If a Tree Falls Read online

  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.

  California, October 2000

  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, be
aming with pride as people rushed and fawned over Sophia. I sipped my iced tea.

  Bill explained to some coworkers that we were considering high-powered hearing aids for Sophia. The audiologist thought they might give Sophia usable access to spoken language. She could be fitted for them within a month. Bill’s manner was upbeat, undaunted. I still spent my days and nights tripping over piles of loss and worry, but Bill leapt right over these.

  “Why don’t you let her be who she is?” The man standing to my left was admiring Sophia and speaking to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you let Sophia be who she is?”

  “Who is she?” I looked at Sophia. She was two months old. Did she have an identity yet?

  “She is deaf,” he answered. “She was born without access to sound. Why not let her live that way?”

  Deaf. That couldn’t be who Sophia is, could it? Just as I started to object, he excused himself to chase a tray of stuffed mushrooms.

  Was it one hundred degrees in here? I gulped my iced tea and scanned the crowded room, noticing for the first time how low the ceiling was. I switched Sophia to my shoulder and peeled off my sweater. I didn’t want to mingle. I didn’t want a curried chicken skewer. What I wanted was to be connected with my baby.

  I felt my face flushing. My Styrofoam cup didn’t transfer any cold to my cheek.

  At home, later that night, I walked into the nursery to check on Sophia. She was swaddled cozily in her lavender striped pajama suit, sleeping soundly. But Bill was hunched over her crib, his face buried in his arms. His body was heaving, inches above the crib railing. I touched his shoulder.

  Bill wiped his wet face with his sleeve. His puffy, tear-filled eyes met mine. “I guess I just lost it,” he said. I hugged him tight. “Or maybe I found it.” He laughed through his sniffles. “I don’t know.”

  That night, I was unable to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill. About Sophia. About my great-great aunts Nellie and Bayla, tying a string from their wrists to their babies in the night. A line, an anchor, a way of hearing their children. I had to find out more: how they fared, what became of them. Did anyone before make an effort to know them? I stole into my study and turned on the computer. I could try an ancestry search.

  Within minutes, I was staring at a 1910 Census Report that showed Nellie Wertheim living in Brooklyn, New York! Born in 1871, to Pearl and Moshe Wertheim, her occupation was listed as sewing corsets. She emigrated from Austro-Hungary, the Gallizien Province.

  Had Nellie’s sister, Bayla, emigrated with her? I searched for Bayla Wertheim in all available US Census Reports. No records. I searched for their mother, Pearl. Nothing. Pearl’s other six children. No.

  What about Judith Fleischer? My cousin Phyllis had not yet located her. Upon typing in her name, the computer screen filled with listings. The Fleischer name was more common than I’d supposed. Without a birth date or home address, I’d never find her. I narrowed my search using her parent’s names, Sam and Gertrude Fleischer. No matches.

  I was restless. I longed to know my ancestors’ stories—especially Pearl’s and her children’s. But how would I ever uncover them? I couldn’t glean Nellie’s experience from a single Census Report. In the shtetl books I’d read, the portrayals of deaf people were heartbreaking. The deaf were considered mentally impaired, isolated, and ostracized. Is that how my ancestors lived?

  For the first time, I felt part of a larger line, reaching back to the past and stretching forward into the future. With the faxed pages of my family tree scattered around me, I opened a new blank journal I’d bought. It was bound in soft black leather, with a long string meant to mark a last writing page then wrap round and round to keep the journal closed. From down the hall, I could hear Sophia rustling in sleep, Bill snoring softly. I stared at the curves and dips in the stucco walls of my study. I breathed in the pulpy scent of the blank page, open before me.

  For the moment, I was left with just my own imagining.

  Galicia, 1871

  WHEN YOU FIRST TRY TO LISTEN, all you hear is noise. So much noise.

  In the shtetl, the noise of men is the din of argument. A challenge to interpretation. A reconstruction of theory. In a circle, rounded with pride, shrouded in humility, trumped up with faith, the men pester their texts, tease their minds, and block out the cries of their own and everyone else’s hearts. The noise of women is the ruffle of contempt for the men who pester texts, the cackle of gossip and the grind of work and the hardening of hearts that chokes a child’s whinny.

  The cloudy morning of 17 Adar, in the Hebrew year 5630, a baby’s wails rip through the Gallizien village of Tasse. Just two days old and little Shimon, Pearl and Moshe’s boy, is filled with inconsolable sorrow. Boiling but ashiver, wriggling and swollen red. Pearl bounces and bobs him. She rocks him, rubs him, wraps him to her chest in her scarf of azure.

  Pearl’s mother hovers about with damp cloths, her eyes settling deep in their sockets. Pearl’s father, with his left arm wound in leather straps, fastens a fragment of scripture to his head. Then he ushers Moshe out of the house, away from the women, off to shul.

  Before going, he ties a string around the baby’s hot ankle, and as they walk down the narrow village streets of Tasse, he lets the spool out. The thin cord—twined with hay along the side of Malkie’s barn, muddied in a puddle along the river path, pulled taut by a snag in the stake of Golde’s herb stand—trails its way to the synagogue’s wooden Ark. Three times, Pearl’s father coils the string around the thick scrolled posts, making a graceful swag in front of the gold brocade curtain that conceals the Torah. Moshe drops to his knees, breathes in the cool stone and must of the shul, and beseeches God—blessed be He—to hear their prayers for the baby.

  Shimon’s wails stop late that afternoon. He is buried the next day. Pearl sits on the earthen floor, her womb still in cramps, her breasts aching, full, as tears drain from her eyes. Moshe sits beside her, his shirt collar ripped in mourning. For seven days, sitting, Moshe hardly looks at Pearl. His unfocused eyes are glazed over with the wash of death.

  Pearl fights to remember how Moshe’s eyes looked before Shimon. She hasn’t known him so very long; their marriage was arranged with a short engagement, the baby conceived quickly. They were just finding their place together, cramped in her parents’ house, establishing sweet rituals, new intimacies—her gentle fingers upon his thought-worn temples; a surprise of sweet, sliced apricots at her bedside table. A month after the burial, Moshe barely looks at her.

  But now he takes Pearl’s hand. It is Friday night, and her parents are still at the table, sipping hot tea through sugar cubes between their teeth. Moshe leads Pearl to his bed. He undresses her, slowly.

  Moshe’s eyes linger upon Pearl, not lustfully, but stubbornly, as if in a challenge to retrieve himself. His sunken jaw causes Pearl’s own sorrow to flare. Every one of her nerves twitches, firing to get up, to run. But she lies nearly still. Her eyes drop to appraise her belly, still slack from childbirth. Moshe lifts himself onto her, enters. Pearl does not so much as touch his shoulder. She stares at the ceiling, at a crack in the plaster wall. With each push, she tightens.

  Is he trying to hurt her? Is this how it is going to be—has she lost them both? Finally, Pearl rolls, toppling Moshe to his side, wet and cold outside of her. Moshe takes hold of a clump of Pearl’s hair. He winds it around his bent forefinger and brings it to his lips. Sniffling, he clutches onto her, and together they fall, hollow, into sleep.

  Who knows how you find your steps after losing your footing? Life grinds on, and your feet teach you how to walk along. Pearl is pregnant again. Fear and hope clot, then thin her blood. Her mother spits left and right to keep trouble at bay. Moshe coils himself around Pearl’s growing figure, cradling her in the night.

  The night before she goes into labor, Pearl wakes to the pops and crackles of shattering glass. The smell of burnt straw. Bands of drunken peasants are running through the shtetl streets with flaming torche
s and rocks, screaming and breaking the windows of every Jewish shop and home. Pearl’s father hurtles into Pearl’s bedroom, grabs her by the arm, and shimmies her into the back hallway.

  At dawn’s light, while the men sweep shards of glass from the streets, a horde of women crowd into Pearl’s house. They rub her back, try to lessen the pain shooting down her legs. Pearl can’t help thinking about the tomorrow of her first labor—Shimon’s quivery form. Her womb cramps tight as if to hold the baby in. The women eye each other sideways, while headlong they blurt assurances.

  Pearl hasn’t slept all night because of the peasant attack. Perhaps a rest will help. She lies down for a minute—until the pain propels her up again. A little walk, a tight circle in the cramped room; a waft of light, a look out the window. Then her legs are spread, her belly wrenching in upon herself, her ears a-ring with shouting. “A head, I see a head!” “How much hair already!” Another breath, a searing rip, and finally the baby is out. A girl. Another chance. A robust cry to ring in the smoke-choked dawn.

  California, October 2000

  IN THE MORNING, I HUDDLED in bed with Sophia draped on top of me. I stroked her soft hair, her warm cheek. Why had I imagined Pearl losing her first child? There was no baby—no Shimon—listed as deceased on my family chart. Of the eight children listed, I knew only that Pearl’s daughters, Nellie and Bayla, were deaf. Whatever I grieved—Sophia’s hearing, the loss of an ideal for my baby—this imagined death far outstripped it. I fetched my journal, splayed open on the study desk. With the long leather string I tied it shut, then shoved it deep into my dresser drawer.

  After breakfast Bill and I walked tentatively, hand in hand, through the park. Sophia was burrowed close to me in the baby carrier, asleep. It was Saturday, and a cool breeze sent the leaves to billowing. The flyer had said that the Deaf playgroup would convene at picnic table 15A. As we approached the area, we saw parents and children soundlessly greeting each other, conversing with fast, crisp hand movements and animated facial expressions. A woman caught sight of me and made an admiring face as she looked upon Sophia, nearly hidden by her floppy hat. I nodded politely, even as I felt my body pull inward. I had to remind myself to breathe. It was quiet all around me except for the occasional tapping sound of hand against hand, or a faint, involuntary vocalization.