Dead Languages

by David Shields

  5

  I’VE ALWAYS been outside the general language. I’ve always insisted upon the one station that won’t come in. The next day, I entered the first grade at a private grammar school that didn’t look kindly upon a little boy who dared to enroll a month late, but Mother pulled some strings here and some arms there, then everything was fine. All the other children admired me because I received an uncorrupted box of crayons. I fell in love with a tiny Chinese girl who made me seem brash by comparison. But the real triumph and consequent tragedy came when Miss Kilner requested that we stop running around the room, sit down at our desks, and produce a short composition concerning the importance of Columbus Day.

  This assignment was way over the heads of most first-graders. Some of them were still struggling with the alphabet. The class vetoed the task and went back to running around the room, but Beth had recently started collaborating with me on some shorter pieces, so I put pencil to big, blue-lined paper and started writing. Beth and I tended to write about not so much the importance of Columbus Day as the imminence of annihilation. I discarded “The Indians Were Here First” and pursued “The Death of Bozo the Clown.”

  Miss Kilner circled behind my desk, read “The Death of Bozo the Clown” over my shoulder and, when she realized that until the penultimate line my little narrative wasn’t in the least about Columbus Day, she was thrilled. I was glad she liked it, but then she had to call the class to order while her arms were wrapped around my neck, had to hold the essay over her head so everyone could see what the new boy wrote, had to read aloud the entire story, which all the children in the class laughed at because it was about a clown. If it was about a clown, they figured it must be funny. Miss Kilner told Mother, “Hubert Humphrey’s appearance in a fictional work is an index of the lovely commingling of fact and fantasy in your child’s rich imagination,” and she told me it was “very, very good: ten gold stars next to your name, Jeremy.” Miss Kilner was no slouch. She was teaching first grade for only a year, to help finance her fiancé through law school, then she herself was off to graduate studies in German at Stanford.

  She demanded “The Death of Bozo the Clown” get the kind of audience she felt it deserved. For Open House, she framed it in red crêpe paper and tacked it up in the middle of the bulletin board, after taking everything else off. The children as well as the parents came to Open House. At the end of the evening I was standing next to my desk, watching Father eat the last few glazed doughnuts and Mother fend off a couple who’d come over to tell me they were really rather fond of Senator Humphrey. Miss Kilner clapped her hands and said, “May I have your attention for just a minute? Before you leave, please be sure to read the student composition on the bulletin board. I think it’s outstanding. Thank you, parents and pupils, for coming. It’s been a delightful evening.”

  It would have been a delightful evening and everyone would have trotted off happily into the night if a woman with a shiny white dress and red hair piled high—she was probably an enemy of Mother’s who knew I couldn’t talk and was getting revenge by humiliating me in public—hadn’t said, “Very few of us have had a chance to read your paper, Jerry. Why don’t you read it to us?”

  My desk was way over by the windows. I contemplated standing on top of the desk and leaping to an early death, but there was a pack of people surrounding me, all of them sipping punch, nibbling glazed doughnuts, dabbing their mouths with party napkins, so I shrank behind Mother and pretended not to have heard the request.

  The woman came over to me and said, “Why don’t you read it to us?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure everyone has already read it.”

  The adults in the room shook their heads in unison and said, “No, we haven’t.”

  “We’d like to hear it,” the woman said, smiling and tugging on my sweater.

  “It’s right here on the bulletin board,” I said, plucking down the controversial text and handing it to someone who looked like Bozo’s right-hand man. “Why doesn’t everyone just read it for themselves?”

  Miss Kilner said, “Why don’t you go ahead and read it to us, Jeremy?” and Mother said, “Yes, Jeremy. Go ahead. Don’t be afraid.” I took a gulp of Father’s punch, ate half his glazed doughnut, then walked to the front of the room and, before all my classmates and their well-dressed parents, started to read “The Death of Bozo the Clown”:

  B-B-Bozo was a clown. He walked around in b-b-baggy pants and b-b-big shoes and had yellow hair and a red nose and made people happy. Everyone loved him. The audience loved him. The b-b-balloon man loved him. The elephant loved him. The fat lady loved him, though not as much as Mrs. B-B-Bozo the Clown loved him b-b-because she loved him more than anyone else loved him and didn’t even care if he came into the house with his b-b-baggy pants and b-b-big shoes still on.

  Some of the parents thought I was giving an intentionally comic recitation and they tittered politely, but everyone else realized the rather pathetic paradox: the little boy couldn’t read his own writing. What I found frustrating was that suddenly Bs were bothering me, and the story was studded with them, while Fs were for the moment as free and easy as vowels had always been. Of course. There was a grand total of two Fs in the entire fable. It was almost as if I craved the jolt of stuttering and went around every few months looking for new phonetics to encapsulate my pain. Miss Kilner had never heard me stutter before, but she seemed to have read enough monographs on the relationship between the wound and the bow to know she should act sanguine, while Mother gave me a look she’d lifted from watching Johnny Wooden too reverently at UCLA games: winners never quit, etc.

  One day the elephant, not meaning to b-b-but not watching where he was going, either, hit B-B-Bozo the Clown in the head with his trunk and B-B-Bozo the Clown had a headache and got very sick and then he got sicker and then he died. Everyone was sad. The b-b-balloon man was sad. The elephant, who had hit him and was sorry, was sad. The fat lady was sad, though not as sad as Mrs. B-B-Bozo the Clown, who was so sad she asked Hubert Humphrey to change October twelfth from Columbus Day to National B-B-Bozo the Clown Day. Hubert Humphrey said no.

  At the end the parents broke into a misguided if very emotional ovation. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just sat down at my desk and ran my finger up and back the pencil trough.

  Mother smooched me and said, “I’m proud of you for hanging in there.”

  “Another glazed doughnut, Jeremy?” Father asked.

  My classmates were kind enough to file out the door and leave me alone with my eloquence.

  CURRIER had an extremely effective public address system. Anyone could address anyone else in the entire school, but no one could address anyone else without everyone in the entire school listening in. There was no privacy, no discrimination to the public address system at Currier; I came to feel this lack every Friday afternoon, when the speech therapist called the same two boys into her office. We were both, as it happened, in the same class and we thought they’d put us together to keep the evil contained. She could have sent a note or tapped us on the shoulder at recess but, no, she had to let the whole school in on our problem. Bobby Rose and I would have to leave Miss Kilner’s room with our heads down and mouths closed, pretending we didn’t know why we were being requested to report once again to the Audio-Visual Center.

  I didn’t much care for Bobby Rose. I have always had too many anxieties of my own to have much patience with other people’s problems. He had a dreadful lisp, and I could hardly stand the spastic way he spoke: the malformation of his mouth every time he said S. But I envied Bobby Rose because he seemed to have reconciled himself to the fact that he would never be rid of his disorder—he said a certain sound differently than everyone else and this seemed to him no great cause for alarm—whereas I was always searching for a solution. I would have good days on which I was able to do anything I wanted (read aloud, tell jokes, say my name) and there would be some real room for hope, then just as suddenly that hope would leave and not return for
a month. My impediment was more unpredictable than his—more directly connected, I liked to think, to the riot of human emotions, so I struggled more with it.

  The speech therapist at Currier Private Elementary School did very little to alleviate that struggle. She was a Romanian born in a tugboat on the Black Sea, and I think it ruined her for life. She had married an American—her name was Mrs. Fletcher—but she had only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. Bobby Rose and I spent as much time as we could correcting her grammar. She would tire of that and set us to absurd exercises. Whatever she had one of us doing she had the other one do as well, as if we were suffering from the same malady. Every week she came up with a new cure: talking while crawling around the room; while swinging our arms back and forth; while striking the table, lightly but rhythmically, with our knuckles; while nodding our heads vigorously up and down like marionettes; while pinching our forefingers and thumbs together; while producing a low drone in the bottom of our throats; while staring at a metronome; while listening to loud music in earphones; but the time I shall always remember and the time, I assume, Mrs. Fletcher shall always remember—for she was fired when the administration found out about it—was when she took her sewing box out of the closet.

  I thought she was going to stitch my lips shut, which, I had read in a little manual for the inarticulate, Hippocrates suggested be done with hesitant speakers. This would have been a welcome if somewhat extreme relief for me, but all she wanted us to do was say the pledge of allegiance with a button on the tips of our tongues. There was nothing in the Audio-Visual Center, only three or four plastic chairs, a Formica table, Mrs. Fletcher’s desk, and some taping equipment, but it did have a flag. Every room at Currier had a flag. It was a very patriotic school. After switching on the tape recorder, she gave us each a button. Bobby Rose and I placed them on our tongues and started saying the pledge of allegiance.

  “Boys, please flag look at,” Mrs. Fletcher said.

  Although she was Romanian, Mrs. Fletcher was as patriotic as the next person at Currier, and we took her to mean we should be looking at the flag while we were saying the pledge of allegiance and balancing a button on the tips of our tongues. Which was all to the well and good, since Bobby Rose and I were as patriotic as Mrs. Fletcher. But the flagstaff in the Audio-Visual Center was way up high on the wall, and it was extremely difficult to look at the flag without swallowing the button. I coughed a couple of times, quickly decided I had had enough of this, and slipped the button into my pocket.

  “I s-s-swallowed the button,” I said.

  Bobby Rose wasn’t stupid. He coughed a couple of times and said, “I thwallowed the button, too.”

  “We’re going to the nurse,” I said.

  “Yeth,” Bobby Rose said, coughing up a storm. “We’re going to the nurth.”

  “No, didn’t you, couldn’t you have,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Boys, come here back.”

  We were already out the room and sprinting down the corridor before she’d arisen from her seat. Bobby Rose and I were the only two people on the playground. We rode the merry-go-round and swung on the rings for a while before I asked him what he’d done with his button.

  “I thwallowed it,” he said.

  “No, really.”

  “I thwallowed it,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  I shook my head and showed him the button. Then Bobby Rose started having trouble breathing. I rushed him to the nurse, who took him to the emergency room. They pumped his stomach and came up with a button, a staple, a postage stamp, and two buffalo nickels. I don’t know whether the items in the bottom of his stomach had somehow been doing the damage, but he stopped lisping. From then on, he liked to come up to me while I was playing foursquare, tap me on the shoulder, and say, “You should have swallowed the button.”

  I DON’T KNOW, maybe I should have. I just could never bring myself to swallow a button on purpose. Besides, by that time I was already engaged in what, very much later, Sandra was to call a “principal compensatory activity.” I was only six but demonstrating the ability to pitch a softball faster than anyone at Currier could swing at it. Legend has it that when Father was in his mid-twenties he was offered a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers and someone named Van Lingle Mungo hit every pitch Father threw—into the left-field bleachers. Legend, I say, can keep it. But Father did have a strong right arm. I inherited my pitching strength from him.

  Most softball pitchers swing their arm all the way back and around, windmill fashion, but I found this unnecessary. I simply threw the ball forward as fast as I could with a quick flick of the wrist. Most softball pitchers also have what they like to call a vast assortment of pitches—slider, dropball, palmball, spitball, knuckle-ball, curve, changeup—but I had only one pitch, a fastball, and no one could hit it. Girls would gather to watch me warm up against the wooden backstop. I always had trouble finding someone to agree to be my catcher, and whoever consented would demand that I provide foam pads for him to wear inside his glove. My team, the self-appointed First-Grade All-Stars, never lost. Not to the Second-Grade All-Stars, not to the Third-Grade All-Stars, not to the Fourth-Grade All-Stars. The Fifth-Grade All-Stars challenged us to a game at lunch time and the whole school shut down.

  Currier must have been the only grammar school in San Francisco that had a grass field for a baseball diamond. A chain fence divided the playground between macadam and grass; that fence was right field. Left field was a stone wall that kept the upper playground separate from the lower playground—the children safe from the older boys—and here we were, the First-Grade All-Stars, parading about the lower playground, stomping on the grass as if we owned it. A high brick tower, with a library on the second floor and hour bells on the third, was to dead center field. On the day of the game, people sat on every window sill in the tower, stood on every step of the fire escape. There were people all along both foul lines, shoulder to shoulder behind the chain fence in right field, perched on top of the jungle gym on the other side of the left field wall.

  I’ve never pitched so well or so hard as I pitched that game. We won, 2–0, when, with one out and one on in the sixth inning, I hit an off-speed pitch into the tower. The Fifth-Grade All-Stars were terribly poor sports about the whole thing. When the tower bell rang, signaling the end of lunch time and the conclusion of the game, they besieged me with bats in their hands. They went straight to the only weakness they knew I had. They pounded their bats on the grass and said, “Say ‘Cincinnati,’ say ‘Chanukah,’ say ‘Golden Gate Park,’” but what they didn’t realize, and what I hadn’t realized until then, was that I often had no trouble saying a word if someone else had already said it, so I said Cincinnati, I said Chanukah, I said Golden Gate Park. They went away and let my teammates carry me on their shoulders back to class.

  6

  I HAD GOTTEN it into my head that, because my interlocutor never knew what I was going to say and once I said it he never understood exactly what I meant, it was incumbent upon me to underscore the impossibility of human communication by stuttering. I actually believed that. I thought it was my duty to insert into every conversation the image of its own absurdity. Worse than that, I came to think all fluent speech was “fascistic” (a word I had learned from Mother); was an assertion of authority in the one enterprise in which any assertion of authority struck me as ludicrous. Whatever I did, wherever I went, whatever I said, I assumed it had already been judged to be unwanted and unneeded. My apology was to tremble.

  This way of thinking may have been nothing more than good old-fashioned Old Testament guilt, but I seemed to be suffering so, I seemed to be creating such a nasty cycle for myself: I felt sinful, so I stammered; I stammered, so I felt sinful. Kennedy was assassinated toward the end of the next year and, whereas most people can tell you that when the news came they were stepping out of the bathtub or buttering toast or watching “Hollywood Squares,” I remember not where I was but what I thought: since Mother and Father had voted for Kennedy, and Mother, in f
act, had been countywide media coordinator for the campaign, I, too, in the sense that whatever one’s parents do one implicitly agrees with, had voted for him, so, no more but certainly no less than anyone else, I was responsible for electing him president. I had killed Kennedy. While Mother drove around the city getting interviews for her award-winning article, “A Shocked San Francisco: Too Numb to Respond,” and Father and Beth sat in front of the television eating dinner, I scoured every room in the house for the best place to hide when the Dallas police came to get me.

  Very shortly after the United States Treasury started producing Kennedy half-dollars, a girl brought to class a glass case of Kennedy halves, commemorative coins, and elegiac medallions. The glass case, of course, was shattered. All the money and memorabilia were stolen. Mrs. McCloskey asked us to put our heads down and shut our eyes. Whoever wished to speak with her concerning the burglary was to raise his hand and see her after school. I raised my hand, sat in a stall in the boys’ bathroom until three-thirty, then walked up to Mrs. McCloskey’s desk and said, “I just wanted to tell you I d-d-didn’t do it.”

  Mrs. McCloskey was taken aback by this confession of innocence and said, “I’m sure you didn’t, Jeremy. But then why did you raise your hand?”

  “I just wanted y-y-you to know I didn’t do it.”

  “But why would you think I thought you did?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I didn’t know. I still don’t. Mrs. McCloskey got tired of posing Zen koans and dismissed me to the playground where, atop the stone wall that was left field, I attempted to explain to myself that I was not the perpetrator of every foul deed in the land, gave up after a while, and went home. I think this whole dreadful circle of pain and purgation would still be inexplicable if a month later, while dusting the mantelpiece, I hadn’t broken Mother’s sculpture. Without this event, I’d now be at a complete loss.