Dictation (17 page)

"Is your uncle some sort of writer?" Annette asked as we climbed the stairs. The wooden steps creaked tunefully; the ancient layers of paint on the banisters were thickly wrinkled. I had told her that Simon was crazy about words. "I mean really crazy," I said.

Simon was sitting at a bridge table lit by a gooseneck lamp. A tower of dictionaries was at his left. A piece of questionable-looking cheese lay in a saucer on his right. In between was a bottle of ink. He was filling his fountain pen.

"My mother sends her love," I said, and handed Simon an envelope with the twenty-dollar bill folded into a page torn from my Modern History text. Except for a photograph of a zeppelin, it was blank. My father's warning about how not to be robbed in broad daylight was always to keep your cash well swaddled. "Otherwise those Village freaks down there will sure as shooting nab it," he wrote at the bottom of my mother's letter. But I had wrapped the money mostly to postpone Simon's humiliation: maybe, if only for a moment, he would think I was once again bringing him one of my mother's snapshots of cactus and dunes. She had lately acquired a box camera; in order not to be taken for a greenhorn, she was behaving like a tourist. At that time I had not yet recognized that an occasional donation might not humiliate Simon.

He screwed the cap back on the ink bottle and looked Annette over.

"Who's this?"

"My roommate. Annette Sorenson."

"A great big girl, how about that. Viking stock. You may be interested to know that I've included a certain uncommon Scandinavian diphthong in my work. Zamenhof didn't dare. He looked the other way. He didn't have the nerve." Behind his glasses Simon was grinning. "Any friend of my niece Phyllis I intend to like. But never an Esperantist. You're not an Esperantist, are you?"

This, or something like it, was his usual opening. I had by now determined that Essie was right: Simon was a flirt, and something more. He went for the girls. Once he even went for me: he put out a hand and cupped my breast. Then he thought better of it. He had, after all, known me from childhood; he desisted. Or else, since it was January, and anyhow I was wearing a heavy wool overcoat, there wasn't much of interest worth cupping. For my part, I ignored it. I was eighteen, with eyes in my head, beginning to know a thing or two. I had what you might call an insight. Simon coveted more than the advancement of GNU.

On my mother's instructions I opened his icebox. A rancid smell rushed out. There was a shapeless object green at the edges—the other half of the cheese in his saucer. The milk was sour, so I poured it down the toilet. Simon was all the while busy with his spiel, lecturing Annette on the evil history of Esperanto and its ignominious creator and champion, Dr. Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, of Bialystok, Poland.

"There they spoke four languages, imagine that! Four lousy languages! And this is what inspires him? Four languages? Did he ever go beyond European roots? Never! The man lived inside a puddle and never stepped out of it. Circumscribed! Small! Narrow!"

"I'll be right back," I called out from the doorway, and went down to the grocery on the corner to replenish Simon's meager larder. I had heard this grandiose history too many times: how Simon alone had ventured into the genuinely universal, how he had roamed far beyond Zamenhof's paltry horizons into the vast tides of human speech, drawing from these a true synthesis, a compact common language unsurpassed in harmony and strength. Yet tragically eclipsed—eclipsed by Zamenhof's disciples, those deluded believers, those adorers of a false messiah! An eye doctor, that charlatan, and look how he blinds all his followers: Germanic roots, Romance roots, Slavic, and then he stops, as if there's no India, no China, no Arabia! No Aleutian Islanders! Why didn't the fellow just stick to the polyglot Yiddish he was born into and let it go at that? Did he ever set foot twenty miles into the Orient, into the Levant? No! Then why didn't he stick to Polish? An eye doctor who couldn't see past his own nose.
Hamlet
in Esperanto, did you ever hear of such chutzpah?

And so on: Esperanto, a fake, a sham, an injustice!

As I was coming up the stairs, carrying bread and milk and eggs in the straw-handled Navajo bag my mother had sent as a present for Simon, I heard Annette say, "But I never knew Esperanto even
existed,"
and I saw that Simon had Annette's hand in his. He was circling her little finger with a coarse thumb that curved backward like a twisted spoon. She didn't seem to mind.

"You shouldn't call him crazy," she protested. "He's only disappointed." By then we were already in the street. She looked up at Simon's fourth-floor window. It flashed back at her like a signal: it had caught the late sun. I noticed that she was holding a white square of paper with writing on it.

"What's that?"

"A word he gave me. A brand-new word that no one's ever used before. He wants me to learn it."

"Oh my God," I said.

"It means 'enchanting maiden,' isn't that something?"

"Not if maiden's supposed to be the same as virgin."

"Cut it out, Phyllis, just stop it. He thinks I can help."

"You? How?"

"I could recruit. He says I could get young people interested."

"I'm young people," I said. "I've never been interested, and I've had to listen to Simon's stuff all my life. He bores me silly."

"Well, he told me you take after your father, whatever that means. A prophet is without honor in his own family, that's what he said."

"Simon isn't a prophet, he's a crank."

"I don't care what he is. You don't get to meet someone like that in Minnesota. And he even wears sandals!"

It seemed she had found her bohemian at last. The sandals were another of my mother's presents. Like the photos of the cactus and the dunes, they were intended as souvenirs of distant Arizona.

After that, though Annette and I ate and slept within inches of each other, an abyss opened between us. There had never been the chance of a friendship. I was serious and diligent, she was not. I attended every class. Annette skipped most of hers. She could spurt instant tears. I was resolutely dry-hearted. Besides, I had my suspicions of people who liked to show off and imagined they could turn into Katharine Cornell, the famous actress. Annette spoke of "thespians" and "theater folk," and began parading in green lipstick and black stockings. But even this wore off after a time. She was starting to take her meals away from our flat. She kept a secret notebook with a mottled cover, bound by a strap connected to a purple sash tied around her waist. I had nothing to say to her, and when in a month or so she told me she had decided to move out ("I need to be with my own crowd," she explained), I was altogether relieved.

I was also troubled. I was afraid to risk another roommate: would my father agree to shouldering the full rent? I put this anxiety in a letter to Arizona; the answer came, unexpectedly, from my father, and not, as usual, in a jagged postscript below my mother's big round slanted Palmer-method penmanship. The extra money, he said, wouldn't be a problem. "Believe it or not," he wrote, "your mother thinks she's a rich woman, she's gone into business! There she was, collecting beaded belts and leather dolls, and God only knows what other cheap junk people like to pick up out here, and before I can look around, she's opened up this dinky little gift shop, and she's got these gullible out-of-staters paying good dollars for what costs your mother less than a dime. Trinkets! To tell the truth, I never knew she had this nonsense in her, and neither did she."

This time it was my mother who supplied the postscript—but I observed it had a later date, and I guessed she had mailed the letter without my father's having seen her addendum. It was a kind of judicial rider: she had put him in the dock. "I don't know why your dad is so surprised," she complained in a tone so familiar that I could almost hear her voice in the sprawl of her handwriting. "I've always had an artistic flair, whether or not it showed, and I don't much appreciate it when your dad puts me down like that, just because he's disillusioned with being stuck out here. He says he's sick and tired of it and misses home, but I don't, and my gallery is already beginning to look like a success, it's all authentic Hopi work! But that's the way your dad is—anywhere there's culture and ambition, he just has to put it down. For years he did it to Simon, and now he's doing it to me. And Phyllis dear, speaking of Simon, he ought to be eating his greens. I hope you're remembering to bring him a salad now and then." A fifty-dollar bill dropped out of the envelope.

That my mother was writing to me without my father's knowledge did not disturb me. It was of a piece with her long-ago attempts to conceal our attendance at Simon's old meetings. But I felt the heat of my guilt: I had neglected Simon, I hadn't looked in on him for ... I hardly knew how many weeks it might have been. Weeks, surely; two months, three? I resented those visits; I resented the responsibility my mother had cursed me with. Simon was worse than a crank and a bore. He was remote from my youth and my life. I thought of him as a bad smell, like his icebox.

But I obediently chopped up lettuce and cucumber and green peppers, and poured a garlic-and-oil dressing over all of it. Then, with the fifty-dollar bill well wrapped in waxed paper and inserted into a folded piece of cardboard with a rubber band around it, I went to see Simon. Two flights below the landing that led to his place I could already hear the commotion vibrating out of it: an incomprehensible clamor, shreds of laughter, and a strangely broken wail that only vaguely passed for a chant. The door was open; I looked in. A mob of acolytes was swarming there—no, not swarming after all: in the tiny square of Simon's parlor, with its sofa-bed in one corner and its makeshift pantry, a pair of wooden crates, in the other, there was hardly a clear foot of space to accommodate a swarming. Yet what I saw through a swaying tangle of elbows and legs had all the buzz and teeming of a hive: a squatting, a slouching, a splaying, a leaning, a curling up, a lying down. And in the center of this fleshy oscillation, gargling forth the syllables of GNU, stood Annette. She stood like a risen tower, solid as bricks. She seemed to be cawing—croaking, crackling, chirring—though in the absence of anything intelligible, how was it possible to tell? Were these the sounds and cadences of the universal tongue? I could not admit surprise: from the start Annette had been so much my unwanted destiny. What else could she be now, having materialized here, in the very bosom of GNU? Or, if she wasn't to be
my
destiny, she intended to be Simon's. She was resurrecting his old meetings—it was plain from the spirit of the thing that this wasn't the first or the last. Anyhow it was flawed. No enemies lurked among these new zealots, if they were zealots at all.

At that time there were faddists of various persuasions proliferating up and down the Village, anarchists who dutifully went home every night to their mother's kitchens, a Hungarian monarchist with his own following, free-verse poets who eschewed capital letters, cultists who sat rapturously for hours in orgone boxes, cloudy Swedenborgians, and all the rest. These crazes never tempted me; my early exposure to Simon's fanatics had been vaccination enough. As for where Annette had fetched this current crew, I supposed they were picked up from the looser margins of her theater crowd. There were corroboratory instances, here and there, of black stockings and green lipstick. And no Esperantists. Zamenhof was as alien to these recruits as—well, as GNU had been two months ago. Not one of them would have been willing to knock Simon down.

Annette lifted her face from her mottled notebook. All around her the wriggling knots of torsos turned inert and watchful.

"Oh my God, it's Phyllis," she said. "What're you doing here? Can't you see we're in the middle of things, we're
work
ing?"

"I'm just bringing a green salad for my uncle—"

"Little Green Riding Hood, how sweet. She's not his actual
niece,"
Annette explained to the mob. "She doesn't give a hoot about him. Hey, Phyl, you don't think we'd let a man like that starve? And if you want to know what a real green salad looks like, here's a green salad." She swooped to the floor and swept up a large straw basket (yet another of my mother's souvenirs) heaped with verdant dollars. "This week's dues," she told me.

I surveyed the bodies at my feet, sorting among them. "Where is he?"

"Simon? Not here. Thursday's his day away, but he gave us the new words last time, so we carry on. We do little dialogues, we're getting the hang of it. We're his pioneers," she declaimed: Katharine Cornell to the hilt.

"And then it'll spread all over," a voice called out.

"There, you see?" Annette said. "Some people understand. Poor Phyl's never figured it out. Simon's going against the Bible, he's an atheist."

"Is that what he tells you?"

"You are
such
a dope," she spat out. "The Tower of Babel's why he got to thinking about GNU in the first place, wasn't it? So that things would go back to the way they were. The way it was before."

"Before what? Before they invented lunatic asylums? Look," I said, "as far as I'm concerned Simon's not exactly right in the head, so I'm supposed to—" But I broke off shamefacedly. "I have to watch out for him, he's sort of my responsibility."

"As far as you're concerned? How far is that? How long's it been since you showed up anyhow?"

Annette, I saw, was shrewder than I could ever hope to be. She was stupid and she was earnest. The stupidity would last, the earnestness might be fleeting, but the combination ignited a volcanic purposefulness: she had succeeded in injecting a bit of living tissue into Simon's desiccated old fossil. She was a first-rate organizer. I wondered how much of that weekly green salad she took away with her. And why not? It was a commission on dues. It was business.

"Where
is
he?" I insisted. I was still holding the bowl of cut vegetables, and all at once discovered a tremor in my hands: from fury, from humiliation.

"He went to visit a family member. That's what he said."