Читать книгу When in French: Love in a Second Language - Lauren Collins, Lauren Collins - Страница 8

THE BELLS RANG every Wednesday morning. The teacher would lift the needle, drop the record on the spindle, and then:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonny LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,

Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.

I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal g’s like cymbals. The French teacher didn’t force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny La-Matina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader: “Come on down to Sonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”

The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn’t English.

I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state. Dawson’s Creek was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.

My family’s idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We’d each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked as if it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.

People who live in big cities get people who live in small towns wrong: they don’t want out. Wilmington was a place where people, considering their habitat unimprovable, tended to stay put. Only one member of my family had ever been abroad, once, but by local standards we were considered suspiciously urbane. We subscribed to the newspaper, which many Wilmingtonians detested, because it was owned by the New York Times. (A popular bumper sticker read “Don’t Ask Me, I Read the Wilmington Morning Star.”) We drove to Pennsylvania every year, in a Volvo, to visit my grandmother. (Another sticker, aimed at tourists: “I-40 West—Use it.”) My parents encouraged us to pursue outside experiences. They were rarely illiberal, even in matters of which they had no direct knowledge. They were both keen readers, especially my mother, whose tastes in fiction were as sophisticated as they were simple in her everyday life. Their horizons were wider than those of many of the people around us, but they extended only a few hundred miles to the north.

Soon the school discontinued French in favor of Spanish, deeming it more practical. I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed cocorico instead of quiquiriki. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”

One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we were planning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren’t sure what it was.

My father flipped to the Y section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker:

I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.

Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.

Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.

I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.

Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!

THE FIRST PLACE I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling’s story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.

I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella’s castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows of the shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?

The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.

We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a platz. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.

“All areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.

French braid flying, I started doing something that would have looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a tendu, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers’ shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn’t know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.

IN THOSE DAYS my parents occasionally went away too. That fall they took the ferry with some friends to Bald Head, a barrier island known for Old Baldy, its defunct lighthouse. There were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.

He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys’ high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.

The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did not succeed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O’Hare’s abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).

By the time I’d started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain’s Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father’s clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).

Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day’s cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I’d insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed sleeping with someone to whom you weren’t married. We often declared mistrials, in the knowledge that, having shared a bed, we were probably prostitutes ourselves.

At night I ran to the door, as eager as a sports fan to hear which cases my father had won, which he’d lost, how the bailiff had yelled at a defendant to get a belt. I often asked him to tell the story of one of his first trials, which concerned a man who had had the misfortune to be urinating in an alleyway where someone had recently broken into a car. A police officer approached and told him he was under arrest.

“What the fuck?” he said.

The police arrested him and took him to the station, where they put him in front of a witness, who said that the guy in front of him was definitely not the guy he’d just seen running away from the scene of the crime. The police charged my father’s client anyhow, with disorderly conduct.

My father, just out of law school, spent a week in the library, trying to ensure that his client wouldn’t end up with a criminal record on account of a single curse.

When the trial date arrived, the state presented its case. My father then rose and asked to approach the judge. Permission granted, he trudged toward the bench, carrying a leather-bound volume in which he had carefully marked the relevant law. Disorderly conduct, the book explained, had been committed only by a person who had said or done something that was “plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation,” not by one who had merely spouted off a profanity without the expectation of a fight.

“I’d ask that you consider this statute—,” my father began.

The judge took one look at the book and cut him off.

“That’s Raleigh law, boy,” he boomed, churning each syllable around in his mouth as though he were whipping cream.

My father retreated and, for lack of a better option, put his client on the stand.

“How many beers did you have?” the state’s attorney asked.

“Nine,” my father’s client replied.

The judge banged the gavel, a woodpecker drilling bark.

“Case dismissed! That’s the only person who’s told the truth in this courtroom all day long.”

My father spun the tale beguilingly, transforming Wilmington into a low-stakes Maycomb, bandying between voices as though he were keeping rhythm for a crowd shucking corn. Now, after two decades in North Carolina, he sounded more or less like a southerner—an affectation, or an adaptation, that troubled my mother’s conscience. “Your father’s a chameleon,” she would say, upon hearing him drop a g or leave an o hanging open like a garden gate. Changing the way you spoke, or simply permitting it to be changed by circumstance, constituted, in her view, a moral failing. It was weird, like wearing someone else’s socks.

Her prejudice was an ancient one. To assume a foreign voice is to arrogate supernatural powers. In Greece, oracles prophesied fates and gastromancers channeled the dead, summoning monologues from deep within their bellies. In Hindu mythology, akashvani—“sky voices”—conducted messages from the gods. The book of Acts describes the visitation of the Holy Spirit as an effusion of chatter: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

In Paul’s first letter, he tries to discourage the Corinthians from speaking in tongues, saying that it’s better to speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a language no one can understand. (In 2006, a study of the effects of glossolalia on the brain showed decreased activity in speakers’ frontal lobes and language centers. “The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” the doctor who led the study said. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them.”) Muzzling charismatics, the early church established itself as the exclusive font of marvelous voices. By the Middle Ages, the ventriloquist was considered the mouthpiece of the devil. Like my father, he inspired fears of fraudulence. A sound-shifter, speaking from the stomach, not the heart, he might forget who he was.

Still, my parents schooled us in southern etiquette as well as they could, figuring that my brother and I had to grow where they had planted us. We said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to adults, even the ones who’d conceived us. My mother suppressed her cringes when the hairdresser called me Miss Priss. But she was proud of her northern upbringing and her Quaker education: she wasn’t going to say that stuff herself. When my father traded “you guys” for “y’all,” she saw an impersonator—a man with a puppet on his knee.

In 1954 Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, published a paper entitled “Upper Class English Usage” in the Bulletin de la Societé Neophilologique de Helsinki—a Finnish linguistics journal, borrowing prestige from French. In it, he cataloged U (upper-class) and non-U (middle-class) vocabularies, a taxonomy that Nancy Mitford went on to popularize in her essay “The English Aristocracy,” asserting, “It is solely by their language nowadays that the upper classes are distinguished.” U speakers pronounced handkerchief so that the final syllable rhymed with “stiff”; non-U speakers rhymed it with “beed” or “weave.” The former might “bike” to someone’s “house” for “luncheon,” dining on “vegetables” and “pudding”; the latter would “cycle” to a “home” for a “dinner” of “greens” and a “sweet.” Mitford elaborated on Ross’s findings, playing expert witness to his court reporter. “Silence is the only possible U-response to many embarrassing modern situations: the ejaculation of ‘cheers’ before drinking, for example, or ‘it was so nice seeing you,’ after saying goodbye,” she wrote. “In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian name and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters—Dear XX—which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.”

Wilmington had its own codes. Visitors were “company,” a two-syllable word. Coupon was pronounced “cuepon”; the emphases in umbrella and ambulance were “UM-brella” and “ambu-LANCE.” You “mowed the lawn,” but you didn’t “cut the grass.” On a summer night, it was inadmissible to say you were going to “barbecue” or “grill”; you had to “cook out.” A noun rather than a verb, barbecue was reserved for what most people would call—I can hardly write it now—“pulled pork.”

Scientists say that in order to speak a language like a native, you must learn it before puberty. Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America from Bavaria, via London, at the age of fifteen, has an accent that a reporter once described as “as thick as potato chowder.” His brother, two years younger, sounds like apple pie. My brother and I had spoken Southern from an early age. But as the offspring of Yankees, our peers reminded us, we existed on a sort of probation, forever obliged to prove ourselves in their ears. We endured as much teasing for the way our mother pronounced tournament—the first syllable rhyming with “whore,” not “her”—as we did when my father, in a cowboy phase, broke both arms riding an Appaloosa, generating speculation during his convalescence as to who had wiped his ass.

BEFORE I WENT TO BED, my father and I would read. A scratch-and-sniff book was one of my favorite portals to sleep. I’d run a fingernail over a blackberry and find myself in a bramble, juice trickling down my chin. Turn a page, and my bedroom was a pizzeria, reeking of oregano and grease.

One night, as we inhaled, an unusual look wafted over my father’s face. He asked me if he could take the book in to work with him the next morning. Sure, I said.

When his car rumbled into the driveway that evening, I flew down the stairs. I was waiting at the door when he came in the house with his jacket creased over his elbow, the sure sign of a win.

That afternoon, he said, he’d tried the case of a client who’d been charged with possession of marijuana. An officer had pulled him over, searched his car, and confiscated several ounces of an herbaceous green substance.

The only weakness in the prosecution’s case was that the officer had failed to send the contraband off to the state crime lab for analysis. When he testified, my father had asked him to identify a sample of the substance.

“It’s marijuana,” the officer said.

“How do you know it’s marijuana?”

“It looks like marijuana, it smells like marijuana. It’s marijuana,” the officer replied.

My father handed him my scratch-’n’-sniff book, open to a page that showed a rose in bloom.

“What does it look like?”

“A rose.”

“What does it smell like?”

“A rose.”

“Is it a rose?”

Juliet swore that a rose by another name would smell equally sweet. My father, by luring the officer into a converse fallacy—if marijuana, then herbaceous and green; herbaceous and green, therefore marijuana—was arguing that a “rose” wasn’t always a rose. Both of them were getting at something about the fallibility of language. The great design flaw of human communication is the discrepancy between things and words.

Proper names, uniquely, work. Each one corresponds to a single object, meaning that if you say “Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot,” you’re referring to a specific man, not to a set of people who share Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot’s characteristics. But words are basically memory aids, and if every particular thing had to have a unique name, there would be too many words for us to remember them all. Unless we were to heed Lemuel Gulliver’s proposal—“Since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on”—a functional language must include words that refer to types of things rather than to each particular manifestation.

General terms are unbalanced equations. As abstractions, their correspondence is one to many, rather than one to one. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” John Locke explored the dilemma, asking whether ice and water could be separate things, given that an Englishman bred in Jamaica, who had never seen ice, might come to England in the winter, discover a solid mass in his sink, and call it “hardened water.” Would this substance be a new species to him, Locke asked, different from the water that he already knew? Locke said no, concluding that “our distinct species are nothing but distinct complex ideas, with distinct names annexed to them.”

Three centuries later, the linguist William Labov took up the problem of referential indeterminacy, devising a series of experiments in which he showed a group of English speakers line drawings of a series of cuplike objects. Labov’s experiment revealed that even among speakers of the same language, there was little agreement about what constituted a “cup” versus a “bowl,” a “mug,” or a “vase.” No one could say at exactly what point one verged into the other. Furthermore, the subjects’ sense of what to call the objects relied heavily on the situation: while a vessel of flowers might be called a “vase,” the same container, filled with coffee, was almost unanimously considered a “cup.”

Labov was building on a distinction that Locke had made between “real essences” (the properties that make it the thing that it is) and “nominal essences” (the name that we use, as a memory aid, to stand in for our conception of it). “The nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed,” Locke wrote. “But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible parts of that body, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend. How far these two are different, though they are both called essence, is obvious at first sight to discover.” Replace gold with marijuana—a body green and herbaceous—and my father’s point becomes clear: a rose is only a “rose,” and “marijuana” is only marijuana, in a linguistically prelapsarian world, when the properties of a thing and its name are perfectly equivalent.

After his accident, my father remained in the hospital for weeks. Thanksgiving came and went—familiar food at a strange table. I was seven, child enough to be entertained by a makeshift toy: a plastic tray filled with uncooked rice. When he was well enough, I went to visit. A vague but specific imprint persists. A right turn from a corridor. Plate glass and a prone silhouette.

Terror came as an estrangement of the senses: a blindfold, a nose clip, a mitten, a gag. I remember only what I heard.

“Do you know who this is?” the nurse said, with the bored cheer of the rhetorical questioner.

He didn’t, though. My father looked at me and committed a category error. Instead of my name, he said, “Bluebird.”

TWO SUMMERS LATER I flung my sleeping bag—a red polyester number, embellished with parrots and palm fronds—onto the ticked mattress of the top bunk. I had pleaded to go to camp. At first my parents had resisted. But I kept on for the better part of a year, and eventually they agreed to send me, in the company of several hometown friends. For three weeks I would be drinking in the beautiful customs of Camp Illahee in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Transylvania County, North Carolina. Oh!

Illahee means “heavenly world” in Cherokee. The camp had been encouraging campers to “be a great girl” for nearly seventy years. It was an old-fashioned place, offering horseback riding, woodworking, archery, needlecraft, camping trips to crests that looked out on the deckled blue haze—it appeared to have been rendered from torn strips of construction paper—from which the range took its name. The ethos was brightly self-improving. According to the Log, the camp’s collective diary, earlier generations of Illahee girls had been divided into three groups: “under five-three,” “average/tall,” “plump.” A camper from 1947 wrote, “Vesta told us our figure defects and we found each other’s. We studied the ideas of some of the world’s great designers and found the clothes best suited for us.”

By the time I arrived, the mode was Umbros and grosgrain hair bows. On Sundays we wore all white—shorts and a polo shirt buttoned to the neck, a periwinkle-blue cotton tie—to a fried-chicken lunch. Vespers was conducted in an outdoor chapel, nestled in a grove of pines. Each of us was allowed one candy bar and one soda per week. Swimming in the spring-fed lake was mandatory, as was communal showering afterward, unless you had swimmer’s ear, a case of which I soon contracted.

The wake-up bell sounded at 7:45. I would sail through the morning activity periods, counting my cross-stitches and plucking my bows. But after lunch, when we repaired to our bunks for an hour of rest, my spirits would plummet. While my bunk-mates jotted cheery letters to their families, I whimpered into my pillow, an incipient hodophobe racked by some impossible mix of homesickness and wanderlust.

Several nights into the session, I wet the bed. I told no one. Even with the parrots as camouflage, rest hour became a torture. Each afternoon I sat there, marinating in my ruined sleeping bag, convincing myself that catastrophes happened to people who ventured away from their hometowns. “COME GET ME! I can’t make it three weeks,” I wrote in a letter home. “I will pay you back, just take me away, please!”

THE PROGNOSIS, in the weeks that my father remained in intensive care, was that he would never work again. One day he got up out of bed and, ignoring the protests of his doctors, checked himself out of the hospital. He resumed his law practice the next week. His recovery was an act of obstinacy, an unmiraculous miracle attributable only to a prodigious will.

Still, it was hard when he came home. Like many victims of brain injuries, he was forgetful and paranoid. His temperament had changed; he was irrational where he’d been lucid, irascible where he’d once been calm. Even more confusingly, as the years went by, I had to take the fact of this transformation on faith from my mother—I’d been so young when it happened—mourning her version of a father I couldn’t quite recall. The accident knocked our confidence, aggravating an already fearful strain in the family history. My mother coped with the situation, my brother accepted it, but I was furiously bereft. My desire to tackle Romania, or the Blue Ridge Mountains—my sense of confidence that I could, even—evaporated as I imagined my fate mirroring that of my mother, who was nine when her father had his accident.

John Zurn—she and her siblings always called him that, in the manner of a historical figure—had been the vice president of Zurn Industries. It was a plumbing products company, founded in 1900 by his grandfather, John A. Zurn, who had purchased the pattern for a backwater valve from the Erie City Iron Works. At thirty-four, John Zurn was a man of the world. As part of his prep school education, he had studied French and Latin. Now a tutor came to his office once a week to drill him in Spanish. Zurn Industries was counting on him, in the coming years, to take its floor drains and grease traps into Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

On December 3, 1959, John Zurn boarded Allegheny Airlines Flight 317, en route from Philadelphia to Erie. Attempting an emergency landing in a snowstorm, the plane slammed into Bald Eagle Mountain, near Wayne. The crash killed everyone aboard except for a sportswear executive, who declared, from his hospital bed, “The Lord opened up my side of the plane and I was able to jump out.” As the Titusville Herald reported, John Zurn had been particularly unlucky: “Mr. Zurn boarded the ill-fated Flight 317 on a reservation listed by J. Mailey, who was coming to Erie to conduct business for the Zurn firm. Apparently last-minute plans were made for Mr. Zurn to travel to Erie in his place. Five children are among the survivors.” The Maileys and their seven kids were my mother’s family’s next-door neighbors.

My grandmother, a thirty-one-year-old widow, remarried two years later. Her new husband was a cancer widower, with a girl and a boy of his own. Together they had two more children. In a photograph taken sometime in the mid-1960s, the brood, outfitted in floral dresses and bright sweater vests, is lined up by height—nine bars on a xylophone. Glimpsed through the window to the basement of the drafty fieldstone house on Fetters Mill Road, where children of various ages and provenances vied to become house champ in air hockey and foosball, or out on the snowy lawn, whooshing down hills on dinner trays, they might have been a poor man’s Kennedys.

They were Protestants, though, descendants, on the Zurn side, of gentleman farmers who had immigrated from Zurndorf, one of the easternmost villages in Austria, to the Bodensee region of Switzerland. There, before moving to Philadelphia, they had been followers of Huldrych Zwingli, the reforming pastor who whitewashed the walls and removed the organ of the Grossmünster in Zurich. (I learned all of this only recently, reading an amateur genealogy produced by a great-uncle. Did I bridle at Geneva because I detected there something of my own congenital rigidity?) If trauma seemed to embolden the Kennedys to the point of recklessnesss, it made my mother’s family cautious. The ultimate wage of travel, John Zurn’s death engendered in his survivors and their descendants a steadfast, preemptive provincialism—an aversion toward risk and adventure, which seemed to them indistinguishable.

MANY YEARS AFTER my father’s accident, I learned that you can be less or more of a bird. Researchers asked college students to rate the “goodness” of different entities as examples of certain categories. Birds, in descending order of birdness:

robin

sparrow

bluejay

bluebird

canary

blackbird

dove

lark

…

hawk

raven

goldfinch

parrot

sandpiper

ostrich

titmouse

emu

penguin

bat

I wondered how many words there were between a me and a bluebird.

IN NINTH GRADE I transferred to New Hanover, a public school of almost two thousand students. It had a football team and an on-campus cop, Officer Waymon B. Hyman. (Another great perk of a small-town upbringing is the names—one of our teachers was called Lawless Bean.) There was a new argot to master—a discriminating, and sometimes discriminatory, lineup of “thespians” and “yo-boys” and jocks and goths. The Catwalk was a caged overpass that connected the two main buildings. The Chafe was Lt. Colonel Chaffins, who patrolled the parking lots for truants. He directed the ROTC, which was supposed to stand for Result of Torn Condom.

I liked Hanover for its amplitude. The bell would ring and mayhem would break out, lockers slamming and kids screaming and screaming kids getting slammed into lockers. In my scaled-down universe—its topology distorted by homesickness, and the fear of experiencing it again, so that local became global, crowding great swaths of the world from view—Hanover was a teeming city after the village of private school. With a student body that was 50 percent white, 43 percent black, and 5 percent Hispanic, the school was significantly more diverse, but the atmosphere wasn’t especially progressive. The school sponsored Miss New Hanover High School, a beauty pageant at which female students competed in evening gowns for a tiara. The homecoming queen was customarily white one year and black in the next one.

Some valiant teachers—Mrs. Bean, scandalously, had a tattoo—tried to expose us to life beyond our hometown and its strictures. An immovable rump of their colleagues, however, subscribed to the belief that book learning was poor preparation for the world as they knew it. To grow up in Wilmington was to have the invaluable privilege of belonging, of knowing that—whatever you did in your life—the same people who were there at its beginning would be there at its end. They were fixed points, forever findable. When the time came, they would welcome your children and mourn your parents. But the closeness of the community relied on its closedness, fostering a sort of micro-xenophobia, the threat less actual foreigners than people from other states. In Advanced Placement English, our teacher—with smudgy beauty mark and scrolled peroxide curls, rumored to be a former Playboy bunny—jettisoned the curriculum in favor of lessons in comportment.

“What is an appropriate hostess gift?” she would ask.

“A candle, a picture frame, or a box of chocolate,” we chorused back.

“With what color ink should one compose a thank-you note?”

“Black is preferred for men, blue is preferred for women.”

Tests were a breeze. All you had to do was walk to the front of the room and demonstrate that you could correctly enunciate words like twenty (not “twunny”) and pen (avoiding “pin”).

“Pop quiz!” she would cry, summoning one of us to the chalkboard like a game-show hostess waving down a contestant from the stands.

“What is the number after nineteen?”

“TWEN-ty.”

“What is the number after nine?”

“TEN.”

“What am I holding in my hand?”

“A PEN.”

“All together now!”

“TEN PENS!”

A FEW YEARS LATER, southeastern North Carolina gave rise to its own neologism. It was 2003. France had just promised to veto the United Nations Security Council’s resolution to invade Iraq. Neal Rowland, the owner of Cubbie’s, a burger joint in Beau-fort—two hours north of Wilmington on Highway 17—decided to strike back. A customer had reminded him that during World War I, sauerkraut makers had euphemized their product as “liberty cabbage,” and frankfurters had been rechristened “hot dogs.” Rowland bought stickers and slapped them on top of such menu items as fries and dressing, scrawling in “freedom” wherever it had once read “French.” “At first, they thought I was crazy,” he told CNN, of the employees of the restaurant’s eleven branches across the state, as the stunt took off. “And then now, they think it’s a great idea, and all the stores have started to change—Wilmington, Greenville, Kinston, all over.”

In Washington, a North Carolina congressman urged his colleagues to join the “freedom fries” movement. Soon, the word French was purged from congressional dining rooms. The French issued an eye-rolling reply: “We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues, and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes.” They noted that frites were Belgian. Nonetheless, the trend caught on. The makers of French’s mustard were forced to issue a press release: “The only thing French about French’s mustard is the name.” Aboard Air Force One, President George W. Bush’s chefs served “stuffed Freedom toast,” with strawberries and powdered sugar.

The next year, in the 2004 presidential election, Rush Limbaugh mocked John Kerry as Jean F. Chéri, a lover of Evian and brie. Tom DeLay, a wit of the era, began his fund-raising speeches with the line, “Good afternoon, or, as John Kerry might say, ‘Bonjour.’” In 2012, when Mitt Romney—who had spent two years as a missionary in Bordeaux—ran for president, the trope that foreign languages, especially French, were unpatriotic remained in evidence. An ad entitled “The French Connection” was set to accordion music. It warned, of Romney, “And just like John Kerry—he speaks French.” The gotcha shot was a clip of Romney saying “Je m’appelle Mitt Romney” in a promotional video for the Salt Lake City Olympics.

Foreign languages were not always taboo in America. The word English appears nowhere in the Constitution, whose framers declined to establish an official language. Many of them were multilingual. Perhaps they thought it obvious that English would prevail. Perhaps they were ambivalent about enshrining the tongue of their former oppressor in the foundational document of a nation that meant to overturn orthodoxies, welcoming men of varying origins.

English, in some sense, meant the monarchy, an association that gave rise to a number of revolutionary schemes. In 1783, when Noah Webster issued his blue-backed speller, freeing his countrymen to spell gaol “jail” and drop the u in honour (spunge and soop, sadly, never caught on), American English itself was a novel language, a runaway strain. One magazine justified it as the inevitable outgrowth of the dry American climate, writing, “The result is apt to be that the pronunciation is not only distinct, but has a nasal twang, which our English friends declare to be even more unpleasant than their wheeziness can be to us.”

Americans were bursting with ideas about what language could be. They saw it as a church or a parliament, another institution to remake. Benjamin Franklin wanted to reform the alphabet so that each letter indicated a single sound. He invented six new letters including ish (to indicate the sh sound) and edth (for the th of this). A letter he wrote to demonstrate the system brings to mind a proto–I Can Has Cheezburger:

THE SOUND OF AMERICA at its inception would have been lilting, susurrating, singsong, guttural. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant to New York, wrote in Letters from an American Farmer, his best-selling survey of revolutionary America, of “whole counties where not a word of English is spoken.” In 1794, a bill that would have mandated the translation of official documents into German failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote. Dutch dominated the Hudson Valley, where the courts struggled to find English speakers to serve on juries. As François Furstenberg writes in When the United States Spoke French, Philadelphia was overrun with refugees from the French Revolution. During the 1790s, sixty-five Frenchmen lived on Second Street alone, including a Berniaud (china merchant), a Dumoutet (goldsmith), a Morel (hairdresser and perfumer), a Duprot (dancing master), and a Chemerinot (pastry cook). At the orchestra, audiences demanded that musicians play “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” leading Abigail Adams to complain, “French tunes have for a long time usurped an uncontrould sway.” In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s French-speaking population. Louisiana entered the union as a bilingual state. Its second governor, Jacques Villeré, conducted the entirety of his official business in his only language: French.

Americans of the nineteenth century continued to accept linguistic pluralism as a fact of life. (Their tolerance notably did not extend to Native Americans, who were conscripted into English-only boarding schools, nor to slaves, whose masters forced them to speak English, while denying them the opportunity to learn to read and write.) During the Civil War, regiments such as New York’s Second Infantry recruited soldiers with German posters—“Vorwärts Marsch!”—and maintained German as their language of command. Even as nativism surged in the 1850s, with the arrival of greater numbers of Catholic immigrants, the chorus persisted. In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United States. (Even Benjamin Franklin founded a German newspaper, which failed after two issues.) One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day, when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.

Twenty-four million foreigners came to America between 1800 and 1924. They hailed from different places than their predecessors: Italy, Russia, Greece, Hungary, Poland. In the West, the frontier was closing. In Europe, multilingual empires were giving way to monolingual nation-states, founded on the link between language and identity. As the country filled up, Americans of older standing began to cast doubt on the ability of the “new immigrants” to assimilate. In the Atlantic, a poem warned of “Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav … In street and alley what strange tongues are loud / Accents of menace alien to our air / Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!” In 1906 Congress passed a law precluding citizenship for any alien “who can not speak the English language.” (According to the 1910 census, this amounted to 23 percent of the foreign-born population.)

World War I transformed bilingualism from an annoyance to a threat. As American soldiers fought Germans in the trenches, American citizens carried out a domestic purge of the “language of the enemy.” In Columbus, Ohio, music teachers pasted blank sheets of paper over the scores of “The Watch on the Rhine.” In New York, City College subtracted one point from the credit value of every course in German. Women’s clubs distributed “Watch Your Speech” pledges to schoolchildren:

I love the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

I love my country’s LANGUAGE.

I PROMISE:

1 That I will not dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words:

2 That I will say a good American “yes” and “no” in place of an Indian grunt “un-hum” and “nup-um” or a foreign “ya” or “yeh” or “nope”:

3 That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud harsh tones, by enunciating distinctly and speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely:

4 That I will try to make my country’s language beautiful for the many boys and girls of foreign nations who come to live here: