Dead Languages by David Shields

as if they’d contrived a way to contract their tongues’ Tower of Babel to a manageable logo.
    The pressure that underlies stuttering also generates the ambition to succeed—to succeed hysterically and on the same field as the original failure: somewhere within the world of words. Very few stutterers I’ve ever met yearn to become glassblowers. Promptly after losing the presidential nomination, I joined the chorus. Mother didn’t think this was a very good idea, since singing was very low in her cultural hierarchy—vocalization being one of the performing rather than creative arts—while Father, bouncing back nicely from Montbel, thought it was an even worse idea: all the rehearsals were pointing toward a Christmas concert in Ghirardelli Square. I didn’t care that we sang hymns in praise of someone else’s savior. The material didn’t matter. What mattered was coming to school an hour before classes started, donning my red robe, standing on the stage with a hundred other red robes, and being unable to hear my own voice: being part of a long song outside myself.
    What mattered even more was a soprano named Cindy Du Pont de Nemours, who prompted the first real romantic passion in my life since I fled Faith five years before. Cindy Du Pont de Nemours was driven to school in a black limousine, was the only girl at Currier to wear either nylon stockings or high-heeled shoes (which nearly got her expelled but ended up causing a furious new trend in fifth- and sixth-grade fashion), and would get people Gauloises if they asked very nicely, but what I loved about her was that during rehearsal she wore the collar of her robe up. The white collar on her red robe: she wore it up. I never asked if she knew the white collar on her red robe was up. I thought maybe that was the style in Montparnasse or maybe she just liked it that way. With her collar pressed to her cheek, French pastry stuffed during quick breaks into her mouth, and her hair tied in an auburn bun, she looked like a saint.
    She would say, “I like zuh azelete.” She actually talked like that. She added a
Z
to every word she possibly could, so I took to calling her
Z,
as in “You looking forward to the Christmas concert, Z?” or “Hey, Z, g-g-got any
croissants
left?” Her English was nah zo good, but she sang beautifully, without the trace of an accent, and she was our only soloist. Whenever we rehearsed one particular song, whose title I forget but whose theme was quite clearly the beauty of the Christian night, Z would step onto her very own carpeted platform and descant on the beauty of Christian night, then sashay back into the soprano section while the conductor held her hand and said,
“Merci, mademoiselle, très bien!”
    The conductor was a voice coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I suspected him of spending the first hour of his morning at Currier for the exclusive purpose of escorting Z back into the soprano section after she sang her solo on the beauty of the Christian night. Everyone else he treated with a contempt bordering on repulsion. He had a wooden leg and would limp up and down the stage, tapping people on the head with his cane when he thought they weren’t giving it their all, clapping his free hand on his good leg to some distant rhythm that only he heard. He also had a gold front tooth; he liked to stand next to one of the floodlights and let that tooth glint into your eyes and say, “I’m sorry, but under no circumstances can I call that singing.”
    He never said that to me. He never told me he didn’t like my singing. I was in a special section of the chorus, way in back. It wasn’t exactly alto, wasn’t exactly tenor. It wasn’t bass. It was a special section for boys whose voices cracked on every eighth note, boys who had no real business being in chorus. To us he’d say, “You’re doing fine. Not so loud, though. A little softer, okay, guys? You’re our muted harmony section, our low melodists in the