Sam’s secret dream since he was eight had been to have a voice like Rossano Brazzi’s in Summertime. He heard it always in his inner ear—the deep, rich, Italian texture oddly like the Nutella Russell’s older sister Elena would introduce Sam to one golden ninth-grade day, seductively spread on a graham cracker.
But his hopes were to be dashed as absolutely as Katharine Hepburn’s in the movie. When his friends’ voices started deepening, and—in Russell’s case (Russell Gilbert III, Sam’s jealously watched rival from the huge Craftsman house around the block on Emerson) developing the sonorous incense-laden overtones of a holy father in crimson robes or a Verdi baritone capable of any villainy, Sam would be devastated to find himself sounding like a cross between Woody Allen and Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, those other guys on the videos they had at home. He was doomed to have the reedy, ineffective, pathetic voice of the mother’s boy Russell accused him of being.
To add insult to injury (the recording Russell made in his father’s sound studio one Saturday of the two of them clowning around), Sam developed a stutter in the spring of tenth grade—most likely a result of his painful self-consciousness, the psychologist thought. Sam himself believed it was grief—the knowledge that he would never be able to say the things that mattered, to charm the woman who gazed at him across the piazza in front of San Marco with its sweep of café tables, the woman who looked quite a bit like Elena. He’d lost his intended future, a whole beckoning world. He stood speechlessly (or as good as) beside the yawning chasm between what should have been and what was.
Sam’s unfortunate voice always got even higher when he became indignant or stood up for himself. It got particularly high-pitched when he tried to tell Russell that he was not weird, not a sissy, not a mother’s boy. That he, an only child, and his mother, a single parent (after his father’s death off a commercial fishing trawler in the Aleutian Islands), were naturally close, and that the Katharine Hepburn movies they watched together, though maybe not “cool,” were a kind of oasis in an unfriendly world, a little pocket of old-fashioned decency in a society out of control. He didn’t actually say all that—just “I am not.”
In high school, though, when the teasing got more and more malicious and Russell’s friends Kiley and Phil joined in, Sam began to feel ashamed of wanting to spend time with her, when other boys communicated with their mothers only through text-messaging or the occasional reluctant cell-phone call. He started finding excuses not to watch the movies with her, even when she’d already made popcorn in the Peter Rabbit bowl—he had homework, he was spending the night at Russell’s, he was way too tired after running sprints during P.E. After a while she gave up watching too, and just went to bed early, looking sad around the eyes but saying nothing when he dodged her kiss and snuck away to read Petrarch sonnets instead of his assigned reading. She was unhappy about her job, Sam told himself, mad at herself for being just a secretary at some boring legal aid office down by the phony Eiffel Tower on El Camino.
They’d never talked much, either Sam or his mother, and when his voice proved a fatal disappointment he started saying almost nothing at all—either at home (where he needed to demonstrate his new-found independence) or in class (where he was jeered for his attempts to get a sentence out). He kept his silence through the rest of high school. But while he looked on mutely, his imagined eloquence grew by leaps and bounds. Inside Sam dwelled a golden-tongued orator. Or a host of them—Demosthenes, Julius Caesar, Cicero, the Apostle Paul. They debated endlessly among themselves about all manner of vital, interesting things. Later, at Foothill (junior college all they could afford, while Russell went off blithely to Stanford to study Law), Malcolm X and the Reverend Jesse Jackson joined the chorus of voices in his head. But always above all Sam was drawn to the Italians, who express themselves so beautifully and profoundly.
At the beginning of Russell’s sophomore year at Stanford, he invited Sam to a fraternity party, a barbeque, on a fall afternoon that felt more like summer. Russell was just showing off, Sam suspected—his blonde girlfriend from Darien, Connecticut, his new BMW roadster convertible, his lacrosse shoulder pads and gloves. Sam felt out of place with the coarse humor and the keg stands, uncomfortable among the glib young athletes and embarrassed when Russell and his girlfriend Meg necked shamelessly in the doorway of the Victorian row house (palatial next to the studio apartment Sam had rented down in Sunnyvale a few months after he got out of highschool, though his mother had clearly not liked it). Sam crept away from the party and walked around the enviable Stanford campus—red tile roofs like an old Italian hilltown, the long shadowed arcades of the Quad where Savanarola (another of his orators) might have walked, a peal of bells tumbling out of a straw-colored tower, and, somewhere far away from everything, a great blue heron standing in an expanse of empty lakebed, dreaming water.
Sam eventually found his way back to the bookstore he’d passed earlier. Browsing aimlessly, he came across a little book on the table of sale items, Speak Italian! with what mysteriously appeared to be Kermit the Frog on its cover. Picking it up to look inside, he discovered it was a book of Italian hand gestures, and Kermit really a fist, fingers held expressively together to say with a measured degree of impatience “What do you expect?” The Fine Art of the Gesture was the subtitle of the little paperbound volume. With a shock of recognition, turning the pages, Sam realized that he had come home. The little book would be his Bible, his guide to redemption in an ugly, unfeeling world, the way the old movies had once been.
Some of the gestures were easy, even familiar. The motion of writing, which any Venetian waiter would understand as “please bring the check,” he had down in no time—though the unsavvy teenager who served him at Chili’s thought he had gotten something on his hand, and brought him a wad of paper napkins to wipe it off. After a few tries Sam had perfected the fingers moving forward from the chin, which expressed with perfect world-weary indifference, “I don’t care”; and the hands flung up palms out to abdicate responsibility, “There’s nothing I can do.” He felt satisfyingly Sicilian when practicing the somewhat ominous “Beware”—or “We understand each other”—with the lower eyelid drawn slightly downward. Trying it out in the Foothill College corridors on Monday on his way to class, he was pleased to see other students and even the formidable Italian literature instructor shrink away from him.
He especially liked the gesture where the hand moved level over the top of the head, meaning drily, “go jump in a lake.” He learned to tilt his hand slightly to specify which lake he had in mind—the lazy length of Lake Como, smoky and blue with late summer bonfires burning tendrils of old grape vine; the gusty German holiday-making shores of Lake Garda with garish bursts of sails; the chilly mirror of a snow-fed lake in the Alps down from the St. Bernard Pass, where the great dogs are raised and archaeologists scour the bedrock for traces of a Roman temple to Jupiter.
Within just a few weeks, freed as he was from the impediments and hesitations of regular speech, Sam got into the more difficult signs. The one that cries out with daring insouciance “bring me some octopus!” The one that asks “is the blue of your eyes what the Renaissance artists made from lapis lazuli and called azzuro oltramarino?” And that gentle flutter of the left-hand fingers against the palm of the other, half-reaching hand, that recalls in a quiet singsong how the sun brushed the pink-throated yellow roses on the morning of your great-grandparents’ wedding day before the vows, I, Albert, take you, Nora.
Sam felt he was being allowed entrance into worlds of gravity and nuance he had never suspected possible. He felt the universe itself opening out before him, as he devoutly turned pages and learned to form the final signs, the most advanced of all.
The one that says, wistfully, how lovely the light is in the valley where the aqueduct stands. And goes on—with a kind of catch in the throat—to say how though the husbands are all hunting wild boar on the wooded slope opposite, in the concealing trees, the watchers in the windows on the near side are the ones who feel fall coming on, and the shortening of days, now that their children have moved off to the cities and to America, where the jobs are, far off in a country which they will never see.
And that other, how sorry I am for global warming, for the irreparable harm we’ve done the world. For all those precious things which will not last beyond us, if that long, and our own children’s children will not know—even the old names, lost. Not tawny tigers, trout, the nightly track of the great constellations, Pegasus and Orion and Cassiopeia, the taste of spring water welling against your thirsty lips as you kneel down to drink it, in a strand of old-growth redwoods hushed and holy on all sides.
He’s got those down pretty well. But the last gesture has defeated him so far. His fingers almost seem to stutter as he repeats it, clumsily, over and over, trying hard to get it right. The almost imperceptible motion, little more than a touch between two hands, that says oh mother, please forgive me for not understanding just how brave and beautiful you were—so much like Katharine Hepburn, had I seen it, with that sadness growing in your face. Towards the end especially, like when Rossano Brazzi turned out to be married and not love Katharine as much as she loved him, seeing her last chance go, the dream of love, the dream of Venice and its bridges and canals, all she had left for her, and you—before the credits flickered past, mother, and then your illness and your hospice death. As the bright domes faded into the Adriatic mist, you looked back with steady eyes and undiminished smile. The train pulled away from Mestre and you saw he wasn’t there, your lover or your son, the one who might have helped you through it if his shame/his pride hadn’t kept him away.
# # #
Christie B. Cochrell is an ardent lover of the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. Her work has been published by Tin House and New Letters, among others, and has won several awards including the Dorothy Cappon Prize for the Essay and the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Her short story “The Pinecone” received Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train March/April 2016 Very Short Fiction contest. http://writingwithlight-bonnard3.blogspot.com
Photo credit: Terri Malone
