If a Tree Falls Read online

  We drove home with the car windows up. I watched a cluster of businessmen standing together at a street corner, their faces animated with talk. One man’s face contorted in laughter. Another’s, in mock surprise. The car filled with Sophia’s short, bleating cries, then quieted.

  I racked my brain for memories, as I had each day since receiving the fax. Had anyone ever spoken of deaf relatives?

  My sister knew the family history. She had told me last night over the phone.

  “Yeah, I remember looking at the family tree. There were two deaf sisters—Dad’s great-great aunts back in the 1870s. Some of their children and their children’s children were deaf, too. Two of Dad’s uncles—Sam and Moe. I don’t know if he knew them.”

  I was shocked at what she knew. When did she learn all this?

  My sister told me she wrote a paper on our family’s geneology years ago, in high school. Grandma Rose had traced the family lines back to the Wertheim strand, and some cousins had worked on it too, on the Fleischer side. My sister had interviewed a few relatives who remembered Dad’s uncles conversing in sign language at a family reunion. “I’m sure Dad assumed you knew this, too,” my sister told me.

  As a young girl, the youngest of four children, I was thrown in with the lot. At the dinner table, my older brothers were bursting with commentary, my sister, with earnest questioning. I couldn’t get a word in. I tried raising my hand, hoping to be “called on” as if in school. I tried shouting. Often, it was a visiting relative, an aunt or an uncle, who would finally cut in. “ Why are you yelling, Jenny?”“Because no one ever listens to me!” I was lost in the din.

  Was I out of earshot when they spoke of deaf relatives? Or was I just not listening? There was deafness everywhere, up and down the limbs of my family tree! Not a word. Had I heard.

  I slapped the thick binder against my legs. A break in the silence. Through the car window, the shade of loquat trees cast shadows across Sophia’s face. Bill steered the car into our driveway.

  I carried Sophia into the house and placed her in her crib. She was asleep, her hands fisted high above her head. “We’ll fight together,” I wanted to whisper in her ear.

  I walked out of the nursery, swallowing.

  California, August 2000

  WITH SOPHIA, I LOST MY VOICE. Sophia couldn’t hear it and I couldn’t produce it. For weeks, I didn’t talk, sing, or read aloud. I picked her up and held her tight.

  Lucca sprawled herself out in a sunny spot beside the bed and licked her paw pads, each cracked line smoothed by the broad, wet slurp of her tongue. Why didn’t her tongue get scratched or cut, I wondered, when her pads were edged sharp like cookie cutters? Lucca was licking her feet quicker and quicker, louder and louder. Slap, lap; slap, lap; slap, lap. I propped Sophia against my shoulder and clapped my hands together to make Lucca stop. Her chestnut eyes darted to me questioningly, her pointy ears wilting flat.

  Bill was back at work, directing a nonprofit that advocated for abused and neglected children in dependency court. He oversaw the training and supervising of volunteers who met with the children, spoke to foster parents and teachers, and tried to determine best home placements. In court hearings, the “child advocates” made their recommendations to a judge.

  When Bill arrived home each night—light- or heavy-hearted, depending on the judicial outcomes—he took care of us. He diapered Sophia and walked Lucca. He fetched me the nursing pillow, the swaddling blankets, the burping cloths. He hugged me as he did when we first met, his strength around me leaving me breathless. He cradled Sophia gently, his eyes crinkling into a loving smile, his lips puckering into a soft kiss.

  When I expressed grief over Sophia’s hearing loss, Bill brought a perspective he acquired from his work. His case-loads included a fifteen-year-old girl molested by three different relatives, a five-year-old boy starved in a house filled with food, an infant left alone for two days. Sophia was loved and cared for. She would thrive. Together, we’d see to it.

  When Sophia was awake, I tickled her cheeks and played “bicycle” gently with her legs. I bounced her up and down, and entertained her with finger puppets. Sophia’s eyes widened with excitement when I brought my face close to hers from far away. Zoom. Kiss. Zoom. Kiss.

  When she napped, I went to my desk and stared at the names on my family chart—those asterisked names—wondering about my deaf relatives. I worked my way through the audiologist’s binder: I read about deafness and called the parents of deaf children willing to provide information and support. I pumped extra breast milk because Sophia’s weight was low, and I prepared supplemental bottles. Friends came by with gifts, with food and hugs, and with the names of still other people to contact.

  Bill and I were given the email addresses of two deaf grown-ups. Their childhood experiences were distressing. One woman described excruciating speech sessions in which she struggled to make vocalizations she could not hear—each utterance exchanged for a Froot Loop. At the age of sixteen, she became fluent in sign language and in the Deaf community found comfort and a sense of belonging for the first time in her life. The other wrote bitterly about how her parents sent her away to a Deaf school, largely severing their relationship with her. She felt she “belonged” at school but never at home. Since neither her parents nor her siblings learned Sign, holidays at home were endlessly lonely.

  I had entered motherhood with my own pressing worries—worries that had nothing to do with a child’s hearing loss; worries that came from my experience growing up amid intermittent connections and patchy hearing. Could I sustain a healthy connection with my baby? Could I mother my child whole? I felt full of holes, and the prospect of mothering disquieted me.

  As a child, my mother’s rapt gaze fed me, filled me up. When I had her affection—her huge seafoam eyes lavishly, generously, focused on me—I held the world in my outstretched hands. But I never had it for long. Distracted or in a rush, my mother would turn away from me. Tune me out. She was masterful at tuning me out. Her hearing loss played an incalculable role—she could slip into her own private reverie, block out the world, disengage from me instantly and entirely. When I reasserted myself, she was sharp-edged. Her gentle brushing of my hair became an impatient ripping of tangles. Her zippering of my dress, a jaw into my flesh. My protests, my cries only hastened her retreat.

  What would I be like with Sophia? More than anything, I wanted to hear my baby. I wanted to be an anchoring force, steady and sure in my attention. As much as I worried about Sophia’s hearing, I worried about my own. I didn’t have a literal hearing loss, but I feared the disconnection I experienced in childhood. I feared it as if it was an inheritable trait.

  One morning while Sophia slept, I tried to nap but couldn’t. I told myself I should shower, but instead I turned on the computer, and through the Internet entered the fractious and militant universe of deafness—the politics of inclusion and exclusion, the legacy of hurt feelings, the horror and awe of technological advancement.

  There was a war going on. One side believed that deaf people should assimilate to the hearing culture by using hearing aids or cochlear implants to help them to hear and to speak. The other believed that deaf people should embrace Deaf culture, a world without sound, and communicate using sign language. The war was focused on new babies because deafness was now detectable at birth. Militants on the side of assimilation considered it a moral obligation to give babies access to the sounds of speech and access to the larger hearing world. Militants on the side of Deaf culture considered it a travesty to do so, arguing that deaf babies were being “altered” by technology, “mutilated” by surgeons, and stripped of their rightful membership in the Deaf community.

  What side are you on? the websites taunted me. Would we try to get Sophia to hear with the latest hearing technology and then work on speech, on spoken language? Would we try to communicate with her in sign language?

  I had stumbled into a minefield where any answer implied a prejudicial judgment. Was deafness a dis
ability? Was it an essential identity? We wanted what was best for our baby, for our family! It was infuriating to think that our choices for Sophia were going to be judged by others, and on these terms.

  I decided I’d better shower after all. Let the water wash over my thoughts.

  In the shower’s mist, a shaft of bright light cast a prism rainbow on the white tile wall. I closed my eyes tight and bent my head into the spray. In another time and place, we wouldn’t have had these decisions to make for our deaf child. Pearl—the mother of the deaf sisters, Nellie and Bayla, listed on my family chart; she raised her babies in a remote Austrian shtetl with neither the luck nor the burden of modern options, with no choices concerning technology or education. What could she do but tote them along with her to the baker, to the butcher, to the synagogue, to the town square? And wonder what it was like for her girls, to weave in and out of the rickety stalls among the mingled smells of horse dung and hay; to watch the swirl of changing expressions—the winking eyes, the pursed lips, the bushy beards—but never to hear the sounds of the bargaining, the beckoning, the greeting, the gossiping, blurted and sputtered and whispered and hissed.

  Was that Sophia crying? I rushed out of the bathroom, grabbing a towel, and I stood dripping in front of my baby. Her eyes were fixed on the slats of sunlight crossing through the bars of her crib. I touched her cheek. She turned to look at me. Droplets of water ran from my hair and splashed soundlessly onto the wood floor.

  California, September 2000

  WHEN SOPHIA WAS SIX WEEKS OLD, we ventured a cross-country flight to visit my parents and other family and friends. Early on a Friday morning, I lugged a last, overstuffed suitcase to the driveway while Bill loaded the car for the airport. Then, I folded my father’s fax sheets into my carry-on handbag, along with two tiny yellow mittens to keep Sophia from scratching herself while she slept. My hands shook as I zippered the bag. I was frayed from the middle of the night feedings. And I was preoccupied, consumed with trying to understand my family history, my deaf origins.

  Day and night, my mind restlessly conjured images. From mere names on the genealogical page arose ashen cheeks, searching eyes, stubborn hands—whole lives fated to be filled with losses I shuddered against, even as I invented them. I scrutinized the pages of my family chart like a treasure map, like tea leaves, like the palm of a hand. What heritage had I passed on, without knowing, to my baby?

  I buckled Sophia into the car and pulled myself in to sit beside her. Soon I would learn whatever it was that I had missed of the family history. I would ask my parents every question I could think of, and call every living relative who might know something about our family’s deafness. I would talk to my two brothers and to my sister. We each had different childhood memories.

  In my parents’ too-hot kitchen, decorated “country French,” I inhaled the familiar smells of perfume, pipe tobacco, and chicken sautéing in wine. I greeted my mother and father tenderly as they surrounded us, hugging us and cooing over Sophia. My love for them, and my longing to be babied in new motherhood, mingled with trepidation. I was offkilter in my parents’ rambling house, even with Bill by my side and Sophia anchored in my arms.

  That afternoon, I stood before the mirror in my mother’s bathroom, cradling Sophia. My mother came to stand behind me. Her lips were glossed the color of raspberries and her salon blonde hair was styled in high coiffure. She looked at her granddaughter, then at her own reflection.

  “She is absolutely beautiful. Don’t worry about the hearing loss—with those eyes, she’ll be just fine.”

  “What?”

  “Where do you think she got those eyes?” her stare darting between the reflection of Sophia’s eyes and her own.

  “From Bill,” I said.

  “You think?” My mother’s smile wavered.

  Just then, I heard my father playing the violin. He had played every day of my life. The sound grew louder. A section of a Bach violin sonata, then a simple scale. I opened the bathroom door to see my father there in the hallway. He walked toward us, his chin still cocked on the rest, his right arm making long, broad strokes with his bow. The violin quivered within inches of Sophia’s ear, flecks of rosin dusting her cheek. Sophia didn’t turn to the sound.

  “No, nothing,” my father muttered. His bow hand dropped to his side.

  So there it was: the proof of Sophia’s hearing loss. It had come, not through last month’s brainstem tests or audiograms, but through the unheard Cs and B flats of my father’s violin.

  As a girl, I took up the violin. And I dressed myself like my mother. I teetered in her spike high heels, and painted my face with her glossy makeup. I even flapped in her silk blouses and whooshed leg-to-leg in her funny leather pants. Decked out in her clothes, adorned in her gold, I sang to her.

  At age eight, I sang whatever I learned in school. By eleven, I had amassed a repertoire of Broadway show tunes. My mother made requests: “Everything Was Beautiful at the Ballet” from A Chorus Line; “Not While I’m Around,” from Sweeney Todd; “Far From the Home I Love,” from Fiddler on the Roof; “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” from Dreamgirls. I trailed after her, from her dressing room to the bathroom mirror, and sang to her as she got dressed to the nines.

  Would she ever have guessed that I liked her best at nighttime when she was in her robe, no makeup on? Her eyes were a shade paler somehow, her face softer than when powdered and tawny, her lips sweeter when no longer waxy and bright. Even at a young age, I intuited that the slathered-on foundations, the layering of brilliant colors, were compensation for ears that couldn’t hear well, for a father who didn’t stay, for a mother who couldn’t cope.

  My mother blasted through many barriers of the times. She was determined to be self-sufficient. She earned her social work doctorate and launched a career. But her focus was on appearances—her own appearance and those of her extensions: our house, my brothers and sister, me. She loved me fiercely, and I loved her. Only I couldn’t fix her attention on my being.

  I made her things: a mop doll, a woodland diorama in a bowl. She thanked me tightly, then set about dismantling my handiwork—washing out the mop, dumping the twigs from the bowl, putting the house to rights—before she scurried off, retreating once more to her dressing room. I sat and watched her then from the periphery, a smudge at the edge of her looking glass.

  I waited for her. I spent hours waiting. She chose a camisole from her closet. She styled her hair. My chatter, my questions, even my songs—nothing could retrieve her. She was distracted, lost in her own thoughts. I called out for her, still waiting. Couldn’t my mother hear me?

  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. The
y 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.