Dictation

by Cynthia Ozick

  I did not ask her to sing. She had hold of me with her fingernails in my flesh, as if I might escape. She drew me back, back, into her young womanhood, when she was newly married to Simon, with Retta already two months in the womb and Simon in his third year at City College, far uptown, dreaming of philology, that funny-sounding snobby stuff (as if a boy from the Bronx could aspire to such goings-on!), unready for marriage and fatherhood, and seriously unwilling. And that was the first of all the jokes, because finally the other boy, the one from Cincinnati who was visiting his aunt (the aunt lived around the corner), and who met Essie in the park every night for a week, went home to Ohio ... She didn't tell Simon about that other boy, the curly-haired boy who pronounced all his r's the midwestern way; even under the wedding canopy Simon had no inkling of the Ohio boy. He believed only that he was behaving as a man should behave who has fathered a child without meaning to. It was the first of all the jokes, the first of all the tricks, but the joke was on herself too, since she was just as much in the dark as anyone: was Retta's papa the Ohio boy, or Simon? Simon had to leave school then, and went to work as a salesman in a men's store on East Tremont Avenue. Essie had introduced him to her boss; she was adept with a needle, and had already been shortening trousers and putting in pleats and letting out waists for half a year.

  Their first summer they did what in those days all young couples with new babies did. They fled the burning Bronx sidewalks, they rented a kochaleyn in the mountains, in one of those Catskill bungalow colonies populated by musty one-room cottages set side by side, no more than the width of a clothes line between them. Every cottage had its own little stove and icebox and tiny front porch. The mothers and babies spent July and August in the shade of green leaves, among wild tiger lilies as orange as the mountain sunsets, and the fathers came up from the city on weekends, carrying bundles of bread and rolls and oily packets of pastries and smoked whitefish. It was on one of these weekends that Essie decided to tell Simon the joke about the baby, it was so much on her mind, and she thought it would be all right to tell him now because he liked the baby so much, he was mad about Retta, and the truth is the truth, so why not? She had been brought up to tell the truth, even if sometimes the truth is exactly like a joke.

  But he did not take it as a joke. He took it as a trick, and for the next two weekends he kept away. Essie, alone with her child and humiliated, went wandering through the countryside, discovering who her neighbors were, and what sort of colony they'd happened into. All the roads were plagued by congregations of wasps, and once the baby, pointing and panting, spied a turtle creeping in the dust. They followed the turtle across the road, and found a community of Trotskyites, beyond which, up the hill, were the Henry George people, and down toward the village a nest of Tolstoyans. Whoever they were, they all had rips in their clothes, they all required mending, they all wanted handmade baby dresses, they all had an eye on styles for the fall, and Essie's summertime business was under way.

  When Simon returned, out of sorts, Essie informed him that in the interim she had taken in fifty-four dollars and twenty-five cents, she could get plenty more if only she had a sewing machine, and besides all that, there was a peculiar surprise that might interest him: next door on one side, next door on the other, and all around, behind them and in front of them—why hadn't she noticed it sooner? but she was preoccupied with the baby, and now with the sewing—their neighbors were chattering in a kind of garble. Sometimes it sounded like German, sometimes like Spanish (it never sounded like Yiddish), and sometimes like she didn't know what. Groups of them were gathering on the little porches, which were no more than leaky wooden lean-tos; they seemed to be studying; they were constantly exchanging comments in their weird garble. They even spoke the weird garble to their older children, who rolled their eyes and answered in plain English.

  Which was how Simon fell in among the Esperantists. Bella was one of them. She lived four cottages down, and had a little boy a month or two older than Retta. Julius, her husband, turned up only rarely; his job, whatever it was, kept him at work right through the weekend. Bella ordered a dimity blouse and a flowered skirt (dirndl was the fashion) and came often to sit with Essie while she diligently sewed. The two babies, with their pull toys and plush bears, prattled and crowed at their feet. It was a pleasant time altogether, and Simon, when he arrived from the city, seeing the young women sweetly side by side with their children crawling all around them, seemed no longer out of sorts. He was silent now about Essie's deception, if it was a deception, because, after all, Essie herself wasn't certain, and the boy from Ohio was by now only a moment's vanished vapor. Besides, Retta's pretty curls were as black and billowy as Simon's own, and Essie was earning money, impressively more than Simon would ever make selling men's underwear in the Bronx. One August afternoon he arranged to have a secondhand sewing machine delivered to the cottage. Essie jumped up and kissed him, she was so pleased; it was as if the sleek metal neck of the sewing machine had restored them to each other.

  After that Essie's orders increased, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, while she worked her treadle, Simon went round to one porch or another, happy in the camaraderie of the Esperantists. They were eager for converts, of course, and he wanted nothing so much as to be converted. Of all of them, Bella was the most advanced. She was not exactly their leader, but she was an expert teacher, and actually had in her possession a letter of praise from Lidia Zamenhof, Zamenhof's own daughter and successor. Bella had sent her a sonnet in fluent Esperanto; Lidia replied that Bella's ingenuity in creating rhyming couplets in the new language remarkably exceeded that of Ludwik Zamenhof himself. There was nothing concerning Esperanto that Bella did not know; she knew, for instance, that the Oomoto religion in Japan held Esperanto to be a sacred language and Zamenhof a god. Zamenhof a god! Simon was entranced; Essie thought he envied Bella even more than he was inspired by her. Also, she felt a little ashamed. It was all those outlandish words Simon loved, he was possessed by them, words had always been his ambition, and on account of his wife and the child whose hair was as black and thick as his own he had been compelled to surrender words for a life of shirts and ties, boxer shorts and suspenders.

  So when Bella asked Essie to take charge of her little boy for just two hours that evening—perhaps he could be put to bed together with Retta, and Bella would come to fetch him afterward—Essie gladly took the child in her arms, and stroked his warm silky nape, and did the same with Retta, whose nape was every bit as silky, and sang both babies to sleep, while Simon walked with Bella through the grassy dusk to be tutored in the quiet of her porch. An electric cord led indoors; there was a lamp and a table and a bottle of citronella to ward off the mosquitoes and (the point of it all) Bella's weighty collection of Esperanto journals.

  It was more than the two hours Bella had promised (it was closer to five, and the crickets had retired into their depth-of-night silence) when she and Simon returned. Simon had under his arm a fat packet of Bella's journals, borrowed to occupy his empty weekday evenings in the city; but it was Bella, not Simon, who explained this. Essie had fallen into a doze in the old stained armchair next to the big bed—Simon and Essie's marital bed—where she had set the babies down, nestled together under one blanket. Retta's crib was too narrow for the two of them; they lay head to head, their round foreheads nearly touching, breathing like a single organism. Bella looked down at her sleeping boy, and murmured that it was a pity to take him out into the cold night air, he was so snug, why wake him, and could she leave him there until morning? She would arrive early to carry him off, and in the meantime wasn't Essie comfortable enough right where she was, in that nice chair, and Simon wouldn't mind a cushion on the floor, would he, it would only be for a few more hours...

  Bella went away, and it was as if she had plotted to keep Simon from Essie that night. But surely this was a worthless imagining: settling into his cushion at Essie's feet, Simon was fixed with all the power and thirst of his will on Bella's journals; he intended
to study them until he could rival Bella, he meant to pursue and conquer the language that was to be humanity's salvation, the structure of it, its strange logic and beauty, and already tonight, he said, he had made a good beginning—and then, without a sign, in the middle of it all, he sent out a soft snore, a velvety vibrating hum. Haplessly alert now, Essie tried not to follow her thoughts. But the night was long, there was so much left of it, and the mountain chill crept round her shoulders, and except for the private voice inside her, a voice that nagged with all its secret confusions, there was nothing to listen to—only one of the babies turning, and Simon's persistent dim hum. She went on listening, she wasn't the least bit drowsy, she forced her eyelids shut and they clicked wide again, of their own accord, like a mechanical doll's. Simon's hum—was it roughening into a wheeze, or something more brutish than a wheeze? A spiraling unnatural noise; an animal being strangled. But the animal noise wasn't coming from Simon, it was hurtling out of one of the babies—a groaning, and then a yowling—good God, was it Retta? No, no, not Retta, it was Bella's boy! She leaped up to see what was the matter: the child's face was mottled, purple and red, his mouth leaked vomit, he was struggling to breathe ... She touched his head. It was wildly hot: a tropical touch. Simon!

  She pummeled him awake.

  "There's something wrong, you have to get down to the village right away, you have to get to the doctor's, the boy's sick—"

  "It's the middle of the night, Essie, for God's sake! Bella's coming for the kid first thing, and maybe by then it'll pass—"

  "Simon, I'm telling you, he's sick—"

  In those uncomplicated years none of the kochaleyns had a telephone, and few of the families owned cars. On Friday evenings the husbands, Simon among them, made their way up the mountainside from the train station by means of the one ancient village taxi, or else they trudged with their suitcases and their city bundles along the mile of dusty stone-strewn road, between high weedy growths, uphill to the colonies of cottages. The village itself was only a cluster of stores on either side of the train station, and a scattering of old houses inhabited by the year-round people. The doctor was one of these. His office was in his front parlor.

  "Go!" Essie cried. Then she thought of the danger to Retta, so close to the feverish child, and seized her and nearly threw her, sobbing, and awakened now by the excitement, into her crib; but the thin little neck under the moistly knotted curls was cool.

  "I ought to stop at Bella's, don't you think, and let her know—"

  "No, no, don't waste a minute, what's the point, what can she do? Oh listen to him, you've got to hurry, the poor thing can't catch his breath—"

  "It's Bella's kid, she'll know what to do," he urged. "It's happened before."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "Bella told me. She said it in Esperanto actually, when we were working on it last week—"

  "Never mind that gibberish, just go and get the doctor!"

  Gibberish. She had called the universal language, the language of human salvation, gibberish.

  He started down the road to the village: it meant he had to pass Bella's cottage. Her windows were unlit, and he went on. But a few yards beyond her door, he stopped and turned back—how perverse it seemed, how unreasonable, it wasn't right not to tell the mother, and probably the kid would get better anyhow, it was a long walk down the mountain in the dark and cold of the country night, Essie had hurried him out without so much as a sweater, and why wake the poor doctor, a doctor needs his sleep even more than ordinary people, why not hold off till morning, a decent hour, wasn't the main thing to let Bella know?

  And here, waiting and waiting, was Essie, with the boy folded in her lap; she kept him there, in the big armchair, lifting him at times (how heavy he was!) to pace from one wall of the narrow room to the other. Now and then she wiped the soles of his feet with a dampened cloth, until he let out a little shudder—almost, it seemed, of satisfaction. But mainly she stood at the window, her wrists aching from the child's weight, watching the sky alter from an opaque square of black to a ghostly pinkish stripe. Retta had long since grown quiet: she lay in the tranquil ruddiness of waxworks sleep, each baby fist resting beside an ear. And finally the white glint of morning struck the windowsill and lit the walls; and at half past eight the doctor came, together with Simon and Bella. He had driven them both up from the village in his Ford. The child was by now perfectly safe, he said, there was nothing the matter that he wouldn't get over, and wasn't the mother told repeatedly not to feed him milk? Her son was clearly allergic to milk, and still she had forgotten, and put some in his pudding.

  "You know your boy's had these episodes before," the doctor said, peevishly, "and he may have them again. Because, dear lady, you don't listen."

  And Bella, apologizing, said, "It's a good thing anyhow we didn't drag you out of your bed at three o'clock in the morning, the way some people would have—"

  Essie knew what "some people" meant, but who was "we"?

  "While I'm here," the doctor said, "I suppose I ought to have a look at the other one."

  "She's fine," Essie said. "She slept through the rest of the night like an angel. Just look, she's still asleep—"

  The doctor looked. He shook Retta. He picked up her two fists; they fell back.

  "Good God," the doctor said. "This child is dead."

  They buried her on the outskirts of a town fifteen miles to the west, in a small nonsectarian cemetery run by an indifferent undertaker who sold them a dog-sized coffin. There was no ceremony; no one came, no one was asked to come. A private burial, a secret burial. In the late afternoon a workman dug out a cavity in the dry soil; down went the box. Simon and Essie stood alone at the graveside and watched as the shovelfuls of earth flew, until the ground was level again. Then they left the kochaleyn and for the rest of the summer rented a room not far from the cemetery. Simon went every day to sit beside the grave. At first Essie went with him; but after a while she stayed away. How he wailed, how he hammered and yammered! She could not endure it: too late, that spew, too late, his shame, his remorse, his disgrace: if only he'd gone earlier for the doctor ... if only he hadn't stopped to see Bella ... if only he hadn't told her the kid's all right, there's no emergency, my wife exaggerates, morning's time enough to bring the doctor ... if only he hadn't knocked on Bella's door, if only she hadn't let him in!

  In her flat whisper Essie said, "What happened to the baby, maybe it wouldn't have happened—"

  She understood that Simon had become Bella's lover that night. She was silent when she saw him carry out Bella's journals and set them afire. The smell of Esperanto burning remained in his clothes for days afterward.

  She did not know what the doctor could have done; she knew only that he hadn't been there to do it.

  Summer after summer they returned to the town near the cemetery, far from all the kochaleyns that were scattered along the pebbly dirt roads in those parts, and settled into the top floor of a frame house owned by a deaf old widower. Simon never went back to his job in the men's store, but Essie kept busy at her sewing machine. She placed a two-line advertisement in the Classified column of the local paper—"Seamstress, Outfits Custom-Made"—and had more orders than ever. Simon no longer sat by the little grave every day; instead, he turned his vigil into a driven penance, consecrating one night each week to mourning. Their first year it was Saturday—it was on a Saturday night that Retta had died. The following year it was Tuesday: Simon had burned Bella's journals on a Tuesday evening. Always, whatever the day and whatever the year and whatever the weather, he walked out into the midnight dark, and lingered there, among the dim headstones, until daybreak. Essie had no use for this self-imposed ritual. It was made up, it was another kind of gibberish out there in the night. She scorned it: what did it mean, this maundering in the cemetery's rime to talk to the wind? He had deceived her with Bella, he had allowed Retta to die. Essie never spoke of Retta; only Simon spoke of her. He remembered her first steps, he remembered he
r first words, he remembered how she had pointed with her tiny forefinger at this and that beast at the zoo. "Tiger," she said. "Monkey," she said. And when they came to the yellow-horned gnu, and Simon said "Gnu," Retta, mistaking it for a cow, blew out an elongated "Moo." And how Simon and Essie had laughed at that! Retta was dead; Simon was to blame, he had deceived her with Bella, and what difference now if he despised Bella, if he had made a bonfire of Bella's journals, if he despised everything that smacked of Bella, if he despised Esperanto, and condemned it, and called it delusion and fakery—what difference all of that, if Retta was dead?

  It was not their first summer, but the next, when Simon was setting aside Tuesdays to visit his shrine ("His shrine," Essie said bitterly to herself), that he began writing letters to Esperanto clubs all over the city, all over the world—nasty letters, furious letters. "Zamenhof, your false idol! Your god!" he wrote. "Why don't you join the Oomoto, you fools!"

  This was the start of Simon's grand scheme—the letters, the outcries, the feverish heaps of philological papers and books with queer foreign alphabets on their spines. Yet in practice it was not grand after all; it was extraordinarily simple to execute. Obscure lives inspire no inquisitiveness. If your neighbor tells you he was born in Pittsburgh when he was really born in Kalamazoo, who will trouble to search out his birth certificate? As for solicitous—or prying—relations, Essie had been motherless since childhood, and her father had remarried a year after her own marriage to Simon. Together with his new wife he ran a hardware store in Florida; he and Essie rarely corresponded. Simon himself had been reared in the Home for Jewish Orphans: his only living connection was his cousin Ruby—gullible Ruby, booby Ruby! The two of them, Simon and Essie, were as rootless as dandelion spores. They had to account to no one, and though Simon continued jobless, there was money enough, as long as Essie's treadle purred. She kept it purring: her little summertime business spread to half a dozen towns nearby, and her arrival in May was regularly greeted by a blizzard of orders for the following autumn. She changed her ad to read "Get Set for Winter Warmth in Summer Heat," and had an eye out for the new styles in woolen jackets and coats. She bought, at a discount, discarded pieces of chinchilla and learned to sew fur collars and linings. And all the while Simon was concocting GNU. He named it, he said, in memory of Retta at the zoo; and besides, it announced itself to the ear as New—only see how it superseded and outshone Esperanto, that fake old carcass!