When in French: Love in a Second Language

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.