Renata Adler - Speedboat

Some images yellow and dry out like parchment. Some casts of mind become obsolete. “And fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away,” for instance, is a thoroughly dated idea. In its obituary of King Faisal, the Times mentioned, as an example of his modernism, the fact that in the 1930s he abolished slavery. As an example of his gift for poetry, there was the line, “See you. There be Arab.” Something lost in translation there, perhaps. Everywhere.

Three holidays. On New Year’s Eve in Zurich, it is customary to bring in a live and healthy piglet. Precisely at midnight, everyone kisses it on the snout. While this occasions what seems to be terror in the piglet, it is meant to bring people a year of luck. One year, my parents and I were, on a New Year’s Eve, in Zurich. We were having dinner in a hotel restaurant. The other guests, except for the Germans, had all been relatively restrained through dinner, although most people seemed to be drinking steadily. Shortly after eleven, there was, at all the tables, that awful and rising tension. It grew. People drank more. At one minute to twelve, a dignified old headwaiter dashed in through the doors of the kitchen. The piglet was struggling under his arm. At midnight, he began to hold it out to one guest after another. Nobody seemed to skip it. Some people shyly or desultorily pecked at it. Some people seemed actually reverent about it, as though they were praying or making a wish. Some of the young Swiss and Germans who were drunkest tried to turn the thing into an amorous joke. Distinguished-looking men tried to look as though they didn’t care one way or another about it. But everyone was kissing the snout of that struggling pig. My mother was worrying about germs, but very apparently worried. When the piglet got to her, she hesitated a moment, then kissed the tip of her finger and touched the piglet’s nose. That seemed to lighten other people’s quandaries. I just patted the piglet. A couple at the only table that came after ours just gave it a hug.

In a public school in a run-down section of Brooklyn, Mrs. Cavell, under a grant for special projects, was conducting her kindergarten civics class. “What are you?” she would say to her little people, right after the bell each weekday morning. “I’m free,” they had learned to say, as one. On a particularly cold, bleak morning of midwinter, Mrs. Cavell tried a variation. “Today, we are going to say it in our individual voices,” she said. “When I call on you, I want you to stand and say it proudly. All right. Jefferson Adams, what are you?” Jefferson Adams got it. “I’m free,” he replied. “Right. What are you, Franklin Atell?” “I’m free,” Franklin Atell said. Mary Lou Jones had to be asked to speak up, but then she said it firmly, “I’m free.” Up and down the rows of carved and gum-stuck desks in the pre-school classroom, the words rang out, but Mrs. Cavell, a good soul, who had taught for thirty years in Brooklyn, saw a look of somehow disquieting resolution on Billy Martin’s face. “What are you, Billy Martin?” Mrs. Cavell asked. “I am four,” he said.

The Piano. The rich grandmother was always giving her grandchildren presents which had to be put away until the children were old enough to care for them properly. On one birthday, the five-year-old was given his great-grandfather’s pocket watch; his twin sister was given an extremely fragile eighteenth-century doll. As a reward for giving up chewing gum, the seven-year-old — who had reached such an intensely tomboy phase that, although she was constantly on playing fields or in the trees, she refused to change out of a single set of clothes, or to permit them to be washed — was given a strand of pearls. For his graduation from grammar school, the twelve-year-old received shares in a utility. On other occasions, this grandmother bought expensive clothes or gold wristwatches, invariably in her own size, which she gave to the children with the suggestion that they grow into them. The other grandmother, who was poor, took the children to the five-and-ten and gave them things that could be put to immediate use. She was, perhaps unfairly, far the more popular grandparent of their early years. Twenty years passed.

At Christmas, in this country, as before in Germany, the family did not have a tree. Not being at all devout, however, and having grown over the years to a considerable number, including one great-grandmother and seven small children, the family had to make some accommodation to the season. This accommodation became increasingly festive and odd. Christmas was called Christmas, but it was celebrated on any day in December when the entire family could make it, could return conveniently from their separate places to the country house where the grandparents lived. This day seldom, any longer, fell on December 25th. Decorations were eclectic. Presents were placed, in fact, on and under the piano — an old Steinway grand that no one any longer played. Out of a vague conviction that the youngest children ought to be reminded that they were not really quite Christians, their grandmother yearly lighted candles on the eight-branched silver holders, which she had inherited from her own grandparents, and which were polished for whatever day was the designated Christmas of the year. The maid, however, a strong-minded Catholic, felt the occasion was too bleak with just those frail and flickering candles. Yearly, she placed more ribbons, tinsel, twigs, pine cones, and finally colored light bulbs on the piano and around its base. The year she put a painted wooden angel on top of the largest present on the piano, it was thought that she had gone too far. The angel was removed.

The presents were an annual disappointment. The great-grandmother, who approached the occasion with the highest expectations, liked to unwrap, not just her own presents, but everyone’s. Among the youngest children, this sometimes brought tears. The grandfather, who pretended not to care about the holiday, every year, until the precise moment when the door to the study, where the piano stood, was opened and the presents were revealed, became, every year, at that moment, hopeful, eager, even zealous, and then dejected, utterly. No one had ever found a present that actually pleased him. “Very nice,” he would say, in a tight voice, as he unwrapped one thing after another. “Very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” The year his sons gave him an electric razor, he said, “Very nice. Of course, I’ll never use it. I’m too old to change the way I shave.” When they asked him at least to try it, he said, “No, I’m sorry. It’s very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” Everyone in the family, through a run of years, had taken this reaction as a challenge, to find him something, anything. But from the years of the clay ashtrays, through the year in the war when his nine-year-old son somehow bought him an object, at the fair, called a butter stretcher, to the years of things in gold, scrapbooks, and family poems, he was, for his own reasons but like almost everyone else, as saddened by Christmas as though the world had died.

What everyone dreaded was the birthday song. Anthems are sung in crowded halls. You can stand and mouthe. Carolers and singers from the Fireside Book are volunteers. You can stand and smile at them, or go away. But when the birthday song is imminent, the group is small. There is the possibility that everyone will mouthe. Someone begins firmly, quavers. Others chime in with a note or two, then look encouragingly, reprovingly, at the mouthing rest. The mouthers release a note or two. The reprovers lapse. The thing comes to a ragged, desperate end. If the birthday person’s name is Andrew or Doris, the syllables at least come out. Otherwise, you can get Dear Ma-ahrk, or Dear Bar-barasoo-ooh, or a complete parting of the ways — some singing Herbert, some Her-erb, some Herbie, and, if the generations and formalities are mixed enough, Herbert Francis, Uncle Herbles, and Mr. Di Santo Stefano. The song is just so awful, anyway. I cannot imagine, though, from what the double shyness about singing, about being seen not to sing derives. There seems to be no early trauma that would account for it. Someone may accuse a small child of being unable to carry a tune, although I’ve never heard of this; but surely no one then insists that the poor child be seen to mouthe. Then, then, just when the song has faltered to its abysmal close, the birthday person inhales somewhere near the candles of that hideous pastel cake, inhales, perhaps singes his mustache or gets frosting on his tie, gets wax onto the cake or, if it is a she, into her hair, sprays everything with the exhaling breath. Applause. But it may well be that having no respect for occasions means having no respect for the moment, after all.