Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Mother’s second journal entry went:

  Late afternoon, walking Bruin through the eucalyptus trees. Thought maybe we would see Jeremy coming home. Would he stop and wait or pretend not to see us? Feeling of rejection crept over me—knew he would not want to walk home with us. Thought shifted to Puppa. I always ran to greet him, no matter where: baggy, dirty pants; sweat-stained shirt; battered old hat, but I wasn’t ashamed of him, was I?

  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.

  Charles had plump stumps for limbs and wore black high-top Keds, striped shirts, tight tan shorts, and a Dodgers cap. When I entered, he was filling his room with smoke—he was seven years old and smoking half a pack of Salems a day—because there was so little else in it, only his unmade bed, a dusty bureau, and an immense bookcase filled shelf after shelf with past issues of Fire Wheel.

  “How much this time?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Thirty. Maybe forty.”

  “Forty?”

  “Maybe forty,” I said, holding the white bag of money above my head in obvious and poor imitation of Puppa, balancing the purple bowl aloft. I didn’t have Puppa’s patience. Instead of spilling the coins slowly, I tugged open the drawstring, spun around the room, and spangled the floor with silver. Charles could never show any enthusiasm for my money. He always had to finish his cigarette first, then rise slowly from his bed and say, “Well, I guess we had better gather up the coins and get them counted.” He loved counting the change, then writing on the front of the bag how much it all came to. He loved telling me how much I was worth.

  Charles took a broom from the closet and swept the coins into a spectacular pile in the middle of the room, where we sat down and started counting or, actually, he counted aloud and I listened because I couldn’t keep up with him and made mistakes. He thought it would make more sense—just this once, since the booty was so big—if he handled the arithmetic. “Two thousand ducats,” Charles said. No, of course Charles didn’t say that, but he should have, sitting cross-legged on the floor, happy atop the pile of petty cash. He’d just separated the coins into homogeneous groups and counted a few dollars when his mother knocked on the door, entered the room upon receiving no response, and said, “Charles, dear, your father and I are correcting galleys in the living room. Will you and your friend be so kind as to keep it down?” Mrs. Ellenboegen always talked like that. She was very formal and dignified, even though she was only managing editor of Fire Wheel.

  “Okay, Mom,” he said. “We’ll keep it down.” As a parody of cooperation, he started whispering each number while counting the pennies. I laughed at first, because that’s what Charles wanted me to do, but also because there was something very funny about the sudden transition from loud broadcast to low hush. After just a few minutes, though, I was in rapture over that whisper. I lost all comprehension of sense—Charles could have been counting backwards from a thousand, for all I knew or cared—and listened only to sound: the incessant scrape of copper sliding across wood and clinking in his hands; the unnecessary and thus incantatory repetition of “Three dollars and sixty-three cents, three dollars and sixty-four cents, three dollars and sixty-five cents, three dollars and sixty-six cents, three dollars and sixty-seven cents”; but most especially the beginning of my best friend’s baritone: the still small voice of a seven-year-old boy, the faint tone in which secrets are told.

  It’s difficult to describe a whisper. Sandra says it’s “sibilant speech with little or no vibration of the vocal cords.” I love the scientific way she has with words, but she doesn’t do much to explain why a shiver shot across my back when Charles started whispering, or why I still get the chills whenever I hear a man lower his voice. It’s the closest I come to inversion, this worship I have of soft masculine sounds, and it’s probably why I spend so much time in Powell Library: in the fourth-floor stacks, the only acceptable mode of discourse is the dead hush. For other people it’s the cadenza of a concerto, the longest line in a letter, the love scene from a sentimental movie, the final stanza of a perfect poem. It’s not as if I’m incapable of responding to such stimuli, but for me the only surefire trigger of electric needles down the spine is a man’s whisper.

  Charles kept asking me to go into the kitchen and bring back a glass of water for his throat, which was parched from smoking so many cigarettes. I did what he said, but I knew what was going on. Every time I left the room and returned, the stack of quarters seemed slightly smaller until, at the end of the day, I could practically count the quarters at sight. I didn’t care, though. That’s the thing. I honestly didn’t care. Charles could have deposited all the quarters and the silver dollars, too, in a long-term savings account, and I still would have brought him a tall glass of ice water—I would have brought him a bottle of Château Margaux ’52, if that had been what he wanted—just to keep him talking in that soft voice that was tickling my ears and making my body tingle all over.

  He finished counting the change, tying the drawstring, and writing on the bag how much it all came to, so I took my loot and said goodbye to my friend, who asked me to bring him one more glass of water, and to his parents, who didn’t have time to glance up from their galleys. I walked through Los Angeles in the dark. Halfway home I caught my foot in a grate and spilled $47.21 down the sewer. I listened to a storm of money on a pool of mud. The sewer was a wishing well. I’d lost so much money I was entitled to at least one wish. I wished Charles would whisper to me forever.

  4

  A COUPLE of years ago I got talked into attending the premiere of a movie in which the lost daughter, leaving St. Louis for Hollywood to make her debut in dirty pictures, was named Flora del Presto. This kind of overt nominal symbolism we now find offensive since it fell out of fashion shortly after the publication of The Faerie Queene. But th
e first girl I ever knew and loved was named Faith. I didn’t make that up. That was just her name.

  Faith and I were preschool painters. Our parents drove us to studio openings, gallery shows, museum exhibits; bought us oversized, overpriced art books and triple overstock in paint supplies: chemically treated rice paper for work in watercolor, palettes round and rectangular, tubes of tempera, tiny brushes for oil touch-ups, high wooden easels, charcoal pencils, pure white smocks, sketch pads.

  We took these sketch pads everywhere we went, painted what we saw, and immediately exchanged pages so we knew what we’d seen. We mailed purple finger paintings to each other. After school at her house, we’d eat cookies her mother made for us and do still lifes of the bowl of fruit on the dining room table, the bottles of liquor in the den cabinet. She was much better than I was; it would have been impossible to be much worse. When she won a newspaper contest by drawing a likeness of Abraham Lincoln better than any six-year-old in Los Angeles County, she used part of the prize money to buy me a paint-by-numbers set, which I nevertheless accepted with appreciation because it came straight from her heart.

  Father had been offered a job as public relations director for the Jewish Welfare Fund of San Francisco, and Mother had convinced The Nation she’d be able to carry out her duties as West Coast correspondent just as well, perhaps even better, in Northern California, so we were moving to the Bay Area. Faith knew I was leaving—she kept painting pictures of cable cars on the Golden Gate Bridge to help herself imagine what my new neighborhood would be like—but I had put off telling her goodbye until the actual day of departure. Father parked across the street from her house and told me to run in and out real quick with my rolled-up painting because he wanted to be well on the way north before the five o’clock rush.

  Faith’s mother told me she was at work in her studio and wasn’t to be disturbed, but I banged on the garage door and told her who had come to visit. Her hands and lower arms were covered with various colors, her hair was pulled back, and she was wearing jeans and a white smock, so she didn’t look her best, but I could have watched her forever as she glided around the garage, mixing paints. She’d thrown a sheet over the front of the easel. Brandishing my painting like a baton, intimating a trade, I asked if I could take a peek.

  “No,” she said.

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Just a little landscape.”

  I took a deep breath, concentrated on the cobwebs in the corner, and said, “I came to say goodbye.”

  “You’re really going?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Really, really going, forever and ever?” “Yes.”

  She threw up her hands, splattering paint on my traveling pants, and said, “Well, goodbye.”

  I couldn’t take much more of this without volunteering to be her life-long apprentice. I said goodbye and turned to go, but she wrapped her purple-green arms around my neck, kissed my cheek, and said, “I love you, Jeremy.”

  “I’ll miss you so much.”

  “I really, truly love you with all my soul,” she said.

  “My Dad’s waiting. I better go.”

  She took her arms off me and stepped back, straightened her smock. Then she said, “I’ve already told you I love you, Jeremy. Can’t you say, ‘I love you, Faith’?”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “‘I love you, Faith,’” she insisted.

  This little scene in the garage occurred only a few months after my futile attempt to say Philadelphia in the living room. Stutterers have a tendency to generalize their fear of one word that begins with a particular sound to a fear of all words that begin with the same sound. In the space of the summer I’d effectively eliminated every F from my vocabulary, with the exception of the preposition, “for,” which for the time being was too small to incite terror. A few weeks later, my fear of F ended when another letter—I think it was L—suddenly loomed large. But at that moment, early October 1962, in Faith’s garage, I was terrified of Fs. I simply wasn’t saying them. I hadn’t called Faith by her first name for nearly a month and had, instead, taken to calling her Carlisle, as if her patronymic had become a term of jocular endearment.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t say that.”

  And by way of explanation I took the rubber band off my painting and unfurled a Crayola crayon effort of a cowboy on a horse that looked more like a dog. This was figure. Ground was short green grass, pool-blue sky, burgundy mountains. Between the cowboy on his dog-horse and the short green grass, pool-blue sky, and burgundy mountains was a barbed wire fence because between me and life that can be touched there has always been a fence.

  Talented as she was, Faith wasn’t exactly Walter Pater when it came to other people’s paintings. She didn’t understand. She took my inability to say her name as an admission of insincerity. Maybe she thought I had some hot new watercolorist stashed away in Encino. She didn’t even give me time to explain. She lifted the sheet over the easel, revealing a beautiful if unfinished self-portrait—it promised to be her best work yet—that she crumpled into a ball and shoved into my hands before running into the house with tears streaming down her face. I meant to run after her and explain everything, but I saw her mother lock the back door. Then I heard Father start honking the car. Like a dead man down a plank, I walked the driveway to our car, vowing to write Faith a full confession once we left Los Angeles.

  The letter, of course, never got written. An hour out of L.A. I fell asleep and started dreaming about the girls up north. Frustrated artists, young lovers are like that: they have traitorous imaginations. We took the coastal route, the slower, prettier way, since Beth and I wanted to watch the waves and neither Mother nor Father was in any particular hurry to arrive in Northern California. They weren’t sure they were doing the right thing, leaving behind good friends to take interesting jobs, and their uncertainty took the form of a sustained elegy to Los Angeles. Suddenly the Hollywood Bowl was “a lovely place to listen to piano,” the Los Angeles Times was a “daily addiction,” and Frank Tang’s, where Father had once launched an entire dish of sweet and sour spare ribs into Mother’s lap, was “the only Chinese restaurant anywhere that left you feeling full.”

  Their combined nostalgia grew so great, in fact, that halfway up the coast Father pulled the Rambler—a 1958 Rambler, one of the worst cars ever made—into a motel, where Beth and I swam in the heated pool and my parents tried to talk themselves out of heading back. Many years later Father, edging into another depression, wrote the Ellenboegens: “While I can’t rewind the clock and there’s little to be gained except anguish and soul-twisting remorse, I wish to Christ we’d never come up here in October of ’62. Saddest move I ever made. Most regrettable. It’s not in the stars but in us, said the man. There it is. I said how I feel and now we go from here. Upward, I hope. Onward. We must.” Why the Ellenboegens found it necessary to take time out from Fire Wheel to show me this letter when I moved back to L.A. I’ve never quite comprehended, but in October 1962 a house had already been bought, the furniture had already been moved: we would continue north. Out of such slight considerations, lives are made.

  At noon the next day we stopped thirty miles south of San Francisco to eat lunch at San Gregorio Beach, which is now a nudist colony but then was only a long stretch of gray shore. Although the beach was packed with people, no one surfed or swam. No one constructed even a sand castle. For as far as I could see in either direction, they were huddled together on towels and blankets, listening to the third and final game of the National League playoff between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. The tinny reecho of a thousand transistor radios held in the hands of Giant fans: this was strange enough. Something else was wrong. The sky was ugly, the food was bad, the sea was green. Then I realized what was the matter. They were all tuned to the wrong station. They weren’t listening to Vin Scully.

  Vin Scully knows baseball about as well as it is possible or desirable to know an
y game. He is always fair, even complimentary, to the opposing team. And he has a voice that must have been a gift from the gods. I used to lie in bed with the radio beneath the pillow and earplugs on and listen to him talk until midnight. It was the clearest, most uncluttered sound I’ve ever heard, that man’s voice, and it would enter my ears, absolve my body of all its burdens, massaging my troubled mind.

  Russ Hodges, on the other hand, was shamelessly partisan in his approach and talked as if he were short, fat, and smoked smelly cigars, all of which he was or did. His one contribution to baseball was the absurd ejaculation, “Bye-Bye, Baby!” whenever the Giants hit a home run. In postgame interviews he’d always say, “Well, Willie, how did it feel to drop that pop fly with two out and the bases loaded in the twelfth inning?” Willie would always say, “That’s right, Lon.”

  I asked Father to turn our radio to the right station, but he said, “We’re in San Francisco now. We can only get San Francisco stations.”

  I ran into the water and started swimming back to Malibu, back to Faith if she’d have me, but Father jumped in and pulled me out. A great roar went up from the crowd. I thought they were cheering Father’s heroism. They weren’t. The Giants, trailing 4–2 at the end of eight innings, had scored four runs in the top of the ninth to win.