Cess: A Spokening

By Gordon Lish

A list. What could be more basic than a list? And a list by Lish is sure to intrigue. In this, Lish’s latest work, he delivers a characteristic exhibition of his peculiar deformities of candor, obsession, and wit, via two extended “notes” to the reader, including a pages-long list of essential but perplexing words. Amidst this stream of apparent incongruities, the alert reader will discover an accruing narrative involving the narrator’s late, beloved Aunt Adele—a medal-bedecked spy for the National Reconnaissance Office—and cryptography, love, poetry, and of course: the nature of language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781939293954

Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish is an acclaimed author and editor. A former editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf, he is celebrated for his notable work with authors including Raymond Carver, Denis Donoghue, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and Christine Schutt, among many others. His previous books include Dear Mr. Capote, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door, Extravaganza, Peru, Zimzum, The Selected Stories of Gordon Lish, and more. He lives in New York.

Book preview

POSTFIX

FIRST OF TWO NOTES

WE BEGIN WHERE else but with my mother, Regina Deutsch, second to Pauline, the eldest, each of five girls domiciled, in the course of fatherless years and, as a practical matter, shortly thereafter, motherless ones too, in an orphanage operated for Hebrew youth, in Astoria, New York, and who (Mother! Mother!—that’s who) was also, to my mind, morally speaking, I mean, second to the least interesting of the Deutsch girls—which luckless child would be Sylvia, and, as was also so, the youngest of these involuntarily abandoned children, all born here, in the United States, when events in Vienna had given their progenitors sufficient notice such people (Jews, the Jews) would be wise to clear out at all good speed. Louis Deutsch, a maker of cabinetry in the old country, brought his missus Ethel Goldstein here, could uncover no labor of a promising kind, but did, within the span of half a dozen years, discover a productive enough discomfort in his kishkes and, in due course, heard the emphatic diagnosis of a newly ordained nephrologist, which practitioner, with uncannily correct acumen, predicted death for the man (my maternal grandfather, if you require reminding) within weeks. This left Ethel Deutsch with the five aforementioned girls—and, further, with no English to fend for them with, all too prepared (my maternal grandmother, that is) to let herself be persuaded to turn her indigent offspring over to the care of the institution already remarked, whereupon, documents executed or perhaps no better than understandings agreed (all this I am, perforce, supposing, of course), the widow gave herself leave to collapse upon the tracks of an oncoming trolley car making its clamorous way through the masses of morning workers crowding the Union Square district for coffee or tea and, if monied enough, a sugarless but miserly salted breakfast roll. The eldest, Pauline, my mother’s senior, as I have, topside, indicated, then sixteen, not long thereafterward entered the doxy’s trade and, more or less in the course of which, to the very real relief of her sisters, became the wife of Lou Hanfling, a fellow who fashioned artificial flowers, and who, by such means, accrued a tidy fortune once he had succeeded in affiliating his endeavor with a clot of key backers of Yiddish musicals. Just junior to my mother, herself sometimes for hire, was Helen. Ah, Helen, the first of  the dead siblings. The facts are hazy at best, but seem to have involved a training episode with the Office of Strategic Services, when, barely antebellum (I expect you needn’t be told which war), this fledgling organization was hurriedly enjoying assembly, for catch-up duty, under the leadership of the renowned Wild Bill Donovan. Helen, not quite twenty, had, you see, proved a whiz at double acrostics, a rather vexing word puzzle, one is informed, put before its readership in the daily left-wing newspaper P.M., an achievement garnering for her a species of local fame robust to the degree for it to have reached the attention of one of Donovan’s lieutenants, others of Donovan’s lieutenants then converging on the prodigy and pressing the woman into signing on for an accelerated apprenticeship aimed at the business of lending a hand to various of the rudimentary combat preparations then coalescing in an assortment of undistinguished-looking buildings situated not very near to, but not all that distant from, the perimeter of the nation’s capital. Wasting no time to endow her patriotism with action, Helen resigned her position as a stock clerk of a ladies’ hosiery shop, left her husband Jack and, at age one, their son Lewis, the two of these chaps pretty cheerless, one guesses, plenty unsteadied on their heels in New York, and, before four months had quite elapsed, was reported dead, deceased, one imagines, from exotic exertions entered into on behalf of our republic, not one scintilla of a further detail, to this day, forthcoming. Helen, third oldest, as might have been said, was the first of the five to die. She was quite handsome, photographs of the period suggest, and kept her silvery blond hair, common to all the girls, cut and combed in a notably exacting bob. I think I met her once or, anyhow, I like to believe I had—for a midafternoon’s ices and pastry treat at the Russian Tea Room. It was, in that lovely era, a dreadfully smoky affair, this hangout, an unsuitable site to escort a child into—and to my impressionable personality, there would never in my days be shown me a stranger nor more thrilling collection of curtly bearded men to gaze upon, I a boy of the most fanciful kind, still in leggings in winter and in short pants otherwise. I nibbled at my first eclair there, and let myself be tinglingly frightened by the gimlet-eyed men sipping their tea through tobacco-stained cubes of sugar clamped angrily, it looked to me like, between low-lying stumpy blocks of eroded teeth, all the while these men inspecting, not at all approvingly, I thought, my aunt Helen’s fierce coif and the aroused callowness of her improbable companion. At any rate, so much for the time being as to Aunt Helen, or, as she preferred to be addressed and referred to, and took no time in letting you, on this score, be preemptively edified, Tante Helen. Now we come to Adele—an epitome of beauty and an incorrigible cutup from the word go. Adele, my Adele, survived into her late nineties, married once (the groom a petty gambler, her pact with the rogue annulled weeks later), reportedly known to have gone on to conduct a lifetime of notorious affairs, and also, just as reportedly, this in the hushiest of tones via my mother, the first woman to be awarded, on the occasion of her retirement (which retirement she lived out peaceably, word so made its way to me in Palo Alto, California, in Daytona Beach, Florida) the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Oh, good friend, do save yourself the bother of attempting to verify this claim. My aunt Adele, Adele Deutsch, of course, was never again at liberty to advertise herself under her given name once she had been inducted, in the 1950s, into the National Reconnaisance Office. At her retirement from the NRO, Adele Deutsch (she never again consented to matrimony, but I believe I might already have said as much) had arrived at the distinction of section leader at one the organization’s undersea (overseas? it must have been a typo) cryptoanalysis units. When mustered out, Adele was sent, by the NRO, along with her then-paramour, Sam Berkowitz, no better than a boisterous Norwegian, if you want my take on it, not to mention that of Frances as well, she, this last-stated personage, my then- (how clumsy this is of me!) spouse, the pair of them (my winsome aunt and her triumphant swain) under the protection of a fastidiously nonchalant bodyguard of three oldtimers, this on a worldwide tour, which experience came to rest in the couple’s taking up quiet residence (cum protectors) four years thereafter, in a modest, immodestly quaint bungalow surrounded by a not unimpressivly shiny, nor an unhideously shiny, chainlink fence (rumored to be electrified) not at all far from an eye clinic whose powers of ministration Aunt Adele appeared to need use of often enough to require her dwelling conveniently close by. It’s in this curious habitation that the great, my beloved Adele died. There was no fuss, no funeral. My mother—Regina, remember?—read me the letter from the admiral whose signature concluded the matter. It was, the letter of commendation was, a model of brevity and opacity. I tell you, its very meagreness and indirection made my heart beat hard. My mother (Regina, Reggie, Reg), predeceasing Adele by several months, succumbed, if you must know, to kidney disease (ah, the genes we are the hapless vassals of). This leaves Sylvia, about whose manner of careening through the years I know almost entirely nothing, save that she bore, this with the unlikely connivance of her meek husband, Sigmund, two children. The girl’s name I forget, utterly, utterly. The boy, however, was dubbed yet another Lewis, who, if alive, would, it cannot be contradicted, now be managing the trials of coping with the degeneration guaranteed our kind in our eighties. You will have detected, I needn’t but will, in any case, point out, that we have been made aware of one Louis, one Lou, and two Lewises, these among the Deutsches, the youngest of which introduced me to the works of James Joyce—actually, not to more than the short story Araby—and to the infamous existence of an exception to the rule of heterosexuality, this not, let me be quick in averring, by means other than confession. I see I have said virtually nothing of my mother. Ah, but what would there be for me to say? The person was my mother. (Oh, Mother, Mother!) All right, let me hasten to adjust the sense of a seeming ingratitude and churlishness—allowing, at the least, that Regina’s signal accomplishment was bearing, yet not always with unimpeachable grace, her name, she having been (we have her oft-recited narratology on this score) very greatly teased, by peers and by a pair of malefic teachers, for its rhyme, when pronounced in an accomodating manner, with a body part rightly celebrated among the children of God. Enough? Enough! Now then, further again to my favorite (Adele, you will by now not have let slip from your forebrain her name): there is some small datum still to be acknowledged of her, this in the interest of what might prompt in you energy to reckon with the all-too-hurriedly on-rushing text,, or test, to follow. I, her adoring, her admiring, her addlepated nephew, had just been dismissed from my post as a teacher-in-training in the language arts, this at Mills, the public high school in Millbrae, California. Let me not understate the extent to which I was seized by (overcome with?) panic, faced, as I was, then and there and of a sudden, with the task of looking after a party of three youngsters and a wife ten years my elder, she, more than understandably, too undone by the demands of child-care to seek gainful, as was said in the day, employment. Not unreasonably—no, stupendously—terrified, I, Gordon, composed a letter beseeching my aunt, the one remaining in government, to determine if there might happen to be within her ken some suitable site for me in work not dissimilar to hers. Adele, as most assuredly Helen would not have done, straightaway mailed to me the material you are going to come upon below. Okay, Sherlock, said she, inditing this on a scrap of paper pinned to the top sheet of the contents of a biggish manila envelope, solve this and we’ll possibly—only possibly—talk. I, of course, couldn’t. To be sure, did I even—ever!—come to acquire the least hint of what my aunt Adele meant for me to do by way of my approaching an interpretation of the word solve? No, no—not in the very least, I tell you, not and no and never ever more! So there you have it, or, all too shortly, will—to wit: what I, Gordon, had, for days and days and days and days, laid out on the kitchen table before me. Your desperate, reverent reporter, no, he made not one iota of headway with the bewilderment assigned him, no, not any at all—did not even comprehend how on earth this challenge was to be construed as, well, a thing to do, a thing to, you know, for a person to act upon, get done. There I was, an American of the 1960s, as buffeted (in my householding) by the obstinate conditions as was my nation for its tempestuous part in the world (at large). Very well, then—I ask that you put yourself in my shoes, okay?—shaken by the authority of the caution bellowing at him in the style of a lurid italicized swash rubber-stamped blazon in a ghastly purplescent diagonal (corner to corner, yes?) across the front of the lumpish envelope—i.e., United States Government Official Business to be Opened by Addressee Only!—the householder then joblessly at home and presently (trust me, the fellow all too unprepared for it) to be made homeless—sap, sucker, Adele-lover—a champ of a chump ready to break ground with the redoubtable verve of a half-blooded Deutsch. Alas, then, was I not, am I still not, your Gordon himself (myself?) a Lish in equal genometric part as well? You bet I was, and am, all a-shriek at a pink Formica kitchen table some horrid morning back in 1963 out West (where the fuck else?) in Millbrae, California.

Like a very Klaxon, right?

Oh,