My father had a favorite story he used to tell. He told it for guests, rising to his feet at the head of the family dinner table, his wineglass up in a toast. The story is about two mice who one day find themselves cornered by a vicious cat. As the first mouse cowers, certain the jig is up, the second mouse looks the cat straight in the eye and bellows: “Bow wow wow!” The cat, terrified, runs away. Astonished, the first mouse asks the second, “My good fellow, how ever did you manage that?” to which the second replies: “Simple. It always pays to have a second language.”
Hyperpolyglot: one who speaks many languages.
My father collected words. He spoke as many as fourteen languages, and when he wasn’t at home studying them, he was traveling abroad to use them in their native context. Many he had fluently, including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, and Polish. Others he categorized as “I can get by in conversation and if need be argue my point.” Some were relegated to “taxi and restaurant” languages, meaning he only had enough to get where he needed to go and order food. Some he had “book fluency” in—he could not converse but could translate from that language to English on paper. Some he didn’t speak at all but knew how to write, such as classical Arabic and Mandarin.
My father had grown up in the Midwest of the early twentieth century. He was a quiet, patient boy from St. Louis, Missouri, whose grandfather John I. Beggs had been a business associate of Thomas Edison, and thus in the right place at the right time to become a multimillionaire utilities magnate in the early twentieth century. His daughter, my grandmother Mary Grace Beggs, married Richard McCulloch of United Railways, a pioneer of electric train transportation. Thus, electricity and railroads formed a major merger, and my father was the offspring. This was all lore by the time it was handed down to us, but for my father and his two siblings, it meant that the life they led was formal and free of financial worry. One dressed for dinner, children were to be seen and not heard, parents were called Mother and Father and one appeared before them at the proper instances, all this regulated by a team of governesses who did the actual nuts-and-bolts parenting—tending to baths and skinned knees and meals and toothaches and bad dreams. To one’s parents one spoke formally and only when spoken to. Summers were spent on a lake in Wisconsin called Oconomowoc, where the family owned their own island, known as Beggs Isle, and all supplies were brought by boat to a grand house where three generations of the Beggs family resided. In photos, my father and his sister and brother are dressed in starched outfits, my aunt Sally with a big bow in her hair, my father and my uncle Robert in ties and short pants. They pose with vacant stares under a vast weeping willow.
Many times, I’ve wished I could locate that young child and see, as he grew, how the quest to master new languages fired his imagination and grew along with him. How he developed his gift of communication when he was not allowed to speak unless spoken to. He was by all accounts a shy boy, growing up in impersonal and joyless luxury, and I wonder where the love of foreign languages took root. Was the gift of communication a dodge, a way to deflect his own feeling? Was it easier to speak in foreign languages than to speak from the heart? Or a code he adopted to speak truth to power—power being the distant and affectless adults—in ways they could not understand? Was communication in foreign languages to foreigners a way to reach out past his upbringing, to learn to express in code that which he did not feel license to express in his native tongue?
These secrets of the past that can only be pieced together through a few stories handed down through the generations, through boxes of photographs, books left on shelves, a suitcase of old letters.
My father entered Yale at sixteen and tucked a number of graduate degrees under his belt by the time, in his late twenties, he departed with his young first wife on a three-year honeymoon exploring the Balkans. It was 1936, and the region, only recently opened at that time to the West, became the subject of the only book he ever wrote, Drums in the Balkan Night.
The author’s bio on the back reads:
In June 1930, when John I. B. McCulloch was graduated from Yale, he left the same night for a trip around the world. The following winter he spent in India where he studied Hindustani in Delhi, met Gandhi in Allahabad and Rabindranath Tagore at his school north of Calcutta. The next spring found him in China. The school year of 1931–32 he studied at New College, Oxford, and learned Arabic and Persian, among other things. For two months in the autumn of 1932 he was in Moscow and saw the celebration for the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1932–33 he was in Paris studying at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. In September 1934, he married Elizabeth Ten Broeck Jones of Milwaukee and since then, most of their time has been spent in Eastern Europe.
In the photo on the frontispiece, he is in shirtsleeves, his hair blowing in the wind, his young wife, Betty, in white shorts, a halter top, and white pumps. He would have been twenty-eight. He is lanky, his face thin, a radiant smile exposing a row of straight white teeth. They appear to be on the deck of a cruising vessel; behind them is a rail, and beyond that the Aegean Sea. He quotes a line of Aubrey Herbert in his book, a line that, he writes, always thrilled him: “I went to the East by accident, as a young man might go to a party, and find his fate there.”
I’ve thought of that line often over the years. The whimsicality, the spirit of adventure, the openness to fate wherever it might lead. “As a young man might go to a party”—the party being in my father’s case the world unfolding in the wake of World War II, where fate defined an entire generation.
After their return from the Balkans, Betty gave birth to their four children in quick succession and America joined the war. Recruited to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, my father served as an intelligence officer during the war, and in the immediate aftermath as a kind of multilingual peacekeeping force of one.
He always spoke modestly of “summoning up” a language, as if he had but to call on one and it appeared on the tip of his tongue. Language primers, the language of each written on the spine, lined the rows of our family bookshelves, and I pictured this shelf whenever he spoke of summoning a language to the fore—Arabic, Hebrew, Modern Persian, Old English, Finnish, Welsh, Icelandic, Urdu, Romanian, Chinese. Jifunze Kiingereza was a primer on teaching English to native Swahili speakers. Yoruba was the mother tongue of certain regions of Western Nigeria.
“Summoning up my best Yoruba” would not be an unusual thing to hear my father say at the start of a story.
Even when at times they didn’t share anything else—dreams, secrets, opinions, or a bed—my parents shared the couch in the library of our apartment. On the bookshelf that spanned the wall behind the couch, my father’s language books lined the rows on his side much as the Social Register lined the rows on hers. These volumes lived side by side for as long as my parents did—the regimented black spines of New York social hierarchy and his textbooks, all different sizes, some leather-bound and some paperbacks, some tall, some short and thick, quite a few first edition hardbacks, their covers chipped from use.
The details of my father’s life in the OSS came out only in small increments. Some nights when they had dinner guests he’d rise to his feet and sing the German ballad “Lili Marlene” in the original German, explaining he’d learned it from a double agent in Berlin at the end of the war—a female double agent, he’d add, and wink to imply wartime romance. For me as a child, this seemed both thrilling, right out of James Bond, and deeply distressing, my father in love with a random woman while he was supposed to be defeating Nazis and missing his wife and small children at home. My mother saw it as performance, at least on the surface, and presumably so did their guests. She would sit at the other end of our long dining table, look at her husband across the candle glow as a maid cleared the dessert plates and poured one last round of wine, and say, “Oh god, there you go again,” and roll her eyes. Yet I noticed the look that came over him as he sang those nights. His eyes got moist; he looked toward the window and his voice seemed almost to crack, as if for that instant it all fell away—the guests, the candlelight, the city noise below—and he was back in a world of international conflict, romance, and espionage, a world where by just “summoning up” a language, his words could cast magical spells.
One evening I found a great commotion in the square. A number of trucks had suddenly appeared with Italian partisans and they were about to batter down the doors of the German officer’s building. A man who appeared to be in charge gave me to understand that they intended to lynch a certain German lieutenant who, they assured me, had been guilty of various war crimes. Summoning up my best Italian, I told the partisan leader that, although the Germans were still technically in charge of the town, authority had passed to the British and Americans and that we couldn’t permit a bloodbath.
This is my father recounting his activities in the OSS at the close of the war in Europe. I heard him give the interview to a man named Russell Miller for his book Behind the Lines about the OSS. I was about ten, curled on the couch beside him as he spoke. I had arrived home after school, kicked off my shoes, and in my uniform wandered in to see my father in his best suit speaking to a man taking notes. He waved me in as he spoke, put a finger to his lips to ensure I stayed quiet, and as I curled up on the couch beside him he went on. It took me years to find the book in which the interview appeared. He speaks of controlling German and Italian and Allied troops like a nanny in a room of overtired children.
I sent one of our GIs, who happened to be in the neighborhood, back to our headquarters to summon help, moral, if not physical, and arranged that an American tank, also there by chance, should circle the square with the Stars and Stripes prominently displayed. Within a few minutes an American officer arrived who was of Italian descent and who had worked closely with the partisans. He was able to persuade them that no good would come of an Italian–German confrontation and that justice would, in the end, be served.
After that VE day itself was something of an anti-climax. We celebrated it with Champagne, which we had taken from the Germans, who had taken it from the French. In the midst of our party, a German major arrived, sat down casually at the piano and started playing Strauss waltzes. This was interrupted when an upper-class British officer gruffly declared that this was a “bad show” and “not at all the thing to do.” It was left to me to explain to the German major that while we liked his music, this was neither the time nor the place for it.
His first wife waited years for his return, and finally found love elsewhere, something they all appeared to accept without acrimony, and when he returned home from the war to Washington, DC, they divorced. He then moved to New York and to projects as varied as editing a Latin American journal and working as a freelance journalist.
This is their story of how my parents met:
“We were at a cocktail party”—my father.
“We were at Sally Stamm’s cocktail party, in her garden”—my mother.
“Somewhere uptown”—my father.
“On East 92nd Street, between Park and Lex”—my mother.
“We were immediately drawn to each other”—my father.
“Daddy had a ‘tootsie’ on his arm”—my mother.
Laughter from my father, hand goes to forehead in amused exasperation.
“Very tacky woman”—my mother.
“Honey, come on”—my father.
“Someone should have taken that monkey and put her back in her cage”—my mother.
“Honey, please. Anyhow. We were pleasantly conversing, and suddenly an ashtray came flying across the garden, narrowly missing us both”—my father.
“The tootsie was throwing it at me”—my mother.
“We never knew which of us she was throwing it at”—my father.
“I could tell, it was me”—my mother.
“So when it was time to leave, I asked Sally, ‘Sally,’ said I, ‘who is that divine creature with whom I was just speaking?’”—my father.
“He took a year to call me”—my mother.
“That’s right, I took a year”—my father.
“A full year”—my mother.
“You didn’t want me to call while I was still seeing someone else, did you?”—my father.
“That tootsie. What you ever saw in that cheap girl I’ll never know”—my mother.
“I was thinking about you every day in that year, Pat”—my father.
“He took a year to call me, he’s lucky I hadn’t run off with someone else”—my mother.
“I was very lucky indeed”—my father.
“A full year, girls, your father took a year to call me, a year almost to the day after his cheap tootsie threw an ashtray at my head”—my mother.
“I was trying to be a gentleman”—my father.
“I had a lot of other suitors”—my mother.
“It was the longest year I ever waited for anything, and that includes waiting for the war to end”—my father.
“Jean-Jean”—my mother, pronouncing it in the French manner.
“My darling dear”—my father.
In a black leather suitcase my father kept all the cards my mother had ever sent him. Each card is addressed to “Jean-Jean” and signed “Patsy Poo.” In the suitcase, there are also envelopes with all our school report cards and our baby teeth. Teeth dating from my half siblings in the 1940s, all the way up to my sister Catherine’s teeth in the mid-’60s. He put the teeth in plain white envelopes and marked the date, with the age of each child. There were far fewer from the half siblings, as he saw them so infrequently a tooth loss was no doubt rare on those visits. Still they are all stored there in his suitcase. Twenty years’ worth of baby teeth shed by his children. In large manila envelopes, there were love letters from women all over Europe in various languages, professing undying passion in the time of wartime pandemonium. These were mixed in among the teeth and report cards. “I know you are probably back Stateside by now,” one woman named Susan wrote, “with your wife and children, and I hope your life will go on happily. As for me, I will never again be as happy as when we were together . . .” There were war journals written in his almost illegible scrawl. “I dreamed I was on a train going through high mountains,” one entry said, written in 1942. “I couldn’t get off and the train wouldn’t stop.”
For my father, when he met my mother, there was no apparent shame in not making a salary. And despite her concerns voiced at the ladies’ lunch at Gino’s, she seemed to take to the life he could afford, and together they moved to an apartment high above Park Avenue shortly before I was born. My father’s day-to-day reality was to sit in our living room all morning in his bathrobe, with a book in his hand and stacks of index cards in piles by his feet, filling the cards with words in whatever language he was studying that year. Verb declensions scattered all over my mother’s soft dove-gray rug. At noon, he’d take a shower and put on a suit. He always wore a dark suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie. “It brings out the blue in his eyes,” my mother would say of his collection of blue silk ties. He never left our apartment building in anything but a jacket and tie—he was proud of mentioning that the doorman had never seen him any other way. This included during the elevator strike when he did his shift taking residents up and down the building in his suit. Once dressed for lunch, he would walk the short distance to Café Geiger on East 86th Street, or down to Lüchow’s on Union Square, so he could keep up his German over assorted wurst or corned pork knuckle with sauerkraut. His trajectory midday in the city was so predictable that when years later I got my acceptance to college, I knew to call Café Geiger and have the maître d’, a dear friend of my father’s by this point, put him on the phone.
After lunch, my father rode in taxis. He would hail a cab to take him home, always with the hope that he’d wind up in a cab with a driver who spoke a language that interested him. In that case his afternoon plan was cemented, and he’d have them drive, no particular destination in mind, so he could practice whatever language the driver spoke. He’d strike up conversations in Urdu or Serbo-Croatian or Hungarian or Greek or Spanish or French or any of another handful of languages, making small talk well into the afternoon if he found the conversation too important to abandon. As he sent the cab on long lazy circumambulations around Central Park, he asked questions (“How did you come by your English, my good man, was it in grade school or when you arrived on our shores? Tell me, how do you view Americans as a rule? What do they say back home in your country about our president? Say, are you raising your children here in New York? Bilingually? You must, it’s the finest gift a child can receive.”).
Late afternoons, my father arrived home just as we’d be returning from school and after homework we’d sit with him in the library and watch television—I Love Lucy or Gilligan’s Island or the bewildering Dark Shadows. He’d occasionally let us take out his comb and we’d style his hair up in puffs on top of his head as we watched television. When my mother happened upon us, she’d find three girls in their school tunics and stocking feet, her husband in a smoking jacket with his hair up in puffs on top of his head and the TV set on. He’d have his first scotch of the evening on the coffee table, the ice cubes melting. His favorite was I Love Lucy, and he laughed a high-pitched giggle as Lucy and Ethel got into household capers, flooding the house with soapsuds or picking chocolates off a conveyer belt. The quiet snarl of Dewar’s scotch was there with us too. Faint but pervasive. Into the evening hours it lingered. Scotch as we grew up became not a substance at all but a characteristic. Scotch was my father, his smell.
He became president of an organization called the English-Speaking Union, and under those auspices my father founded, published, and edited a monthly newsletter called English Around the World. He featured monthly articles on topics that included “Inbreeding and the Aboriginal Subjunctive” and “Togo’s Many Dialects.” These were the concerns that drove his passions, the demise of the subjunctive form among the descendants of Northern Finns in Australia or the evolution of dialects in Togo. Once a week he and my mother had a secretary, Mrs. Bertcher, come and sit in the living room at a folding bridge table near my father’s chair in the mornings. On the street below there would be the daily sound of jackhammers fracturing the smooth sidewalks of the Upper East Side, pavement that in the sunshine glinted like mirrors up and down the avenues. Amid the clang of the workday breaking in small dramas around the neighborhood, Mrs. Bertcher would ride the elevator to the eighteenth floor, hang her coat in the closet off the foyer, unfold the bridge table and chair, unlock the typewriter she stored in a hard leather carrying case, and settle in for the morning, taking dictation from a man in his pajamas and slippers as he edited his newsletter for his beloved English-Speaking Union—the ESU, as he called it. My mother also had need of Mrs. Bertcher from time to time, to make social engagements or type letters, and Mrs. Bertcher would go from the living room to the library, where my mother sat every morning on her side of the couch. There she’d perch on the edge of a leather wingback chair and take notes on a yellow legal pad. My parents both called her “Bertcher” as if it were her secret agent name—“Have Bertcher take care of it,” they’d say to each other, or “Get Bertcher in ASAP,” or “This is a job for Bertcher.”
It also fell to Mrs. Bertcher to type up the Franklin stories. For years, my father had been working on the Franklin stories, a series of stories for my sisters and me, at my urging. Knowing his handwriting was impossible, he wrote them as they came to him, and then later dictated the stories to Mrs. Bertcher in his pajamas. His alter ego was an octopus named Franklin. The stories were Franklin’s bar stories, the people he met as he lounged at his favorite bar, which my father had named Ralph’s Rest. The significant thing about Franklin was that, being an octopus, he would order eight scotches at one time, one for each arm. Sometimes, he would ask Ralph to make it a double or a triple. Scotches in the story multiplied by eight.
When my father wasn’t at home studying languages, index cards at his feet, he took us traveling where he could use them.
The summer we were in Greece, he taught us how to write the Greek alphabet. He propped up his books on the table in the hotel suite, open at the spine, so we could follow along. He always traveled with boxes of No. 2 pencils, sharp and new, and gave us each a pencil and a package of unopened index cards, still fresh in their cellophane wrapping. He had whole suitcases just for supplies such as these, language books, pencils, and index cards. When my family traveled, my sisters and I had one suitcase each, my mother had an enormous folding Val-A-Pak, and my father had six suitcases mottled with luggage tags.
“I’ll teach you a word,” he’d say. “‘Parakalo.’ You can use it at dinner tonight. It means ‘please.’ Then you say, ‘Efcharisto’—‘thank you.’ ‘Efcharisto poly’—‘thank you very much’—if you want to be extra polite.”
“Efcharisto poly.”
“Good. If you write it down on an index card, I’ll check your lettering.”
My sisters and I spent vacation hours in hotel suites writing vocabulary words on index cards in new languages. If we were well behaved in restaurants, he promised to bark like a seal at the waiter when he came by with the check. We held up our end of the bargain and so did he. “Thank you very much,” he’d say to the waiter, then pretend to reach for his wallet, pause, and look up at the waiter and open his mouth as if to ask a question. Instead, he’d let out a loud series of barks, startling many a waiter and surrounding tables of guests. “I gave him a good tip,” he’d say as we’d leave the restaurant. “Affable fellow.”
Our laughter, he said, was everything. Ditto, I might say to that. His laugh was the freest thing about him.
“Laughter is the universal language,” he used to tell us. “The great unifier. Never forget that.”
A photograph has the date June 1965 stamped on the white-rimmed edge of the print. We are at the Parthenon, running along the sun-bleached slabs of limestone, playing hide-and-seek. My two sisters and I are dressed in matching sundresses and white Mary Janes; my father is in a short-sleeved white shirt and gray lightweight suit trousers. He would be counting out loud to ten in Greek while we hid. In the picture, we are behind him, peeking out from behind the marble columns. He stands on the stones of the ancient Greek acropolis with his light blue sports jacket draped over his head, so as not to peek as he called out the numbers: “Ena, dio, tria, tessera, pente, exi, efta, octo, ennea, deka!”
“How do you say ‘lion’ in Swahili?” we asked one summer when we were in Kenya. We were driving through the arid countryside. Occasionally we’d pass elephants and okapi and warthogs along the way. We wanted to see a lion.
“‘Simba.’ Say ‘sim-ba.’ Go ahead, try it.”
Often, on long road trips, our parents sang. My father had an easy tenor voice, my mother, though she couldn’t hold a tune, sang with a playful, rhythmic exuberance.
Together they sang duets, love songs, show tunes. “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love” was a favorite. My father crooned. My mother snapped her fingers as she sang a jaunty accompaniment.
We were on our way from Nairobi to a Masai village so my father could practice his Swahili. I wonder what they must have thought of us, the regal Masai villagers, their bright cloths wrapped around them, when we emerged from our rented van. Our van was white with black zebra stripes, as were all the vans rented to tourists. My mother had gone to Abercrombie & Fitch on Madison Avenue before the trip and outfitted herself and my father in khaki outdoor wear, which the Abercrombie catalogue referred to as “Safari Chic.” While she poked out from the sunroof of the van with her camera, my father emerged with Pam, our British guide, and engaged in lengthy though halting conversation with a tall Masai tribesman. The man wore a lush orange cotton wrap and nodded as my father spoke. Soon both my father and the Masai were laughing their heads off.
My father had three rules for measuring proficiency in a language. Can you tell a joke, can you understand song lyrics, and finally, do you ever dream in that language? The last, the dreaming, was the final test of proficiency. “But start with the joke,” he’d remind us. “If you can tell a joke in a foreign language, you reach across cultures, time zones, and barriers you girls can’t possibly realize. It’s the unifier, I always tell you girls that. You make a lot of friends through laughter.”
By the time we went to Africa, I was thirteen and our traveling road show embarrassed me. My mother dressed up like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, her noisy Super 8 movie camera going out the top of the sunroof, we three girls in the back seat of the zebra van, my father busting into the Masai’s daily routine to tell a few jokes, as if he were some kind of freelance Bob Hope. What I remember of that day is a woman holding a tiny baby wrapped tight about her chest in a carrier made of bright pink-and-green fabric. She wore long strands of beads in many colors. She had the tired, patient face of an overwhelmed young mother. Beside her, a young boy, a boy around eight, the age of my sister Catherine, was crying, his ankle tied to a pole by thin rope.
“That fellow was a very amusing chap,” my father said of his new Masai friend when we were settled in the car and driving back to Nairobi. “Good sport letting me barge in on him like that.” He laughed to himself as we drove along the dry dirt roads.
“What did he do, the kid?” we wanted to know. We wouldn’t let this go and kept asking our father all the way back to Nairobi. “Why did they tie him up?”
“Honey, that’s their culture, not ours.” He pulled out the phrasebook and passed it back. “‘Samahani,’ say.”
“Samahani.”
“That’s right. Samahani.” He sighed. “It means ‘I’m sorry.’ I think he had probably done something naughty, and she was waiting for him to apologize.”
“Samahani,” we repeated.
“As much as you should say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in each language, ‘I’m sorry’ is pretty useful too, if you get into scrapes,” he told us as we drove.
“Which John McCulloch never does, does he?” my mother said from the front of the van.
“Me? Honey. Scrapes? I never.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. Sometimes, the mood between them altered suddenly.
The truth was, he did get into scrapes. He would go off “exploring,” as he called it, in cities we visited and return late and sloppy. Sometimes his traveler’s checks or watch went missing during these excursions, and like a tarnished angel he wanted forgiveness. In these instances, for long empty hours his remorse hung heavily in the air, gray and loud, drowning out any other family life. He’d shuffle around or sit silent in a chair in our hotel suite, watching us but not seeing us, his eyes watery, his body hunched, a man slumped in guilt. And then he would drink more, another scotch or another martini. He’d hold the glass in his hand and tears would run down his cheeks. As a child, it was painful and terrifying to watch this man, our sweet and loving father who spoke volumes in a multitude of tongues, who barked like a seal for our amusement, now changed horribly in the space of a few hours into a well of helplessness, and self-pity.
It was the remorse of the alcoholic. For years I thought of his demeanor in these episodes as pathetic and it made me angry. Yet being only a child, I blamed myself for my anger—it seemed wrong somehow, to feel irritation.
My mother, impatient, seethed. Rows in hotel suites were a feature of these trips, and the pattern tinged our childhood. We did not know when our playful father would disappear behind his eyes and a blundering facsimile take his place. Not knowing when the cycle would recur scared us. As we got older, the cycle was more frequent, and as he got older, the cycle was more severe. I was young though, and I didn’t see it as a feature of having an alcoholic parent. I just reacted to the familiar pattern the same way every time: He “was bad” and in his subsequent guilt he inspired anger, then pity. My mother lashed out and we felt angry at her for yelling and angry at him for being pathetic. We’d retreat. The child of an alcoholic retreats in many ways; the subtlest is the retreat into the background, into silence. I recognized it only as self-preservation at the time, but of course it was self-abnegation, a hardscrabble strategy that becomes the automatic response to trauma, the desire to disappear.
Then there was the physical retreat. The need to be anywhere but where the episode was unraveling. When we were home, we could simply retreat into our rooms, but in the hotel episodes, retreat was nearly impossible. Being too young to be allowed outside by ourselves in those early years, we developed elaborate escapes within hotel confines, plotting elevator races through the hotel to escape the din. The rules would be devised on the spot and someone would yell “Go!”: run to the eighth floor, pass through the whole hallway front to back once, then take the elevator to three, run down to the lobby, past the ladies having tea, take the elevator down to the Grill Room floor below, then up to the lobby, touch the concierge desk, then back to our door. By the time we’d run down the long carpeted halls that smelled like perfume, past the women in furs drinking tea in the lobby amid the ferns, and back up to our door, we’d be breathless and invigorated. We’d return to our rooms laughing, the silence no longer deafening. Our father would have gone to sleep or would be watching television with a blank stare. Our mother would be waiting. Sometimes we’d go with her for a walk outside, the fresh air bracing. She knew we needed an out, and hotel managers were handsomely tipped, I imagine, to indulge our relay drills. Casing hotels for potential elevator-race tracks was always something we did when we arrived. We had to be prepared. We never knew when it would all happen again, but it always did.
Outside, that day in the zebra-striped van, the sun blasted the baked African plains, and herds of giraffes walked languidly in the tall yellow grass, their necks slanted forward as if leaning into the windless afternoon. These days held a golden extravagance wreathed in an intangible tension, which was often my memory of trips with my father in pursuit of words. By the time I was in college I had stopped traveling with my family altogether. I thought if I stopped and stayed home, then instead of retreating I’d actually be moving forward, like those giraffes that appeared to be leaning into the future as they made their way through the midday heat. I’d make my own way, and the reminder of our family sorrow would leave town without me and for a while I’d be whole.
These are the naive expectations brought about by a blind faith, as if there were shortcuts to our wholeness and to my father’s redemption. Blind in the belief that things would change. Life could only go back to where it had been upon their return.
I believe words danced in my father’s head. Even as he sat in our living room in his bathrobe, index cards by his feet and the morning can of Budweiser on a tray at his side, words were his passport to a world far outside his imagination. Words were his power.
Danish was his final language. He was translating a novel from Danish into English the summer he died, and the index cards by his feet the last time I spoke to him were Danish words he collected as he worked on the translation.
Pearls of wisdom, he said, each word is a pearl of wisdom, and in the art of translation you recognize you cannot replicate a pearl, yet you are called to equal its luster in the passage. That is the art. That is the challenge. Pearls of wisdom. Translation is a calling.
My father: “Respect the words, girls. They will open doors to you that you’ve never imagined.”
My mother: “Respect the sea, girls. It can turn on you in an instant.”
These are the lessons we learned as children.
Full fathom five thy father lies . . .
Those are pearls that were his eyes.