If a Tree Falls (4 page)

Edging my way out of my mother’s bathroom, I gently swayed Sophia back and forth in the cradle of my arms. All I wanted was to wrap myself around and around my baby. Protect her. Reflect her. I positioned her in the baby carrier, facing in and snuggled close, and I squeezed by my
parents. My mother was still in front of her mirror. My father watched me from the doorway, his violin extending downward from beneath his cocked chin.

In the kitchen, I settled myself into an armchair with raisin toast and tea. The dining table was already set for Shabbat dinner. While Sophia napped, I called as many relatives as I could, probing their memories. I worked my way through my parents’ Rolodex, inquiring about our deaf ancestors. Relative after relative, their voices shaky and old, strained with earnest effort, then wilted with regret over lost recollections. Uncle Franklin and Aunt Shirley, on one family branch. Uncle Bob and Aunt Etti, on another.

Eventually, I reached my father’s cousin, Phyllis, in Colorado. Phyllis’s voice was authoritative, if crackly. She had a clear memory of my father’s deaf uncles, Sam and Moe. She was insistent that they were deafened in childhood, not genetically, but as a result of the 1918 flu. So much family deafness, yet none of it claimed as genetic. I could practically see the lines of DNA crouched in hiding, dodging responsibility.

Phyllis remembered watching Sam and Moe sign together in their apartment in the Bronx. They had a light over their kitchen table that blinked when someone rang the doorbell. On the family chart, they were listed as Pearl’s grandsons, asterisks near each of their names. Both men
married deaf women. Sam and his wife had a deaf daughter, Judith Fleischer.

“Judy may still be alive; she’d be around your father’s age,” Phyllis offered.

If only I could find
her
—the one deaf relative who might connect me to all the others! My father’s fax had catapulted me into the past, past the isolation I felt amidst my family into a search for long-ago connections. I wanted to learn all I could about my deaf ancestors. Were they happy? Were they heard? Were they integral to the life of their family, or did they stare on from the periphery, as if through a pane of glass? My deaf cousin might know something.

Phyllis told me she was in touch with a few relatives who might know of Judith’s whereabouts. She would try and locate her.

I flipped through the Rolodex and dialed another number. Sophia woke and nestled against me. As I spoke again—this time to an aunt in Florida—Sophia burrowed her face under my neck. Could she feel me talking? I tightened the straps of the baby carrier, hoisting her closer.

After the call, which yielded nothing, I put Sophia down on a knitted blanket. I held her hand against the bottom
of a small tom tom drum while I tapped its taut center. Sophia’s short legs kicked wildly. Tap tap. Another round of kicks.

I put Sophia’s palm to my throat, and haltingly, I sang my first lullaby to her. Choked it out, knowing she couldn’t hear it. My voice was classically trained and strong—I had studied since the age of thirteen with a former singer of the Metropolitan Opera—yet all that I could muster now was a breaking melody.“Brahms’ Lullaby,” hoarse and thin.

Bill rubbed the small of my back, kissed me on the cheek. Then he took out the furry, fuzzy, rubbery, bumpy toys we had stuffed into our suitcase. He tickled Sophia with a small purple feather and she squealed with delight. I cleared my throat, then grabbed a lemon from the kitchen counter and put it to her nose. Sophia opened her eyes wide.

Bill and I were up through the night for feedings and diapering. I felt grateful that Lucca, at least, was spared the wake-ups these few nights while we were traveling. Ever since we brought Sophia home from the hospital, Lucca woke to guard me while I nursed Sophia. In the wee hours, night after night, she’d hoist herself up, plod from our bedroom to the nursery, and drop down at the foot of my rocker with a deep-throated rumble. Her ears would remain pricked, attentive to my every rustle. Lying on the
front porch beside the dog-sitter as we drove off to the airport, Lucca’s face was furrowed with exhaustion.

Early the next morning, I made another call while Bill strolled Sophia along a woodsy path. If Bill was tiring of my ancestry obsession, he was indulgent enough not to show it. I dialed Blossom, my mother’s cousin. I doubted that she could shed light on the origins of my mother’s hearing loss. And the documented deafness was on my father’s side. But I was taking a broader view of my family’s hearing issues—the intermittent attentions, the flickering perceptions, the deafness that encompassed more than damage of the ears.

Blossom had a trove of stories about my mother’s side of the family. She told me that my grandmother, Mae, was raised by two aunts on a farm in Poland after her mother died in childbirth and her father fled the scene. As a young girl my grandmother traveled to America and married my grandfather—also the progeny of a fugitive—who became impatient and restless after my mother was born and one day drove off, taking with him my mother’s little girl heart.

Blossom described my mother as a child, her beginnings with her brother in a small Mount Vernon apartment filled with glazed porcelain roosters—brown wings, red chests, yellow beaks, and black clawed feet. As she spoke, I wondered at how such fragile things could populate a house so ravaged by brokenness. I knew that my mother
had a difficult childhood, one marked by her parents’ break up, by her hearing loss, and later, by a need to starve herself. I knew that my mother was ten when her father drove away for the first time, leaving her mother forlorn among fake roosters, struggling to rescue her pride. I used to touch those roosters—run my finger along their plumed wings, bent claws, glassy eyes—as I stood in my grandmother’s crowded apartment amidst the scent of mothballs and hairnets. Back then I hadn’t known how my grandmother had scrubbed herself clean after the long boat ride from Poland, changing in the Macy’s bathroom before tracking down her runaway father in Brooklyn and venturing to his flat; how she watched as disappointment—or was it disgust?—flickered across her father’s bearded face as he stood gaping at her from his threshold; how she came to recognize the look of flight in her new husband’s eyes; how my mother came to look for it in everyone’s eyes. A glint at first, a slight turn inward, perhaps. Then away. An absence, pulsing through the generations, chasing away presence.

Later in the day, I asked my mother if she would tell me about her past, about her family. “I have a dazzling picture of my parents,” she said. “Wait ’til you see it.” My mother rushed down the hall, her heels clicking along the terra cotta floor, her hearing aids whistling with feedback. She returned with an old photograph in a gilded frame, her
face triumphant. Her parents were pictured in the bloom of their romance, peeking out of their 1930s car. Her father wore his hat brimmed rakishly above his almond eyes; her mother smiled shyly, adorned in white pearls.

As I stared at the photograph, I remembered the feel of my mother’s necklaces, thin gold strands in a bumpy, jumbled mound. When I was a child I spent hours cross-legged on her bedroom floor, working out the knots. My mother always asked me to untangle them because I was patient and painstaking. When I brought her the unknotted necklaces, shimmering in long loops, her eyes gleamed and she smiled widely. Later, in a rush, she would try the necklaces on, reject them one by one, none quite right, and throw them hastily in a twisted pile.

“Do you know why he ran off?” I asked, looking at the image of a grandfather I had never met, debonair in black and white. “Did he ever return, did he try to make contact with you? Did he even know about your hearing problems?”

“Oh, Jenny, I don’t want to talk about all
that
.”

I set aside my family research for the time being. We had only a few days left on the east coast, and we hadn’t yet introduced Sophia to nearby friends and relatives.

On the last night of our visit, I found my father downstairs in his study, the cool basement air thick with the smell of pipe tobacco. I asked him to tell me what he knew of our deaf relatives, the ones with the asterisks on his family tree.

My father told me that his grandmother, Sarah, was one of eight children in the Wertheim family. The deaf girls, Nellie and Bayla, were her sisters. He’d learned from his mother that Nellie and Bayla were tutored to become literate and that Bayla was further educated at a school for the deaf. Nellie and another sister, Elish, married two brothers from the same family, both printers by trade.

I wondered if those brothers were deaf, too. There were no marks by their names on the family tree, but from the reading I’d done, printing was a likely profession for the deaf because it was solitary and the noise of the working press wasn’t a bother to them.

Why didn’t my father ever talk about all this? Why didn’t he say something when Sophia failed the hearing test?

My father’s brown eyes peered at me over the thick horn rim of his eyeglasses. “Jenny, your mother and I found out all we could about the family’s deafness before having you children. We brought the family chart to a geneticist. We were told that the family branches with deaf relatives
on them were too distant from ours to indicate a genetic transfer. That’s why I didn’t mention it to you when you called from the hospital.” My father unrolled his leather tobacco pouch, packed his pipe and lit it. I stood, looking at him. His hair was peppered gray. His eyes were cloudy, soft. I clutched the white painted banister.

“There’s one other detail, Jenny,” my father’s voice was slightly hoarse. “It’s always stayed with me. Tante Nellie and Tante Bayla—they tied strings from their wrists to their babies at bedtime. When the babies fidgeted, they would feel their tugs and wake to care for them in the night.”

 

Strings, wrist to wrist: ties in the darkness to combat disconnection! I reeled with this image, this innovation of hearing. I stepped toward my father and bent slightly. He kissed me on the top of my head, like a small child.

HOME IN CALIFORNIA, with my toes nestled beneath Lucca’s soft fur as she lay at my feet, I scanned websites, studied American Sign Language hand forms, and read what I could about deafness. Every fact, every anecdote cast new shadows in my mind, bouncing into my fears, my hopes, for Sophia. I figured out how to nurse Sophia, even change her diaper, while using the phone, dialing still more relatives rumored to have worked on our shared family tree. I didn’t leave the house much. It felt like a relief, one Friday evening, to dress myself and Sophia in fancy clothes and drive to a party at Bill’s office.

Cradling Sophia in my arms while clutching the Styrofoam edge of a cup between my fingers, I weaved my way around the crowded reception room. Bill was mingling, beaming with pride as people rushed and fawned over Sophia. I sipped my iced tea.