Dead Languages (17 page)

“I didn’t think you’d be quite so short,” she said.

I thought maybe studies had shown that all stutterers were short—no palliation for the little people—but that Mrs. Sherfey hadn’t thought I’d be quite so short. I was fourteen years old, five foot four, and I had a mad moment’s hope that was what she meant, since Mother was five foot eight and Father was five foot eleven. Sooner or later I’d simply outgrow this midgets’ disease. Attempting to enunciate every word clearly and cleanly, I asked, “What … exactly … do … you … mean … by … that … Mrs. … Sherfey?”

She swiveled around in her chair for a while, then said, “My husband is Rick Sherfey. You know,
the
Rick Sherfey, All-Pac-Eight forward for the University of Washington Huskies, ’fifty-nine and ’sixty. He still follows all the games in the ‘Sporting Green,’ even the junior high school leagues. Rick’s something of a fan of yours. He told me that, whatever I do, I’m not to tamper with your set shot. I’m surprised a star basketball player is so short, that’s all.”

I recognized this as the most ancient of all therapeutic ploys—give the poor kid
something
to take pride in—but it still worked. I blushed and smiled and shook my head and tried to act like an athlete. She proved to be surprisingly knowledgeable about the game, and for the next half hour we talked about how it doesn’t matter if a guard is short if he knows how to protect the ball; what a shame it was her husband, after being a third-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Lakers, broke his back the first week of the season; how embarrassing and absurd it was that London had a girls’ field hockey team but no boys’ basketball squad; how
A Sense of Where You Are
was good but
The Last Loud Roar
was probably even better.

Then she had to turn on the tape recorder, hand me a mimeographed interoffice memorandum, and say, “You’ve been speaking really well, Jeremy, only a few minor disfluencies here and there. Let me hear you read for a while.”

“Oh, I read fine,” I said and wasn’t being intentionally insincere. I remembered giving the integration speech at Currier and reading aloud in my bedroom. The Bozo the Clown fiasco was too long ago to recollect. I saw myself as a relatively articulate reader.

“That’s funny,” she said and started rummaging around in her desk drawer for some study or other. “Almost all stutterers have at least a little trouble when it comes to oral reading.” She couldn’t find the monograph that proved it.

I, on the other hand, disliked the label. It sounded like
atheist
or
heretic
or
cat burglar.
Stutterer, life sentence, with no chance for parole. Nor was I pleased with her sudden and complete redefinition of me from admired, if short, basketball star to terminal titubant.

“I don’t see myself exactly as a stutterer,” I said. “It’s more just a case of getting nervous in certain situations. When I feel comfortable, I never have any trouble talking.”

This wasn’t true, but I felt pressed.

“Well, you feel comfortable with me, I hope. Why don’t you read aloud that memo? We’ll record it, play it back, and you tell me what you think.”

Her remarks had a prophecy of doom about them, but I sat back in the chair, attempted to derive some omnipotent peace from the white seagull against an empty blue sky, and began to read. The memo was from all the principals, deans, vice principals, and assistant principals to all the guidance counselors, psychologists, nurses, and therapists. The gist of it was that students should be urged to transcend (via arduous scholarship) rather than dwell morosely upon (via paralytic self-absorption) their emotional problems. The finer points of the communiqué I really didn’t follow, since I was paying more attention to form than content.

At the time, my particular plague spot happened to be words beginning with vowels. This text, for one reason or another, was riddled with them. I kept opening my mouth and uttering air bubbles, half-human pops of empty repetition. She didn’t have to play it back for me to know it had been the very embodiment of babble, but she did, and then, raising her right eyebrow, asked, “Well?”

I explained that the whirring of the tape recorder and her ostentatious tallying of my errata had made me nervous. The proof I wasn’t just one more stutterer was that I could whisper.

“But, Jeremy,” she said, opening her drawer to find another study to support her new point. “That’s one of the hallmarks of stutterers: exaggerated enjoyment of whispering.” She couldn’t find the folder in which there was a graph affirming this fact.

I seized upon her inability to come up with any conclusive evidence and, pounding my hand on her desk, said, “That’s not true. You’re lying. I know you are. You’re just saying that. Stutterers cannot whisper. I know they can’t.”

“Please take your hands off the papers on my desk, Jeremy, and, yes, they can. Virtually all stutterers can whisper and take enormous pride in their whispering. You’re a stutterer. I want you to admit that fact. It’s an important step on the road to recovery. Once you acknowledge the abnormality, we can get to work on correcting it. I want to help you. When you’re a professional basketball player, I don’t want to see you giving hesitant interviews at half time.”

The flattery tactic didn’t work this time, not least because she was wrong: the athletic aesthetic is always to assert that the ecstasies experienced by the body are beyond the reach of words. Interviewed warriors answer every question with the proper platitude like Zulu tribesmen retaining possession of their souls by refusing to be photographed. I’d regularly distinguished myself from the common run of repeaters by the fact that I could whisper and now, informed I was one among ten million, I was enraged—at what or whom I didn’t quite know, but enraged.

I stood and said, “I don’t want your happy posters or your happy smiles or your happy basketball chitchat. I don’t want to be happy. I want to be u-u-unusual.” Then I did something I thought was very unusual. I tore down a poster—I think it was the one with the colorful peacock—and ran out of the room.

IT RAINED
a lot that fall in San Francisco and I spent most of my time sitting on one particular bench in the courtyard, wondering about the effect of rainwater on metal railing, since all my classes consisted of Socratic dialogue and I disliked playing Plato’s part. When I did attend class I’d sit in back, pretending not to hear when called upon and, when pressed to respond, would produce an answer that I knew was incorrect but was the only word I could say. I studied with extreme devotion the dictionary and thesaurus in the hope I could possess a vocabulary of such immense range that, for every word, I’d know half a dozen synonyms and thus always be able to substitute an easy word for an unspeakable one. My sentences became so saturated with approximate verbal equivalents that what I thought often bore almost no relation to what I actually said.

One day I was asked whether the origin of the American Revolution was essentially economic or philosophical. I wanted to say, as Mother and Father always said, that revolution arises from an unfair distribution of wealth, but instead I replied: “The Whigs had a multiplicity of fomentations, ultimate or at least penultimate of which would have to be their predilection to be utterly discrete from colonial intervention, especially on numismatical pabulae.” The teacher roared; the class shrieked; within hours I was begging Mrs. Sherfey to take me back, which she did, with open arms and the promise of eloquence.

Still, I hated walking across the London campus with Mrs. Sher-fey. Everyone knew who she was; they, unlike I, thought she was sexy, and it defined me ineradicably as a boy castrated by his own tongue. Although they’d heard me falter in class, I hated them seeing my attempted recovery. I hated having to listen to Mrs. Sherfey’s earnest benevolence with a hundred eyes on us as we circled the swimming pool. She, of course, knew this and as often as possible escorted me the long way round the courtyard on some fool’s errand to the science wing. It was, she felt, for reasons that have remained obscure to me, integral to even the possibility of improvement. En route to the science wing she’d curl her arm inside mine as if we were lollygagging through Lincoln Park.

She changed all my courses, enrolling me in Public Speaking, Spanish Conversation in place of Mexican Folktales, and a special section of English Literature in which the
modus operandi
was for students to stand in front of the room, recite poems, and explicate them. I was a poor public speaker, but when I did an imitation of Mayor Alioto I finally relaxed and the class applauded its approval. I dreaded Spanish conversation because I didn’t have the resources of an extended vocabulary I had in English. “Cerca” was “c-c-cerca.” It couldn’t be “quite proximate to where I’m now standing.” When I adopted a mock-elegant Castilian accent, however, I spoke perfectly. Modern poetry seemed a little too laconic, but I recited iambic pentameter as if I were Sir Philip Sidney at a court masque. A principle of linguistic redemption emerged: distance converted to clarity.

Mrs. Sherfey was determined to press this phenomenon into habitual glibness. The drama department was doing
Othello
for its winter performance—a torrid play for a cold season—and Mrs. Sherfey thought I’d derive such confidence from speaking a few poetical lines to a packed house that I’d stop stuttering forever. When I didn’t meet her at the first night of tryouts, as I was supposed to do, she drove to my house, knocked on the door, and said, “Let’s go, Iago.” Mother was so sympathetic to other women who were completely wrapped up in their work that she nearly hugged Mrs. Sherfey into submission and Father joked—like Loud Blazer—heh heh, wasn’t I a little too young to be going out with someone so beautiful?

Mrs. Sherfey was right. I did want to play Iago. It seemed to me his play moor than it was Othello’s. His rhetoric created every event of the play, he stood alone at the end of each of the first two acts and thought about turning people into pawns. I loved his innate sense of transverse alliteration: his “prattle, without practice”; his “night and negligence,” a truly gorgeous phrase; his “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” I gave what I thought was a fairly good reading of Iago’s “Put money in thy purse” speech, but the general consensus was that Iago should exude a little more malicious energy than I appeared to possess, so I was given the role of the Sailor.

Nearly everyone who reads the play, or sees it performed, fails to find the least significance in the Sailor. It’s true he appears in only one scene and is in and out in a flash; true, too, he has only one line, but what a line he delivers! What meaning he compresses into so few words! First, “within”—offstage—he says, “What ho! What ho! What ho!” At first glance, these lines look simple enough. They appear to be nothing more than the Sailor’s rather rude way of entering. But in his triple reiteration of “ho!” is he not in fact preparing the audience for Othello’s much later, and more universally appreciated only because so much more transparent, treble repetition of “Oh!” in “Oh
Desdemon!
dead
Desdemon:
dead. Oh, Oh!”? I think he is.

The Officer acknowledges the clear importance of the Sailor by saying, “A messenger from the galleys.” Perhaps a pun is intended here on “galleys” in the sense of “printers’ proofs”; the Sailor is a messenger of language itself, a nautical representative of poetry. The Duke further surrounds the Sailor in mystery by asking, “Now, what’s the business?” and then the Sailor comes straight out with it: “The Turkish preparation makes for Rhodes./So was I bid report here to the state/By Signior Angelo.” One hardly knows where to begin the elucidation of this line. Doesn’t “The Turkish preparation makes for Rhodes” hint at the entire movement of the play, the descent from Venetian city streets to Cyprus goats and monkeys and isn’t the leitmotif of
Othello—
the schism between the desires of the individual and the demands of civilization—caught in the Sailor’s winning phrase, “So was I bid report here to the state by Signior Angelo”? Doesn’t “report” register the impossibility of marrying spoken words to perceived realities that is so fundamental to the drama? Isn’t that impossibility further underscored by the Messenger’s immediate contradiction of the Sailor’s dispatch, with the news that the Turks are sailing for Cyprus and only gathering guns at Rhodes? Why give a man only one line in a play and make that line a lie? Why give that part to someone who was a little weary of speaking only a few words and all of them wrong? Why?

For a good month I lived with these lines. I knew everything there was to know about them. I knew that my offstage line took two and one-quarter seconds to say, and my onstage line exactly twice that long. I knew that “What ho!” rhymed with “Signior Angelo,” as if all twenty-four words I spoke were meant to form a neat little poem. “What ho!” became my all-purpose exclamation to express surprise, perplexity, encouragement, happiness, grief, and to the lit mirror in the bathroom, to Bruin in her basket, to the metal railing at London, I bellowed: “The Turkish preparation makes for Rhodes./So was I bid report here to the state/By Signior Angelo.”

I practiced my lines so much on my own because I hardly ever got to say them at rehearsal. Whenever we worked on my scene—I.iii—Desdemona always got to gasp that she wasn’t about to spend her wedding night away from her black hulk, and Othello always got to run through his tedious explanation of how he seduced Desdemona by telling her war stories. The director’s only concern was that I not foul up the blocking: that I come to center stage for a second, then quickly retreat into a corner and pretend to chat with the attendants.

She was very severe and capable of being cruel to her actors but such an outstanding director that Berkeley kept inviting her to join its theater arts department. She never left London, at least while I was there, since she had total freedom and an unlimited budget, and her name was certainly still on the stage door when I went wandering around my alma mater just recently over Christmas break. Her sole responsibility was to produce three spectacular performances a year, and she had two favorite sayings. “Shakespeare occupied a wholly verbal universe.” My kinda guy. And “D is L.” Drama is Life, which didn’t mean life was an extremely theatrical affair, but the obverse, really; the only thing which mattered was whatever play she was doing at the time. I didn’t believe that and I didn’t like the people in the cast who did. In fact, I didn’t like any of the people in the cast. They were older than I was, more sophisticated, and prettier. They seemed to me some nightmare union of Audrey’s and Beth’s friends: very intelligent, but disdainful of anything even vaguely sincere and quite fond of saying reality was for people who couldn’t handle LSD.