In the spring of 1987 Ruth Hirschfeld, a retired organist and piano teacher, can swear fluently but cannot name the cup in her hand. A stroke has left her understanding intact and her speech in pieces. Twice a week a speech therapist arrives with worn picture cards. Every morning her son Nathan arrives with fifty-one years of knowing how her sentences end. And every night, alone at the piano, Ruth plays the opening of a Bach fugue with one good hand and stops at the same bar. Told in ten short numbered sections by the simulacrum of Marvin Minsky, the story looks plainly at how a mind finds another way round when one road is closed, and at how hard it can be to keep quiet while someone does it.
by Marvin Minsky, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
In the second week of March 1987, Ruth Hirschfeld, seventy-nine, retired organist of Temple Ohabei Shalom and teacher of piano to three generations of Brookline children, sat at her own kitchen table holding a cup and could not say the word for it.
She could say goddamn it. She said it clearly, with the old Bronx edge on the vowel, and then she said it again. The speech therapist, a broad woman in a green cardigan named Dolores Quinn, wrote something on her clipboard and did not look shocked. She had heard it before. Most of her patients could swear. Some of them could count to ten, and some could sing "Happy Birthday" straight through, and a few could recite the Lord's Prayer at full speed and then sit for a minute, mouth open, trying to ask for a glass of water.
You might think this means the swearing is stored in a safer place. That is not quite right. A curse is not a sentence anyone builds. It is a whole thing, fired off in one piece by a part of the mind that was never asked to choose words, only to let off pressure. The clot in Ruth's left middle cerebral artery had damaged the builders. It had not touched the part that swears, because that part had never needed them.
"Cup," said Dolores. "Cuh. Cuh-up."
Ruth looked at the cup. It was white, with a hairline crack near the handle that she had been meaning to deal with since the Carter administration. She knew exactly what it was. She knew it held tea, that it had come from her sister Bea, that it was the cup she used on Fridays. Every one of these things was right there. The one thing that would not come was the small sound that all the others were supposed to point to.
"Kuh," said Ruth. "Kih. Kettle." She put the cup down hard. "Goddamn it."
Dolores came on Tuesdays and Fridays at ten, and stayed fifty minutes, and billed Medicare for an hour. She brought a deck of picture cards held together with a rubber band: a key, a comb, a shoe, a cup, a dog, a bus. The cards had been handled so often that their corners were soft as cloth.
Nathan, Ruth's son, took the mornings off to be there. He was fifty-one and worked on Route 128 for a company that made disk controllers, and he had a way of standing in a doorway with his arms crossed that made his mother want to throw things at him. He did not know he had it. Most people don't know what their faces are doing.
On the second Friday Dolores held up the card with the key on it.
Ruth's lips worked. Nathan, from the doorway, said, "Key."
"Please don't," said Dolores, without turning around.
"Sorry."
Ruth looked at him, and then at the card, and then at the window, where a squirrel was going head-first down the trunk of the maple as if gravity were a rumour. She said nothing for the rest of the session. When Dolores left, Ruth went into the living room and sat on the piano bench with her back to the piano, which was the way she used to sit when she was waiting for a student to finish a scale she had already heard was wrong.
Whenever we meet a familiar kind of situation, we don't examine it from scratch. We call up a sort of skeleton of what usually happens, with blanks to be filled. A kitchen has a stove, a sink, a window over the sink. A morning visit to your mother has coffee, then the mail, then the question about whether she is eating. Most of the blanks come already filled with what usually goes there. We only look harder when something doesn't fit.
Nathan had fifty-one years of his mother's sentences. When she started one, the rest of it was already sitting in his head before she had got to the verb. This had been true when he was nine and she said "If you leave that bicycle in the driveway one more time," and it was true now. The difference was that before, she had always finished the sentence herself, and he had found out whether he was right. Now she got three words in and stopped, and the rest of the sentence just stayed in his mouth until it came out.
"Did you want the—"
"The mail? I'll get the mail."
"No. The—"
"Your glasses. They're on the—"
She hit the table with her left hand. Her right hand had been weak since the stroke; it lay beside the saucer like something she had been asked to mind for someone else. "No," she said. And then, very slowly, as if she were walking across ice: "Not. Glasses."
He waited. She waited. Neither of them knew what she had wanted, and after a while she shook her head, and he got the mail anyway, because the mail was what usually came next.
Dolores did not believe in the cards as much as her supervisor did. She had trained in the early seventies at the Veterans hospital in Jamaica Plain, where she had worked under a neurologist who wore bow ties and who liked to say that the hospital was full of men who could not ask for the bedpan but could sing every verse of "The Caissons Go Rolling Along." He had a method for it. He had her sit across from those men and hold their left hands and tap, once for each syllable, and sing a short phrase on two notes, high and low, like a doorbell. Thank you. Good morning. I want water. Then they sang it together. Then she dropped out and let the man sing it alone. Then, over weeks, she flattened the two notes until they were nearly one, and the singing became something very close to talking.
It didn't work for everyone. It worked best for people who understood speech well but could not produce it, who had good hearing and some patience and who did not hate being made to sing like children. Dolores had looked at Ruth on the first day and put her down, in her head, as one of the ones who would hate it.
On the third Tuesday, Nathan met her at the door instead of standing in it.
"She plays at night," he said.
"Plays what?"
"The piano. I didn't know she could. I mean, with the hand. I stayed over Sunday because of the snow, and at about two in the morning I heard it. I didn't go in."
"What was she playing?"
He frowned. He had taken lessons from his mother for six years and quit at twelve, in the middle of a Clementi sonatina, and he had felt guilty about it ever since. "Bach," he said. "I think it's one of the fugues. She keeps playing the start of it and then stopping. The same place every time."
The piece was the C minor fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, in three voices. Ruth had learned it at fifteen from a woman on Grand Concourse who smelled of camphor and who rapped her knuckles with a pencil whenever her wrists sagged. She had taught it, since, to perhaps forty students. She could have written it out from memory, every note.
The fugue starts with one voice alone, in the middle of the keyboard: a short, busy subject that sounds like someone arguing quietly with themselves. Two bars later a second voice comes in above it with the same tune, transposed, while the first voice keeps going underneath with something new. Then there are two bars of free passage. Then, in the seventh bar, the third voice enters in the bass, and the piece becomes what it is going to be.
Ruth had worked out that she could play the first voice with her left hand. It was slow, but the fingers knew where to go, and they did not have to ask anyone. She could manage most of the second voice by bringing her left hand up and dropping the first. Her right hand could do a little, a few notes at a time, the thumb and the first two fingers, if she did not look at it.
What she could not do was three voices with one and a half hands. Every night she got to the seventh bar and the bass came due, and there was no hand for it, and she stopped.
She did not explain any of this to Dolores. She couldn't have. When Dolores came into the living room on Tuesday and sat down on the hard chair beside the piano, Ruth simply turned around on the bench, put her left hand on the keys, and played the subject, alone, twice through. Then she turned back and looked at Dolores with an expression that said, quite clearly, So?
Dolores took Ruth's left hand off the keyboard and held it on her own knee.
"I'm going to sing something stupid," she said. "You're going to hate it."
Ruth's eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch.
Dolores tapped the back of Ruth's hand once for each syllable and sang, on two notes, high-low-high: "Cup of tea."
Ruth looked at her as if she had taken her clothes off.
"Cup of tea," sang Dolores again, tapping. "Come on. With me."
Ruth's mouth was a straight line. Dolores sang it a third time, and a fourth, tapping, and on the fifth time Ruth's lips moved, and on the sixth something came out with them, thin and flat and a little behind the beat, like an amateur alto in a congregation:
"Cuh of tea."
"Again."
"Cup—of—tea."
Ruth stopped. She pulled her hand away and put it over her own mouth, and held it there.
From the doorway—he had come back to it without meaning to—Nathan said, "Mom." And then, because he could not help it: "That's—you said—"
Dolores held up one finger without looking round, and he closed his mouth.
It would be pleasant to say that the music woke up the words. That isn't what happened, and it isn't how minds work. Nothing was asleep.
Think of the mind as a great many small machines, each of which knows how to do one thing and nothing else, and none of which can see much of what the others are doing. To say "cup" in an ordinary voice, a whole team of them has to work together: one to find the word, one to put its sounds in order, one to time the lips and tongue and breath. The stroke had broken some of the links in that team. But there are other teams. Singing runs on a different set of machines, ones that keep time and carry tunes, and those were in a part of Ruth's brain that the clot had not reached. If you hand the job of saying "cup" to the singing team, and give them a rhythm to hang it on, some of them turn out to know a back road to the lips.
Everything we can do, we can usually do in more than one way. That is the most important thing about a mind. People are not resourceful because they have one excellent method. They are resourceful because they have many methods, mostly bad, and something that notices when one of them has failed and tries another.
Dolores came three more times that week, on her own time, and did not bill Medicare for them. By the second Friday Ruth could sing cup of tea, good morning, where is my coat, Nathan, go home, and two more that she sang at Dolores and that Dolores pretended not to understand. She could not yet say any of them. When she tried to speak them flat, the back road closed and she was left standing at the front door with nothing.
Then Ruth did something nobody had suggested.
It was a Friday, late in March. The window was open an inch because the radiators in that house had two settings, off and July. Dolores had brought her doorbell phrases. She sat down and took Ruth's hand.
Ruth took it back.
She turned around on the bench and played the first bar and a half of the fugue subject with her left hand, alone, slowly. Then she played it again, and this time she sang along with it—not the notes' names, not la, but words, fitted to the busy little tune one syllable to a note, the way you fit a new verse to an old hymn:
"Nathan, will you get the mail and put it on the table, please."
It did not fit perfectly. "Table" had to be squeezed. But every word was there, in order, and it was a sentence, with a verb in it and a please at the end, and it was hers. She had not borrowed it from a card. She had built it.
Dolores sat very still. She had never had a patient pick their own melody. The method used two notes because two notes were easy, and easy was supposed to be the point. But Ruth had not had an easy tune in her head since 1923. A doorbell gave her nothing to stand on. The fugue subject was something she had played perhaps ten thousand times; it was not a tune she had to remember but a road her hand had worn smooth, and words could ride on it.
Nathan, in the kitchen, did not hear the sentence; the tap was running. When he came into the living room drying a mug, his mother looked at him and sang it again.
He stood there. Then he went out to the front step and got the mail, and brought it in, and put it on the table.
Most of what a good teacher knows is what not to do. Ruth had known this for fifty years. A student plays a wrong note, and nine times in ten the right thing is to say nothing and let them hear it. Interrupt, and they learn that someone else will catch their mistakes. Wait, and they learn to catch their own. The hard part is not knowing the right note. The hard part is keeping your own mouth shut.
Nathan did not know this. Nobody had ever taught it to him, because he had quit at twelve.
He learned some of it in April. He had to. Ruth now sang most of what she wanted, to bits of the C minor subject and the D major prelude and, for complaints, to the tune of "A Bicycle Built for Two," and it took her a long time to fit the words, and he could almost always see where a sentence was going before she got there. Every time, the rest of it came up into his throat. He found out that if he let it out, she would stop singing and look at him, and the sentence she had been building would fall down, and she would not start it again.
So he started doing a thing with his hands. When she began to sing, he put them flat on his knees and pressed down, hard enough to feel the bone, and kept pressing until she had finished. It looked odd. Ruth noticed it the first day and said nothing, which, from her, was approval.
He was wrong about the end of her sentences about one time in four. He had not expected that. He had thought he knew her.
On the last Sunday in April he stayed over again, though there was no snow. At about eleven at night he heard the fugue start in the living room, and he lay in the narrow bed in his old room and listened to the first voice and then the second, slow and careful, and the two bars of free passage, and then the stop at the seventh bar.
He heard her start it again. He heard her stop again.
He got up and went downstairs in his socks. She was on the bench in her housecoat, her right hand in her lap, her left hand resting on the keys at the place where the music had run out. She did not turn round.
She sang, to the tune of the subject, with her hand still resting where it had stopped:
"Nathan, come and sit down here and play the upper voice for me."
He had not played the piano in thirty-nine years. He said, "Mom, I can't—" and stopped himself.
She moved over on the bench. He sat down on her right, on the side that didn't work. She reached across with her left hand and took his right wrist and set it on the keys, high in the treble, and pressed his thumb onto a G. Then she pressed his second finger onto the F-sharp below it, then back to the G. She pressed his wrist, gently, from underneath, until it stopped sagging.
It took them until half past one. He played the second voice wrong in eleven different ways and she sang each correction to him on the subject's tune, in sentences he did not finish for her. At a quarter past one he played it right, slowly, with one finger doing the work of three, and she brought her left hand down into the bass and played the third voice in, in the seventh bar, the low C under everything, and hummed the middle voice because there was no hand left for it, and the fugue went on past the place where it had always stopped.
They did not get much further. Four bars, five. His hand ran out. It didn't matter.
She lifted her hand off the keys and sat looking at it. Nathan put both of his flat on his knees and pressed, and waited to hear what she would say.
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THE END
Marvin Minsky, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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