The Voiceover Artist. Dave Reidy
Frank sighed and shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say. “Wh— what’s wrong w— with you, Simon?”
Simon said nothing.
“Wh— why d— don’t you s— speak up?”
Simon made no reply.
“S— s— say s— something!”
I leaned forward just in time to see Simon’s bottom lip slide over the top one. His eyes glowed with defiance. My heart leapt at the thought that Simon might scream.
But it was I who screamed when Frank stood up and raised his right hand to slap the scorn from his son’s face. I put myself between the two of them and carried Simon away, cowering against a blow that didn’t come.
When I had delivered him safely to his bedroom, Simon wriggled out of my arms. I had assumed he’d be visibly frightened, maybe even crying, but his expression, now directed at an empty corner of his room, was the same defiant one he’d shown his father. I understood then that Simon had become a mirror for more than his father’s broken speech. In Simon’s hateful gaze, Frank had glimpsed his own self-hatred.
I should never have left Simon unprotected in front of Frank. A man pretending he isn’t wounded can only look in a mirror for so long before he tries to break it.
•••
SIMON HAD BEEN silent for seven months when I got it in my head that I should try to scare a sound out of him.
I left work an hour early and parked my car down the road, off the route of the boys’ school bus. I hid my purse in my bedroom, lay down on the far side of Simon’s bed, and waited. The hiding itself was thrilling—I hadn’t hidden from anyone since I was a little girl—but what really excited me was the idea that I could break my son’s silence. I told myself that once it was broken, Simon would have no reason to start a new string of days and weeks and months without speaking. He’d outlasted the wishes of his mother and commands of his teacher and shown his father what he thought of him. What could possibly be left for him to prove? And to whom?
The airbrakes of the bus shrieked. The engine chugged as it idled and growled as the bus accelerated past the house. I put my feet under me and squatted in a crouch. Feeling a giggle rise, I buried my smiling face in the comforter hanging over the side of Simon’s bed.
When the back door opened into the kitchen, the house seemed to exhale, as if it had been holding its breath until the boys returned home. Connor called for me from the kitchen, and called my name again in the living room. When he got no answer, he said, “Yippee!” and turned on the television.
I listened to two game-show hosts—the one actually on TV and the much younger one in my living room—for what seemed like several minutes.
Then the door to Simon’s room opened.
Still smiling, I sprang into view. “Boo!” I screamed.
Simon jumped back and his mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. He stood with his back to the wall, clasping his windpipe between his thumb and his fingers. My first thought was that he’d inhaled a cookie. Then I heard the air coming in and out of his nose and understood: His stutter had seized him and would not let go.
Alarmed, I hurried around the foot of the bed. Before I could reach him, Simon ran at me and started pounding my hips with the heels of his open hands.
“Stop it!” I yelled, grabbing at him. “Simon! Stop!”
He hit me a few more times, and then ran out of the room.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes and let the tears come, crying not over the blows that my son had dealt me in his wordless rage, but at a possibility I hadn’t considered: Simon’s silence was not a matter of choice. His stutter, emboldened by his silence, had strangled his broken voice.
It was only in his withholding of them, in his unwillingness to meet my eye for the next thirteen days, that I came to understand just how much love my Simon had been showing me in his glances and gestures and heavy smiles.
•••
KNOWING THAT SIMON was unable to speak changed everything for me. I no longer took his silence as a slight. I stopped pleading for him to speak and trying to trick him into speaking. I began to treat the silence as something I couldn’t change, as if it were any other crippling injury a boy could suffer.
I signed us both up for a sign-language class, but Simon didn’t want to sign any more than he wanted to play an instrument. For two half-hour sessions, he refused to take his hands out of his lap. I agreed to stop taking him but believed we’d go back, eventually. In the meantime, though, I asked Simon questions that he could answer with a nod or a shake of his head, and we developed our own pidgin signs for the niceties I couldn’t let go: two open palms for please, palms together in prayer for thank you, and a fist to the breast, the same mea culpa I’d learned in church as a little girl, for I’m sorry. Simon never learned I’m hungry or I’m thirsty or anything else that would’ve helped me to meet his needs. He did things for himself. If he was hungry, he went to the kitchen and had a snack. If he was thirsty, he poured himself a Sprite. Soon, I was raising a highly independent little boy I was afraid to let out of my sight.
At the beginning of each school year, I informed Simon’s teachers that he could not speak, and made them promise me that they would never, under any circumstances, demand that he do what he could not. And I gave Connor an assignment.
“You stay close to your brother before and after school,” I told him. “And if you see anybody doing or saying anything mean to him, I want you to tell me.”
“Okay,” Connor said. Then, after a couple of nervous ums, he asked, “Do you want me to try and stop them?”
“No,” I said. “Just tell me. If it’s an emergency, go find a teacher and tell her.”
I assumed that Connor talking Simon’s way out of a schoolyard fight would only move the fight to my living room. The boys were fighting all the time, it seemed. If Connor spoke for Simon once too often, or hit a little too close to home with his teasing, or, God forbid, laid a hand on Simon’s radio, Simon would tackle Connor and pound him in the shoulders. I pulled Simon off of Connor a few times a week, at least, and made him say I’m sorry with the same fist he’d been using to hit his brother.
But if, when the fighting began, I was outside hanging the washing or deafened to Connor’s protests by my hair dryer, I would find Connor on top of Simon, giving the punches he’d been getting, and Simon under his smaller, younger brother, calmly taking blows he didn’t have to take. For months, I worried that Simon was taking pleasure in his own pain and humiliation, but I came to see the fights as something else entirely. Simon was acting out his longing to be Connor’s equal, if only in a game he rigged himself.
There was one adjustment to his silence, though, that Simon would not allow me to make. When he handed me a permission slip to join the Boy Scouts or Little League or become an altar server, I’d ask Simon a question: “Will you let me come with you every time you go?”
Simon would wince at me, stomp his feet and shake his head emphatically.
“I’m sorry,” I would say. “I can’t let you go alone.”
There would be more stomping then, until Frank had yelled for it to stop and Simon had shut himself in his room.
I understood that no boy wanted his mother watching over him, especially if his was the only mother around. But a boy who cannot speak is too tempting a target for a predatory coach or priest or scout leader—who is more likely than a mute child to keep a pedophile’s secrets? Somehow, I managed to convince myself that Simon would be safe at school. But after school and on the weekends, I’d only leave him in the care of Frank or my mother.
From the time they were babies, I’d tried to raise boys brave enough to be more than their mother’s