Dictation (21 page)

I said lamely, "I'm here."

"Ruby's kid, why should I care? I mean the Esperanto people, they're the ones who came. Because they saw I was against Simon. Some of them brought flowers, can you believe it?"

"If you were against him," I said, "why did you go along with everything?"

"I told you why. To get even."

"A funny way of getting even, if you did just what he wanted."

"My God, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, just like your mother, blind as a bat. You don't think I'd let anybody know my own husband managed to kill off my own child right in my own bed, do you?"

She was all zigzag and contradiction: she had taken revenge on Simon; she had protected him. She was both sword and shield. Was this what an improvisational temperament added up to? I was certain now that no word Essie uttered could be trusted.

She had little more to say about Simon, and there was little more she cared to hear. But before I left she pushed her brownish face, wrinkled as a walnut, into mine, and told me something I have never forgotten.

"Listen," she said, "that goddamn universal language, you want to know what it is? Not Esperanto, and not Simon's gibberish either. I'll tell you, but only if you want to know."

I said I did.

"Everyone uses it," she said. "Everyone, all over the world."

And was that it really, what Essie gave out just then in her mercurial frenzied whisper? Lie, illusion, deception, she said—was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?