Dead Languages Read online

  7

  FATHER WOULD GO to sleep at nine o’clock and awake to darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit—navy blue pants with zippers up and down both sides, his smelly sweatshirt, and on top of that his sweat jacket with Speed of Sound stitched across the back. Birds would be just starting to call, black would still streak the colored pencil soft blue of the sky, Father would be jogging. In an hour he’d run twenty times around a track which was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, which had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. It wasn’t what would be called a fast track. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. He jogged because he preferred to go to sleep before Mother did and awake before she’d even begun to dream. What did she dream about? I suppose she dreamed about justice.

  Father once wrote me, apropos of nothing: “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.” He doesn’t really run anymore, so what did he mean other than to turn himself into a figure in a frieze? We share that trait, we Zorns, all the way down the nondistaff side. A little too often for my taste Father likes to say,

  Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

  Make me a child again just for tonight!

  Father’s mother, after whom Beth is named, died when he was eight, and it’s fashionable in certain psychiatric circles to see this as the formative event of Father’s life. It was not. The formative event of Father’s life was this: he and his friends were crossing train tracks when little Teddy, last in line, stepped directly on the third rail, which transformed him from a happy vertical child into a horizontal conductor of electric current. It’s difficult to think of Father as young once, since he’s so old now, so very old. In 1919 he didn’t have six pairs of eyeglasses, a bald head, or false teeth, though I suppose he already had the Jimmy Durante schnoz and those blue, blue eyes. The train, a slow-moving local but nevertheless a train, with wheels and gears and steel, rattled down the tracks toward Teddy, who was lying flat on his back, powerless to prevent his own, unfortunate, self-induced electrocution.

  I wouldn’t be here today if Big Abe, a seventeen-year-old block of massive triangular stone, a wrestler who wore black shirts and a purple hat, hadn’t slid a long piece of dry wood between galvanized Theodore and the third rail, flipping him high into the atmosphere only seconds before the train passed. Teddy was bruised about the elbows and knees and, later in summer, was a near-corpse as flesh turned red, turned pink, turned black, and peeled away to lean white bone. Toenails and fingernails crumbled and what little hair he had on his body was shed until Teddy himself had nearly vanished. His father, named Nate, sued Long Island Railroad for one hundred dollars, which paid—no more, no less—for the doctor’s visits once a week to check for infection.

  I never met Father’s father. This past Christmas, from a straight-backed bed at Montbel, Teddy tried in all seriousness to pin Nate to the page for me: “You can tell, Jeremy, can’t you, how his life touched me? There was the sense of doing things for his fellow men; there was the kindly, mediating approach. Ess vett soch oy spressen, he liked to say. It will press itself out. It will take care of itself. This, when told about a problem. He couldn’t cope with problems. He let them drift, grow, fester, or fly away. Recognize some of your dad’s penchants and peccadilloes in that?” My favorite thing Nate did was fall asleep on the subway every morning after reading one paragraph each from the Jewish Daily Forward, the conservative paper, and Freiheit, the Communist gazette, as if he knew even then how communication can cancel itself out, how “penchants and peccadilloes” alliterates a little too easily. In the summer of ’56 Mother and Father had gone to Balboa to give Mother a shady haven in which to edit copy for a special double issue of Open Forum, the ACLU “in-house organ.” Mother was pregnant and Beth was three, with a blood blister on her left foot. When Father’s sister called from the nursing home in Floral Park to say Nate was dead, Father somehow found this cause for confessing his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

  “What do you mean?” Mother said, who was a young thirty-one. “Like you get down in the dumps every now and again?”

  “I think I’m on the road to having it licked,” he said, “but after the war, then again during a brief period of unemployment before we met, I needed a little electroshock to get me through some bad patches.”

  Mother literally dropped Beth, blood blister or no blood blister, onto a rocky part of the sand, then fainted face-forward into that parked rowboat which soon figured so prominently in the iconography of my childhood. Who knows what damage that did to my diction? I don’t think their marriage ever really recovered its equilibrium after that.

  LIVING WITH a manic-depressive wasn’t like living with a drug addict. It wasn’t like living with a funeral. I got a twentieth birthday card from Gretchen that shows the word “HAPPY” being manufactured by a bunch of goofy little guys who look like Santa’s sugar battalion. It was more like that: just knowing every lake is man-made and sooner or later needs to be emptied. Mother virtually carried in her wallet an article written by some psychiatrist friend of hers that said “manic-depressive illness is not simply a series of manic or depressive episodes but rather a continuing personality disorder punctuated by these dramatic episodes.” She wanted to be able to track an atom in a centrifuge and she couldn’t and, if she hadn’t died first, she might have driven herself mad as well. For four years he’d be fine and funny and athletically buoyant, then one day he’d come back with an entire roll of negatives of the freeway. His qualifiers would slide downward: “whole, worthwhile”; “modest, feeble.” “If a shirt comes to you from Macy’s, it’s from me, Dad,” he might keep saying. “The shirt is from Dad.” Then you’d be looking for some leftovers in the fridge and come across a note Scotch-taped together, sticky with blood stains, like advertisements for a sympathetic reader. Mother would pack his suitcase and he’d wave shy goodbyes like a boy leaving for camp.

  Which fairly took the wind out of my sails because, with a pause here, an inflection there, he used to be able to convert the most unpromising material into such high tragedy, such low comedy, such an enjoyable narrative. In the forties and fifties he supposedly got invited to the most exclusive Industry parties in Beverly Hills for the solitary purpose of telling Yiddish jokes. He told many, many stories very, very well, but the only one I want to remember is the only one that was true. Father would writhe on the rug, waiting for the train, and leap on top of the hi-fi console when Big Abe lifted him into the trees. When I was ten years old, Father was making noises that intimated another stay at Montbel—he flew to Sacramento on behalf of the poverty program of the county of San Francisco and airmailed me an epistle consisting entirely of blank pages for no real reason I could make out—so Mother lent me her tape recorder and told me to tell him I’d forgotten some of the finer points of the third-rail story. Father and I had some problems figuring out how to work the recorder, but once we realized the stupid thing had to be plugged in we were all set. He lay back on my bed with pillows under his neck while I sat in a chair, holding the microphone, sitting over him, listening to him talk with his eyes closed and the bed lamp focused on his face. I felt like his shrink. I wanted him to sit up or open his eyes or ask me to turn the lamp away, but he entered immediately into the prologue: “I want to tell you, Jeremy, about the world I have lost. It seems like it existed a thousand years ago, if indeed it ever existed. One sweltering Indian summer day….”

  I didn’t know what was the matter. I expected him to be pinning his arms to the mattress and bouncing up and down on the bed to indicate the thrill of the third rail; flipping the lamp on and off and whistling through his teeth in imitation of the o
ncoming local; arcing across the room to show how he’d been saved; stripping off his clothes to show how his skin had peeled; doing all the things I’d seen him do so perfectly at parties, but he was doing none of that. He was telling the tale as if he didn’t know what came next and, worse, as if he didn’t care. I turned off the microphone and asked, “What’s the matter? You’re not telling it like you usually do.”

  “I think that microphone throws me off,” he said, opening his eyes for the first time. “I feel self-conscious with just you and me and Mom’s tape recorder. I need more people around me, a party atmosphere, a couple of drinks.”

  I got up and brought back a cup of cold water from the bathroom, but that didn’t seem to do the trick and Father returned to worlds we have lost, to sweltering Indian summer days. Every scene was slowly set, every amusing little digression was relentlessly pursued, every character was described down to the contents of his lunch pail. When I go back and listen to the tape, what’s even more noticeable than the relative banality of Father’s recital is his endlessly sibilant S, his fluttering F. He seems to be on the verge of stuttering. Sandra says S and F are voiceless sounds that arise from air flowing from the lungs to the tongue; if Father was having trouble with S and F, his stomach must have been in knots, his chest must have been constricted, his throat must have been thick with pressure: he must have been very nervous. And I’m the one who created such an awkward situation. I’m the one who moved the microphone down his mouth and urged in a stage whisper every five minutes: “Relax, Dad, just relax. Tell it like you usually do. Just pretend I’m not here.” I’m on the tape, actually saying that, barely audible in the background: “R-r-relax, Dad, just relax.”

  Sandra has heard the third-rail tape and says Father is definitely not a stutterer. “No more than six percent disfluencies,” as she would put it. I would put it that the third rail didn’t produce in Father a speech impediment, but that it’s probably the origin of his preoccupation with the Rosenbergs. He nearly wrestled once with Uncle Gilbert over Gil’s lackadaisical pace proving the Rosenbergs’ innocence through special-access AEC documents. It’s himself Father sees at Sing Sing: electrified at last, purged of all pain. Sometimes I think I’ve inherited all of that from him: the relentless misdirection, the oblivious wandering, the fatal footfall, the helpless passivity, the catch in the voice. He used to tell me about the time when, waiting for a subway back from Coney Island, he watched the impatient crowd push a pretty girl onto the tracks just as the Brooklyn train was arriving; on certain late summer afternoons he can still smell the pretty girl’s body burning. That’s sort of the way I think about the third rail. In certain situations I can still feel Father’s body vibrating from the voltage because that’s what has been passed down to me: nervous energy running nowhere. Sometimes I could swear those electrical currents are coursing through my veins; sometimes when my jaw jitters I could swear all the circuits have been disconnected.

  I don’t mean to suggest that, ordinarily, Father was anything other than fluent. It was only when he was shy or unsure that he faltered. I hear him hesitate as he introduces himself over the phone to Mr. Oligher before he asks Mr. Oligher if he would like a free estimate of the market value of his house from the real estate company Father has so recently and temporarily joined. Then I hear him hesitate when he calls me cross-California: “J-J-Jeremy?” he’ll ask and I’ll say, “Yes, Father,” because with Father I’m always articulate, because of Father I’m not afraid. Beth says when she visits him occasionally he’ll babble a bit, but that’s more the result of old age than the manifestation of any neurosis. And yet I hear him at dinner one night a decade ago.

  Mother worked part-time as editor of Eureka, the monthly magazine of the San Francisco Historical Society. She came home around five some Friday with the news that we should eat and run, since in just a few hours the society was unveiling the exhibition the public had been panting for: Charcoal Drawings of the Damage Done by the 1906 Earthquake. None of us had the heart to tell her we were less interested in perusing fuzzy re-creations of the wreckage than staying right where we were—drinking lemonade, scouting hummingbirds, barbecuing steaks. Mother appeared at the steps of the patio and said, “Okay, you guys, time to get ready. Gulp it down and get changed and let’s go. We don’t want to be tardy.”

  We didn’t want to be tardy. We didn’t even want to be present. We wanted to lie back in our lounge chairs and let the night fall. Mother returned ten minutes later, looking very sharp in an Indian-style hoop skirt. Still quite cheerful, she said, “What’s the matter with you lazy bums? I’m offering you an education in art and a night on the town, and you’re guzzling lemonade. Come on. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  Father took the easy way out. He stirred the coals in the barbecue and said, “I don’t think the kids want to go, Annette.”

  The kids were age ten and fourteen and could speak for themselves, but had chosen not to. Mother’s face turned the color of one of our medium-rare steaks. She rustled her skirt and stomped about a bit in her boots, nearly crushing Bruin, who was begging for a scrap of meat. I suppose if I had to say what it was I despised about that sterile dog it was how it was always either scratching at you for something or stretched out on all fours for you to scratch it, like human desire reduced to the lowest common denominator.

  “What do you mean the kids don’t want to go?” she said.

  “I mean I think the kids don’t want to go.”

  “You mean you think you don’t want to go, but just don’t want to say so, is that right, Teddy?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, squirting more lighter fluid onto the coals.

  She asked Beth and me if we wanted to go.

  “No, thank you.”

  “N-n-no.”

  Father, suddenly very brave, said, “I’ll go if you need a hand to hold.”

  “Oh, no you won’t, if you’re doing me a great big favor. I work on Eureka so my family can take advantage of some of the social affairs, and when the biggest event of the year comes along—Mayor Alioto will be there, champagne, the press—you want to stay home and wipe grease off your mouths.”

  We wiped grease off our mouths. Then, in the wonderful way in which only Mother’s mind could work, and which we were accustomed to accept as sane, she suddenly decided she didn’t want to look at earthquake etchings, either. She wanted to go to La Guerre est finie, some sort of political thriller that was getting good reviews. She slumped down in a chair that had a bad front leg, drank the last of Beth’s lemonade, and asked—told—Father to call the cinema. We had an extension cord on the telephone that probably would have allowed Mother to make a call from the Embarcadero Freeway if she ever really needed to; Father dragged that cord out to the patio. While putting on some more steaks, he dialed the theater. He listened to a man on a machine. I don’t know whether he was trying to do too many things at once, or trying to please all the people all the time, or whether he knew, or thought he knew, Mother had no intention of missing the Society bash and was sending him through a farcical task. But he did have trouble telling Mother what time the movie started. He had his problems.

  He said: “I-i-it starts at seven th-th-thirty.”

  Mock-sincere, stirring her lemonade, Mother said, “Do you mean to say a movie actually starts at seven-thirty-three?”

  She had to say that. She had to wreck Father’s barbecue. He went inside to change clothes so he could escort Mother to the exhibit, or the theater, or wherever it was she finally decided to go. The steaks caught fire and a great flame went up until Beth had the presence of mind to pitch some dirt onto the pit.

  SO FATHER WASN’T the high sovereign on the home front. We all find some place we are powerful, though; we all go somewhere to be strong. Where Father went, Sundays in summer, was to Golden Gate Park. In the early 1930s, Father had worked as a minor league umpire on the East Coast, teaming up occasionally with Emmett Ashford, who was something of a showman and thirty years later beca
me the first black umpire in the major leagues. Some people thought all of Father’s behind-the-plate antics amounted to nothing more than “white Ashford.” We’d go to Giants games not when Koufax was the competition or bats were being given away, but when Ashford was calling balls and strikes. All game long, Father would keep the binoculars on Ashford and say to me, “Emmett’s calling a low strike,” “Emmett was out of position on that one,” “If that guy gives Emmett any more guff, Emmett’s going to give him the old heave-ho.” Then I’d look up and Emmett would be giving the guy the old heave-ho.

  It wasn’t the major leagues that played at Golden Gate Park. It wasn’t even the minor leagues. It was something called the industrial leagues. The Machinists would play the Accountants, Pacific Gas and Electric would play Western Airlines. But they played with a hardball, they played for blood, their wives cheered like enraged schoolgirls, and Father was the referee. He’d leave for Golden Gate Park early on Sunday morning with his spikes and metal mask already on, his chest protector underneath his blue uniform, and a little whisk broom, with which to dust off home plate, sticking out his pocket. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him umpire.

  We lived a short bus ride from the park, so Father went ahead and I was to follow after him. I watched alligators yawn on cracked rocks in the Steinhart Aquarium; bought a fortune cookie, whose message was that I should spend less time on business and more on love, at the Japanese Tea Garden; found the Botanical Garden, on the other hand, a little too pretty to appreciate; and finally worked my way toward the baseball stadium, which wasn’t really a stadium at all but an immense field without fences. There was a diamond, though. There were dugouts and a half-circle of stands. I stood behind the screen, watching Denny’s Restaurant play Safeway Market. Neither team meant a thing to me and after a few innings I looked around for Father, who I figured must be working the next game. Then I realized the big man in blue, squatting behind the catcher with every pitch, was Father. In certain sections of the country, in certain leagues and stadiums, the spectators are expected to focus all their economic and sexual frustrations upon the lonely figure of the umpire, but in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, on at least one Sunday in the summer of 1966, they didn’t do that.