Dead Languages (28 page)

We argued for the first time when, during exam week, I did what passed with me for exploding. “Sandra, please. Language is more than just a lot of lists. Speech isn’t just a mechanical behavior, some neutral physical activity. It’s suffused with emotion.”

Which is obvious and yet I had to say it. We’d been transferred to a clinic room designed for normal human beings rather than midgets. The blackboard, presently untouched and never to my knowledge touched, was glistening in the corner like the reminder of a headache. Someone—Dr. Hemley, the director? Neil, the technician?—was peering through the black-edged, silver, one-way mirror. I was sitting with my legs stretched out and my hands tapping on the table. Sandra was sitting with her legs crossed and her hands held politely together in her lap. When I said what I had to say, her hands fairly flew out of her lap, landed on my happily tapping hands, and squeezed them.

“Don’t you see?” she said, lifting my hands in the air, rubbing them, dropping them back to the table. I didn’t understand this business with my hands. Maybe it was an imitation of Shaking Sudden Sense into me. “If you’re ever going to make any progress, you’ve got to distinguish between, on the one hand, the emotions surrounding speech and, on the other, the mechanics of communication. Sure, stuttering has psychological, though not necessarily pathological, origins; sure, speech is a highly emotional activity, but if you want the romance of psychoanalysis you’d be wise to take a good hard look at what Freud said about disfluency. His only hypothesis was the half-baked notion that the quivering of the stutterer’s lips was a rather futile attempt to return to infantile nipple-sucking. Is that what you want?”

No, Sandra, that wasn’t what I wanted, and you knew that wasn’t what I wanted, and you knew if you phrased the question that way you’d succeed in persuading me to take back to San Francisco in June, and pursue, the UCLA Speech and Hearing Clinic summer home program—reading aloud to myself, making deliberate changes in the five parameters when talking on the telephone, not avoiding feared words, noting stressful situations, observing and analyzing speakers I admired—but, Sandra, let’s face it: the summer home program was a colossal flop, my speech went to hell because I was too busy writing my first short story, and I was too busy writing my first short story because Mother contracted cancer right through her heart.

MOTHER WAS WORKING
now for two oddly complementary organizations: the California Council on Health Plan Alternatives, which lobbied for nationalized medicine, and the Stanford Medical Center, where she publicized the radiation lab. It might seem as if I’ve rearranged Mother’s résumé to underline the symbolism of something or other, but I haven’t. There was just some cell inside her that was screaming about sickness and survival.

Hyperthermia—abnormally high body temperature—when used with radiation or chemotherapy is a promising new avenue for treatment of tumors.

Kidney cancer may be killed by a new nonsurgical technique that shuts off its blood supply and starves it to death.

The nursing profession continues to develop passive, conforming, neutral people at a point in its history when there is an urgent need for nurses who can think imaginatively and develop new solutions to increasingly complex problems.

This was the order of sentence Mother was composing on her classic black Remington as July turned surprisingly warm in San Francisco, so when she cried, “Announcement! Announcement! Everyone around the hearth for a heart-to-heart,” who among us could have expected it would be anything more than another chance for her to discuss the Women’s Liberation movement in the context of a realignment of the family chores? She had a remarkable manner of entering rooms. I’ve never met anyone who so completely determined the mood of a particular space the way she affected every feeling that emerged from the floorboards, and I remember her walking into the living room four months before her fiftieth birthday. Whereas anybody else would have been carrying a handkerchief in one hand and a bottle of sleeping pills in the other, Mother was carrying gift-wrapped packages. Ten years before, she’d entered the hospital for a minor operation (nodule, nose) and upon her return brought me a transistor radio. I had loved that radio’s white earplug, black dial, black leather case beneath my pillow at night, and now here she was again—home from the doctor with three presents in her hands. She read her mail and mixed a large gin-and-tonic without any tonic while we unwrapped our presents: a jogging suit for Father;
The Riverside Shakespeare
for Beth, who, in her second year of graduate studies at Berkeley in British history and first year of residing with Michael, missed the dramaturgy of her recent past; and for me a text entitled
Disfluency Dissolved,
which belonged to the genre of self-help quackery—swing your left arm when talking to someone on your right side, swing your right arm when talking to someone on your left side—that Sandra despised.

Father looked up from his sweat pants and said, “Honey, I assume these wonderful gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun.”

Father, Beth, and I were sitting, quite literally, at Mother’s feet. Mother’s feet were resting on, of all things, the foot rest of the Good Chair. She fiddled with the FM dial of the hi-fi, pouring herself more Beefeater Gin and petting Bruin’s ancient, fat, but still glossy back. That dumb dog’s sole desire in life was to eliminate all itches. When, in her youth, we tried to get her to debauch a beagle from around the block, Bruin pranced away like a poodle with dancer’s attitude.

“I suppose,” Father said, “these wonderful gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun.”

“Do you like the book, Beth?” Mother asked. “Is that the right edition, the one you wanted, with the color pictures in front?”

Beth was a grad student at Berkeley at a time when being a grad student at Berkeley made you answer: “Certainly there are going to be those who prefer the Signets, Mother, the individual paperback editions with those gorgeous Milton Glaser covers.”

Beth didn’t mean to hurt Mother. Nor did I when I said Sandra wouldn’t let me even look at
Disfluency Dissolved.
Nor did Father when he said the jogging suit would fit fine after a couple of washings. The living room was almost totally dark now and for some reason Mother prohibited anyone from turning on the lights. She tilted the foot rest, threatening, or so it seemed, to kick it over but managing quite nicely to keep it on
pointe.
Drinking entirely too much gin, she petted Bruin so vigorously the animal finally flopped off her lap. KKHI-FM, as if by thematic prearrangement with Mother, was playing Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.”

“I guess these gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun,” Father said.

“Yes,” Mother said, “yes, I mean: no, nothing like that at all, no.” The Unfinished Symphony finished. Bruin tried to establish sympathetic eye contact with the other members of the family. Mother gulped a full glass of gin. “Actually,” Mother said (for the first time ever she had trouble talking, her voice cracked, she couldn’t enunciate), “I found a little lump in my breast, and the day after tomorrow we’re having it biopsied.” Here she found it necessary to lie. “It’s not going to be malignant. I’m going to be all right. None of you is to worry.” She laughed unconvincingly, too high, too abruptly aborted, to herself.

I wasn’t there with Mother in the examination room when she made Doctor Braun feel one lump in her left breast and another along her lymph nodes, when she told him about the blood dripping from her nipple, when he kept saying, “I hope you’re wrong, I really do,” in response to her saying, “I’m sorry, I know, I just do, I know my body, so let’s go after this with everything you’ve got.” Still, I see the harsh white light of the overhead lamp, the crinkly paper stretched across the narrow table, the doctor’s little desk in the corner, the icy steel chairs, the silvery-glassy reflection off scissors and bottles, the tardy antiseptic of rubbing alcohol, Mother’s toes almost touching the cold floor—and I wonder why she didn’t tell us when she found out for certain that she had a year and a half to live. Me and Beth, at least, if not Father, since shortly after this he was back at Montbel. It was an extraordinarily misguided decision, to leave us guessing all along. She pretended to be so public and transparent, but she was certainly as secretive as the rest of us. The only person she told was Elaine Ellenboegen, who shared this information when she showed me Father’s letters.

In the living room, when Mother said she was sure the tumor wasn’t malignant, I recalled stopping in Salt Lake City on the way home from Jackson Hole. We were admitted to an overpopulated auditorium when Father told the doorman we’d come “all the way from San Francisco to see the senator.” The rally was for Eugene McCarthy; it must have been
1967
, I must have been eleven. Afterward we swam in or, actually, on Salt Lake. Mother, stretching out seductively in her ubiquitous black one-piece, called to Father: “What else is like this? What in all of life, Teddy, is such an uninterrupted lull?” We had dinner near the state capitol at a restaurant that featured a waterfall and served twelve courses including as many Italian ices as you could eat. Father ate more than he could eat and fell asleep the moment he lay down back at the motel room. Beth and I swam in the indoor pool while Mother sat in a wet chaise longue, somehow both reading the
Congressional Quarterly
and admiring us. Mother said it was time to towel off but first bought us bottles of orange Fanta and lit a cigarette. As we crossed the parking lot to the motel room, Beth warned Mother about the likely lethal effects of inhaling nicotine and tar. “It’s not the quantity of life,” Mother said, “it’s the quality of life.” Surely this was the most meaningless platitude she knew. She only wanted Beth to give back her matches. Somehow, though, there we were, the three of us walking across the parking lot, waiting for Mother to finish her cigarette. Clinging like gossamer to Mother’s banality was the sensation of something seized: the sun disappearing into the bottom of the soda bottle, the Great Salt Lake rushing into the indoor pool, Father dreaming he was a soldier in boot camp.

Immediately upon absorbing the significance of Mother’s upcoming operation, Father yielded conscious control over the left side of his brain. By comparison, Beth said afterward, Lucky’s monologue toward the end of
Godot
was practically a model of decorum. Father kneeled like a begging Bruin, wailing and crying into Mother’s lap: “No no ’Nette please no O love dearheart No I life so O no love ’Nette I O please dearheart no no.” Beth and I stared at each other with the worthless weight of our books in our hands, not knowing where to go till we surrounded Mother and started hugging either shoulder, calling her “Mom” for the first time in I don’t know how long. The one thing she couldn’t accept was sympathy for herself. Later, when she was really ill, she photocopied a statement that said: “I ask that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering even if they hasten the moment of death. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain.” All those
d
s. She stood, kicked over the foot rest, and said, “You’ll excuse me. I’m going to bed. Nighty night.” She was sloshed.

Pressing his jogging suit in a bundle to his chest, Father followed after her, crawling across the carpet. Like so many of his other gestures—the way he kissed people or shook your hand, how he made a toast at a fundraiser—this struck me as an act. It was as if he were always portraying what he imagined might be laudatory. Even away from all the electrodes, he never impressed me as having a genuine core upon which to draw. He could get very flustered if anyone else in the room said they were seriously sick. That was his province.

Mother dissuaded Beth and me from visiting her at the hospital, but Father virtually lived there. He was working now for the city as a housing inspector of slum dwellings and accountable to no one. When Mother came home, she looked basically the same as she had before. She never had much of a bust, so I could hardly tell the difference when she returned or when, a little later, a prosthesis was strapped to her shoulder.

She missed little more than a month at the California Council on Health Plan Alternatives, where a big bill with Senator Kennedy’s backing awaited Mother’s hand to hammer it into final form. They took what amounts to a team picture the day she went back to work; looking recently at the photograph in the family album, I couldn’t distinguish her from all the other overworked health planners. I found and focused my little loupe. She might as well as have been me trying to say
Ford.
The veins in her neck were like two long fingers in the claw of a canary.

MOTHER STOOD
in the doorway between the kitchen and the den, pulling a white rope over and back a chin-up bar in order to regain strength in her left shoulder. I sat down in a chair and talked to her about stuttering: how much it had bothered me while growing up, how hard I was trying to improve my speech this summer, how much it defined who I was. If I had known she was dying, I wouldn’t have talked about stuttering with such solemnity, since it would have seemed so inconsequential. But I didn’t know she was dying and I wanted us to be like two injured veterans trading war stories.
I
can comprehend pain, Mom—tell me where it hurts.

Five o’clock light came into the kitchen, making the yellow linoleum look liquid and the top of the round Formica table like a floating saucer. Mother was only a few feet away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the San Andreas Fault: on the den side of the door, a step down from the kitchen, in semidarkness, wearing bathrobe and slippers, grunting as she raised her shoulder a little higher with each effort.

Between rope pulls, in response to my speech about speech, Mother said, “Do you know something, Jeremy?”

“No, what, Mother?”