Dead Languages (6 page)

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.

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 fact, 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.

MOTHER WAS BORN
in Steubenville, Ohio, a town whose only fame rests on the fact that it was a punchline to a joke in an episode of “Get Smart,” a television show I used to watch as a child and from which I would derive exquisite pleasure because whenever the Chief and Agent
86
had something secret to discuss they’d enter the cone of silence. They’d never be able to understand each other before the cone would rise. Steubenville sits on the shore of the Ohio River, and I suppose adorable little Annette swung over the rim of the river on a tire tied to a rope tied to a tree and ran barefoot in the woods in summer and skipped stones across the creek at night, but it would be preposterous to assert that Mother was ever anything resembling a river rat. I see her instead writing only one word—“Uneventful”—in her diary at the end of each day and reading mysteries under the covers with a flashlight until morning. I see her doing these things because Mother was never the storyteller Father was; she never liked to talk about her distant past.

Girlhood strikes me as one of life’s more unfathomable mysteries, and I haven’t the faintest idea what Mother did when her family moved to Los Angeles in
1940
. She wasn’t sitting in a malt shop wearing a tight pink sweater, waiting to make it big with Paramount, because she always had tiny breasts like wings. And she wasn’t falling in love with the star linebacker because, until her too-late twenties, until she met and married Father, she had a terrible time with pimples. I suppose she was busy hating her father, whom she thought she loved, and envying her brother, whom she thought she admired.

Uncle Gilbert is now chief science counselor to the American ambassador to Japan, and when he was working for the Atomic Energy Commission he discovered something about the nature of entropy that won a Nobel Prize in physics for the chairman of the AEC, but when he was just a kid in L.A. he was content to wander around the junk shop, fixing whatever his father thought was irreparable. Gilbert transformed a dark corner of the garage into a lab, where he had an impressively low number of nuclear near-explosions, and every science class he took at Dorsey High he ended up teaching until, in his senior year, Puppa decided that Berty deserved to study at the very best college in the country, within a reasonable distance. On a full fellowship in physics, he went to the California Institute of Technology.

Annette did not go to the California Institute of Technology. She went to UCLA. Any girl, if she is able to secure a parking space, can attend UCLA. And Annette wasn’t even plagued by this problem, since she was living at home and hitchhiking to school, something which very few other “Uclan co-eds” were doing. Something which even fewer of them were doing but which Annette was doing, with deep, unapproved pleasure, was smoking two packs of Kents a day through a filter, if indeed Kents were in circulation in
1942
and, if not, two packs a day of another equally strong brand through a filter. Something which no one, absolutely no one else in all of Westwood except Annette, was doing was being the managing editor of the
Daily Bruin.
She did very little all day other than call up the police station and correct proof sheets, then hitchhike home in the dark.

Whenever she had a couple of hours to kill, she’d walk across campus to her studio in the basement of the Art Department, where a certain professor of Post-Impressionism would invariably stop by to speak very favorably of the work she was producing in clay. Nearly all professors of Post-Impressionism are sexual in the extreme; this nice man probably just wanted Mother to put down her piece of clay and kiss him unconscious. Mother avoided such implications, if she was even aware of them, and concentrated, instead, on her statue, which she took very seriously. Spending a couple of hours when the spirit moves you does very little to enhance the quality of a work of art. Upon graduation, Mother had created only one small sculpture, and even it wasn’t quite finished. The left foot had only four toes.

Mother was proud of that piece of clay, despite its flaws. I think it was the only thing she ever made with her hands and she wanted other people to see it. When she married Father, she thought it should appear over the fireplace. Father agreed, though he thought it more properly displayed in the attic. When we moved north, she paid the Bekins moving man twenty dollars to wrap it carefully and hold it in his lap while he drove. Mother was disappointed, however, in how he handled a few plates and felt she had to file a protest with his employer: “Despite my repeated requests for the use of extreme care in handling and packing our fine set of imported china, these dishes were stacked together and wrapped only in coarse paper, unprotected by any kind of separating cushion. I was shocked to find this gross negligence, especially when such items as a plastic measuring cup were packed with more care than that accorded Limoges china.” She could certainly take the high road.

She placed the sculpture in the middle of the mantel, the first thing guests saw upon entering. I’ve avoided describing the figure because it’s so difficult to describe without making it sound grotesque. It was sort of a tragic self-portrait in red clay: an adobe woman with eyes of lead and hair of rock, her head bent sadly and impossibly between her legs. Her left foot was still missing a toe, her
mons Veneris
was curiously box-shaped, her breasts had the appearance and texture of acorns. I don’t know whether this was the artist’s intended effect, or whether it’s in extremely bad taste to comment upon the private parts of your mother’s sculpture, but I was touching those acorn breasts, thrilling to their strange roughness, when Adobe Woman fell from the shelf.

It was Sunday afternoon. Father, Beth, and I were trying to clean house before Mother returned from a weekend of interviewing state senators in Sacramento. Father was vacuuming the hall rug while Beth was mopping the kitchen floor and I was dusting the den furniture. We were all listening to Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
turned up loud and playing over and over again on the hi-fi. We were all hard at work and happy and eager for Mother to return and compliment us on our cleaning. Then I picked up Mother’s sculpture in order to dust the mantelpiece. Above the sound of the
Four Seasons,
above the sound of the whining vacuum cleaner, Father and Beth could hear the crash.

After turning off the music, Beth stood at the edge of the kitchen floor and her only comment was: “You’re dead, Jeremy. Now you’ve really had it.”

Father shut off the vacuum cleaner and tried to piece the sculpture together, but it was hopeless. Adobe Woman had a crack down her spine, her right arm stopped at the shoulder, her feet were missing.

“If I glue it together and put it back where it was, maybe Mom won’t notice the difference when she returns,” Father said. “I don’t want to upset her after a long weekend of hard work.”

“Don’t even think of trying that,” Beth called from the kitchen.

“Why not?” he asked.

“You know how disdainful Mom is of duplicity.”

“Yeah, Dad, d-d-don’t piece it together. I’ll just tell her what I did when she gets home.”

Mother was, above all else, a woman of moods. If she’d been escorted out of the San Francisco Press Club for wearing slacks or her editor in New York had tampered with her lead, dinner would be a long silent affair, the rest of the evening she’d try to find fault with us, and we’d stay out of her way. But when things broke right for her, when
The Nation
played her story on the inside front cover, or an important politician invited her to ask the first question at a press conference, she was capable, I think, of divine love. She would give back to us the blessings the world had bestowed upon her, and in her glory we could do no wrong. She’d gone to Sacramento with the intention of talking to a few senators, some assemblymen, and maybe a couple of lobbyists, but Arnie Logan, Mother’s former sports editor on the
Daily Bruin
and now Pat Brown’s press secretary, had arranged an exclusive interview for her with the governor, and on the way home she’d sold it as a free-lance feature to the Sunday supplement of the
San Francisco Examiner.

She wanted so much to share her triumph with us that she bought Father another book to add to his The Rosenbergs Were Not Guilty Library, she bought Beth a marionette, she bought me a box of cinnamon gingerbread men, and she bought herself a bottle of champagne. When she handed me my box of cinnamon gingerbread men, I handed her the broken pieces of Adobe Woman and said, “I’m sorry, M-M-Mom, I dropped your c-c-clay lady.”

On that Sunday afternoon, I don’t think the death of her father would have seriously dampened her spirits. She was so giddy with success, so drunk with champagne, that she just looked at the pieces and laughed and tousled my hair and said, “That’s okay, Jeremy. Don’t worry about it. It was an ugly old thing, anyhow, don’t you think? I didn’t care much for it any more. Cheer up, hon, it was only a statue. All is forgiven if you’ll promise to be as honest with me about everything as you’ve been about this. Will you do that? From now on, if you do something I should know about, will you come tell me rather than make me find out for myself? Good. Now, may I have one of your gingerbread men? I’ve always liked best the kind with icing on the nose.”