Dead Languages

THE REASON WHY it was not just one more broken leg, why I imbue it with significance, is that I was never again able to play competitive sports. Two months in traction and nine more in a metal leg brace nullified whatever dreams I still had of becoming an athlete and forced me into finding another way of ordering my world. Phrasemaker that she was, Mother called this the silver lining of a very black cloud. I still believed in love at first sight, the ultimate triumph of political justice, and the consolation of beautiful language.

Conventional wisdom has it that poetry begins when the pain or at least the boredom gets intolerable. Conventional wisdom has it right for once, since immediately after dispensing with the last of sophomore year course work I commenced to write the first and last series of poems I’ve ever written, a satirical sonnet sequence too pathetic to look at again, even here. I took as the subjects of the Hospital Cycle the standard themes of convalescent life—the cold doctor, the cheerful nurses, the bland food, the tedious visitor—whereas what I wanted to write about was the sound of the little Korean woman’s voice when she entered the room at sunrise, selling papers, screeching “Chron-eee-cle, Chron-eee-cle,” as if she were consciously attempting to reproduce in her intonation the undesirability of morning and irritability of the world.

In July I began purchasing the newspaper from her because I could no longer abide the sound of her voice and wanted to dismiss her, with a ten-cent tip, as quickly as I possibly could, but also because I was becoming increasingly interested in the adventures of Thomas Eagleton. There I was, flat on my back in a body cast from chest to toes, and there he was: Poor Tom, wearing checkered sportcoats, running around getting assurances, sweating on national television, crying, hugging his wife, having that dead metaphor “skeletons in his closet” applied to him so often that I came to think of him carrying, quite literally, a little closet wherever he went, with a plastic skeleton dangling from a coat hanger. My curiosity about Poor Tom derived, I suppose, from Father, to whom he represented the Right of the Electrically Shocked to Live without Shame.

Father would come visit me on his lunch hour, shaking his head, licking his lips, complaining of a muscle he’d pulled when he tried to sprint the final 440 of a five-mile jog. Upon entering the room he’d rattle the bed frame, which was meant as a gesture of paternal jocularity. He would sit in a metal chair with his arms folded and sunglasses on, as if he were blind, criminally suspect, or excruciatingly shy: looking straight ahead, saying nothing. But then the noon news would come on, Poor Tom would appear, and we’d start exchanging information from magazine articles and reports we’d heard on the radio. In that there was nothing in the least heroic about him, Poor Tom was an unlikely hero, but via the vice-presidential candidate Father was attempting to prevent another visit to Montbel, so we waxed eloquent.

“I don’t know about Woodcock. I don’t know if he’s a thousand percent behind him.”

“Well, at least they aren’t going to find any more skeletons in Tom’s closet.”

“Right you are who say you are,” Father would say, using one of his favorite if somewhat opaque phrases. “Nothing’s worse in the eyes of the democracy than a man sensitive enough to have been depressed once or twice in his life and sought help.”

The leg was all right until the doctor misread, on the X-rays, a knot of still broken bone as healing scar tissue. Mother and Father were called to Kaiser Hospital. I was rushed from physical therapy into surgery, and a metal pin was inserted near the bone to lend support. The pin is still there. When the weather shifts suddenly to rain, I can feel it rubbing against my bones. In airport inspections, it invariably triggers an electronic beep; I take from my wallet and pass to the police a letter from my doctor explaining that I have not a revolver in my hip pocket but a hollow rod in my left leg. After strenuous exercise of any sort—rock-climbing, full-court basketball, difficult-angled desire—I get a twinge where the pin was inserted, I drag my leg a little, limp walking uphill, and must shower soon after the exertion or my nerves will pinch and the next day I’ll have to lean on the cane I’ve kept in the closet all these years.

Six years later, such minor handicaps are the only aftereffects of the accident, but when I was sixteen it seemed like a near-mortal wound. Over the summer I’d grown several inches and lost twenty pounds, so when I walked across the parking lot and appeared in the courtyard a few minutes before the first bell of a new year no one recognized me. They all took me for some crippled kid who’d transferred. It was a nice enough feeling at first—having doors opened for me and held—but I soon wearied of it. I appreciated people’s condescension no more than my own passivity. I missed athletics so much that for a while I consented to serve as score-keeper and assistant manager for the girls’ field hockey team, but there’s no experience quite so degrading as being bossed around by a phalanx of stocky, padded girls waving sticks; I turned in my key to the towel room.

Both Mother and Father urged me to escape from immobility into the wonderful world of literature, and Mother even went so far as to set up a kind of course for me in the Bildungsroman. Every afternoon, upon coming home from school, I would unbuckle my brace, lie on my bed doing leg exercises with the rope pulleys and ankle weights I still had from my basketball days, then read variations on the theme of my own childhood from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Henry Roth. It was a little late to begin reading seriously—I think Beth had read all the comedies by the time she was twelve; “All what comedies?” I once asked, and she said, “Tell me you’re kidding”—but at least I was finally reading with, to Mother’s elation, a certain compulsiveness and insatiability.

When I mumbled something about trying my own hand at this stuff, a brand-new electric typewriter magically materialized on the top step of the stairs to my room. My first story was about a boy who “puts toe to gleaming metal and leaps off the most beautiful bridge in the world.” My second story focused upon a boy—the same boy, I think, resurrected—who, while waiting for the traffic light to change, imagines the inner lives of the drivers in front, behind, and to either side of him, comes to comprehend the latent sexuality of automobiles, the vulnerability of pedestrians, and the symbolic force of the color red. My third effort was based upon the tragic misfortunes of a man Father had known when he was director of the Mission district poverty program. There was present in all three stories an opposition between the Individual and Society, as well as a kind of Gothic despair that I thought was probably pretty important to good writing, but you can’t write a Bildungsroman when you’re in the middle of your Bildung, and I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about other people to write well about them, so I gave up my first go at fabrication.

I remember one very long night I spent doing leg exercises on the rope pulley while Father—who not only had never become the Jerusalem correspondent for United Press International but also had to watch and make as if to cheer while Mother rose higher and higher in the field of feature journalism—explained that I. F. Stone was doing more practical good for the world than Twelfth Night ever did. Perhaps because Twelfth Night was Beth’s favorite comedy, I set out to prove Father right: I would navigate the nonfiction section.

Although newspapers are meant to be read very quickly and then thrown out, or used to start fires or line trash bins or wrap fish for the freezer, Mother had had the Daily Bruin for her tenure as editor, 1942 to 1945, bound in green leather. I don’t know where those volumes are now—Beth is so very much the archivist she probably has them locked away in Puppa’s trunk slid beneath her four-poster bed in the Berkeley hills—but when I was a child I used to read back issues of the Bruin all the time. I have no idea what I was looking for, since it wasn’t like a yearbook in which there would have been black-and-white photographs of Mother at her more immature. It seemed to me like any other newspaper, only a little yellow around the edges, a little more directly irrelevant. Apparently, it was one of the very best college dailies in the country and, in any case, beyond comparison with the crosstown competition, which printed lead editorials in praise of the USC football team.

When FDR died, Mother put on the front page a picture of him puffing a cigarette through a nicotine filter. This wasn’t an appropriately glum photo for the president’s funeral, and she caught so much flak from the chancellor that she threatened to resign until the entire editorial staff delivered an eloquent letter of support. Every Thursday evening Arnie Logan (who later became Pat Brown’s, then Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, but who at the time was nothing more than sports editor of the Daily Bruin) conspired with the rest of the boys in Sports to write an article which, if you read it linearly, made almost no sense at all but which, if you read it backwards and skipped every other line, produced a rather risqué narrative. Every Thursday evening they’d try to sneak these naughty tales past Mother into the Friday edition. I think it would be unfair to say Mother ever had a particularly dirty mind. She was an amazingly precise proofreader, though, and she never let their lewd little stories get by her. I feel for Arnie and the boys. Growing up, I used to feel like Arnie and the boys, speaking backwards to rebel against Mother but never making it into her Friday edition, her heart of hearts. Mother was always the editor, I was always her little cub reporter turning in rough drafts, and she was always sending me back for one more rewrite.

I became, by default, editor-in-chief of the London Journal, which the principal thought was ghostwritten by Mother because I was so meek in person and so mean in print. Every other week I wrote what was called “A Satire,” but which was really an all-out assault upon myself, a sort of suicide note in the guise of covering student government. One night, while I was staying late to work on what I thought was a particularly wicked essay, Mother knocked on the door of the newspaper office, ostensibly to bring dinner but actually to determine whether I was doing justice to the name that meant so much in mass media. When I was a junior in high school, I hated everything but the sound of the door being closed from the inside, and there she was—on the other side of that door, peering through the glass window, tapping with her key ring, wanting in.

She was wearing her black leather boots (what Beth called “boots not made for walkin’”), her Pacific Ocean blue business dress, and a weird string of wooden beads. Perfume was apparent, as were lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge: Mother as Mature Model. In one hand she held her reporter’s notebook in which stenography recorded every word uttered at a press conference whose highlight was Mayor Alioto’s denial that he’d ever met his brother-in-law, and the other had a sack of food that she’d bought for me at an A&W Root Beer stand on her way home after Father told her I was still at school. While I inhaled hamburgers and french fries, Mother walked around the Journal office, studying the assignment sheet on the bulletin board; trying out the typewriter, which was missing plastic caps to vowel keys and had a jammed margin release; flipping through the photo file, dead black negatives of all twenty-seven candidates for student body president.

In the way that anyone human would have asked how you are doing, Mother asked, “What are you working on?”

“My column,” I said. Mother was not the most loyal fan of my column, but she did think every fifth or sixth effort scored some marvelous sociological points.

“Are you happy with it?” For Mother this wasn’t a question so much as a direct challenge, since she was never happy, at least publicly, with her own work and assumed no one else would admit he derived any pleasure from his own expressions either.

“It can’t stand any improvement?” she asked, tilting her head to the left. She leaned against my desk, watching me sweep crumbs onto the floor with a ruler.

“That’s great. It must be very good. I’m eager to read it.” And woe to you if I am at all disappointed.

“It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, pushing back my chair and locking my leg brace. I was still supposed to be using a cane, but I’d left it in my locker, so I limped across the room to throw my A&W garbage into the wastebasket. Mother followed. When I leaned against the wall to gather strength before making the return trip to my seat, she cornered me.

The fluorescent lights flickered like melodramatic special effects for a storm scene.

“It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, resting against her to get my balance, then limping back to my seat. “You’ll see it then.”

“Why won’t you let me see it now?” she asked, shoving some papers aside, sitting on the side of my desk, tapping her toes on a plastic chair.

I wouldn’t let her see it now because I remembered how thoroughly she took the fun out of the city championship by calling my article a “tissue of sportswriting platitudes.” I said: “Because I don’t want to hear your criticism until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“I won’t criticize it, I promise. I’m just curious to see what you’ve been working on. I wrote three thousand words today on Joseph Alioto’s ancestry. You can look at that and laugh. Let me just look at your lead,” Mother said, descending to her most transparent strategy.

“It’s not a lead. It’s more of an overture,” I said. I’d just read Swann’s Way and really liked the word “overture.”

“No,” I said, squirming in my seat, banging the brace against the leg of the desk.

This could have gone on forever. Mother’s sweet sincerity was starting to get on my nerves, so I opened my desk drawer, took out my satire, and handed it to her. I figured the least I could do was let her look at my lead, if that was what she really wanted to do, although of course she read the lead, then the paragraph after the lead, then the paragraph after the paragraph after the lead, all the way to the column’s sad conclusion:

I’d like to applaud, with unabashed pleasure and amid great revelry and excitement, the replacement of windows with mirrors in the principal’s offices. Silver, one-way mirrors.

I’ve been told the windows were replaced because in the sun they caused glare. The reflection of the sun off the windows was disturbing, was discomforting to passersby, and comfort should be our first consideration.

There were, though, other disadvantages to the windows. They were, first of all, windows, clear glass panes: people could see in and out. We could stare at one another. If safety should be our first consideration, then privacy should be our second consideration.

Also, the windows revealed ugliness. I often found evidence of fingerprints and dust and dirt and rain and mud on the glass. If safety should be our first consideration; and privacy, our second; then cleanliness should be our third consideration.

The silver, one-way mirrors, on the other hand, appear spotless and reveal no smudges. They are easier to clean, too.

As to privacy, there’s now a sense of security, even peace, for students needn’t know whether there’s anything recognizably human behind the mirror. All we can see is our own reflection in black shadows of silver. This is how it should be.

Lastly, as to comfort, the silver mirrors dull the sun’s glare, so what’s seen isn’t the reflection of the sun but the glossy image of ourselves. I’m pleased that I no longer have to avert my eyes as I walk by the windows. I cheer for the new mirrors.

I hobbled around the office, pretending to clean up, putting away scissors that didn’t cut and staplers that didn’t have staples, while she brandished her blue pencil—she actually carried an editor’s blue pencil at all times—and interrupted her reading of the article only twice: at the end of the third paragraph to ask if I wanted a ride home (“y-y-yes”) and at the end of the fifth paragraph to ask if there was an ashtray around anywhere (“n-n-no”). She commenced her attack upon my little column immediately after she finished reading it.

I guess now I can admit the irony is heavy-handed, the last few paragraphs are dominated by overwrought figures, the prose is repetitious in a coy, anachronistic sort of way, the basic idea is needlessly Manichaean, but at the time I thought it was killingly good, and when Mother lit into it I wanted to scream. She said one of these days I really must begin to take into account the objective world of reality.

She said I had better learn how to write a “straight news story” that “tumbled down cleanly,” if I ever wanted to amount to anything as a journalist.

She said there was editorializing and there was editorializing, but this was psychosis.

She said there might be a “decent four-inch filler of a factual story” buried somewhere in the satire and, if I wanted, she’d stay late “digging it out.”

I imagined a night of Mother and me sitting next to each other at a wobbly desk and giving the thing a much closer reading than it deserved. I asked her to stop smoking and told her I didn’t need a ride home: it was nice out, I wasn’t tired, I’d walk. She said if I couldn’t take constructive criticism I was a baby. With that, somehow, I fell apart. I clumped around the room in a crazy circle, yelling, “Get out, Mother, please get out,” and tearing up the satire, only to spend the rest of the night on the floor piecing it, then taping it together, although the next morning I decided not to print it, anyway. Not enough space.

That was the way Mother ran a newspaper. That was the kind of chaos she could create so quickly. It’s a wonder to me Arnie and the boys didn’t lock her up in the ladies’ lav until she promised to be less imperial, but she served her reign without a whisper of insurrection. On the Monday after commencement, which Puppa did not deem a signal enough event to attend, she started working as the editor of the “house organ” for the ACLU, which have always been interesting initials to me in that ACLU is an anagram of UCLA, as if wherever she went Mother, in contradistinction to her disfluent son, changed the language to suit her own needs.

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