Melting Pot

“Who are you to tell us how to live or why, et cetera?”   No Man, of course, and not so tall as is the current fashion, nor smart enough in the acceptable modern way, to enthrall the crowd with stories of my life among the savages where I was home and growing baffled day by day, raging through the night as if it were new music I made, groaing. It came to me today at lunch, the sound of women in the next booth, a voice like Aunt Odile’s—whom I never knew well nor did I like her, but not her spite but her voice like home-grown fame, a touch gravelly, a considerable groan itself, it seemed. They spoke outmoded French around me, never to me, except to taunt, I thought.   She leaned above me, on those visits, speaking to Mother in their private French, laughing.   A boy surrounded by the sound of foreign tongues knowing what wasn’t meant for him:   toy temptations, suggestive coils of syllables. I learned Latin, for Mass, and did love its terrific laddered randomness: The Blessed hovering Virgin above every station of a boy’s new path, hormonal disharmonies, her praises sung into hundreds the first Tuesday of every month: and yet Latin could not expose such shreds of glittering flesh as I found in French, not like the living tongue whose tip twined into an Uncle’s mustache as he leered at the wrong Aunt and winked and a fine distance crystallized loud there, then gone. Crashing like German. Father’s family spoke clear English among the bayous, boys and girls of immigrants accentless happily German through two wars, not counting Civil.   I had the tongue for arithmetic and spoke it beautifully.   I loved to count: precision’s a tempting career, clicking into a future like an abacus ignoring all those accents around. I never learned the luck of any but English, bland and bound. But only yesterday I heard a word the mechanic said in Czech to his cousin—shop rag—clearly centered in a welter of incomprehension, the wreck of my car at their wretched mercies:   shop rag.   And he wiped his hands and cried for me, shrugging like a cousin would. I wrote a check. I drove home, or tried. So does it count?   Am I a man of passion or child of comprehension?   “Father of little lusts driving myself home who thinks:   Buy some sentiment, a little like love and she must speak French this time. She longs for you, you know; it isn’t just the money. America loves you for yourself alone” and so I go for professional help, honey- blond hair and a disposition like a happy banker, whose French for dear sounds like dog; the cost of living is going up, loving her here.