One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

by Diane Ackerman

  Number two, Roger, was a bearded young man, who always arrived with a hospitable handshake, though I found his palm damp and bony. I wondered if Paul did, too, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it in a way he’d understand.

  “For this next activity,” I heard Roger say as I did chores nearby in the kitchen, “we will practice a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound.” He spaced his words rather far apart as he spoke, which removed some of the natural rise and fall of his voice.

  “I want you to listen carefully and repeat after me. Let’s start with the consonant M. Ready?” Opening his mouth, he exaggerated the movement of his lips as he pronounced the sound “MA” clear as a musical note.

  “M-M-MA,” Paul repeated stumblingly, more like a goat’s bleat.

  A purposeful pause.

  “MAY.” Said with lips rolled tightly together—grandpa without his dentures—then opened wide.

  Staring hard, Paul studied how Roger’s lips moved to round out the sound.

  “MM-MAY,” he said, elongating both parts, the M and the A.

  Another pause.

  “MY . . . MY.”

  Roger continued through ME and MO and back to MA again, over and over, trying to help Paul’s brain connect letters with sounds that can be mouthed in speech.

  We liked Roger, who tutored Paul for another few weeks, but a new semester was starting at Ithaca College and he needed to return.

  Number three was Julie, a slender twenty-something woman with bulging blue eyes, and a voice that hadn’t “cracked” yet—the female equivalent of a boy’s voice during adolescence—from the distinctive crinkling soprano of a young woman into the slightly lower register of middle age.

  I overheard her asking Paul “yes” and “no” questions, each of which he took his time answering, thinking it through and giving his brain a chance to mobilize a reply.

  “Is your name Jack?”

  “No,” Paul croaked.

  “Is your name Paul?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the light on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, Mr. West. Now I’d like you to tell me what you see in the pictures I show you. Okay? Let’s begin.” The sound of several 5-by-7-inch cards being tapped on a teak

  table.

  “What’s this?”

  Paul paused a long while, then said haltingly, as if groping for an unknown language: “Duck? No, smird. grap. looch, mem, mem, mem, snok . . .”

  The strain in his voice tore through me, and at that moment I would have done anything to help him, including burning incense to Panacea, the goddess of healing.

  “No, those are nonsense sounds,” Julie said, adding a little crackling laugh. “It’s a broom, a broom.”

  “Broooom,” Paul repeated, with the sigh of someone reminded of a word on the tip of his tongue.

  After a few weeks, Julie left for a job at a college in another state.

  Paul’s least favorite therapist was number four, a tall, robust woman whom he referred to only as “the Canadian” because he couldn’t remember her name. Sessions with her drove him crazy. After one, Paul escorted her politely to the front door, waved bye-bye, and explained with a false smile, a swimming motion, and the word “away,” that he was going to the Caribbean on vacation.

  She nervously adjusted the sit of her watch, which she wore turned around, its face on the underside of her wrist.

  “When might you be returning?” she asked tentatively.

  “I’m . . . not . . . com-coming back,” he rejoined.

  “We’ll phone,” I said, caught completely by surprise.

  That was the last we saw of her.

  All of Paul’s speech therapists worked hard and stayed unflaggingly polite, but he disliked what he perceived as a condescending and too corrective manner. For speech therapy to work, patient and therapist need to feel as well matched as ice dancers. The kindest and most experienced of them was Sandra, a middle-aged woman with long brown hair and a lovely maternal way about her. Despite her patience, Paul was still suffering through therapy sessions.

  After Sandra left one morning, he raised his rigid hands to the heavens as if summoning a lightning strike or preparing to do a war dance.

  “She failed her postillion!” he wailed.

  “I don’t even know what a postillion is,” I said, “but I’m sorry to hear she failed it.”

  I looked it up and found that a postillion is the person riding the lead horse of a horse-drawn carriage, guiding it from one post-house to the next. Once again, he couldn’t remember a word like cake or paper, but he knew she was supposed to lead him from one stage to another.

  Sandra continued to visit us on schedule, and during her next visit, instead of flash cards she used some art postcards I’d given her to break up the routine. Seated on a couch by the window, off to Paul’s right, where he’d be less likely to spot me, I watched as he grappled with a dozen of the flash cards and postcards, most of which left him speechless or uttering the wrong words. One showed Raphael’s famous painting of two baby angels leaning on their chubby elbows over a balcony.

  “Chair-roo-beem,” Paul piped up.

  “No,” Sandra patiently corrected, “these are angels, AINGELS.”

  I chuckled softly, but Sandra heard it and turned to me.

  “A cherub is a baby angel,” I said, taking the cue. “But the plural is cherubim.” I raised what I hoped was a good-natured smile.

  Several more flash cards followed. Then Sandra went over his written homework, patiently correcting it. When the session ended and she was packing up to leave, Paul looked exhausted and glum, thoroughly disappointed in himself.

  “You’re coming along fine,” Sandra reassured him.

  Paul shook his head and grumbled: “Words come like tardigrades.”

  Sandra started to speak, to say something like, That’s a nonsense word, but paused. When her eyes sought mine, she discovered I was smiling.

  “Water bears,” I offered. “Microscopic little animals with eight legs that waddle like bears, and can survive anything—hot springs, absolute zero, outer space, massive radiation . . .”

  “Cute!” Paul chimed in, happy, it seemed, to have made sense to someone. With his two pointer fingers, he drew a square in midair. Another templum—his all-purpose pantomime for envelopes, postcards, boxes, Post-its, stamps, Slim Bears . . . and now tardigrades.

  We had once admired black-and-white photographs of pudgy tardigrades in a magazine, awed to learn that they settle in ditches, leaf litter, and ponds, living for up to fifty years, and absolutely thriving at –400 degrees Fahrenheit. If their puddles dry up, they dry up, too, becoming light and aerial astronauts, who wake at the first dash of water to swell again and waddle after food once more.

  “Yeah, they’re adorable,” I agreed, picturing their well-padded, huggable-looking bodies. Sandra’s face screwed up, as if at a large insect.

  “. . . if you like that sort of thing,” I quickly added.

  One day I happened to be walking through our home library when Sandra was showing Paul a black-and-white photograph of a table with a telephone sitting on it.

  “What is this?” she asked, pointing to the table.

  “Sky-LAR-ghll?” Paul whispered.

  “No, that’s a nonsense word,” she said pleasantly. “It’s a table. And what is this?” she asked, pointing to the telephone.

  “TESS-er-act?” he ventured.

  “No, that’s a nonsense word, too.”

  At that moment, my understanding, his therapy, and the trajectory of our lives abruptly changed. Startled, I turned on my heel and walked back
into the library.

  “No, tesseract is a real word!” I said. “It’s a three-dimensional object unfolded into a fourth dimension. In a strange way, he’s right, that’s what a telephone is.”

  I didn’t actually mean the fourth dimension of time we associate with space-time, but a physical fourth dimension—like length, breadth, and width—which creates a sort of Möbius strip.

  Paul nodded vehemently. How curious, I thought. The words he learned when he was little—words like table and chair—might indeed be stuck in the broken primary-language areas of his brain. But it was just possible that sophisticated words, the ones he learned as an adult, get processed elsewhere, more like a second language. Doctors, speech therapists, and books on stroke didn’t mention this, but it made sense, and I realized how important that insight might be for his improvement. His surprising use of plebian, postillion, cherubim, and tardigrade all suddenly fell into place.

  From then on, I began rethinking Paul’s therapy and creating homework tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending, a sort of madcap Mad Libs that provided some much-needed humor (tough to come by for stroke victims and their loved ones). Some were easy, lest he grow discouraged, others a little more taxing. Instead of dull and childishly written exercises, I used adult vocabulary, and referred to people he knew and things happening around him, as well as familiar household objects. Had he been a welder or a golfer, I would have tried to include those activities. Here’s one of the exercises I gave him:

  When the fat lady sat on the swooning couch, she —.

  The last thing Robert expected to see on a farm was a chicken

  wearing —.

  In Diane’s closet, one can find —.

  When hummingbirds fall in love, they —.

  Despite his height and decrepitude, he carried in his pockets

  —.

  Just thinking about — makes my heart revolve.

  Airplanes — and —.

  If I had flour, eggs, vanilla, and seven cockroaches, I could make

  a —.

  The king said: “Bring me eight bronze monkeys and —.

  Few things on earth are as beautiful as —.

  Most days, I provided such fill-in-the-blank, Mad Libs–type homework to do, and he also laboriously tried to write still-unreadable notes to friends (squiggles instead of words, words misspelled, words left out, with many strike-throughs), practiced check-writing, time-telling, and reading.

  Returning to his study one day for a round of homework, he declared: “When the iron strikes, you will have to obey,” which meant: “I’d better get started since I’m feeling inspired to work.”

  All the practice seemed to be helping. Paul found the freedom of personally designed assignments liberating. A lifetime of buoyant, and at times zany, thinking had ill-prepared him for straightforward exercises. His answers to my quizzes, such as this one, unfailingly made me chuckle:

  Q: Why was smoke coming out of the man’s ears?

  A: Sitting in tub full dry ice.

  Paul was beginning to spout some normal expressions, which he understood perfectly well: “Want to go out for a dinner date?” or “I’m bone-weary.” Also, with increasing frequency as the days passed, he would use an unusual word correctly without being able to define it. “I’m spavined” he began saying whenever he was pooped.

  “Do you know what spavined means?” I asked, suspicious that he might not.

  He thought hard for a moment, his face growing red from the effort, as if he were trying to buttonhole a star. “No,” he finally admitted in dismay. “I used to.”

  I explained matter-of-factly that it’s when a horse or cow has legs that bow a little convexly and can’t walk right, and that he had used the word correctly, that it could mean very exhausted.

  Another favorite was skiving off, British slang for avoiding work, whose sense of freedom doesn’t stem from having nothing to do, but from evading a wealth of specific, pressing duties.

  People’s names seemed to live in their own drawer in his brain, one that was brutally hard for him to open. And the randomness of words embedded and words sprung loose constantly amazed me. Why should checkbook or wallet keep disappearing, like keys forever sliding to the bottom of a pocket, yet spavined always stay in plain view? Probably because nouns and verbs are quarried in different haunts of the brain.

  “Don’t chavvle it!” he chided me as I was opening an envelope for him by sliding my pointer finger under the flap and dragging it bumpily across.

  “Chavvle? . . . Chavvle.” Paul beamed at me as I ferreted through the recesses of my memory. It wasn’t nonsense sounds, that much I knew, but where had I heard the word before? Then it came to me: his mother, Mildred, a woman with gray-blue eyes, in her eighties, standing in the kitchen of an Eckington row house that sprawled up three narrow flights of stairs. Chenille tablecloth laid with empty jam jars and mixed crockery. Few modern fripperies. Electric lights replaced the gaslights that used to beg for another penny. But no telephone, bank account, or refrigerator (food stayed cool on a stone slab in the basement). The memory glided across my inner eye: beside her a slender forty-something Paul wearing tan corduroy pants and a striped long-sleeved shirt, whittling the edge off a piece of spice cake, and Mildred mock-chiding him with, “Now, now, don’t go and chavvle it!

  Chavvle—a Derbyshire word for cutting food untidily.

  An equally exotic word tumbled from his mouth on a dinner outing. We’d chosen a quiet out-of-the-way restaurant, where he needn’t worry about running into anyone he knew, which would have entailed the agony of talking. I steered him safely around the large central fireplace, between the close tables, and into his chair.

  We’d learned by now to practice beforehand how he would order in the restaurant. Withdrawing a crib sheet from his shirt pocket, he read off simple requests that wouldn’t prompt questions from the waitress—“Egg beater omelet—plain. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Skim milk”—trying, I could tell, to sound casual.

  After a quiet and blessedly uneventful meal, he pulled a credit card from his wallet and offered it to the waitress. We’d rehearsed this ahead of time, too, since he couldn’t see the numbers on paper money, or reliably remember that $50 was different from $5. But as she swept the card away, he whispered to me:

  “How much . . . how much . . .” He pointed sharply at the table as he groped for a word, finally throwing up his hands as if to say, This isn’t the right word but it’s the best I can come up with, as he pronounced “baksheesh?”

  Of course, baksheesh, the Turkish for tip or bribe. I wasn’t sure where I knew it from—maybe the trip to Istanbul with my mom when I was a moody sixteen-year-old and she, already a seasoned traveler, an attractive woman of 46 with a teenage chaperone in tow.

  “My, my,” I said, nodding appreciatively. “I’ll work out the tip for you.”

  “Tip, tip, tip,” I heard him repeating under his breath.

  “Can you say something cute?” I playfully teased as we were driving home in the declining light. It didn’t matter to me what lingo he used; I just wanted him to keep trying to communicate for as long as possible every day.

  “Don’t know,” he said weakly. His few words dropped down into a deep silence, and I forgot about my question as night’s dark cocoon began gathering around us.

  Then, unexpectedly, with some labor and a silent fanfare, he pronounced: “You are the hapax legomenon of my life.” Hapax legomenon: Latin for a word that occurs only once in the entire written record of a language. Like flother, used once, in a thirteenth-century text, as a synonym for snowflake, or slaepwerigne, used once in an Old English text to mean weary with sleep. I’d stumbled upon hapax legomenon one day while grazing in the dictionary, that Land of Perpetual Detours.

&
nbsp; “Well done!” I cheered.

  You’re still in there! I thought, my morale lifted by the flicker of his creative spirit. Despite everything, despite the monumental effort it was taking, the smithy who bends words was still keeping a forge somewhere in his brain.

  He’s nearly eighty, I thought, and there’s no predicting the what-will-be. For any of us. Carpe diem. Then I smiled bittersweetly, because carpe diem sounded like a travel allowance for goldfish, a pun that would have tickled Paul in bygone days. Now? Could he still make the mental hop from carpe diem sounding like per diem, and goldfish being a member of the carp family, to carpe diem not really meaning seize the day, but equaling what the carp’s employer will reimburse him for in a twenty-four-hour period when he’s traveling on business? That’s a lot of swerves. For a healthy brain, a pleasurable jaunt, but for Paul, whose mental pogo stick was missing some of its spring? Doubtful. And then he might feel bad about disappointing me, maybe slump into a discouraged low. Let it all go, I thought. Seize the day.

  CHAPTER 20

  ENRICH YOUR LAB RAT’S ENVIRONMENT IF YOU WANT him to thrive. To that end, Liz and I engaged Paul in “conversation therapy” nonstop. Almost daily, Liz regaled Paul with stories about her neighbor Gustaf, who could easily have been a zany character from one of Paul’s novels brought to life, and Paul always listened raptly to the madcap adventures.

  “Gustaf’s back from Chernobyl!” she said. “He slept outside on the ground to save money. Sometimes under bridges! One morning he woke up scared to death by a big guy with a gun yelling at him in Russian. Remember, Gustaf’s seven feet tall, and wears bright yellow bell-bottoms, so he’s not exactly blending into the landscape.”

  On other days I overheard: “Gustaf’s planning an illegal trip to a banned, deserted Japanese island. . . . He thinks he can kite-board to it. It’s only about a mile offshore. If the breeze is right . . .”

  “Gustaf’s having the guy from Texas who puts decals on the Hooters buses apply a decal to his car with an eight-foot-long naked woman on one side.”