If a Tree Falls (7 page)

I spoke into Sophia’s ears—“miked” at top volume—and I wondered, did Pearl try stubbornly, ineffectually, to speak to her girls even after she knew of their deafness? Did she persist in speaking the words she deemed most
crucial into their unfixable ears? And did her girls hear her, if not through the sound waves, then through the contours of her face, through her expressions? I kept my eyes fixed on Sophia so she might read my expressions. Just in case my sound wasn’t getting through.

In time, our pockets would be filled with toupee tape, strings, clips, and rubber bands—anything that might keep the hearing aids in Sophia’s ears long enough for her to hear a bit of spoken language each day. A read-through of
Good Night Moon
. A rendition of “When Cows Wake Up In The Morning, They Always Say ‘Good Day’.” Each day, we worked with Sophia on listening with her hearing aids. We no longer ignored the hum of the refrigerator, or the sizzling of a frying egg; we pointed out the crinkling leaves, the approach of footsteps, every faucet run of water. “I hear it,” I’d say and point to my ear, when the bed creaked, or a dog barked.

Did
she
hear it? I didn’t know. I was half-reassured just by our having chosen a plan of action; half-terrified that it was a misguided one. I talked to Sophia constantly now. I narrated every activity and named every object in our path.

I interjected signs here and there. I admired, even craved, sign language the more I learned it. You couldn’t turn away, stare off, do a thousand other things. It required presence and intimacy.

I took Sophia’s hearing aids out for bath-time. In bathroom surround-sound, I alone heard the droplets of water drip from her short hair, the swishes and waves made by her kicks, the lap-lap of the water at the tub’s edge. Did she wonder what the water sounded like?
Could
she wonder it? I toweled her off, and put the hearing aids back in her ears. Holding her suspended above the bathwater, I grabbed a handful and let it drip drip drip into the tub.

At night, Bill and I cradled Sophia in our arms and swayed to the rhythms of lullabies played far louder than lullabies ought to be. We had discs of lullabies from around the world: lilting voices from Tahiti; sharp operatic sopranos from Japan; gentle wooings from Israel.

When Sophia’s eyes fluttered to close, we plied her with kisses and laid her down. Just before taking out her hearing aids, we’d whisper, “Bye, bye sound,” and wave good night.

EACH MORNING, I GENTLY WRIGGLED Sophia’s hearing aids into her tiny ears. It stung me to see other mothers whispering softly in their babies’ ears, their babies responding with gurgles and coos and pudgy fingers tapping at their mothers’ lips. At the library, at the bookstore—mothers reading stories in airy, lilting voices; their children leaning in to listen, ready to catch magic. I couldn’t afford whispers with Sophia. I spoke loudly, with the sharp enunciation of a strict grammar school teacher. The gentlest nursery rhyme, the sweetest lullaby, I now belted out at full volume—a bull in the china shop of motherese.

Only after Sophia’s birth did I start to view my own childhood through the lens of my mother’s hearing loss. I hadn’t before traced my experience—the feeling that I wasn’t being heard—to the dislocation in my mother’s own upbringing, to the ways she grew up unhearing, and also,
unheard. Nor had I traced it to the constant punking-out of my mother’s hearing aid batteries. I began to wonder, in new motherhood, how it must have been for my mother with her hearing loss. I began to wonder how it was for Pearl—how she managed to moor her girls, so that they could in time tie a string from their wrists to their babies’. Awaken in the silence. How
I
might manage it.

Bill and I started researching oral-deaf schools. Several schools had early infant programs to work with deaf babies and their parents on listening and vocalizing.

We went to a school in commuting distance one morning. We walked through the classrooms, then observed a preschool group through a one-way mirror inside a soundproof booth. Teachers drilled the students military-style. The children were just four or five years old, yet their foreheads tensed with effort. Their eyes pierced with concentration. They sputtered single-syllable sounds like “bah” and “pah”—sounds devoid of meaning. Not a single one of them was
speaking
. In the play area, they puttered about, lonely, each child in a bubble of isolation.

In the parking lot, I gasped for cool air and burst into tears.

“This is not the only school.” Bill said. He must have felt as I did. “We can look around. We can look around the country.”

“Really?”

We hadn’t spoken about moving. People in the juvenile court had recently encouraged Bill to apply to be the new commissioner. It was a dream of Bill’s to judge dependency cases. We both knew that if he were to get the job, he would be busy day and night. Now, my head swirled with the prospect of relocating.

On the computer the next morning, I found sites for every oral school in the country. I followed up with calls. I had an instant rapport with the director of the parent-infant program at the oldest school, the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her name was Jan, and her perspective on deaf education was rooted in a rich study of child development. She asked about our bonding with Sophia, about our style of play. I phoned Bill at work, my voice full of excitement. He suggested we arrange a visit.

I jumped in the shower, thinking about all the conversations I’d had that morning. My hands and hair were lathered thick with apricot shampoo when I panicked. Before my shower, I had placed Sophia, asleep, in the middle of the bed—she was safe there—but I hadn’t closed the door.
What if Lucca jumped up onto the bed and squashed her? I rushed out of the shower, blotting foam from my forehead, and sprinted down the hallway.

I heard Lucca’s tail thumping the bedcovers before I saw her. Up on the bed, Lucca’s body curled like a horseshoe around Sophia, who was still sound asleep. Dripping wet, I kissed Lucca’s snout, praised her, and ran back into the shower to rinse.

Days before our flight east to visit the Clarke School, I located a US Census Report from 1930 listing Nellie Wertheim living with her daughter Bertha on Union Street in Brooklyn. I also located army registration forms for Nellie’s sons, Manny and Leo, and I found a phone number for my cousin, Valerie. Valerie was interested in our family tree, too. She’d been working on a different branch of it—the Meyer line—over the course of several years, since her mother died. She’d met with relatives this past summer to learn what she could. I told her of my efforts to learn about Pearl and Moshe Wertheim, and their daughters, Nellie and Bayla.

Valerie told me of ways to search through birth and marriage certificates, immigration documents, holocaust records, and synagogue membership lists. I mentioned the
asterisks near some of the names on the family chart, and my interest in our family’s deafness. I described how I’d located Nellie in US Census Reports, but not Bayla, and how I hoped to find the whereabouts of Judith Fleischer, perhaps our one living deaf relative.

Valerie must have heard the weariness in my voice, because she offered to help. She started to write out a list.

As Valerie ticked off concrete search strategies—we could search student rosters at schools for the deaf and TTY directories; we could look at boat schedules and Ellis Island records—I despaired of ever learning how Nellie and Bayla really lived, how they
fared
. Their names scrawled on school attendance sheets—what would those tell me of the rhythm of their days, their nights? Fragmented images swirled in my head. Half-hidden faces, one cheek cold against the white plaster wall. Two eyes flickering in a candle-flame’s shadow, yellow against the dark brocaded drapery. Were our deaf ancestors shunned, kept out of view? Did they sneak sunshine upon their pale faces only when no one was looking?

All afternoon, I wanted to phone Valerie back. To explain how I perched precariously in new motherhood, in search of models, in search of ties. How I grew up groundless amidst the static of interrupted connections, how I nursed only fractured childhood memories. Fish flopping
on the lawn after a rainstorm flooded the pond. The smell of clover by the old railroad ties. Violin music. The tiny vials of oil from a perfume-making kit. My father’s mittenless hands shaking with chill as he buckled up my ski boots. My mother’s expression, laid bare like wet seaglass, as I sang to her. That laid-bare expression, recollecting itself, as if for departure. The heat of the kitchen. The din of family voices. The force of loneliness that could have replaced gravity itself.

I knew that my questions—
Were Nellie and Bayla known? Did anyone push through the barrier of their deafness to know them?
—were unanswerable. I sat down on the quilted glider in the nursery and held Sophia snug to my chest. I thought about my mother, how she retreated daily to her mirror, hid behind the closed bathroom door. She had been bereft in childhood. I didn’t know the particular circumstances of her father’s leaving. Yet now I pictured her as a girl, scuttling down four flights of fire stairs, watching his car pull away, a smudge of black on grey. I pictured her tottering back up the stairs, then coming to stand at the bathroom mirror, shaky, with eyeliner and mascara in hand. Trying to conceal her tears, to makeup her eyes. Makeup:
make believe, invent.
Or:
cover over, camouflage.

Throughout my own childhood, my mother’s eyes—alternately cast on me, then turned away—always held her
father’s leaving. She identified with her father, he who had also been left, he who left her behind. I sought to retrieve her, yet my eyes, too, filled up with the look of departure. And now I clutched, unmoored, to my Sophia.

In Massachusetts, Bill maneuvered our bright red rental car up a steep, narrow Northampton street, marked with an engraved metal placard for Clarke School for the Deaf. Signposts in the shape of yellow diamonds marked each crosswalk with the word “DEAF”—a descriptor I still couldn’t weave into my thoughts about Sophia without an internal revolt.

Just a week before, back in California, we had brought Sophia to the audiologist for another hearing test and a review of her hearing aid settings. Her diagnosis was “severe” on a scale of mild, moderate, severe, and profound. I had stepped into the thick sound booth full of groundless hope: my girl would hear today, and her diagnosis, like a judge’s sentence, would be lessened or even reversed. With Sophia, three and a half months old, cradled on my lap, I had sat completely still as my own ears filled with the sounds piped in, and I had waited for Sophia’s ears to register the pure tones, for her eyes to widen with each beep. It
was not the last time I would teeter out of a sound booth, crestfallen.

We parked on the street, the fresh air a relief after the artificial cherry scent of the rental car. Bill looked at maps of Northampton and Amherst while I nursed Sophia. An extra feeding, because she wasn’t gaining weight fast enough.