I understand that whenever Demosthenes got a little tongue-tied he'd leave Athens to camp out on the Mediterranean coast where, with pebbles in his mouth, he'd rehearse his oration against the sound of the Aegean Sea until his rather unGreek diffidence ceased and words became waves within him. Then he'd return to Athens to deliver a very authoritative, unhesitant speech which always concerned the sanctity of the Greek city-state and never received anything less than unrestrained applause from the rude multitude. The trip to the Mediterranean, the swim at sea, the favorable reception in the senate: it's a delightful tale complete with moral in tow. And yet there are those—surely, Sandra, you are one of them—who will want to insist that Demosthenes, forced to flee Athens and lecture inattentive fish every time he was scheduled to speak about the city-state, should have drowned himself at high tide, whereas I'd want to emphasize that Demosthenes never left the coast until he was speaking so loud he could no longer hear the Aegean arriving on the rocks.
The big city boy, who hates the city, leaves the city to perfect a speech in praise of the absolute supremacy of the city. The audience, impatient to applaud, doesn't perceive that the greatest orator in western civilization often speaks with seaweed sliding out his mouth. Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he'd have drowned himself at high tide. My sister—so shy, so sincere—once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I've ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves.
And what's my calling? I am not a postal clerk. All I've ever had are memories; metaphor is only an escape from error into elegance. No imagination, only memory. More specifically: Lido Isle the summer of 1960. I remember Father reading about the Rosenbergs in a wooden chair chained to a steel stake in the sand; Mother sitting at her black typewriter in her ugly black swimsuit, inhaling Kents and exhaling black smoke while writing a retrospective on the Hollywood Ten for The Nation ("Perhaps the whole intent and purpose of the loyalty orders was merely to collect evidentiary leads--like a boy collecting wads of string in the hope that someday he will have enough for a noose"); Beth, too fat to have fun, never failing by lunch to complete the crossword puzzle; the hideous sand dunes in the distance, slime mold clinging to the four legs of the dock, the muddy shore at morning, but all that recedes and I see myself, absurdly small, seated in a white rowboat that later is to become much-photographed by Father because it's the source of all mystery. It's the source of all mystery because, although it's without oars or owner and isn't moored, it never leaves the shore. Never. It's always there, always white, rusted, pure, austere.
The rowboat isn't only The Source of All Mystery and The Vehicle of the Voyage. It's also an Icon of My Own Isolation. C'est moi. I never leave the shore. I don't know how to swim. Tears lift the waves to high water. The horizon is Hong Kong. I decide to cross the Pacific so I can stop speaking English, with which I am having considerable difficulty, and learn Chinese, which seems so much faster, so much more natural. No pauses, just jabbering. I decide to row across but have no oars. I decide to swim across but don't know how to swim. I can't even float. Though I haven't yet heard of Demosthenes, I speak to the Pacific, love how dark it looks as night nears. I want from the waves what he wanted: a little bit of cruel constancy. I orate to the ocean what I've heard about all day—that neither of the Rosenbergs and none of the Hollywood Ten was guilty—and, all alone in the night, I become witty, jocular. I explain to the Pacific how helplessly attracted I am to Ruth Greenglass's red hair, how erotic her betrayal of the Rosenbergs is for me. My voice picks up power, I'm drowning out high tide, I can't hear it any more. The Pacific is puny. China is mere chimera. I start to stand in the boat, bellowing at the waves, but as I rise I lose my balance and fall overboard. I learn how to swim: the water is not warm.
I hope it's clear this is no mere tale of a five-year-old finding his first flippers, even if swimming is finally only swimming: an undertow here, a red tide there, a scorpion in the sand. And a family is only a family. My family was only a family. It wasn't a nightmare. It wasn't a concentration camp. Each of us isn't the sum total of all the faults of his family. That's impossible. That can't be who we are. So I suppose I selectively remember that Mother was writing an article, Father was reading a book, and Beth was completing crossword puzzles, while I wandered the island, wondering whether I should cut off my tongue or simply put a pistol to my head. My family was living in language whereas I was dying in it, and I understand such a situation is classical, not in the sense of Demosthenes but Herr Doktor: the opposite of success is suicide.
Beth had done so well in a high school course called Psychoanalysis and Literature that when the teacher—a handsome man who wore loud blazers and said such things as, "Have any of you ever seen a picture of Kafka? He looks like a criminal. Do you know why he looks like a criminal? Because he was an artist. Do you know why the artist is a criminal? Because he steals our secrets" —got tired, he'd let Beth lead the discussion. So well-dressed, so seraphically smart, she'd stand up and say, "Did it occur to any of you that Gertrude's last words—'O my dear Hamlet'—are not without meaning for us?" Years later, of course, I wanted to do even better than Beth had done, but when Loud Blazer called on me I'd shake my head No, or maybe nod Yes, then after class he'd come up to me and say: "Are you sure your last name is Zorn?"
Place-Names: The Name. Zorn, Germany: Zorn. Three hundred years ago: "Are you Zorns from Zorn?" "Why, yes, of course, all Zorns are from Zorn." German; Jew. So the secret has been stolen, and not by Kafka. So I am not Demosthenes. Which is why it's curious to me that Mother often said she never trusted German-Jews because their loyalty was divided between culture and country and, in some of the last articles she wrote, attacked Kissinger, really quite viciously attacked him, for that very reason. Didn't she trust Father? Is that what this means? Who knows? Maybe that's why Father always insisted we were Russian. He liked to see himself as one of those who would have contradicted the Cossacks if he had had the chance. I can't believe Mother had any reason to mistrust Father or that, on the other hand, Father would have listened to such a harangue against his lineage. If memory serves, though, that's precisely what happened. The discovery that I'm a descendant of the Zorns from Zorn was a recent product of my own research.
I've never been exactly clear on where Mother's people came from—England, I suppose, or France—but wasn't she always the Cossack and Father the cowering Jew? Wasn't this his chance to be tough and didn't he bow and scrape? It's fashionable these days to equate marriage and murder, and I don't mean to invoke such a simple formula, but it would be a lie to say Mother was ever anything less than a tyrant or Father anything more than a mole. Mother often gave dinner parties for the West Coast correspondents of other magazines—very lavish affairs at which they drank a lot, talked very loudly and learnedly about everything in the world, and told me Mother was a marvelous writer as well as a "great gal," but which were always being interrupted by a call from someone's copy editor "back East" who wanted the entire article on Governor Reagan rewritten by midnight. It was all very exciting.
It's one party in particular I remember. I don't remember what year it was or what season. Instead, I remember those terrible gingham curtains drawn back so the picture window presented rather spectacularly: the Bay and the Bridge, with a Moon. On one wall was a Klee print, and on the other wall was a black-and-white photograph, mounted and framed, of two children kissing, which, if you looked at it in the wrong light or without, say, love in your heart, you might take for nothing more than two water glasses touching. The first time Father saw it he thought it was waves, dark waves at dawn. Even now I cannot convince him those are lips. The party people were reading one another's articles in one another's magazines, as they spooned chocolate mousse, which Beth had been so good to make, and sipped coffee. They were praising one another extravagantly and meditating upon the power of the written word, the nature of attractive typography. Oh, I don't know, maybe a few candles flickered in the black wind.
Then Father found something offensive about one of the articles, and the moon dissolved. He read aloud the first paragraph of the story, which was written by an Englishman for Reuters:
At a $100-a-plate dinner last night sponsored by the San Francisco Jewish Welfare Fund, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called for Jewish-American men and women to contribute 1% of their paychecks to the war effort, and all Jewish-American boys over the age of 18 to enlist in the Israeli Army. She assured the affluent audience that visa applications would be waived for all potential soldiers. Alluding to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's boast that "our aim is to drive Israel into the Red Sea," Prime Minister Meir said, "The people of Israel have never had, do not now have, and shall never have any intention of residing underwater," drawing a sustained, standing ovation from this charming city's ethnic elite.
“ 'Affluent audience,' ” Father said. “ 'Potential soldiers.' 'Ethnic elite.' You call this objective reporting?”
Reuters, who was tapping the ashes of a sophisticated cigarette into his empty mousse dish, said, “For godsakes, chap, cheer up, will you? We call it 'in-depth analysis.' ”
On the few occasions Father became furious, I always had the sense thirty years were receding before my eyes, and this time was no exception: the voice a vibrato; the face, quite literally, crimson; those thin legs very suddenly tight and mighty. Father stood, spilling his mousse.
“Teddy, sit down” Mother said.
Teddy—Father—sat down, then said, “In-depth Analysis? What, are you kidding? This is slander.”
“I found it—as a lead paragraph—wonderfully terse, wonderfully, really quite wonderfully, to-the-point,” someone said.
“It's a nice mixture, Taylor, of reportage and local color,” Mother said. “It really is.”
“Annette, how can you say that?” Father pleaded, tugging on the tablecloth. “It's subtly, or not so subtly, anti-Semitic. I demand an apology.”
And then, amid all the West Coast correspondents, Father put his napkin down on the table and just started weeping. Huge convulsive heaves of the shoulders and slobbering gasps for breath. While the discussion returned to more civilized concerns (international politics and pay raises and that kind of thing), Father got up and left, taking his mousse and a bent metal spoon with him into the bedroom. I'd like to say I went with him, helped him eat his mousse, held his hand, and told him I thought they were wrong, all wrong, but Mother stared at me to sit perfectly still, so I stayed. The control she had over people was really rather extraordinary. Maybe Father was bored silly with the conversation and just wanted an excuse to leave the table so he could sit up in bed, scoop pudding, and read some more about Sing Sing, but I imagine he squeezed a pillow tightly and cried the night away. He used to be such an emotional man.
And yet I don't see how he could have been expecting anything terribly much more from Mother, as it was just not her way to rush to Father's defense. She didn't do that sort of thing. Father was so helpless he would have needed the Russian Army as a defense and, although Mother was the Russian Army, she was never especially prone to eliminating the enemy for him. Or, rather, she was the enemy for him. Why was she always so sweet to strangers and so tough on Father? I wish I knew. The more helpless he became the more unhelpful she became and then, when she finally needed some attention, Father was nowhere to be found.
I don't mean to imply the sheer agony of watching Mother and Father argue was the sole cause of my curse. Sometimes, though, when I'm playing tennis I'll know I can't quite reach the ball if I hit it with a backhand, so I'll shift the racquet and return the ball lefty—a maneuver I didn't so much learn from Father as inherit from him—or when hurriedly filling out a form I'll realize my "Z," with its wicked horizontal slash, might just as well have been written by Mother. It's times like these when I acknowledge that if my parents affected my tennis game and my penmanship they must have had some influence upon my mouth as well. I recently learned that Mother wasn't the first person ever to say, "The past is but prologue to the present," although probably no one ever said it as often as she did. It's a very nice if somewhat too alliterative axiom, and it might serve well as my emblem throughout these episodes. The past is but prologue. I suppose I should begin at the beginning.
Contemporary pathological theory—Sandra tells me—has it that "the stuttering problem begins in early childhood and develops as a negative reaction by the child to disfluencies while speaking." Right around age three, children find language for the first time. In their eagerness and anxiety to master the communicative process by morning, almost all little ones encounter considerable difficulty at one time or another with their diction. Every day they add dozens of new words to their vocabularies and, impatient for progress, they trip over this t, fumble with that f. If just about every child babbles occasionally from age three to age five, only a very select one half of one percent go on to make a nasty adult habit out of it.
Why do some "develop a negative reaction to disfluencies" while others do not? Why is every stutterer I have ever met a man? And why are his eyes always rimmed with fear? The reason ninety percent of all impeded speakers are male is, according to Sandra, that little boys feel more pressure than little girls to perform verbal magic. In some ways it's an attractive theory, but I have my doubts. Beth claims she was already reading second-rate mysteries when she was five, whereas I'd never pretend that at such an early age I was doing anything more ambitious than attempting to master the alphabet, that terrible catalogue of unspeakable sounds.
Still, I did always feel a certain subtle pressure to produce perfect speech, and for that I suppose I should blame Mother and Father, since Sandra is so convinced the origin of all stuttering is a scene in which one of the parents calls the child's attention to and scolds him for what is normal, everyday disfluency. The example Sandra uses is always the same: a boy and his mother lean out the second-floor window of a burning house, waiting for the boy's father to line up the ladder with the ledge of the window. The boy turns to his mother and says, “I-I-I'm afraid, Mommy.” Sandra is certain that if the mother in such a situation says, “Don't worry, Melvin, Daddy will have us out of here in no time,” Melvin will turn out all right, but if the mother says, “Don't say, 'I-I-I'm afraid,' Melvin, just 'I'm afraid,' ” Melvin will try not to stutter on I the next time he says it. This, as we all know, is the beginning of the end. He will, as Sandra says, “develop a general orientation toward speech of 'what can I do not to stutter' instead of 'what can I do to talk.' ” Poor little Melvin. I've always assumed his only hope was for the house to go up fast in flames.
There's no house on fire in my memory but, when Sandra insists that I must remember the origin of the disorder, I see a Pacific Palisades living room as the scene of the crime. Beth was away at a classical guitar lesson; Father, who had just returned from playing four sets of doubles at Rancho Park, was sprawled on the floor, bouncing a white tennis ball on the red Persian rug; Mother, who had to be in North Hollywood by noon to interview a screenwriter who'd been blacklisted and wanted to talk, was sitting in the Good Chair with her polished shoes on the stool and the puppy in her lap. The dog was named Bruin, in honor of Mother's alma mater, but it should have been called CIA, since it looked like nothing so much as the black-coated specter in Mad's "Spy vs. Spy." And it would have been an appropriate appellation, too, as its only desires in the world were to claw your bare ruined legs, curl up in Mother's soul, and look at you lugubriously. It was wounded half a dozen years later when I got upset one afternoon about my inability to talk, even to a dog, and neglected to latch the back gate. Bruin ran right into the grillwork of a Mustang convertible.
At the origin of the disorder, in the living room on Saturday morning, Bruin was still healthy and dreaming in Mother's lap. Mother was sitting in the Good Chair, Father was bouncing a tennis ball on the Persian rug, and I was lying down on the couch. Yes, lying down on the couch, and I suspect the symbolism was intentional, since Mother said I should put a pillow behind my head and my arms at my side, just relax, close my eyes, and talk very slowly. I tried to do what Mother said, I honestly tried, but I was four years old, it was the month of May, and all that morning sun waxed the bay window with quasi-religious light, with reasons to live. It was obvious to me that outside the window was what is known as life, and inside the window was what is commonly referred to as death. I wanted very much to be outside and got up to go, but Father stood, guarding the front door, playing the patrolman for probably the first and last time in his life. Mother said if she could be a little late for her interview, “well, then, you can come right back here and lie down on the couch and listen to me for a few minutes, Buster.” My name wasn't Buster. The dog's name was Bruin or, to free-associating friends of Beth's borrowing our house between marches throughout the 60's, Brewin'. The dog leapt off Mother's lap, pranced across the Persian rug, and Father opened the door to let her go outside. Beth was strumming Segovia and eating fancy cookies in a nice Italian lady's house in Bel-Air.
“Are you comfortable over there on the couch?” Mother asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you happy?” she asked.
Surely she meant this as an inquiry into the general state of my spiritual life, what sort of reconciliation I'd arrived at between death and desire. Father sat upright and Mother raised her eyebrows when I said, “No, I'm not happy.” She thought she was onto something. She thought I was going to tell her what she wanted to hear.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I'd rather be outside, playing,” I said.
“Oh, right,” she said, nodding. She slumped back in the Good Chair. Father returned to his prone position on the floor.
This wasn't working out the way she wanted. She wasn't establishing the empathy she was famous for establishing between herself and her subject. I guess I wasn't giving a very good interview. Mother went into the den to call the screenwriter and say she'd be a little late, while Father went to take a shower because in twenty minutes he was supposed to pick up Beth at the nice Italian lady's house in the hills. As he was walking out of the room he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Just relax, Jeremy. Don't worry about what Mom is saying.” So then, of course,waiting for Mother to get off the phone, lying face down on the scratchy couch, I couldn't do anything except worry. Mother had just given me a new watch to teach me responsibility and make me acutely aware of my own mortality. Studying its blue face, its white dial, I admired the ease with which the silver second hand made its rounds, the way it couldn't stop moving if it wanted to.
When Mother returned from the den, she pulled the stool next to the couch, pushed the hair off my forehead, and blew smoke in my face. Then she brought out her rook for mopping up. She said this very softly and sympathetically, she said it while massaging my skull, but what she said was: “Do you realize, Jeremy, that sometimes you talk too fast? Sometimes you're in just such a hurry to say something the words trip you up. Have you ever noticed that, honey? Sometimes you'll want to say a word so fast you won't be able to say it at all or you'll say the first sound of the word over and over. I don't want this to become a habit for you. There's no need to be quite so anxious. People will wait to hear what you have to say.”
“I don't do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Talk too fast.”
“Sometimes you do”; Mother said. “Not a lot or even often, but now and then you try to rush your words and you'll stumble over one of them. Daddy has noticed it, I've noticed it, and Beth said she's noticed it.”
Actually, studies show it's not stutterers who talk too fast but the mothers of stutterers; it's their fault.
“Beth said that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“She said yesterday the two of you were looking at the map of the United States in the World Book and, when you were racing to see who could name all the capital cities first, you had some difficulty saying 'Philadelphia.' ”
“I didn't,” I said. “She's a liar.” Beth was a liar, but she was also the winner of the map game when Harrisburg, of all places, rather than Philadelphia, proved to be the capital of Pennsylvania.
I listened to the shower running, to the expansion of the pipes. I watched Bruin press her black little nose to the window and beg to be let back in. I studied the threads in the couch. I computed the fantastic rate at which Mother was removing cigarettes from her pack. I did anything I could to miss what Mother was saying because the main theme of her monologue was: “I just want to show you how easily you can say 'Philadelphia' if you'll concentrate on saying it very slowly and carefully. Come on now, Jeremy, say it with me: Fill-a-dell-fee-a. You can do it. I know you can. Show me you can do it. Say 'Philadelphia' for me, honey.”
I tried. God knows I tried. But "Philadelphia" lay like dead weight on my chest, like helium in my head, neither light nor heavy, and yet with definite gravity to it: with downward pull. Sandra says the only way to lose a fear of certain words is to treat them as utterly random and insignificant collocations of sounds. I tried to visualize "Philadelphia" as "Fill-a-dell-fee-a," but all I could think was Philadelphia was too far away. It was clear across the country, the country was very wide, and I was too small, too weak, too afraid to make the trip. I was in the Palisades and Philadelphia was in Philadelphia. It was too far. It was definitely out of the question. It isn't even the capital of Pennsylvania, I kept telling myself, trying to weaken the enemy, but Philadelphia was Constitution City, Locus of Brotherly Love, Metropolis for men who had large yellow farms and long white wigs. Teeth on lips forever, and all I could come up with was an infinitely extended, infinitely painful Fffffffff. That's all. Only that. Fffffffff. Nothing more.
“I don't feel like saying that word right now,” I said.
“What word?” Mother asked.
“That word.”
“What word?”
“You know.”
“Give it a try.”
“No,” I said. “Not now. Maybe later. Not right now.”
Mother shook her head in sadness and disgust. She withdrew to the den to call the screenwriter, canceling the interview, and came back carrying six boxes of flash cards. She waited until Father left to pick up Beth, then kicked off her shoes, cozied up next to me on the couch, and told me to lay my head in her lap. I did what she said. For what seemed like forever, she flipped flash cards in front of my face. I was supposed to say what each picture depicted, which was a sympathetic gesture on her part since it was a game we'd played before and I'd always enjoyed. She assumed it would restore confidence in my ability to communicate, but one by one the tangible things of the world vanished on me. I couldn't say a chair was a chair, or an umbrella was an umbrella, or a zebra was a zebra. As Sandra likes to point out, what you can't identify doesn't exist; no stutterer can say his own name. Mother must have flipped four hundred flash cards, and not one card could I call. I wanted to do what Mother called "caption the picture," but my mouth refused to open. The words weren't there.
Beth and Father returned sooner than I'd expected. When Beth walked in the back door humming the new notes she'd learned, the contrast—Beth the musician, Jeremy the mutation—was so striking I buried my head in Mother's lap and burst into tears. It was a wonderful feeling to produce such loud and continuous sound after I'd been silent for so long. A truly excellent cry redistributes the bones of the body; with the cessation of sobbing, I felt more completely cleaned out than I've ever felt before or since. It's a difficult emotion to explain, but it was as if the most complete emptiness had suddenly passed into purity. I thought the ugly language living in my soul had finally been killed. The future held in store only flashing phrases; perfect sentences; burning, noble words.
Father was so embarrassed by my behavior he changed back into his tennis clothes and left to go bang a white ball against a green backboard. He was never very good at the game but terribly devoted to it, and I can remember hardly a day when he didn't come back from the courts with a tin of balls in one hand, his Jack Kramer in the other, a sweaty smile on his face. Always attentive and eager to help, Beth stopped humming, marched straight into her room, closed the door, and played morose ballads for me on her guitar. She played well, though she always played well. She was a very gifted little girl. The dog had scooted inside when Father opened the back door on his way to Rancho Park; it was all over me now, scratching my neck and licking salt from the tears as they streamed down my face.
“You can go outside and play now,” Mother said, sitting on the couch, handing me Kleenex, stroking my arm. “You still have some time to play before dinner, Jeremy. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. You know that, honey. I'm very sorry. Please don't let anything I said bother you, because you're going to be just fine. Most of the time you speak beautifully. Give me a smile, Jeremy. Don't you want to go outside and play?”
This was something of a first for me, to stay put rather than rush outdoors. When frolicking outside, it's fairly common for most children to experience what might be termed the opposite of the pathetic fallacy: to feel, after a few hours of fun, that the dirt, the grass, the trees, the sun, the sky are simply apart of them, are buried deep inside their bodies. But I'd never felt that way before about a living room. The scratchy couch, the Persian rug, the Good Chair, the unsteady chandelier, all these supposedly inanimate objects suddenly took on a life of their own and started playing house in my heart. For anyone to feel like a living room is a minor disaster, but for a boy-child it's the worst feeling in the world. The late afternoon sun dissolved into the artificial light of the overhead lamp. No, Mother, I didn't want to go outside and play. All I really wanted to do was close the curtains, turn off the lights, put my head on a pillow, and ascend. No such luck. “Come help me take out the garbage,” Mother said, “and I'll make whatever you want for dinner.”
Maybe I'm deluding myself when I say this scene was the inception of the problem, since it's not as if from that time forward the only thing I've been aware of has been my disfluency. That's simply not the case. But, until Mother mentioned it to me, I'd never heard those hesitations that are now habit. Apparently, other people had. It offended them, they felt compelled to tell Mother, and she felt compelled to tell me. Mother didn't create the catch in my voice. She only heard that something was wrong and, like any good reporter, went straight to the source.
Sandra says I must have become aware of the impropriety of my speech earlier than age four but have chosen not to remember it. She says the "traumatic nexus surrounding dissiliency is invariably established no later than three-and-a-half." Maybe so. I couldn't say. The tableau in the living room is the earliest trauma I can come up with. Sandra's eyes light up and she gets giddy all over when I tell her, though, how solid middle-class we Zorns were, because a disproportionate percentage of sputterers comes from the ambitious bourgeoisie, the rising gentry who, in the considered opinion of our finest historians, prompted the English Revolution. Mother would like to have covered the beheading of Charles I and Father would like to have fought at Philiphaugh, but I don't think either one of them realized how unrevolutionary they were, how upwardly mobile, how extremely middle-class. The filthy rich are so rich they hire a private tutor to instruct little Theodore in the elusive art of elocution; the filthy poor are so poor they don't know where little Leroy is, let alone care how he communicates; but the filthy middle-class are so middle-class they call little Jeremy onto the couch and ask him why he talks so fast.
“Look at the graph,” Sandra will say, pointing to some piece of paper on the wall. “Statistics don't lie.” I suppose they don't. They show most stammerers coming from families on the move, middle-class families that don't have a fireplace but are seeking fame and fortune. The new chairs in the breakfast room, the well-swept patio, the maid on Friday, the stuttering son: these, apparently, are the true totems of the climbing middle-class. The rich will always be rich, the poor will always be poor, but the middle-class is always in motion, is always in a state of suspended transformation, is not necessarily tomorrow what it is today. All that social sliding, the uneasy economic position members of the middle-class occupy, throws some children into a tizzy and their confusion comes out in strangled articulation.
The last thing I would want to do would be to ascribe this fascinating phenomenon to mere class conflict—titubation as the burden of the bourgeoisie—but I do want to acknowledge the cultural context of my disfluency. A voice from the burning bush commanded Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, but Moses was "slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." When the time came to inform the Israelites of God's command, Moses' brother, Aaron, "spake all the words that the Lord had spoken unto Moses." I always imagine Moses standing in the desert, trimming the bush, and pleading: "C-C-Come on, Aaron, why d-d-don't you tell them?" From Moses on, Jews have worried about words.
“Don't you see?” Father would say. “Jews have always beenin exile. We have had to be contemplative in order to survive.”
“So they read books and looked for loopholes in the law,” I'd say.
”Don't be silly. Kafka, Proust, Freud, Marx, Einstein:all Jews in one way or another. You should be proud they are a part of you.”
“I am,” I would say.“I really am.”
But I'm not. I really am not. I'm tired of hearing that you can flee so many times before you start looking for more long-lasting shelter, that if you have been trampled by life you can triumph in language, that the only recourse to everything is to read and write yourself into existence. It's no longer romantic to me, this Hebraic hunger for words. I hear the ceaseless clickety-clack of Mother's typewriter at the beach; I see a photograph of Father hiking in the High Sierras with a biography of Alger Hiss sticking out of his hip pocket; I imagine Beth masturbating to the pictures in the middle of Modern Drama Review. I see, I hear, I imagine these things, and I'm depressed beyond despair.