named Kenneth Anger. She should be presented a quote by Kenneth Anger, or Davis Storr, anyone less antique than J. B. Priestley. But she feels satisfied with this attempt.

  “No. New York.”

  Miriam has betrayed the man with the framed photograph on the subway, allowed her category to be stolen from her. She’s gone on record flubbing a question whose answer is her very birthright. This will not be edited out. Which blond singer buys herself a silver bangle at the Conrad Shop on MacDougal Street each time her group has a top-ten hit? Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Weathermen Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson were the sole survivors of a March 1970 bomb blast that destroyed a townhouse on West Eleventh. Name the political organization that set the bomb. Trick question—the bomb was set by the Weathermen. Or so they say. Attica inmate Winston Moseley participated in the 1970 riots, violently suppressed by the Nelson Rockefeller administration. Moseley was notorious for which 1964 Kew Gardens murder, in which thirty-eight witnesses failed to come to the aid of the slowly dying victim? Kitty Genovese. The murder was the basis of which 1967 song by folksinger Phil Ochs? “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” Which childhood friend became so insufferably obsessed with the Kitty Genovese murder that it stopped being worth bothering to call her anymore? Lorna Himmelfarb. But no, the opportunity is impossible to revise or distend. “Cities in Crisis” will not come again. Miriam goes sullenly unprotesting. For the first time she thinks it might have been better not to get stoned this morning. For the first time she considers, and is astonished she has not considered it before, that it is not only her friends who will watch this episode when it is broadcast—in visualizing her triumph there had been only the image of herself with Stella Kim and others at the Carmine Street commune watching in celebration—but that Rose will be watching as well.

  Matusevitch $200 Gogan $45 Stone $155

  Spanish Expressions. Miriam, returned to actuality, identifies little upside here. Miriam bets twenty-five on “What” a
t even odds and finds herself, mercifully, outbid by Stone. Rose exhorted Miriam to learn Spanish as a child, arguing how it would serve her to know the second language of her city—in fact, when they wander together in the old neighborhood these days, Rose goes among the Hispanic residents of the tenements on Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth, under the el, speaking in her painfully overenunciated and patronizing sidewalk-acquired fragments, inquiring about “escuela” and insisting the children call her “abuelita” and so forth, a ritual rebuke to Miriam’s failure to acquire the language. To meet her requirements in school, Miriam took two years of French. This, a rebuke to Rose, for whom French is the second language of the aristocracy and also specifically of the Vichy collaborationist anti-Semite she suspects is hiding in any Frenchman, whereas the Spanish flavor of Fascism is properly tragic, commemorating noble remorse at the vanquishment of the Lincoln Brigade. Ironic, then, that the language-flavor of so many of Miriam’s present and coming causes—Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua—is Spanish, too, so in her participation in bilingual meetings and protest demonstrations she is continually thrust against the awkwardness and embarrassment of her old resistance to that tongue.

  There lay a deeper explanation, one Rose could never be made to understand and Miriam only partially gleans herself: Miriam’s recoil from a second language derives from Rose’s aspirational exclusion of her own Yiddish, the language of Rose’s parents and the life of her childhood, and a language that Miriam hears not in the Sunnyside Gardens apartment where mother and daughter live together, apart from a word or two so common as to be available to the Irish and Italians as well as the Jews, so common as to be heard at times in the movies or on television. No, Rose puts a premium on proper English. No outer-borough accent is acceptable for the girl. After-school elocution classes were not optional—Miriam at ten and eleven years old rehearsing passages from Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence and eventually sent home with a shellac 78 recording to give evidence of successful graduation from the course. Any Yiddish more extensive and authentic Miriam heard only around the fringes, in the shared backyards, and on visits to her aunts and uncles, the wider Angrushes, for whom it was a matter of no shame whatsoever to mingle a steady stream of fermisht and shteigs and mishpocha and tsutcheppenish and ongepotchket into their palaver, nor to imbue even fully Anglo-Saxon sentences with a syntactical curvature in the shtetl direction.

  In other words, it was Rose who, despite herself, imbued Miriam with a horror of second tongues, residue of her own primal and suppressed bilingualism. If, at one level, by refusing Spanish Miriam was trying not-to-be-Rose, at another she was trying to-be-Rose-trying-not-to-be-Rose-who-speaks-Yiddish. What sense can be made of this? For the defiant prole, why struggle so, to talk like one of the swells? For one so eagerly brandishing the wounds of an exiled people, wherefore such revulsion at the native tongues of the underclass? Well, along with a helpless belief in propriety, and a fear of filth and disorder, a grain of the Communist one-worlder resided in Rose’s exalting of a pure English. Shedding the muck of Yiddish, you might shed religion and history. You might make yourself ready for the radiant future. Was this confounding? It was. It might even be fermisht, the kind of fermisht that caused your daughter to study French instead of Spanish, then flunk French.

  Peter Matusevitch now scores on “Where,” naming “La Paz” as the Bolivian city known as “the City of Peace.” Miriam’s gratitude at being spared the “What” category then suffers injury as Art James poses the following to Graham Stone: “The expression ‘Venceremos,’ used by many Latin American political groups, is the Spanish translation of a well-known motto used by many civil rights groups in this country. Can you name that three-word phrase?” Stone, stroking his blurry goatee, smugly replies, “We shall overcome.” Perhaps the least-inspiring utterance of this particular phrase to enter the annals of human speech. She could find it in herself to begin hating Stone, too.

  Matusevitch $235 Gogan $45 Stone $185

  Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. The category exists solely in her mind. In the gulf that seems to yawn between transitions Miriam rewrites the show to her preferences, imagining compensation for her shit odds at a comeback, stoking her amusement and outrage. All—compensation, amusement, outrage—are for the moment indistinguishably melded into a tactic for enduring to the next question, should she ever be faced with one. In 1967 federal judge William Harold Cox of the Southern District of Mississippi sentenced a group of Klansmen convicted under the Force Act in the murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in Mississippi, three years earlier. With what memorable phrase did the judge subsequently explain his actions? He said, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved.” If it is not that Miriam had actually gone down to Mississippi during that Freedom Summer, neither is it that she had been indifferent to going: She’d been specifically prevented from doing so. Now Miriam’s failure on The Who, What, or Where Game (for it is to be failure, she sees now) recalls to her her interview with the Congress of Racial Equality recruiter, at the start of that Freedom Summer.

  Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were buried in an earthen dam in the woods, and their bodies located only after a massive FBI search of a hundred-square-mile area of backwoods Mississippi. Before their discovery, how many bodies of unidentified black men, presumably other victims of Klan lynchings, were unearthed in the search? Untold numbers, of which no one could bear to keep count. Miriam, having come to fairly regard herself as a whiz at games and puzzles, genius taker of standardized tests and filler-out of standardized forms, master of negotiation with bureaucracies both of the New York civic infrastructure and of the Organized Left, and above all a dervish at one-on-one interlocutive repartee, at always having the answers, always clearing the hurdle, thanks to the long ferocious experiment in Rose Zimmer’s laboratory of childhood—her collapse on the quiz program calls up that other shameful moment when she’d failed. The encounter in CORE’s offices was a follow-up, actually an appeal she’d requested after being stupefyingly denied in her application to join the Mississippi Summer Project. To enlist in one capacity or another was 1964’s sensation, after Martin Luther King’s march on the Mall, where they’d all been the summer before, Tommy a little burned up to see Bobby Dylan get the gig, but that was how it went with Dylan then—he’d rocketed from the human pavement of their world. You had to get accustomed to spotting his gawky figure, constellation of elbows and harmonica holder, in the distant sky. Tommy took it personally even if he shouldn’t. Andrew Goodman was a drama student at Queens College in the early sixties. For thirty-five dollars at two-to-one odds, did you know him personally? No, I wouldn’t say personally, but I did find out later from some friends in common that we’d picketed LBJ together at New York Pavilion at the World’s Fair, a couple of months before Goodman was killed … Mario Savio, also Queens College, was supposed to be there as well …

  Miriam’s examiner in her self-instigated appeal was a slim, proud, scholarly Negro close to her age named John Rascoe. At CORE headquarters he’d led her to a windowless, closet-size office to sit in scuffed white plastic chairs, no desk between them, while he paged through her application file as if he’d never read it, though it held nothing new besides a letter of support from Rose. Miriam at twenty-four technically needed no parental waiver, as would have a college student like Goodman or so many other volunteers, but once she’d been turned down she figured a letter from Rose couldn’t hurt—Rose pounded out, God only knew, a strong letter on her cursive manual Olympia. Miriam, waiting for Rascoe to unfurrow his brow and ask her a question—much as she waited now for Art James to throw her another opportunity—felt in that small office the ready expansion of her persuasive self, the insinuating worldly aura with which she’d grown accustomed to seducing down the doors before her. Really, who better to go and transform Mississippi? Miriam was a sovereign in the cause of equality, a legacy from Rose. So for the council’s error to be repai
red, she merely let her certainty be felt by Rascoe. Talk was hardly needed, really, except as a medium for conveyance of this mood. She’d been welcomed to the Corona Park parlor of the Reverend Gary Davis, listening as the blind singer plucked his guitar, while the reverend’s wife served them coffee and sugar cookies. To mention such a thing might nearly be unfair to John Rascoe. He looked about as uptight as they come. Now Rascoe coughed into his hand and explained wincingly that the council had “not seen fit to revise their estimation.”

  “It’s sort of crazy, you couldn’t find someone more ready for whatever kind of thing is likely to go down down there—”

  “Miss Gogan, the council examiner’s impression appears to be that you’d be surpassed by no one in your zeal for the effort.”

  “Mrs. Gogan. I’ve been on all sorts of front lines.”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. I don’t doubt you’ve nerves of steel. The conditions for our workers”—he coughed again—“this is a situation where what’s sought is a certain temperance, a capacity to abide with the local population, and in many cases precisely a willingness not to assume a position on any kind of ‘front line.’ Instead one must allow oneself to be led by the black field directors, even to put oneself primarily in a listening attitude with those you meet in the field.”

  Black or white, a classic bureaucrat in the making. An egghead. She couldn’t resist tweaking him. “Field is a funny word in this case, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think it’s funny at all.”

  “Listen, I’ve lived in all kinds of privations, most recently in secrecy in illegal loft buildings, and in fact my whole life fearing the knock on the door of both the Nazis and the FBI, which I was taught to believe were more or less the same thing. I’ve attended more meetings beginning before I was even born than you can possibly imagine. As far as a listening attitude, you can consider yourself to be staring at a gigantic walking human ear, like from a monster movie. Nobody’s had to do more listening than me.”