CHAPTER 19

PAUL WOULD DITIFULLY JOIN HIS SPEECH THERAPIST IN the library for an hour each day, emerging exhausted and demoralized, having punished his brain in an effort to fill in blanks, list words within categories (how many flowers can you name? None . . . How many animals can you name? None . . . ), link words with pictures, and attempt to perform other language skills. She tried teaching him to ask himself: What category is a word in? What color or shape is the object? If he could exclude many competing things, his quest would be clearer. Despite their simplicity, he found the exercises demanding and at times impossible.

Later, I watched Paul puzzling over workbook pages, trying to rack words, like skittish pool table balls, into the rigid triangle of just one concept—he was racking his brains.

“Can bowls swim?” a question asked. I knew the answer they wanted was No. But bowls could float, even heavy bowls, if flat and large enough. The large, flat-bottomed bowl of an ocean liner, for instance. If Paul thought like that, too, he’d give the wrong answer. They meant small inanimate household bowls. Not the bowl of the deep ocean, say, holding currents, coral, plants, and creatures—itself floating on the earth’s liquid core of iron and nickel, whose swaying produces Earth’s magnetic field. Not the bowl of the earth floating—or, with so many life-forms, was it swimming?—in space.

“Can water freeze?” That one was easy. But some other questions required only the literal meaning of a word, not the way it’s used every day in slang. “Can bullets grow?” Certain kinds of exploding bullets expand, grow, on impact. “Can pearls fly?” If someone throws them. “Can beavers talk?” Those in the Ipana toothpaste commercials of the 1950s used to sing. “Is a siren loud?” Air-raid sirens—yes. The seductive bird-ladies of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths—not necessarily. “Can stones burn?” And how. The stones on a sun-baked beach, or the stones encircling a campfire. “Can bags frown?” They often do, especially when groceries are packed unevenly. “Are parakeets tame?” Store-bought—yes. But wild parakeets nest on several continents. Paul loved the squabbling, squawking monk parakeets that nest in Florida palm trees. “Are potatoes hollow?” No . . . but the minute I read the question I imagined a hollow potato. An intricate ivory one, carved by a Japanese craftsman, its skin a filigree where, on closer inspection, a cityscape loomed. “Are vitamins greasy?” Some absolutely are. The thick syrupy gold vitamins my mom fed me when I was little slid right down. “Are coupons expensive?” I presumed they meant coupons offering discounts at the supermarket. But municipalities had to pay the coupons on bonds, and they could be expensive. “Is satin sticky?” If you had rough fingertips, as Paul did, then your fingers snagged easily on satin and other slick fabrics.

Choosing the correct answer could be as tough as herding cats. But, like most people, I did know the accepted answer. Selecting it, I had to ignore all other answers that sprang to mind or were truer to my experience. Could Paul do that now with a hurt brain? Could he understand the domestic use of a word, while chasing away wild game? Or had his mind become simpler than all of that? Had he lost the mental elastic that used to connect everything to everything else with the tug of a few words? There it was again. Tug was another of those deliciously ambiguous words. I pictured the game we played when I sneaked up on Paul from behind and tugged almost imperceptibly at his sleeve; then I pictured a tiny boat tugging a goliath tanker into port.

Bewildered, Paul handed me the homework sheets, on which he had answered a few questions, and I silently read them, shaking my head in disbelief. Some questions seemed simple, yet were fiendishly ambiguous. Only context was missing, the opera of cues we often need to guess what sentences mean.

“Do you drink a cup of water or drink a cup of river,” I read out loud. My eyes clouded with memories of the Amazon River Basin, weeks of floating and walking through the vine-thick jungle, under canopies effervescent with life. After dinner one evening, carrying an underwater lantern, some boat mates and I had snorkeled in waters dark and clear as quartz. Except for the occasional stingray, there was nothing much to fear. Nothing large enough to see, that is. Out of curiosity, I’d drunk a slow, savory mouthful of river, which tasted tinny yet soft, as if it had been stirred by water hyacinths, mechanical watches, and dolphins. Bad mistake.

“Remember when I drank some of the Amazon and got that awful parasite?” I asked Paul.

“Gaaagh!” His jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he aped the blue tribal mask I’d brought home to him along with reddish-brown bats carved from mahogany, polished to a tranquil sheen, and bark-cloth paintings of butterflies in ginger, ochre, and black. The black had come from pressed fruits of the huito tree, which produce a liquid like invisible ink that’s painted on with clear brush-strokes, but later oxidizes to a rich, satiny black in the open air.

Then the huge sprawling Amazon vanished from my mind’s eye as I followed Paul’s finger, pointing to a workbook question that offered Sit at a table vs. Sit under a table. He pointed to Cement is hard vs. Cement is soft. Next he spread his fingers stiffly—all but the two droopy ones—in a sign of tortured woe. Then he mimed the weighing of produce. At last, sighing unevenly, he seemed to let all the air out of the room.

I understood. Poured cement is soft, set cement hard.

“How about these?” I pointed to Bridges can be carried vs. Radios can be carried, and Sew your hair vs. Comb your hair.

“Yes!” he said, making a darning motion in the air.

Of course one could sew with hair. Before manufacturing, people sewed with animal hair.

“Kwai,” he added. Just the one word. For a few moments, I floated the word in my mind . . . Kwai . . . Kwai . . . only its bare sounds at first, until images marched in. The Bridge Over the River Kwai was a favorite WWII film of Paul’s, in which prisoners built, while simultaneously sabotaging, a wooden bridge for the Burma railway.

“Do you imagine these things—carrying a bridge or sewing with hair—when you read the sentence?”

“YES,” he whispered hard in exasperation, while rubbing his brow with his good hand.

Even if he understood all the words—and I wasn’t sure he did—he was still too imaginative for this sort of exercise, which required a different habit of mind. The minute he heard or read about it, he automatically pictured taking cabbage for a walk, wearing poems, or discovering a wall full of money. The brain imagines whatever it’s told about, and trying to suppress a thought results in preoccupation with it. Try not to picture a polar bear.

“Want to take a cabbage for a walk?” I teased with an exaggerated smile. “I think we’ve got a cabbage leash around here somewhere.”

“Why not,” he said in a blasé tone, like any normal spouse being asked to walk the family spaniel.

In all Paul went through five speech therapists, mainly teaching the same skills in the same way, none able to help him progress much. Number one was Catherine, a handsome middle-aged woman with tawny skin and an apologetic smile who had the habit of peeping up over her rimless glasses, as if she were repeatedly surfacing from a deep thought.

“Can you use these words to make a sentence?” she asked Paul, setting five cards on the table, one word printed on each: “Pat,” “John,” “down,” “eats,” “sits.”

Paul stared at the cards for a long silent spell, without touching them. Later he would tell me that they sometimes looked like worms cavorting on ice floes, or hieroglyphics on a tomb wall. He wasn’t sure which, not that it mattered much, because reading was no longer an effortless and unconscious knack. The brain doesn’t swallow a word whole. It breaks it into twigs, then reassembles the separate letters, syllables, and sounds to create meaning. Some of those mental steps had been damaged during the stroke. Anyway, he didn’t know what these scattered words were for. What was he supposed to do with them? Was it line them up? Soon they lost their novelty and he sat back in his chair and began drumming on the table with bored fingers.

“Now, now, don’t give up so fast!” she said. Leaning over the cards, she arranged two of them like this: JOHN EATS. “John eats,” she pronounced slowly and deliberately. “See? It’s easy. Now you do it.”

Then he allowed one hand to hover above the words, before slowly lowering it into action and plucking at the cards, sliding them into different arrangements, finally settling on PAT DOWN and JOHN SITS.

Toward the end of the session, their fifth time together, she surprised us by announcing: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to work with you anymore, Mr. West. . . .”

I looked questioningly at Paul. Had something gone amiss? He seemed puzzled as well.

“Because I’m getting married this weekend!” She beamed. “And we’re leaving right after the ceremony on our honeymoon . . . in Europe. We’ll be gone all summer.”

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.

“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.