If a Tree Falls (17 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Rosner

BOOK: If a Tree Falls
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The house is complete chaos. Pearl stuffs extra scarves into an already bulging suitcase. Family and friends weep and kiss and hug the confused travelers. Moshe stalls the carriage driver, as people run in and out of the house. As Nellie, Bayla, Elish, and Herschel take their seats in the carriage, Pearl steps up after them. She takes their faces in her quivering hands, kisses their foreheads, her lips making promises of a quick reunion. When the horses start to whinny and stomp their feet, Pearl steps down. Nellie links her arms with Bayla, and Pearl wonders, suddenly, if perhaps the girls do not understand that they
will be parting in Budapest, that Bayla will be left at the deaf school, and Nellie will take a train to the port at Bremen with Elish and Herschel. Pearl yells out to Elish, “Please explain, Elish
—
Nellie and Bayla will have to part, but they will be together soon. We will send for Bayla, and we will join you in America.”
But as the carriage lurches forward, then turns sharply out of sight, Pearl is overtaken with anguish. Moshe comes to stand beside Pearl. He takes up her hand. Pearl yanks it away.
Inside the house, the four littlest children scuttle and run, they crawl and give chase; yet to Pearl, the house is vacant. Silent, amidst the din. How did they leave behind so much silence
—
they, who were largely silent themselves?
Moshe tries to placate her, he promises it will turn out all right. “How?” she asks. “How will it turn out all right?” Pearl stares at her husband. She has no faith left in him. He lives with his head in the clouds.
Elish sits in the carriage, staring at her sisters. Nellie is bouncing Herschel on her lap, one arm twined around Bayla. Elish stalls. She gives herself a marker: I’ll tell them when the carriage passes that tree. But the tree is well behind them now, and her eyes are scanning for a new marker. Finally, Elish takes a
breath and taps her sisters on the knees to get their attention. As Nellie and Bayla comprehend her news, their heads shake violently. Tears drip dark spots onto their skirts. How could Mama have left it to her to tell them? Elish rages inside. As the carriage bumps along, Elish begins to cry; then Herschel, seeing the distraught faces of his three sisters, cries out too.
In Budapest, the carriage stops in front of a large brick building, its rows of arched windows with black wrought iron grates rising up four flights. Moshe had instructed the driver and paid him to escort Bayla into the office of the Headmaster. He nearly has to pry Bayla out of Nellie’s grip and drag her, rumpled and shaking, into the school. The three in the carriage are still crying, as he hoists himself back up and takes hold of the reins.
In a dank corner, below deck on the ship, Nellie sits huddled with Elish and Herschel. Day and night. Day and night. They hardly have room to stretch out their legs. All around them, passengers are gripped with seasickness. For Nellie, it is not the turbulent motions of the ship that nauseate her, but the foul smells all around
—
the body odors, the vomit, the urine clinging to the sides of open buckets. Nellie offers Elish and Herschel food from the satchel that Pearl carefully packed for
them. She herself can scarcely eat. She winds a shawl
—
Bayla’s shawl
—
around her nose and mouth, and breathes in her missing sister.
Nellie takes knitting in hand, but her stitches bunch and pull. She rips them out, stows the yarn in her bag. Her temples pound with grief, as Elish tutors her to speak out answers to questions she may be asked by an Inspections Officer.
Weeks pass, and finally the boat docks in New York harbor. Filthy and ragged, they weave their way out of the ship’s steerage compartment, unsteadily up the stairs to the outer decks, and finally, by barge, onto a pier in New York Bay. In a long winding line, they step into Castle Gardens. Uniformed doctors are everywhere, inspecting the passengers’ scalps for lice, their nails for fungus. Nellie yelps at the sight of a doctor brandishing a gleaming buttonhook, a man’s face twisting in pain as his eyelid is turned up. She clutches tight to Elish and Herschel.
As they approach the front of their line, numbers pinned to their coats, an inspection officer barks a soundless question at Nellie. Her name, she thinks. He must have asked her to state her name. She practiced this day and night on the ship. Now she shapes her lips, her tongue flat against the bridge of her mouth for the “n”, then poking out a bit for the “l.” She manages the four syllables “Nel-lie Wert-heim,” her belly pressing down on her bowel as her breath recedes. Her sounds—were they all
right, she wonders? Because the man’s eyes have widened and his eyebrows are up.
Quickly, Elish steps forward, saying in Yiddish that she, her sister, and brother, have traveled together to meet Samuel Baumann. If Samuel Baumann isn’t waiting for them, they are to make their way to 1742 Union Street in Brooklyn. She picks up Herschel, as if to be on her way to Union Street that very moment. The inspector looks at the threesome uncertainly, a piece of chalk balancing between two dusty white fingers. Herschel blinks and smiles, his eyes puffy, his skin reddened from the sea air. The inspector asks to see Herschel walk. Elish sets Herschel down, steps several lengths back, then beckons him to come. As Herschel walks to Elish, the officer turns back to Nellie, hesitating. Then, with a brush of his arm, he waves them along into the interior rotunda. They gather their belongings, and Elish tells a registering clerk their names, their old residence, and their destination.
Nellie, Elish, and Herschel squeeze onto a wooden bench next to three elderly women cloaked in scarves. Their eyes search the faces of each passerby as their feet dangle in America’s hope-suspended air. When Nellie raises her hands to sign something to Herschel, Elish presses them against Nellie’s lap, a pleading look on her face. As it is, a clerk has looked over at them more than once. Four hours pass. Then five. Herschel has fallen asleep, his head cocked against Nellie’s shoulder. A large
man with a bushy grey beard and a wide black hat approaches the bench. In Yiddish, he asks Elish her name. When she tells him, he smiles in relief and points a finger to his chest. “I am Samuel Baumann. My wife, Lill, is an old friend of your mother’s. You children gather your things. You’re to stay with us!”
Massachusetts, March 2004
SOPHIA AND JULIET HAD SEPARATE bedrooms but I put them together at night. They would settle cozily in Juliet’s bright purple room, decorated with Sophia’s white painted hand prints and lit gently with a lamb night-light.
When they fell asleep, I’d trudge upstairs to my bedroom and undress before the mirror. Though months had passed since my surgery, I wasn’t at peace with the thick pink scar that lay across the soft white skin of my breast. A deep vacancy still inside, coarsely sewn over, giving the impression of being healed, of being filled—yet gaping.
Bill and I were like factory workers on different shifts, managing the endless conveyor belt of needs. Feedings. Diaper changes. Story readings. Strolls around the block. Juliet was still waking through the night. Sophia was testy and oppositional during the day. Lucca was getting sicker. Both girls were low weight, and I had morphed myself into a combination short order cook and pastry chef. Amidst it
all, we had big decisions still to make for Juliet, and for us. I felt drained, empty.
Bill started playing with Juliet in the early morning, so I could get more sleep. When Juliet cried out, Bill would take her into the playroom to look at books, to play with puzzles, and to dance. Bill twirled Juliet and tickled her. He bundled her up and trudged with her out in the snow. They were the first customers for hot bagels at the bagel shop. He walked her to the river, to the boathouse, to the marshes where the heron came. He jogged her to the farmer’s market, then plopped her at my bedside with a big bouquet of flowers. Bill became Juliet’s “adventure” man; when he entered a room, she looked around for her shoes and coat, and for clues as to where they might be going.
Bill was my “adventure” man, too; I looked at him and wondered where in the roller-coaster ride we were at this or that precise moment. Over time, and with a little more sleep, the twists felt smoother; the heaves less sudden. We hired a babysitter so we could take quiet walks together. We mulled around used bookstores, found our way back to the Indian restaurant we liked on our first visit to Northampton. We inched our way back in, closer.
The Boston ear surgeon gave us the names of the three companies that manufactured cochlear implants: Cochlear, MED-EL, and Advanced Bionics. Late one night, I looked up the Cochlear company on the Internet. Link by link, I found my way to their implant simulation site. Alan Alda was narrating. I was instantly calmed by his familiar voice, and though his hair was grey and he wore a dark suit, he had the relaxed, youthful manner of the army doctor he played all those years on
M*A*S*H*
. After a few minutes, Alda’s crisp visual image broke up into a fragmented blur of tiny rectangles, with parts fading out of focus, others darkening. I could just barely recognize Alda’s face when the screen froze and I heard Alda’s voice proudly announce that
this
—this disjointed mess—was the visual analogue of the cochlear implant.
Next, a lady’s voice piped in to give the auditory simulation. “ I like to play tennis,” she said, and I heard it first the “regular” way. Then I heard it simulated, as it sounded to someone with a cochlear implant. The perky, even melodious phrase“I like to play tennis” was mutilated, grotesquely transformed.
Had Darth Vader joined Demi Moore and the Wicked Witch of the West to create this raspy, witchy, all-throat sound?
I sat stiffly in front of the computer screen.
Then I woke Bill. Were we going to drill into Juliet’s tiny skull for
this
? Could we never expect Juliet to hear the timbre of our voices, or to distinguish between voices, or experience the beauty of music?
For the next several days, Bill and I went to the Clarke School playground at recess and we watched and listened to the children with cochlear implants. There was not a single Darth-Demi-Gulch sound-alike in the bunch. The implanted children heard language and spoke clearly. On the sideline of a soccer game, I chatted with the Clarke teachers about the implant technology. It was not without challenges—it would be hard to hear in noisy places and localizing sound would be difficult—but the implant, if successful, could bring a profoundly deaf child access to spoken language and other sound.

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