Dictation

by Cynthia Ozick

  In the fall of each year they moved back to the Bronx. By now Essie owned two sewing machines. "My city Singer and my country Singer," she liked to say, and in the winter worked her treadle as tirelessly as in the summer, while Simon went out proselytizing. He printed up fliers on yellow paper, with long rows of sponsors—lists that were anonymous but for their golden Park Avenue addresses—and tacked them on telephone poles.

  It was not surprising, Essie thought, that GNU could attract its earliest adherents—all the kochaleyns come home for the winter, and more: the Trotskyites, the Henry George people, the Tolstoyans, the classical music lovers who went to the free concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, the Norman Thomas loyalists, the Yiddish Bundists, the wilder Hebraists, the evolving Thomas Merton mystics, the budding young Taoists and Zen Buddhists, the aging humanists and atheists, the Ayn Rand enthusiasts ... and, most dangerously, the angry Esperantists. But after the first few meetings, too many of Simon's would-be converts fell away, the merely inquisitive to begin with, the rest out of boredom, or resentment over dues, or because the rental hall was unheated (the stinginess of those Park Avenue donors!), or because the accustomed messianisms they had arrived with were more beguiling than Simon's ingrown incantations.

  "What these people need to keep them interested," Simon argued, "is entertainment. If it's a show they want, Essie, let's give them a show, how about it?"

  So Essie was recruited to sing. She had not immediately agreed; the idea of it repelled her, but only until she perceived the use of it; the ruse of it. She was already complicit in Simon's scheme—give your little finger to the devil, and he'll take your whole arm. And even the little finger was not so spare: no matter what Simon's yellow fliers boasted, it was Essie's industry at her two sewing machines that paid for the rental hall. Well then, all right, she'd sing! It turned out, besides, that she had a way with a rhyme. Her rhymes were inconsequential ditties, private mockeries—the latest of her mockeries: the Park Avenue philanthropists were the first of her inventions. As for her singing voice, it had no range, and she was nearly breathless at the close of a long verse, but she poured into it the fury and force of her ridicule, and her ridicule had the sound of conviction. She put herself in the service of Simon's gibberish—why not, why not? Retta was dead, Simon was to blame! Her performances in the cold hall—the costume, the patter, the ditties—were her own contraption, her secret derision, her revenge for what happened to the baby.

  And still Simon's meetings shrank and shrank, until only the quarrelsome diehards remained, and Simon's enemies, the Esperantists.

  "Jealousy!" he said. "Because I've outdone them, I've finished them off. And it's Bella who's sending them, it's got to be Bella, who else?"

  But it was Essie. She knew where they were, she knew how to find them: she had helped Simon with all those letters calling them fools, she had written their names on the envelopes. Slyly, clandestinely, she summoned them, and they were glad to come, and stand on chairs, and stomp and chant and shriek and pound and threaten. Simon, that usurper, with his shabby homemade mimicry of the real thing, had called them fools! They were pleased to shout him down, and some were even pleased to put up their fists in defense of the sole genuine original universal language, Zamenhof's! Essie herself gave the signal: when she ended those nonsensical couplets, when she hopped off the little podium, the assault began.

  She let it go on, winter after winter, with the summer's expeditions to look forward to. From a secondhand bookshop she bought herself a world atlas, and instructed Simon in latitudes and longitudes, all those remote wadis and glaciers and canyons and jungles and steppes he was to explore from May through August (she always with him on every trek, never mind how hazardous), all for the purpose of uncovering fresh syllables to feed and fatten his GNU—while here they sat, the two of them, from May through August, lapping up their suppers of bananas and sour cream at the kitchen counter, half of which held Essie's faithful Singer, on the top floor of the deaf old widower's decaying house.

  She let it go on, the meetings winter after winter in the city, in the summers hidden away in their mountain townlet close to Retta's grave. She let it go on until it was enough, until her mockery was slaked, until the warring Esperantists had left him sufficiently bruised to satisfy her. There was more to it than spite, the almost carnal relishing of spite, the gloating pleasure of punishing Simon with his own stick. It was the fantastical stick itself: Essie's trickster apparatus, the hoax of those exotic wanderings, when all the world—simple-minded, credulous world!—believed them to be ... where? Wherever Dravido-Munda, Bugi, Veps, Brahui, Khowar, Oriya, Ilokano, Mordvinian, Shilha, Jagatai, Tipura, Yurak, and all other teeming tongues, were spoken. From May through August, Essie's atlas marked out these shrewdly distant regions; and on a Tuesday, or a Sunday, or any chosen day of the week, Simon moaned out his gibberish beside Retta's grave in the misty night air.

  It did not take long for Annette and her crowd to tire of GNU. They cleared out, I learned afterward, on one of those Thursdays that took Simon conveniently away: there were no goodbyes. When I went to see him again, he was alone. This time, and all the times that followed, I was not prodded by my mother. Her mind was on business; she trusted that Simon was still, as she put it, blooming, and I did not disabuse her. She too, she reported, was blooming like mad—i t was no longer economical to import the kachinas, so she had gone into producing them on her own. She'd bought up a bit more property, and had a little factory buzzing away, which made not only replicas of the dolls, but all manner of other presumably local artifacts, shawls no Indian had ever worn, moccasins no Indian had ever trod in. Many of these she had designed herself ("I do have this flair," she reminded me), and to tell the truth, they were an improvement on the raw-looking native stuff. My father wrote often, asking when I was coming out for a visit, since from my mother's point of view a trip to New York was out of the question: they had their hands full, the business was so demanding. I answered with commonplace undergraduate complaints—I had too many papers overdue, catching up would consume the winter break, and as for vacation later in the year, I was intending to take courses all summer long.

  I was becoming an easy liar. My papers were not overdue. I was reluctant to witness my mother's pride in turning out fakes.

  The checks she continued to send (with my father's signature over "Comptroller" in print) grew bigger and bigger. I cashed them and gave the money to Simon. He took it sadly, idly, without protest. He was unshaven and wore his sandals on bare feet. His toenails were overgrown and as thick as oyster shells. His breath was bad; he had an abscess on a molar that sometimes tormented him and sometimes receded. I begged him to see a dentist. Little by little I had begun to look after him. I tipped the grocery boy and hired the janitor to take a brush to the toilet bowl. He had given up those fruitless hours among alien lexicons; but every Thursday he put on his frayed city hat, with its faded grosgrain ribbon, and locked the door of his flat and did not return until late the next afternoon. I imagined him in a rattling train headed upstate, toward a forgotten town in the Catskills; I imagined him kneeling in the dark in damp grass alongside a small stone marker. I went so far as to conjecture what Thursday might commemorate to a mind as deluded as Simon's: suppose it was on a Thursday that Essie had confessed her doubts about the baby; suppose it was on a Thursday that Simon first heard about the curly-haired boy from Cincinnati—then the grieving guilty mourner at the graveside might not be a father at all, but only the man Essie had gulled into marriage long ago. If he did not know which one he was, the father or the dupe, why should he not be half mad?

  And what if everything Essie had confided was a fickle fable, myself (like those flies to her sugar bowl) lured into it, a partner to Simon's delusions?

  The sophomore term began. One morning on my way to class I saw, across the street, Annette and two young men. The men were dressed in gray business suits and striped ties and had conventional short haircuts. All three were carrying leather briefcase
s. Annette herself looked less theatrical than I remembered her, though I could not think why. She wore a silk scarf and sober shoes with sharp little heels.

  "Hey, Phyl," she called. "How's your uncle nowadays?"

  Unwillingly, I crossed the street.

  "Tim. John. My old roommate," she introduced me. Close up, I noticed the absence of lipstick. "Is Simon O.K.? I have to tell you, he changed my life."

  "You wrecked his."

  "Well, you were right, maybe I took him too seriously. But I got something out of it. I'm in the School of Commerce now. I've switched to accounting, I'm a finance major."

  "Just like Katharine Cornell."

  "No, really, I have this entrepreneurial streak. I figured it out just from running Simon's meetings."

  "Sure, all that green salad," I said, and walked off.

  I did not honestly believe that Annette had wrecked Simon's life. It was true that her defection had left him depleted, but some inner deterioration, from a source unknown to me, was gnawing at him. Perhaps it was age: he was turning into a sick old man. The tooth abscess, long neglected, had affected his heart. He suffered from repeated fits of angina and for relief swallowed handfuls of nitroglycerin. He implored me to visit more often; there were no more Thursdays away. I had come to suspect these anyhow—was it conceivable after so many decades that he would still be looking to set his thin haunches on the damp ground of a graveyard, and in snowy winter to boot? Had there been, instead, a once-a-week lover? One of those girlies he diddled? Or Bella, secretly restored? He had no lover now. When he put out a hand to me, it was no longer an attempt to feel for my breast. He hoped for comfort, he wanted to hold on to warmth. The old man's hand that took mine was bloodlessly cold.

  I loitered with him through tedious afternoons. I brought him petit fours and tins of fancy tea. While he dozed over his cup, I emptied the leaves out of their gilt canister and filled it with hundred-dollar bills: froth and foam of my mother's fraudulent prosperity. I tried to wake him into alertness: I asked why he had stopped working on GNU.

  "I haven't stopped."

  "I don't see you doing it—"

  "I think about it. It's in my head. But lately ... well, what good does it do, you can't beat the Esperantists. Zamenhof, that swindler, he had it all sewed up long ago, he cornered the market." He blinked repeatedly; he had acquired a distracting twitch. "Is Ruby getting on all right out there? I remember how she hated to go. You know," he said, "your mother was always steadfast. The only one who was steadfast was my cousin Ruby."

  Some weeks after this conversation I went to see Essie; it would be for the last time.

  "Simon's dead," I told her.

  "Simon? How about that." She took it in with one of her shallow breathy sighs, and all at once blazed up into rage. "Who made the arrangements? Who! Was it you? If he's buried there, next to Retta, I swear I'll have him dug up and thrown out!"

  "It's all right, my mother took care of it. On the telephone, long distance, from Arizona. He's over in Staten Island, my parents own some plots."

  "Ruby took care of it? Well, at least that, she doesn't know where Retta is. She thinks it was Timbuktu, what happened to the baby. I've told you and told you, your silly mother never knew a thing—"

  The apartment had its familiar smell. I had done what I came for, and was ready to leave. But I noticed, though the mannequin still kept its place against the wall, that the sewing machine was gone.

  "I got rid of it. I sold it," she said. "I saved up, I've got plenty. There never was a time when I couldn't make a living, no matter what. Even after the divorce. But people came in those days, it was like a condolence call. I don't suppose anyone's coming now."

  I said lamely, "I'm here."

  "Ruby's kid, why should I care? I mean the Esperanto people, they're the ones who came. Because they saw I was against Simon. Some of them brought flowers, can you believe it?"

  "If you were against him," I said, "why did you go along with everything?"

  "I told you why. To get even."

  "A funny way of getting even, if you did just what he wanted."

  "My God, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, just like your mother, blind as a bat. You don't think I'd let anybody know my own husband managed to kill off my own child right in my own bed, do you?"

  She was all zigzag and contradiction: she had taken revenge on Simon; she had protected him. She was both sword and shield. Was this what an improvisational temperament added up to? I was certain now that no word Essie uttered could be trusted.

  She had little more to say about Simon, and there was little more she cared to hear. But before I left she pushed her brownish face, wrinkled as a walnut, into mine, and told me something I have never forgotten.

  "Listen," she said, "that goddamn universal language, you want to know what it is? Not Esperanto, and not Simon's gibberish either. I'll tell you, but only if you want to know."

  I said I did.

  "Everyone uses it," she said. "Everyone, all over the world."

  And was that it really, what Essie gave out just then in her mercurial frenzied whisper? Lie, illusion, deception, she said—was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?