FIRST CONSONANTS, page 10
This began Art Moriarty’s precipitous decline as the head of the family. Boeing called him back to the plant six months later, but by then his shoulders were permanently stooped like a man who knew he could be easily discarded. Brian took perverse pleasure in that. He knew all about Oedipal complexes, but this wasn’t one of them. He was not so much his father’s rival son as he was a reminder of how unexpectedly failures just happen.
His father’s heart attack saved the surviving Moriarty family the expense of a long, lingering illness. You were supposed to grow up to be like your father, Brian mused to himself at the funeral. He never stopped stuttering long enough to be anything like him, and in hindsight he was glad. He had disappointed his father repeatedly. His father had disappointed him, too. He’d never worked hard to understand him. Or do all sons think that? He might have asked Bam what he thought, but there was no Bam at the funeral to ask.
The mourners, led by Brian, his mother and Mary, moved to the cemetery across town to watch the casket descend into the ground. Brian had another realization there. He and his father had never tied the score. His father was always his father. Brian couldn’t help wanting his approval. What had Brian done wrong? Aside from his stammer, he never figured it out. Maybe his father got him as a consolation prize for another son who would have done better. Brian thought of his old dream, the fraternal fetus left behind. Was his father any prouder of Bam? Unlikely. Bam had all his older brother’s faults, plus he was lousy at sports and a lazy student to boot. Brian never saw the two of them together. He hadn’t even taken Bam fishing, best Brian could recall. Bam barely made it out of Tummus High, had no interest in college, and would never make it as a singer like he wanted. No word of a wife or children, wherever he was these days. Their parents, Brian decided as he watched the casket disappear from view, should have had daughters and not sons. There would have been less stuttering, and by now more grandchildren.
Arthur Fitzgerald Moriarty’s grave marker recorded he was a World War II veteran and the years he was born and died. Brian threw a handful of dirt into the hole in the ground. He was grateful for one thing, though. No Father Thomas here today, just the one father whom Brian came to say goodbye to.
On the drive back from the cemetery, he let Mary and Eve talk while he did some quick math. He calculated his share of the Moriarty sons’ small inheritance after their mother was taken care of. He’d put Bam’s into saving bonds, should he ever resurface to claim them. With his share, he’d start a special bank account to visit Utopia one day. This was the first thing he would ever keep secret from Mary. Aside, of course, from the details of his visit to the church’s vestry for spiritual counseling years ago. The same church was named after the patron saint of fathers. Where, mindful of his stutter and other things, Brian had declined today to stand at the pulpit and eulogize his own father.
Chapter Nine
Blue things materialized in the house one day. Mary was writing thank-you notes at the kitchen table to friends who had come to her baby shower the evening before. They’d given her presents. Blue booties. A blue rattle. A blue bonnet and a blue knit cap. A little blue bunny rabbit toy. A blue hoodie. A blue scrapbook entitled Our First Baby.
Brian interrupted Mary’s chore to ask her the question that had been bothering him since walking into the kitchen that morning.
“Did the doctor sey-sey-say something to you?”
She rapped the tip of her pen against the tabletop. “Oh, no. I just have a feeling. I told the girls I thought it’s going to be a boy. I guess they took me at my word. I mean, look at all this. Not one pink thing! And they asked me about names. I said we hadn’t decided. Hadn’t even talked about it! But honey, if I’m right, it’s going to be easier to pick a name, won’t it? We won’t have to worry about any girls’ names. There are so many more of them. And fathers want their sons to be just like them. Brian Junior!”
Brian Senior stood and stared. Mary went back to her scribbling. He was seeing the female in front of him for the first time. Had he done anything to make her happy, other than to impregnate her? He wasn’t happy, either. Not that it was Mary’s fault. His happiness wasn’t all that mattered. He was a family man now, and he barely supported his wife. He knew that. They lived from commission to commission. Nor had he given her a litter of babies. Her high school classmates, the Catholic ones at least, had broods. Not Mary.
He squinted to look more closely. He did not know this person in front of him. Someone who until now may have pretended to be Mary. Now she revealed her true self. Whatever she was, Mary didn’t look like his mother had when she was pregnant with Bam. His mother was beautiful back then. Pregnant women were supposed to be beautiful. This thing in front of him didn’t look beautiful. It was hatching something, some egg having nothing to do with him. Where had this baby come from? What had this thing in front of him done? Who were the women who’d brought these blue things into his house? He didn’t know any of these people. He wondered, who tricked me into becoming a father?
He coughed to make her look up. “Mary, I’m headed to New York soon. In a few days. It’s work.” He tried hard to make it look as if he regretted going. In fact, he had decided to go just that second, acting on a whim while standing in someone else’s house full of blue things.
“New York! Oh, I wish I could go! How long?”
“A couple of days. I’ll bring you something back.” Mary asked no further questions and resumed writing.
*
Brian had never been to New York, or anywhere on the East Coast. At the last moment he accepted an invitation to attend a conference on new challenges in translating scientific Russian. The government was paying all the expenses. Once, he’d attended a similar workshop in Chicago. He went and came back without leaving the conference hotel once. New York was different. It was America’s biggest city, and he wanted to see it. It was a city of many languages, spoken by immigrants from everywhere. Real Frenchmen and real Russians.
He hailed a taxi at Kennedy and handed the driver his hotel’s address on a piece of paper. Brian had prepared for this. He didn’t want to stutter. He wanted to be appreciated by his colleagues. He needed some recognition, just a little bit. Sure, he made a living as a translator, but what was in it for him except a paycheck? He seldom remembered for long anything he had translated. The French, the Russian, they melded into one long promiscuous stream of words, words he repackaged to sell. He might recall more, were he allowed to improve what he was working on, insert himself into what he was laboring over, be an actor on stage rather than seated amid the audience. Plenty of what he did, he did poorly; deep down, he knew that. Technical translations had to be done fast, not endlessly tinkered with. If he translated fiction, he could edit what the authors had done. He still harbored the ambition of being a writer one day.
He checked into the conference hotel around his usual dinner time but it was already ten o’clock in New York. He was free to go anywhere still open. He walked down 42nd Street toward Times Square. There, he figured out how the subways worked and found himself in Chinatown. He thought the restaurants there would be cheap and open late. All this he accomplished without talking to anyone but the check-in clerk.
The restaurant he chose gaudily advertised itself with a neon sign: GOLDEN PAVILI N, the o burnt out. Brian raised a finger to make sure the Chinese woman at the register understood. “Just one.” She led him to the smallest table in the center of the restaurant.
Another older Chinese lady in a red dress with black embroidery approached his seat. She was as unsmiling as the first woman when she handed him a large, laminated menu. Her gold plastic name tag read RUBY. His table was under a fancy red and gold decoration, like the ones in Seattle’s Chinese restaurants, but, he decided, more authentic because this was New York.
He looked around the room. The restaurant was bright with fluorescent lights and sparsely occupied. Most of the other customers were white people such as himself, except for one large Asian family noisily celebrating something. He studied the menu as if he’d have to translate it. Ruby, chatting in Chinese with another employee, glanced his way to see if he was ready to order. He waved the menu in the air to signal her. She strolled over to his table, nodded, and waited for him to say something.
There were a million things to choose from. The print was small and streaks of grease on the menu made some words hard to read. He had no idea what most of the items were. There were no pictures on the menus like Chinese restaurants back home. He pointed at a few things tentatively, his gesture for help. He was by himself. I can take what’s left over back in a doggy bag, he decided. I’m in New York and I want to try everything. Tomorrow night I’ll go to a real Italian restaurant and do the same.
Ruby stopped looking at the finger hovering over the menu and turned her head to the next table. Six men in suits and ties had just sat down. They looked ready to order. One of them shouted for drinks. “Six beers. Heineken.” Brian looked at the steel pot of tea Ruby set before him. He didn’t like tea.
He stared at the menu some more. Mapo Dofu. No. It starts with an M. Ditto Moo Goo Gai Pan, whatever that was. Kung Pao Chicken. A k. He might get it out. Wonton Soup. Definitely risky. Yangzhou Fried Rice. A possibility, but what is a zh? Broccoli Beef. Two bs in a row? Forget it. Beef Lo Mein would be less of a challenge. No to Buddha Delight. Potstickers? Too close to a b. Barbecued Spare Ribs. Why do so many things in Chinese restaurants start with b? Egg Foo Young. Bingo, that’s one he might manage. Piece of cake to pronounce, so to speak, with the advantage of knowing what it was. Cake. Do they have desserts in New York Chinese restaurants? It wasn’t just his stuttering scaring him. He didn’t want to look like a rube ordering the wrong things, whatever wrong might be.
He made up his mind, intimidated by Ruby leaning over him. “Sweet and Sah-sah-sour soup. Puh-puh-pork Stir-Fry with . . . veh-veh-veh-vegetables. Egg Fuh-foo Young.”
“Rice?”
“No rice. Thuh-thank you.”
The diners at the next table got their beers. Loosening their ties, they spoke louder and louder in accents Brian guessed were South African.
“That bloody stutter just now. Did you hear it? I mean, the fellow is an adult.”
“My broer grew out of his. This bakkies must not try very hard. Americans. No different from the Engels.”
Brian’s cheeks flashed hot. He knew at once the Afrikaner with the brother had been a stutterer himself, just adept now at hiding it. He was talking deliberately loud enough that Brian would hear him. One stutterer finds another. There are telltale clues. Brian knew the tricks of The Clan of the Tangled Tongue. They were an international fraternity.
Ruby arrived with a tureen of soup too big for one person. After she ladled some into his tiny, porcelain bowl, he flashed her a smile that was not returned.
Broer-stutterer was not the only closeted one at the South African table. There was another, Brian ferreted, once he perked up his ears to listen in. He identified him through his word substitution, the changes in tone, the shifts in register, the measured beat between sentences. Brian hated these tricksters, the “reformed” ex-stutterers. He learned long ago there is a hierarchy of stutterers world over. Brian was nearer the bottom of the pyramid than the top. He would have liked to go over to the South fucking African table and have words with them. If he did, he might stutter and prove what they’d said about him. Brian had a choice. Sit alone at his table and be humiliated, or go over to theirs and be humiliated.
Why should he care? Let the whole restaurant know he was a stutterer. He clenched his right fist while his left gripped hard the plastic spoon he’d been given for the soup. In his younger days, he would have beaten these jerks up. They were half a dozen big men, but he still might have. He would have waited for their party to finish eating, pay their bill and leave. He’d have followed them until they were in the shadows and then jumped all six.
A pile of some multi-colored, stir-fried stuff appeared before him. He didn’t recognize it as anything he had ordered. The spoon and the uneaten soup were whisked away.
He knew how the real world worked. Police would come and investigate the unprovoked attack. While he sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, the Chinese waitress, suddenly able to speak perfect English, would identify him as the diner at the table nearest the victims. It would be better, he thought, staring at his food, to follow the dudes out and call them the bastards they were, but bastard was a b-word. He couldn’t risk giving his prey another chance to snicker. He’d have to use his fists.
The Egg Foo Young arrived. Why, in his mid-twenties, did he still get so worked up? He knew every second pissed off was another second of his life thrown away, that knowing isn’t always knowing. Other things gnawed at him, too. His so-called career had stalled at being a competent translator but nothing more. Perfect sentences never made it onto the page. It was like being on one side of a thick glass wall and watching the world pass by.
Interpreters could be famous, even glamorous, Brian thought. They’re on stage at the Oscars when French directors win. Translators never are. Translators never have to look their best. They can be overweight. They can skip shaving if they work at home. Some days, if Mary didn’t have errands for him, he never got out of his pajamas. There were many such days.
Translators, he thought while looking at his plate and not eating, are like stutterers. He had the impression interpreters got along fine with each other. He knew for sure translators did not. Interpreters form relay teams, they relieve each other. Who ever heard of translators working together? Put a bunch of us in a room and we’ll kill each other.
Ruby was studying him warily out of the corner of her eye. A minute later, she brought him two fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane on a little white plastic dish. He hadn’t touched his food. He wasn’t hungry. Brian opened one of them and read the fortune: YOU WILL COME HERE AGAIN. He got Ruby’s hint that it was time to go. It was late, even for Chinatown.
He motioned with a flap of his hand for the bill. Ruby nodded. She kept him waiting while she wrote out the bill for the South Africans, who delayed her by arguing about who was going to pick up the check. The six men rose from their seats. Brian threw down too much cash for what he had ordered. He didn’t mean to leave a big tip, he was just in a hurry. He followed the South Africans outside, keeping his distance. They turned onto Mott Street and teetered this way and that on the sidewalk, brushing past Asian pedestrians and pushing the smaller ones aside. It had rained while Brian was in the restaurant. Everything was wet and shiny with reflected neon lights. None of the South Africans hailed a cab. Brian figured they were headed on foot to find another place to drink. New York had to be as unfamiliar to them as it was to him, but another bar couldn’t be hard to find. He had to do what he wanted to do before they found one.
They turned down a side street. It was lit, but there were no other people on the block. Brian considered his options. There were six of them, but they were drunk. They weren’t looking around. Their voices were loud, but Brian was glad his shoes made no sound on the sidewalk.
One of the South Africans stopped to cup his hands to light a cigarette. His friends kept walking. A stray separated from the pack. Perfect. Brian grabbed him by the back of his collar. The man was caught so unawares he didn’t resist or cry out. Brian had him down on the sidewalk. The man raised his arms to fend off the coming blows. Brian looked up for a second and didn’t see his victim’s compatriots on the street anymore. They must have turned a corner and not noticed their colleague was no longer trailing them.
Brian kicked one of the man’s raised arms. The South African lowered it. The round curve of his middle-aged beer belly, wrapped in a tight white dress shirt, was his next target. He glanced to the side and noticed a dead bird in the gutter. Brian’s shoe transferred his body’s weight to a fat South African stomach. The man puked all colors of Chinese food. The vomit-covered his face. He gagged on it. That was where Brian’s dress shoe traveled next, and where it stayed until blood flowed from the man’s nose and mouth. He could smell regurgitated beer.
Brian kicked a store’s sandwich board sign out of his way as he retraced his steps. On the same subway line he’d taken downtown, he scraped his foot on the train’s dirty floor to wipe off the man’s vomit. An older Black woman across from him had a look of disapproval.
In the hotel lobby he spotted some of the other translators in town for the workshop. They were having drinks in the cocktail lounge. If there were a club for translators, he’d be the last to join it. But he nudged them to make room around their low table.
“Hey, Brian, come join us. Guys, move over. You all know Brian, right? He was in Chicago with us. Seattle, right?”
“Near Seattle,” Brian corrected. He was on West Coast time, and it was too soon to call it a night, even after his downtown adventure. He was in New York and determined to get something out of his trip. Brian flagged down the waiter. “Rye with wah-wah-water.”
Three drinks later, he wasn’t stuttering anymore. He wasn’t much of a drinker. He thought to himself: Is it this easy? Not that liquor cured stuttering. It was that alcohol, for a while, had the power to suspend his terror of stuttering. This had happened to him before. At his wedding reception he had gotten drunk and didn’t stammer. Drinking shrank the boundaries of his world and let that happen. Mary took his keys from him when they left the party, embarrassing him in front of everyone. She drove the two of them to the Marysville casino.
