426
ALAN
FRIEDMAN
My father was a lawyer, a tiny man with a moustache that
looked phony and big ears with tufts of hair growing in them.
His voice was unbelievable. People who heard him speak for the
first time, only a few words of trivial conversation, were invariably
shocked: that out of such a tiny man, under the suddenly arched lip
and moustache, broke a voice like an overloaded loudspeaker, metallic,
compelling, and deeply annoying. Perhaps that was why his legal
successes were cerebral ones, triumphs of the office rather than the
court. Still, he believed with passion in forensic skill and he began
training my older brother Sander from early childhood in public
speaking-heading him for the bar and, I suppose, Congress. He used
to have Sandy stand up at the table after dinner every night to
speak extemporaneously for five minutes to all of us (though Mother
usually left in obvious boredom) on whatever topic my father chose.
These were usually matters of childhood interest, though later, as
Sandy grew older, they became wider in scope, political or philo–
sophical. Often, however, they were topics of mere absurdity. Indeed
my father claimed that-for practice- the best subjects in the world
on which to sharpen the teeth of logic and persuasion were those
to which no reasonable man could listen. They would serve Sandy
later, he claimed, like the weights carried by the Spartans or the
stones in Demosthenes' mouth.
I recall in particular one of the absurd topics on which Daddy
insisted Sandy speak, because it made, at the time, an almost mystical
impression on me. I was four years old and Sandy was nine and
he spoke with all the eloquence he could muster (which by that
time was plenty) on the proposition that the sun was really the
moon. I listened with my cheek on the table. Sandy stood by his
chair as usual, alternately leaning on the table with curled fingers
and standing back from it, pushing the blond hair off his forehead,
squinting one eye sometimes while he spoke, blowing his nose once
or twice and picking it, and pointing a subtle finger at the moon.
"You say you can see for yourself. But how good are your eyes?
At that distance anyone could make a mistake, couldn't they? The
evidence is suspicious right off. Even if every
one
of you thinks
it's the sun, in China they all think they're standing on top of the
world. And the earth looks flat, doesn't it? What we need is people
with an open mind because the cards are stacked-"
